D&D 5E What are the Roles now?

[Janx]

Fixed it for you...

yeah, I thought about original D&D after I posted that...

I think the core point though is that the traditional "balanced" party is one PC from each of the major food groups.

This meat shield, striker, defender nonsense is just tacked on verbiage to the original point of having coverage of the main powers/activities in the game: fighting, wizardy, undead/healing and thieving.

And the game made classes for each of those things. So if you got 4 players....

 

[Rejuvenator]

Recap please of the previous 90-something pages before this starts up all over again

 

[Bluenose]

This meat shield, striker, defender nonsense is just tacked on verbiage to the original point of having coverage of the main powers/activities in the game: fighting, wizardy, undead/healing and thieving.

Three of those things are different from the other one. Three describe what the characters do - fighting or thieving or healing. Wizardry defines how the class does things - through casting spells. So, what does/should wizardry Do?

 

[Janx]

Three of those things are different from the other one. Three describe what the characters do - fighting or thieving or healing. Wizardry defines how the class does things - through casting spells. So, what does/should wizardry Do?

you might be parsing a line that I don't see.

clerics cast clerical spells, heal and turn undead.

wizards cast wizardy spells which in some editions aren't the same as cleric spells.

that difference is crucial in some games as those wizardy spells/abilities come in handy in situations where fighting or thieving or clericing don't cut it.

My point was, for some chunk of people, All you needed was a party with those 4 classes to cover the bases of potential need an heretofore unseen next-adventure may require.

 

[Hussar]

you might be parsing a line that I don't see.

clerics cast clerical spells, heal and turn undead.

wizards cast wizardy spells which in some editions aren't the same as cleric spells.

that difference is crucial in some games as those wizardy spells/abilities come in handy in situations where fighting or thieving or clericing don't cut it.

My point was, for some chunk of people, All you needed was a party with those 4 classes to cover the bases of potential need an heretofore unseen next-adventure may require.

The point that Bluenose is trying to make, I think, is that he's trying to drill down to what makes those wizard spells crucial. What are those situations? Because, by and large, you can map the 4 4e roles pretty well here. How does the fighter fight? How does the thief fight? Are they the same or different? What does the cleric bring to combat? Because 4e roles are combat specific. They don't talk about anything else. And, finally, what does the wizard bring to the fight?

I think that something people really lost sight of is that the 4e roles only talk about combat. That is the sole function of roles. They aren't meant to describe the entirety of the class at all. A striker could be great at exploration and so could a defender. A leader or a controller could be fantastic (or very bad) at the talky bits and diplomacy. Those are not described in the 4e roles. But, people read the roles and figured that that was the sum total of the class and then extrapolated that 4e was only about combat. After all, it's right there in the PHB right? Your class is this role and this role is all about combat, therefore the game is all about combat.

Again, it all rolls back (heh, see what I did there?) to the idea that 4e was a great game that was horribly written. The vast majority of problems and criticisms with 4e go away as soon as you phrase things differently. If roles were written as a tiny side note, buried somewhere in the back of the book in a short essay about how to approach combat with different characters and the classes were written from an in-world perspective of how to play the character in that world, then we wouldn't have seen a large swath of the criticism we see still today. We wouldn't have 90 page threads about roles because it becomes largely self evident that roles have always been in any game with classes.

But, alas, people will still conflate 4e roles with class and character and the arguments go round and round.

 

[SirAntoine]

Giving characters a combat role is a mistake. The classes are all you need.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

RE# 995, why do you people insist on bringing up 4E over and over and over and over? Janx (in #954) didn't say anything at all about 4E, and he didn't restrict "roles" to combat--he just observed that fighter/cleric/thief/magic user is a sufficient adventuring party to handle most challenges in adventuring. You're correct to point out that 4E focused exclusively on only one part of adventuring (fighting), but how is that in any way germane to Janx's observation?

Janx said there are situations where fighting/thieving/clericing doesn't cut it. Isn't it pretty obvious that he's not talking exclusively or even primarily about combat? What can wizards do? Well, for one thing, they can summon Phantom Steeds for everybody to ride on the overland map. That isn't thieving, fighting, or clericing, and yet it's valuable.

But, alas, people will still conflate 4e roles with class and character and the arguments go round and round.

In this case, the argument is going round and round and round because someone injected 4E into the discussion, apparently to try to revive the argument just when it was moving back to 5E.

Obligatory 5E roles observation: I maintain that "grease man" is a pretty excellent role to have someone in the party play. A grease man gets you into places you otherwise couldn't get. How you do it doesn't matter: a druid could polymorph everyone into spiders via Animal Shapes; a sorcerer/bard/rogue could fast-talk you past the guards with some combination of illusions, Enhance Ability (Charisma), and Expertise (Deception); a wizard could turn everyone invisible and cast Passwall at the crucial juncture. My players last session avoided some killer fights by virtue of the Shadow Monk's Pass Without Trace ability on their way to the fortified enemy temple. Unfortunately someone wandered away from the grease man halfway through and then a huge enemy patrol did spot them...

 

[Hussar]

Giving characters a combat role is a mistake. The classes are all you need.

See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. There was no giving going on. It was a recognition of how the class was actually being played at the table. Or, at least the attempt at that. I'm not saying they got it right, but, that's what they were trying to do. And, once you have that recognition - fighters are defensive characters, heavy armoured, not particularly adept at dealing damage to large numbers of targets and typically not ranged combatants, then you build the class around that core concept. Again, realising that this is only as it pertains to combat, not the other pillars.

Look at what people generally do with that class, and then make that class do that thing really well. It's not a bad design goal. And, because it's not prescriptive, it doesn't mean that the class can only do that thing and nothing else. Which is yet another misinterpretation that gets trotted out pretty regularly.

 

[BryonD]

See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. There was no giving going on.

This == Irony

 

[SirAntoine]

The story drives the game. Every character will do what is required of them.