D&D 5E What are the Roles now?

[TarionzCousin]

Yes! 150 pages! I was routing for this thread to make it here, it did not disappoint. Go thread go!

I skipped pages 2-149. Could someone please sum it all up for me?

Thanks.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I skipped pages 2-149. Could someone please sum it all up for me?

Thanks.

Sure.

 

[pemerton]

RPGs, if you shop around for the right one, maybe. But in general D&D doesn't really allow for recreating characters without a lot of bending... I find that filling the concept with some modifications works best.

Traditionally, I think the biggest issue with D&D and fantasy characters has been the way that it handles magic.

...but not the events which happen to those characters. For example, Harry Dresden almost gets killed in almost every book. Someone always warns him just in time to dodge, or jerks him away, it spots the baddie before he gets Harry. It's a function of the narrative, but in game terms each one of them is a hefty chance of instant death (call it 50% each book) which is part of what makes the book exciting... bit if you try that in game terms, you'll go through 2^20 ~= 1,000,000 Harry clones before one of them manages to compete the whole plotline.

5E dealt with this problem by removing save-or-die from the game in favor of HP attrition.

(Yes, I realize that some people like to play HP as abstract luck points or something, and would consider those close calls to be simple HP ablation. I discount that model because it's incoherent--so, doesn't count as "modeling" anything--but YMMV.)

I think there are a range of ways to go through close calls in RPGs. As you note, hit points is one of them. Fail forward adjudication is another.

 

[Unwise]

I skipped pages 2-149. Could someone please sum it all up for me?

Thanks.

Haha, sorry mate, can't help you there. I only read the first little bit, despite being the OP. I must have expressed myself badly as I have never seen a thread start less on topic than this one. I think the OP must have been insulting too, as it got oddly confrontational pretty early on. I am aware of only two posts addressing what I thought the OP was going to be about.

It might be fun to summaries a thread I have not read though, so let me have a go:

- "You are wrong in every way" followed by statements thoroughly agreeing with the previous persons premise.
- A two person conversation that takes up 3 pages or so about the initial confusion.
- A misreading of somebody's post, followed by a vehement defense of a stance they don't hold, but don't want to have to admit to misreading
- A mod calling to keep it civil
- Some on topic posts
- A reference to nazis in a puzzling context (Any thread over 50 pages has to have a least one of these, I think its the law or something)
- A pearl of wisdom that nobody replies to as it arrived in the middle of a heated exchange about a character from a book that is not really relevent to a thread
- "actually, Aragorn was more class X than a ranger..." (repeate ad nausum for a few more book characters that most people reading have not heard of)
- an on topic post
- some guy just commenting on how long the thread is
- A long post about Goku, i don't know why either.
- some on topic posts
- "Well I actually have fought in platemail before and..."
- Damage on a miss
- Mod "seriously guys, I'll close this down if you do that"
- Some pearls of wisdom that the mods see an decide not to close the thread
- A reference to Agincourt completely out of context
- an attempt to post a meme where the user did not know the correct method and the post amounted to "<img> <-image> LOL!!!!" It would have been very funny though.
- some replies posted in the wrong thread on a completely different topic, but by now nobody even notices.
- I like to think that pages 125-149 will go down as the birth of the Hemmingway of our age and we will kick ourselves of having skipped them.
- after a strong sense of bonding over having spent such a long time together, the thread participants form their own subculture and develop their own dialect, a mix of gnomish and english.
- some douche posting about the thread reaching 150 pages and cheering it on.
- the same douche thinking he is being amusing, but coming off as passive aggressive and insulting the community he really like. He is oblivious though due to a staggering lack of self awareness.

 

[Tony Vargas]

My brother in law would play Gandalf as a wizard, and claim to be smarter then the one in the book because he throws firballs...

Maybe it's a nerd culture thing, but isn't it all-too-familiar to see a character in a book or movie who has already clearly demonstrated an ability that would clearly get him out of the jam he's currently facing, yet inexplicably fails to use it? A game that does a terrible job at emulating a genre gives you the opportunity to re-play that scene 'smart.'

A game that models a genre well gives you mechanical reasons for that ability to be conveniently inaccessible at that moment.

One of his big problems with 4e was he didn't want to play a ranger he wanted to play a fighter with a bow... and could not understand what is written on the sheet doesn't matter.

Today, there are folks complaining about how they 'can't' play a non-spellcasting ranger. Yet, they can certainly play a fighter with a bow and the outlander background. That's even a multi-attack-based 'Striker.'

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Fiction happens. D&D puts you in the role of the character, and too much power and ability would take away challenge and over-shadow other players unless they also get as much.

Completely agreed. This is why I'm not especially keen on design that has players "pay for" great power later on by being "weak" to start off. Everyone should, roughly speaking, have the same level of ability to impact the world they're playing around in. They may achieve that power in radically different ways, and may be very strong in some areas and weak or even helpless in others, but "net" power should be roughly equivalent.

To say it a different way: If there were a way to rank classes on a scale from 1 to 10 with 10 being the best, I feel many editions of D&D have either put classes on a relatively strict scale that disadvantages some of them over others (e.g. 3e had Fighters and Monks at a 4 or 5, while Wizards, Clerics, and Druids were all rocking solid 10s), or starts Fighters off at 7 and Wizards off at 4 and has them slowly move in opposite directions (though, admittedly, in many of the editions where I think this is true, it's more like the Fighter "holds his ground" while the Wizard eventually exceeds him). In my opinion, ALL classes should be in the 8-10 range: it's okay that some of them are really quite awesome and others are a little more niche, but all of them should "feel" powerful and competent, should be "a blast to play" for someone with even a slight active interest in playing one.

This is why I believe having solid design goals for every class is so terrifically important. I believe that if the designers fail to give specific, well-articulated design goals (NOT the same as player goals!) to each class, then some or all those classes will end up being substantially inferior or superior to others. Particularly when you add in the commonly-held perception that "magic can do anything!!", the magic-using classes thus innately creep higher and higher up the power scale, while the purely (or "mostly," e.g. excluding magic-using subclasses) non-magic-using classes fall behind. If the designers can decide on specific goals before they write any mechanics, those mechanics will have a guide, something to help rein in the excesses and highlight the deficiencies so that players won't have "too much power and ability," at least to the fullest extent that design can address that issue. (Obviously, perverse players and/or DMs can always break anything.)

D&D, as much as it does let you become like Conan or Hercules, or Merlin or Gandalf, it does better for an ordinary man who becomes a hero.

Some times, for some games, and some players--sure! But for other times, other games, and other players, it can be and has been absolutely fine to play dragons, balrogs, robots with lasers, and a huge variety of other zany, gonzo things. What the game does "better" or "worse" depends far more heavily on the kind of challenge the DM chooses to provide. Some editions make it very easy for the DM to see what kind of challenge is provided, some require a great deal f familiarity before you can get to that point. Some games are harder on the players (or the DM) if those challenges are specifically made (or allowed to be) widely varying, while others shrug and accept the unpredictability as a fact of play.

In general, I would agree that earlier editions (0e, 1e, B/X and its family) lend themselves to a low-fantasy, "zero to hero (and/or bloodsmear)" style, by dint of their numbers, their design choices, and by far most importantly, the advocated DMing style. 3e, 4e, and to a lesser extent 5e are more high-action, to one degree or another; 5e has tried to include some of the early-edition style in the first few levels, where characters are frail, have very few options, and build relatively quickly. Past level 5 or so, the game has transitioned almost fully to the 3e style at the mechanical level, though monster design and a few other things can still potentially bring more of the early-edition style back in (though this is true of essentially any game).

Today, there are folks complaining about how they 'can't' play a non-spellcasting ranger. Yet, they can certainly play a fighter with a bow and the outlander background. That's even a multi-attack-based 'Striker.'

And if someone is jonesing for the Twin Strike-y kind of Ranger, I'd probably point them in that direction. If someone wants a Beastmaster, on the other hand...well, they don't really have much option, now do they? Plus being a Fighter pretty damn heavily shortchanges you in terms of non-combat effects. Rangers of times past had plenty of non-combat things they could do, without having to expend extra resources. The background helps a lot, to be sure, but it only goes so far.

 

[pemerton]

I like to think that pages 125-149 will go down as the birth of the Hemmingway of our age and we will kick ourselves of having skipped them.

My favourite part of your summary.

 

[pemerton]

Some times, for some games, and some players--sure! But for other times, other games, and other players, it can be and has been absolutely fine to play dragons, balrogs, robots with lasers, and a huge variety of other zany, gonzo things. What the game does "better" or "worse" depends far more heavily on the kind of challenge the DM chooses to provide

It depends, at least in part, on whether the "scaling up" of the stakes (from zero to gonzo) happens mostly in the fiction, or also impacts the mechanics.

In AD&D it impacts the mechanics, and hence puts pressure on the game.

In 4e it is mostly just about the fiction, and hence the game handles it better. (Only "mostly" - conditions change in the move towards gonzo, and the numbers get bigger which exaggerates some disparities of expertise.)

In 5e I'm not sure, but I think bounded accuracy is meant to handle this.

 

[Tony Vargas]

And if someone is jonesing for the Twin Strike-y kind of Ranger, I'd probably point them in that direction. If someone wants a Beastmaster, on the other hand...well, they don't really have much option, now do they?

The beastmaster ranger and the Essentials Druid were created to mirror the 3.x Druids and Rangers with Animal Companions. In turn, 3.x intended the Animal Companion feature to be a less broken alternative to the AD&D Animal Friendship spell.

5e has brought back the Animal Friendship spell, so, yes, if you want a Beastmaster Ranger, you just play a Ranger. A spellcasting ranger, but, then, you want a supernatural bond with an animal, so you shouldn't be that resistant to be being a nature-oriented caster, in the first place.

If you don't want the supernatural bond, just take the right proficiencies and train an animal.

Plus being a Fighter pretty damn heavily shortchanges you in terms of non-combat effects. Rangers of times past had plenty of non-combat things they could do, without having to expend extra resources. The background helps a lot, to be sure, but it only goes so far.

Rangers of times past cast spells, too, that's how they got that happy non-combat effectiveness, for the most part. A non-spell-casting ranger with just some archery or TWFing and some woodsy skills is handled in 5e by Fighter with a Background. That non-casters in D&D have tended to lack out of combat, as well as lag at higher levels, notwithstanding. The concept is provided for. What's written on the sheet doesn't matter.

 

[Hussar]

. What's written on the sheet doesn't matter.

Oh if only that were true.