D&D 5E What are the Roles now?

[FormerlyHemlock]

This is a bit of a tangent, but I'm still trying to understand your intent in that statement. Bear with me for just a second, okay?

It applies to defender and striker.

I'm still not getting what you mean by "invalidates these roles." What does "invalid" mean here? Do you mean:

1.) There's no such thing as a defender or a striker, even in 4E?
2.) The categories "defender" and "striker" are not always useful to everybody everywhere?
3.) The categories "defender" and "striker" are never useful to anybody anywhere outside of 4E?
4.) The categories "defender" and "striker" are uninteresting/inapplicable when applied to super heroes?
5.) The categories "defender" and "striker" are basically uninteresting in 5E since everyone possesses basic competence in most things due to bounded accuracy?
6.) People who use the terms "defender" and "striker" to describe anything except 4E are stupid/wrong/etc.
7.) Something else?

I don't think you mean #5, although someone on this thread will probably assume you do, and I don't think you can mean #1, but in context I'm not sure exactly what you do mean, whether you're talking about utility of the concept or some kind of larger universal validity. On this thread, I see lots of cases of people saying #2 and #5 and other people hearing #3 and #5, which leads to various people loudly asserting #2/#3/#5 and #5B ("I still find them interesting/useful"), all of which are true IMO. Arguments don't get much more pointless than that.

-Max

Edit: sorry, I meant, "I don't think you mean #6".

 

[Eirikrautha]

Wait, what now? I'm playing a 5e crusader fighter. How in the world can I be a controller? I get no AoE attacks, none. I'm a sword and board fighter, so the ranger/rogue, with his bonuses to attack with a bow and sneak attack damage dice will almost always out damage me. Now, tank? Sure, I can do that. And since 5e doesn't really allow anyone to grant out of turn actions, Leader is largely out, but Striker or Controller? Nope, sorry, not happening.

It's called a doorway.

Seriously, though, your character could determine the shape of the battlefield depending on where he stands, who he attacks, etc. Move into the center of the enemy forces and split them, now your allies can attack one set together. Stand in a doorway and allow your ranged and spell casters to fire past you.

See, your post actually confirms my fears. Once you start thinking in terms of "roles", many people subconsciously reject the possibility of acting outside of them. This is why I am so adamantly against enshrining them in 5e terminology.

It'd be one thing if roles were presented as tactical choices in a combat. Then each character could decide what tactic they were best suited for in that situation, rather than simply saying, "OK, I'm the defender, so I move up to create the line..." But with 4e roles, we are talking about characters designed and built to fulfill certain combat tactics every time. And that's a game I and my table don't find fun.

This is why I don't care if WotC creates feats or archetypes that allow the players who enjoy specialization to be able to specialize. The game is stronger when it encompasses multiple play styles. But explicitly identifying roles in the language of D&D (by WotC) and making those roles a standard assumption of character construction precludes my play style. It will narrow the choice of styles at the table. And that's not good.

P.S. On the topic of traditional roles, I've played (as have others at my table) 2e clerics without turn undead or a single healing spell. So clerics were NOT always "healers" in previous editions. In fact, you could often decide every morning what your role was going to be...

 

[SirAntoine]

This is a bit of a tangent, but I'm still trying to understand your intent in that statement. Bear with me for just a second, okay?



I'm still not getting what you mean by "invalidates these roles." What does "invalid" mean here? Do you mean:

1.) There's no such thing as a defender or a striker, even in 4E?
2.) The categories "defender" and "striker" are not always useful to everybody everywhere?
3.) The categories "defender" and "striker" are never useful to anybody anywhere outside of 4E?
4.) The categories "defender" and "striker" are uninteresting/inapplicable when applied to super heroes?
5.) The categories "defender" and "striker" are basically uninteresting in 5E since everyone possesses basic competence in most things due to bounded accuracy?
6.) People who use the terms "defender" and "striker" to describe anything except 4E are stupid/wrong/etc.
7.) Something else?

I don't think you mean #5, although someone on this thread will probably assume you do, and I don't think you can mean #1, but in context I'm not sure exactly what you do mean, whether you're talking about utility of the concept or some kind of larger universal validity. On this thread, I see lots of cases of people saying #2 and #5 and other people hearing #3 and #5, which leads to various people loudly asserting #2/#3/#5 and #5B ("I still find them interesting/useful"), all of which are true IMO. Arguments don't get much more pointless than that.

-Max

#2. The usefulness of the roles from 4e have just been so exaggerated in this thread. I have read they were always in the game, they are even in the comic books going back to 1961, and they are still the roles of D&D today. These are all generalizations, and I take your point about how making the kind of comments I did actually is unproductive. I was trying to say the 4e roles were never universal. So it's like I am rejecting the philosophy underpinning those roles. "The" roles are very much different, if we care to define them.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

#2. The usefulness of the roles from 4e have just been so exaggerated in this thread. I have read they were always in the game, they are even in the comic books going back to 1961, and they are still the roles of D&D today. These are all generalizations, and I take your point about how making the kind of comments I did actually is unproductive. I was trying to say the 4e roles were never universal. So it's like I am rejecting the philosophy underpinning those roles. "The" roles are very much different, if we care to define them.

Yep. I 100% agree with you here on #2.

 

[Hussar]

Because almost none of them actually play the defender role. Superman is the sole one who typically plays it.

Thing? Colossus? Hulk? These are not defensive characters.

Within Fantastic Four, the Thing has very little to do with presenting an impassible barrier; that's the role Mr. Fantastic plays (hint: the roles assigned to the group earlier in this thread are almost entirely wrong by the way 4E defines the roles and how the characters actually act).

Hulk? He doesn't really understand the concept of being defensive when he's mean and green; he's a pure attacker. He doesn't really try to defend others; usually, if he does do it, it's an accidental side-effect.

Colossus is pretty similar to Thing in his comics as far as tactics.

[MENTION=63508]Minigiant[/MENTION] pretty much nails this .

A defender does not make anyone harder to hit. A defender presents such a threat on the battlefield that if you ignore the defender, you get your ass handed to you.

Just like Hulk, Thing or any other defender in comic books.

 

[Hussar]

It's called a doorway.

Seriously, though, your character could determine the shape of the battlefield depending on where he stands, who he attacks, etc. Move into the center of the enemy forces and split them, now your allies can attack one set together. Stand in a doorway and allow your ranged and spell casters to fire past you.

See, your post actually confirms my fears. Once you start thinking in terms of "roles", many people subconsciously reject the possibility of acting outside of them. This is why I am so adamantly against enshrining them in 5e terminology.

It'd be one thing if roles were presented as tactical choices in a combat. Then each character could decide what tactic they were best suited for in that situation, rather than simply saying, "OK, I'm the defender, so I move up to create the line..." But with 4e roles, we are talking about characters designed and built to fulfill certain combat tactics every time. And that's a game I and my table don't find fun.

This is why I don't care if WotC creates feats or archetypes that allow the players who enjoy specialization to be able to specialize. The game is stronger when it encompasses multiple play styles. But explicitly identifying roles in the language of D&D (by WotC) and making those roles a standard assumption of character construction precludes my play style. It will narrow the choice of styles at the table. And that's not good.

P.S. On the topic of traditional roles, I've played (as have others at my table) 2e clerics without turn undead or a single healing spell. So clerics were NOT always "healers" in previous editions. In fact, you could often decide every morning what your role was going to be...

Situational modifiers are not helping the conversation.

How many doors do I have outdoors? Or in natural caves? There is no narrowing of choices here at all. After all, a defender can very well stand in a doorway and gain all sorts of advantages. In fact, what character would you have stand in a doorway? The lightly armoured thief or the heavily armoured fighter? Why? After all, since I'm being told that any character can fill any role, then a thief should work equally as well as a fighter in holding a choke point.

If you would choose one character over another, then there has to be a reason.

Note, in your example, the defender is actually actively hindering the rest of the party trying to shoot past him, since he grants disadvantage in the form of cover to anyone trying to fire past him.

 

[Ashrym]

Date-wise (late December 2006), this does not support your conclusion.

2006 was when WotC started designing 4E. Hence, the 4E concept of roles comes directly from Skip's thoughts in in this article.

All the article does is illustrate that at the beginning of 4E design, the designers were talking about roles.

Since nobody made that claim, this is a strawman. The claim I made is that you could not come to your previous conclusion based on the time frame of the article.

When you supplied your examples from the 3E PHB, then your conclusion that the concept of (specialized) roles (always) existing in the game becomes more supportable.

It looks to me like you were stating the roles concept was reflective of 4e because you brought it up. But that's not possible given 4e didn't exist. 4e does not pertain to the article, which clearly states the concepts of the roles from the earliest editions of the game.

4E roles are very generic combat oriented niches. The term is used in a general way and only describes combat.

Roles before and after (if one were to use the term role) are more like specialized combat and non-combat job functions. The "face" of the group. The "scout" of the group. The "healer" of the group.

Don't confuse the word role in the 3E PHB (which is used to describe specialized activities) with the word role in the 4E PHB (which is used to described generic combat tendencies). They really are two different things. Similar, but different. 4E roles primarily describe the job function that a given class mostly brings to the combat table.

4e combat role designations do not cause roles in other editions to cease to exist simply because the those designations exist in 4e. The only point that was being made was that roles existed outside of 4e and whether those were combat roles or not is irrelevant. Roles existed in and out of combat. Examples I used with direct quotes were the healer role for clerics and front line combat specialists for barbarians. Those are combat roles specifically mentioned as roles in that non-4e PHB.

The only difference is in how 4e used more specific terms applied by class instead of letting players choose their roles.

You are jumping to a conclusion here that since the word role was used in the description for specific classes in 3E, that the generic use of that term in that article must be referring solely to existing editions of the game. That's like saying that even though scientists had not yet created the A bomb at the start of the Manhattan project, that they had no ideas at all on how to go about solving that problem. People were clandestinely starting work on 4E at the time Skip wrote that article. Roles are a big part of 4E. It makes total sense that he was focused on roles in that article because the 4E team was starting work on 4E at the time. Nothing indicates that the article is solely based on ideas from 3.5 and earlier. That's just your unsupported conclusion.

The 3E use of the term is discussing specialized roles (or job functions if you will). The article erroneously claims that there are four basic roles when in fact, the 3E PHB that you quoted illustrate that roles can be specialized into more than four generic ones. Additionally, the very concept of the "sturdy brawler" from that articles morphed into a slightly different role concept called "defender" in 4E. These are not too far apart, but "arcane spell slinger" and "controller" are not as close. A 4E Sorcerer, for example, is an arcane spell slinger, but is considered a "striker". Obviously, role means different things to different people at different portions of time in the life span of D&D.

The bard is a perfect case in point. He is a generalist. He doesn't fit the other four roles in that article directly, but takes a bit from several of them plus some more that those roles do not actually talk about. In 4E, he fit the leader role fairly well because a leader was defined as "healing and support".

The article I quoted listed broad categories like I additionally listed for 5e. More specific roles can be built within those more general roles. How specific or general a role is also becomes irrelevant to the question of whether or not roles existed. Existence is a binary answer; it's yes or no and in either general or specific roles it's still yes.

Yes, role and function are synonymous and I'm not jumping to any conclusion. Completely remove 4e from any discussion on it and those roles still existed in 3.5; 4e roles are extraneous information to the existence of roles within previous editions. Clerics were healers and defensive specialists. Bards did fit in as stealthy rascals easily enough.

"These characters can take the fight to the enemy fairly well, but they often do better with a more subtle approach to adventuring. They generally have skills that allow them to serve as a party's eyes and ears. These characters also often have interaction skills that make them the most able negotiators in a party, which can prove handy when combat doesn't seem the best option."

These are roles bard did -- social interaction / face, possibly scout, information gathering, healing. Bards were one of the best sources of information in the edition with the combination of social skills, knowledge skills, and divination spells. A class's roles depended on the players' choices in which roles towards which they would build but still existed in those choices.

 

[Eirikrautha]

Situational modifiers are not helping the conversation.

How many doors do I have outdoors? Or in natural caves? There is no narrowing of choices here at all. After all, a defender can very well stand in a doorway and gain all sorts of advantages. In fact, what character would you have stand in a doorway? The lightly armoured thief or the heavily armoured fighter? Why? After all, since I'm being told that any character can fill any role, then a thief should work equally as well as a fighter in holding a choke point.

If you would choose one character over another, then there has to be a reason.

Note, in your example, the defender is actually actively hindering the rest of the party trying to shoot past him, since he grants disadvantage in the form of cover to anyone trying to fire past him.

Situational modifiers are the conversation! The whole point of this argument is that the combat roles are situational! The thing that many people at my table don't like is the idea of building a character for a combat role when such a role depends on the circumstance of a combat.

With a doorway, you might act as a controller. Without it, you might action surge and be a striker. You are absolutely right that a thief might decide to hold the doorway and be the controller. Or a wizard might buff his AC and hold the door while you fire or jab with a reach weapon past him. Without a door, other tactics present themselves. Roles depend on your actions, not your "build." Combat choices should NOT be arbitrarily narrowed by the rules based on your build. The idea that mechanical advantages are necessary before you can fulfill a role is a repugnant holdover from 3.5 - 4. My table doesn't want the mechanics of the game to assume that. And 5e doesn't (at present). Bounded accuracy means the 15 AC thief can hold the door in a pinch, he's just doing so with slightly more risk than the 17 AC fighter. And, unless I'm misreading the rules, cover doesn't provide disadvantage, just a bonus of +2 to the opponents' AC (for firing through one character). It's better than being swarmed by 12 orcs!

See, what some folks on this thread don't seem to realize is that you can play with static combat roles without them being specified in the rules. That's a table choice. But once delineated in the rules and mechanics of the game, you can't play without them. So you are arguing for a change to 5e that will preclude the playstyle at my table. Which is why I don't want to see it happen!

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

How many doors do I have outdoors? Or in natural caves? There is no narrowing of choices here at all. After all, a defender can very well stand in a doorway and gain all sorts of advantages. In fact, what character would you have stand in a doorway? The lightly armoured thief or the heavily armoured fighter? Why? After all, since I'm being told that any character can fill any role, then a thief should work equally as well as a fighter in holding a choke point.

Against something with a single big attack, like a gigantic golem, in 5E you'd go with the Thief here because of Uncanny Dodge and because high AC doesn't help much. Against something with lots of little attacks you'd go with the fighter, unless a monk is available, because Patient Defense. In both cases you'd probably like the wizard to cast Web right outside the doorway.

And cover cuts both ways--at least the bad guys beyond the doorway are hampered as well when targeting party members, so it's probably worth it, at least until they start hammering through the walls.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

[MENTION=63508]Minigiant[/MENTION] pretty much nails this .

A defender does not make anyone harder to hit. A defender presents such a threat on the battlefield that if you ignore the defender, you get your --- handed to you.

Just like Hulk, Thing or any other defender in comic books.

So does that mean you are right and the DnD4 wikia is wrong? "A character with the defender role primarily focuses enemy fire by making it difficult for enemies to move past, and punishing enemies who attack other party members." Because your definition implies that the defender must have the highest offensive output in the game or else a way to make enemies behave irrationally. Where does your definition come from and why should it be preferred?