D&D 5E What are the Roles now?

[Herschel]

However, that doesn't mean the roles themselves did exist before 4E. I'm going to be blunt: The 1E players and 2E players I knew called WotC's reasoning for the roles existing bull and suggested WotC was flat-out lying. Maybe they were; maybe they weren't. But even I have to admit I never saw signs of some of those roles.

Just because you didn't see them doesn't mean they weren't there. One of the big things 4E did was "pull back the curtain" and give some characters (mainly non-casters) to tools to actually do what they'd always been trying to do.

Defender? That wasn't a role for any DnD game I played prior to 4E; it was a temporary tactical consideration, and usually one taken because things were going horribly wrong.

So your Fighter never stood on the front line, directly facing foes and keeping them from a free run at the back liners? Clerics didn't Bless and heal the party?

Controller wasn't a role; it was a tactical consideration someone like the wizard made when preparing their spells for the day (and, just as often, they chose otherwise). The same character could, at various times during the same adventure, cover every single role that 4E lined out.

Correction: The mid-to-high-level WIZARD could do that in the early edition, Spellcasters in 3E. In 4E those dirty muggles got their tools enhanced to be able to contribute too.

 

[Herschel]

I personally think that the 4E roles came mostly from MMORPGs, not D&D.

Patently false. MMORPG's got their roles from D&D. They were trying to actually have the "classes" do what they had always tried to do and were giving them ways to actually do it better/easier.

 

[Janx]

Well, that's nice, but you're abusing the different senses of the word "role." 4e consistently uses "role" in one way: the answer to the question, "What functions should this class be consistently competent at in combat?" The 4e term says nothing about anything that isn't combat, because that's a separate consideration; this is not to say that classes therefore lack things outside of combat, merely that 4e doesn't have a term, description, or specifically-declared mechanical goal for things outside of combat.

You're using the word "role" to answer the question, "What functions does my character contribute over the course of its entire life?" This question is fundamentally different, and I'd argue it's beyond the scope of being answered in the way that 4e answered its "functions in combat" question. Your question admits so many possible variants and is so deeply dependent on the context of each table that I don't believe it can be answered systematically.

"Wizard" is what you contribute to your player-group, sure. But that's not, at all, the same kind of "role" that 4e talks about. Conflating the two is at best just confusing, and probably more like strawmanning.

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?408712-What-are-the-Roles-now/page98#ixzz3RfHRfcZC

I probably need to put a disclaimer in my sig about what editions I play

I don't do 4E. I haven't read it. Don't intend to diss it, just not my cup of tea. At present, I play 3.5 and we're talking about upgrading to 5E in my group.

So most of my thoughts are either 3.x centric or aligned with the pre-4e way of organizing things.

Class mostly tells me what I'm going to be contributing to the party. I'm leery of terms like "Striker" as that's not written on my character sheet. And in fact, my Fighter might wear lots of armor this week, and drop it all for a bow next week. And per the older rules, he'll do it better than the thief or cleric probably.

 

[pemerton]

I'm just saying that the 4 main classes (or categories of classes) are a decent indicator of party diversity and thus balance.

If I am about to join a 3-player group of 5e and I hear they have a Fighter, Thief and Cleric, then I am going to choose to play a Wizard in order to "balance" that party out by providing a category of class, they had left out.

I'm sure we'll all contribute to combat. But I am also sure that stuff that only my wizard can do will be quite handy to the party. That's my role.

Following up on this: would it be fair to say that, whatever exactly the function of each of the classes may be, you're relying on the designers to have "balanced" them so that each has a somewhat distinct and generally useful schtick?

 

[pemerton]

The classes themselves are the roles, and they tell you everything you need to know.

I am finding some of these comments a bit inscrutable - are you able to elaborate?

For instance, I could say - truly - that in 4e "the classes tell you everything you need to know", in the sense that a class description, including an outline of all its features and options, gives you all the information you need to know to work out what functions it is capable of performing. The role label is just a generalising summary of such information.

But presumably you are trying to draw some contrast between AD&D (and 5e?) on the one hand, and 4e on the other.

If you mean that the class names tell you everything you need to know, then I think that is simply false. In AD&D a wizard cannot heal, but I can't tell that from the class-name (be that magic-user, mage, or wizard). In AD&D a cleric but not a wizard can cast Animate Objects. I can't tell that from the class names either.

If you mean that there was no need, in AD&D, for magazine articles giving advice on the range of functions that a class might fulfil, and the ways it might fulfil them - well, I have many pages of Dragon and White Dwarf that take the contrary view!

 

[Janx]

Following up on this: would it be fair to say that, whatever exactly the function of each of the classes may be, you're relying on the designers to have "balanced" them so that each has a somewhat distinct and generally useful schtick?

yes. I may or may not expect that to mean "we all do well in combat", as some editions that varies, but by the end of the night of varied encounters, we all should have had fun and we all should have been needed.

Per some other guy's comment, pre-4e, I wouldn't say Clerics and Wizards are the same as they "use Magic". Cleric spells tended to be healing-centric. Turning Undead and some other stuff were unique to them. Wizards had their bits of things they could do that clerics can't. The classes existed in different categories for that reason by my older view.

I also would assume that the GM built the adventure to match our party (1 of each class), to support that, and if we were all thieves, we'd be doing theives guild stuff, instead of playing at war as if we were fighters.

I would also assume that if the GM told us this was a "traditional" dungeon crawl, then it's back on the players to diversify their party to handle the diversity of problems we could expect.

I assume 5e works more or less the same. Now if y'all are telling me I have to talk like a WoW player and build my PC as a Striker or a Controller, than y'all are doing a good job of turning me off of 5e. The Class is as narrow as I'd like to define my character as I enjoy flexibility during a session to handle different aspects.

 

[SirAntoine]

When fighter and rogue are defined by what they do (fight and steal, more or less), and cleric and wizard are defined by how they do things (Use Magic), the names really don't actually tell you that much at all. Someone with a heavy LotR mindset (not unexpected, given the popularity of the movies) will probably expect Fighters to be pretty damn awesome, and there's a very good chance they'll be disappointed to see Wizards capable of completely overshadowing them over and over again, except and unless there are big fat sacks of HP with some Legendary Saves to slowly whittle down to 0.

These words do not actually tell us as much as you claim they do.



How do you mean? I see "calling a fighter a defender" as in no way whatsoever different from saying "fighters have good defenses and can interpose between their allies and the threats they face." Where is this conflicting with "the game as it is intended to be played," and what exactly IS "the game as it is intended to be played"? Because that sounds to me like a fancy way of saying, "The word 'defender' is badwrongfun."



Well, that's nice, but you're abusing the different senses of the word "role." 4e consistently uses "role" in one way: the answer to the question, "What functions should this class be consistently competent at in combat?" The 4e term says nothing about anything that isn't combat, because that's a separate consideration; this is not to say that classes therefore lack things outside of combat, merely that 4e doesn't have a term, description, or specifically-declared mechanical goal for things outside of combat.

You're using the word "role" to answer the question, "What functions does my character contribute over the course of its entire life?" This question is fundamentally different, and I'd argue it's beyond the scope of being answered in the way that 4e answered its "functions in combat" question. Your question admits so many possible variants and is so deeply dependent on the context of each table that I don't believe it can be answered systematically.

"Wizard" is what you contribute to your player-group, sure. But that's not, at all, the same kind of "role" that 4e talks about. Conflating the two is at best just confusing, and probably more like strawmanning.



Ah, yes, the "truth" that class literally doesn't matter and you can do absolutely anything you want...except that that hasn't been true since at least 2e and probably earlier. The Fighter was always--even from the 0e days--intended to be a meatshield and to tell people "you shall not pass" with a weapon to the face/body/etc. The whole "marching order" thing and the like. That's the design of the class. People can take the class and then actively oppose what it's designed to do, but that's probably an exercise in heartache. The only way to not do that is to have a class designed to do absolutely everything...at which point "class" really doesn't mean anything anymore.

Some things that were agreed upon earlier in the thread were
- some people could always see the 4e roles in earlier editions of D&D going back to 1st Edition AD&D
- some people could not see the 4e roles, or indeed, any trace of them, before 4e

How do you reconcile those two positions? It's wrong to just say the 4e roles were always in D&D, but it's still right to say for some people they were, only the mechanics 4e developed weren't before. This is to say that I can agree the 4e roles, even with their mechanics, were "organically" grown from earlier editions, as Hussar said, but those roles are still exclusive, to me and many others, to 4e (and to the tables and players who saw them in the game before). The designers apparently tapped the game's earlier editions as much as invented anything new in making the 4e roles and their supporting mechanics, but the philosophy underpinning these roles is also a problem to me and perhaps to others. In other words, I am merely contending that these roles are not the quote-unquote "combat roles" or the "be-all combat roles" of D&D.

 

[SirAntoine]

I am finding some of these comments a bit inscrutable - are you able to elaborate?

For instance, I could say - truly - that in 4e "the classes tell you everything you need to know", in the sense that a class description, including an outline of all its features and options, gives you all the information you need to know to work out what functions it is capable of performing. The role label is just a generalising summary of such information.

But presumably you are trying to draw some contrast between AD&D (and 5e?) on the one hand, and 4e on the other.

If you mean that the class names tell you everything you need to know, then I think that is simply false. In AD&D a wizard cannot heal, but I can't tell that from the class-name (be that magic-user, mage, or wizard). In AD&D a cleric but not a wizard can cast Animate Objects. I can't tell that from the class names either.

If you mean that there was no need, in AD&D, for magazine articles giving advice on the range of functions that a class might fulfil, and the ways it might fulfil them - well, I have many pages of Dragon and White Dwarf that take the contrary view!

I mean everything should be decribed under character classes, with no combat roles labeled or summarized. The strategic ideas encapsulated particularly by the 4e roles should also be presented only as one possible formulation.

The four core classes make a separate point, like every other class will share basic similarities with one of them. They are a traditional guide to the different areas of knowledge characters can have.

 

[pemerton]

The four core classes make a separate point, like every other class will share basic similarities with one of them. They are a traditional guide to the different areas of knowledge characters can have.

Even in AD&D I don't think this is really true. The monk straddles thief and fighter. The druid straddles cleric and magic-user.

 

[SirAntoine]

Even in AD&D I don't think this is really true. The monk straddles thief and fighter. The druid straddles cleric and magic-user.

I think it's true in every edition.