D&D 5E What are the Roles now?

[Hussar]

It would create arguments and people claiming that playing the class as anything other than a striker would be playing the game outside of the way it was intended to be played.

However, saying the class leans towards a striker role, but is best played as the player wishes, drops the hint that it was designed a certain way while eliminating the arguments about how it's supposed to be played.

So, in text, acknowledging it leans a certain way but being careful about wording isn't an issue. IIRC, the 5E PHB actually does this a couple of times in the introductory chapters.

Who would argue this? Actually I'll answer my own question. People would simply use this as ammunition. Arguing in bad faith in order to exclude those who play differently.

Same old same old.

 

[SirAntoine]

I thought you wanted the terms to be intuitive. The words you're using seem to be just as unintuitive as the names for the roles in 4e which were similar enough to MMO roles that I would say many/most understood them. If I came across a game which said this character is the force multiplier or this is the unstoppable divine magic user I'd have little clue as to what that meant.

For your heavy melee cover does that mean protecting others in melee? Does the heavy missile cover mean shooting opponents before they make it to your allies? Or does it mean providing defence against missile weapons.

You may be on to something good, I don't know, but at the moment your terms are worse than the 4e roles and require a lot of clarification.

They speak to how the desired effects are achieved, and they are "things" which are obviously what characters can do rather than "roles" which can come across like telling players what to do.

I actually hoped they would be clearer. I felt there would still be some learning required, but less than the existing terms. Their descriptions in the book could explain them easily.

"Cover" is like in the movies when someone says during a gunbattle, "cover me", before they do something. This is making the enemy pay attention to you and/or duck for cover themselves, instead of the person you're trying to protect.

"Controller" doesn't mention magic, or explain by itself what you mean. I think calling it unstoppable magic would make a person curious, and they could be told right away the scope of magic involved. For someone totally new to fantasy role playing, it also helps to distinguish magic in the game from pulling a rabbit out of a hat or the kind of subtle magic Gandalf used in The Lord of the Rings. If a spell can truly control, it can't be stopped generally speaking (without some counter in the game).

"Leader" as force multiplier is escoteric outside the military. I used the term because Pemerton used it to explain what leader meant in 4e, and why it was designed that way. That description is too much for the casual reader, so you're right about this one. I should have changed it to something else, but I wanted to connect these ideas to the earlier writings. "Instantaneous re-conditioning" is the most accurate term, distinguished between magical healing and martial prowess. That's a mouthful, but again the reader should be curious and it sounds like something that would be useful in a battle.

Striker is intuitive in general, but since you're talking about a specific, more narrow set of activities, it doesn't really fit well. Pemerton made another good point that was similar. Since both the defender and striker "defend and strike", they're two different versions of the same set of things. The defender draws attention by attacking, so the striker would, too. The light cover characters can be faster and more mobile or less "sticky", and the heavy cover characters can keep up the attack for longer. I would take it much farther, but this is changing people's expectations enough.

As much as I could, I wrote this for people who enjoy using the 4e roles, with their particular philosophy and focus.

 

[SirAntoine]

Who would argue this? Actually I'll answer my own question. People would simply use this as ammunition. Arguing in bad faith in order to exclude those who play differently.

Same old same old.

I would envision a person arguing that as a system or rule devotee. They want to play a particular way, sure, but prejudice doesn't have to enter into it.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Striker is intuitive in general, but since you're talking about a specific, more narrow set of activities, it doesn't really fit well. Pemerton made another good point that was similar. Since both the defender and striker "defend and strike", they're two different versions of the same set of things. The defender draws attention by attacking, so the striker would, too. The light cover characters can be faster and more mobile or less "sticky", and the heavy cover characters can keep up the attack for longer. I would take it much farther, but this is changing people's expectations enough.

"Heavy" vs. "light" is a well-understood distinction, so you could just drop the "cover" bit and refer to them as "heavies" vs. "lights". Or "heavy infantry" if you prefer, vs. "light skirmisher." There's no shortage of real-world terminology to choose from without making up RPG-specific jargon.

One place where thinking about roles explicitly (though not in the 4E sense) may be useful is adventure/encounter design. You shouldn't tailor encounters to your specific PCs because that's unfair, but you can and should design many/most encounters against the iconic roles. (I need to be better at this.) Six Allosaurs attacking in a pack is boring and will be dealt with mostly by the heavies, so make it four allosaurs and three swooping pteranodons, or four allosaurs and six flying apes with bows: something that the heavy is less well-equipped to fight but the archer or artillery can. Add in some interesting terrain (fight takes place at the base of a cliff, and there's a nearby grove of tall trees) for the skulker to play with, and a dramatic conflict ("can our favorite dinosaurs catch themselves a meal? can our heroes avoid getting eaten without losing the trail of the jewel thief?"), and a consequence for the outcome of the battle, and you've got yourself an encounter. The question of whether your actual PCs conform to the roles is immaterial: they play they characters they want to play, and whether the heavy is a fighter or a melee necromancer with Vampiric Touch isn't your problem. Perhaps they don't have an archer at all, and the flying apes will be dealt with by the Lore Bard summoning Giant Owls. The key thing is that by designing the encounter to be satisfying to an iconic set of roles, you ensure that a variety of approaches is needed, which means there will likely be something satisfying for each of your players.

 

[Ashrym]

There seems to be some over-thinking going on.

The questions is what roles exist in 5e. It doesn't matter if they specifically map out to 4e specific classes roles listed in the that edition. It doesn't matter if they are specified roles or not. It doesn't matter if more than one role is available to a character. It doesn't matter if a person plays semantics and calls them functions, styles, roles, or whatever. It also doesn't matter how many things a character can do to various degrees.

What matters is what we answer when someone asks us what our character does as our main contributions to the group. If I'm playing a bard and someone asks me that questions then my answer is that I heal, buff, and apply status effects to opponents. I also fill out x skill functions. If I were to define my abilities selected in 4e terms I would call myself a leader and a controller. I define myself as a healer, support, and controller. Those are the contributions my character makes no matter how I choose to label the role I play. I could build my bard differently but in doing so I have not invalidated the existence of roles simply because he uses different roles.

The bottom line is that roles exist and they don't need to be specific, labelled, defined, or attached to any particular class but there are clear mechanics that enable certain classes better than others in some of those group roles. As stated multiple times in the thread, roles exist as perceived by each player in his or her character.

 

[TrippyHippy]

There seems to be some over-thinking going on.

The questions is what roles exist in 5e. It doesn't matter if they specifically map out to 4e specific classes roles listed in the that edition. It doesn't matter if they are specified roles or not. It doesn't matter if more than one role is available to a character. It doesn't matter if a person plays semantics and calls them functions, styles, roles, or whatever. It also doesn't matter how many things a character can do to various degrees.

What matters is what we answer when someone asks us what our character does as our main contributions to the group. If I'm playing a bard and someone asks me that questions then my answer is that I heal, buff, and apply status effects to opponents. I also fill out x skill functions. If I were to define my abilities selected in 4e terms I would call myself a leader and a controller. I define myself as a healer, support, and controller. Those are the contributions my character makes no matter how I choose to label the role I play. I could build my bard differently but in doing so I have not invalidated the existence of roles simply because he uses different roles.

The bottom line is that roles exist and they don't need to be specific, labelled, defined, or attached to any particular class but there are clear mechanics that enable certain classes better than others in some of those group roles. As stated multiple times in the thread, roles exist as perceived by each player in his or her character.

So, after 60+ pages of threads we get to the point that ‘roles’ are just a bit of jargon? A point of pure semantics to argue about? Agreed.

However, I would also add, in nearly 30 years of roleplaying, I have yet to find any player that needed instruction about how to play any particular Class they had chosen or what their ‘role’ is.

 

[pemerton]

I'm sorry but contrary to pemerton's assertion earlier I'm not seeing these droves of players who are clueless bout building the character they really want in 5e

I didn't make any such assertion. I spoke expressly about 4e, and gave an anecdote from AD&D.

I think we can take it as a given that 5e is a better-designed system than 2nd ed AD&D.

What would be more interesting is if part of the design of 5e is such that any player, of whatever degree of experience, can build a character which will "automatically", as it were, make a valuable contribution to play however played.

Bounded accuracy probably helps support this as a design goal, but it still seems a bit idealistic to me. In the Basic PDF, on p 8, there is a big table that sets out the ability scores, and which classes they are good for. That is exactly the same sort of advice as roles. STR is said to be important for fighters - does that mean that WotC is telling players of fighters who dump STR and favour DEX and CON (for an exploration/archery-oriented character) that s/he is doing it wrong? That all fighters s/hould have high STR?

I'll leave it to some other budding sociologist to explain why roles cause outrage whereas the functionally near-identical ability score table is something I've never seen mentioned in a thread.

if people really want or need help knowing what the classes are good at, and the description in the books just aren't good enough there is an entire forum with handbooks on WotC's site to help optimize characters.

So are you saying that WotC was wrong, and overly prescriptive, to include that ability score table?

you still haven't answered the question of what exactly we would be labeling... moment to moment actions? Entire classes? Specific Builds?

I can't remember who you were asking this of, but my answer would be that I"m talking about character builds - for practical purposes, sub-classes would probably be where I'd start.

the mechanics of 4E anticipate and reinforce the gamist elements of these roles in a much more heavy-handed manner than many people were accustomed to experiencing, or found enjoyable.

<snip>

putting a character on a set of game mechanics designed to play to form is different than playing a game with a set of mechanics designed to capture the feel of an individual.

I'm sure some people didn't find 4e enjoyable.

And I know that some people didn't find D&D's "heavy handed" class system, in which only fighters can wear heavy armour (and thereby achieve high ACs without magical assistance) or only fighters can wield the heaviest weapons (and thereby achieve maximum melee capability). So they played games designed to "capture the feel of an individual", such as RM or RQ (or, later, HERO or GURPS).

The whole point of a class system is to channel character building so as to produce characters who "play to form". And of course it's no great surprise that different people like different forms.

My brief experience with 4E was that the term "defender" was counterintuitive: defenders did none of the defensive things I was expecting them to. "Controller" would have been a better label.

As I've mentioned a couple of times upthread, defenders can easily be seen as a special case of controllers, whose control requires putting their bodies on the line.

The main reason for calling out this special case of defenders by their own moniker is to preserve the legacy contrast between fighters and wizards. (Similar legacy considerations explain why leaders group together force multiplication and healing; and explain why, especially in the PHB, "controller" is said to include both AoE hit point ablation (classic wizard artillery) and non-hit-point oriented control (classic wizard anti-personnel hit point bypassing effects).)

the vicious mockery spell.

Another 4e legacy in 5e.

 

[pemerton]

One place where thinking about roles explicitly (though not in the 4E sense) may be useful is adventure/encounter design. You shouldn't tailor encounters to your specific PCs because that's unfair, but you can and should design many/most encounters against the iconic roles. (I need to be better at this.) Six Allosaurs attacking in a pack is boring and will be dealt with mostly by the heavies, so make it four allosaurs and three swooping pteranodons, or four allosaurs and six flying apes with bows: something that the heavy is less well-equipped to fight but the archer or artillery can. Add in some interesting terrain (fight takes place at the base of a cliff, and there's a nearby grove of tall trees) for the skulker to play with, and a dramatic conflict ("can our favorite dinosaurs catch themselves a meal? can our heroes avoid getting eaten without losing the trail of the jewel thief?"), and a consequence for the outcome of the battle, and you've got yourself an encounter.

A couple of non-role related comments:

* Your advice on encounter building could have been lifted straight from the 4e DMG;

* I don't see why it's unfair to tailor encounters to your specific PCs - to me it is more-or-less the essence of GMing to decide what sort of tailoring suits the mood, pace and overall thematic dynamics of the game.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

The main reason for calling out this special case of defenders by their own moniker is to preserve the legacy contrast between fighters and wizards.

It's a bit disconcerting to have you responding to single sentences out of a post, especially if you're going off on a tangent instead of addressing the meat of the post. Granting for the sake of argument that your theory is correct about why they wanted to separate out physical from magical controller-ing; that doesn't make the moniker "defender" any more intuitive. I don't know why you attached your observation to (a single sentence from) my post. Free association?

 

[pemerton]

Maybe so, but as has been repeatedly pointed out, 4e explicitly told you that if you were Class X, you had role Y. 5e does not do that.

But it had multi-classing, which mixes roles. And it had hybrids, which more fully mix roles. And it had cleric and warlord powers that permit marking. And fighter powers for self-healing. And paladin powers for self and/or other healing. And warlock single-target control effects. (And except for hybrids, that's all at launch.)

Do you get outraged by the bit where 5e tells you that fighters need STR? Or when you're building a DEX fighter do you just ignore the advice as a bit of a generalisation that doesn't apply to you?