Unpopular opinions go here

[Tony Vargas]

The combat roles have existed in D&D from the beginning

Arguably, the OG Thief Role was for the Exploration pillar.

It would be really something if you could choose your Social, Exploration, and Combat Roles independently...

 

[Maxperson]

lol, yeah. It's DM Empowerment. I didn't realize I'd been missing it for the preceding 14 years until I switched out of playtest mode and started running 5e with premeditated intent to make it fun.

DM fiat and house rules are the single best tools for making the game fun. Like any good tool, it can be misused, but that's not the tool's fault.

I suppose at the same point that D&D, itself, became arguably no longer D&D? When the classes balance, meaning even the martials aren't underpowered and even the wizard isn't OP, when magic items don't re-define the character who claims them, when magic just doesn't feel magical anymore.

Sure. If that's where you draw the line for yourself, that's okay. That's not where I draw the line, but we all draw it in different places.

 

[Maxperson]

The pillars of play should have roughly equal mechanical weight. Combat has way too many dedicated rules. At most combat should be as involved as social interactions as detailed in the DMG.

All three pillars should have explicit roles you choose when making your character. Tank, DPS, and heals are not dirty words. Nor are face, scout, sage, or various others. Roles are great design that works well. The combat roles have existed in D&D from the beginning. That’s where CRPGs got the idea. Just making roles explicit would go a long way to improve game play and show obviously lacking design space.

This is wrong. Combat gets the most rules, because it's the most complicated. Social is the least complicated and needs very few rules. Exploration is in-between. All three pillars are equal, but the amount of ruled dedicated to them shouldn't be. It would make the game worse if they tried that.

 

[overgeeked]

Arguably, the OG Thief Role was for the Exploration pillar.

It would be really something if you could choose your Social, Exploration, and Combat Roles independently...

That's what I was meaning, but apparently didn't outright say.

Combat roles. Tank. DPS. Heals. Others?
Social roles. Face. Sage. Good cop. Bad cop. Blackmailer. Others?
Exploration roles. Scout. Sage. Quartermaster. Forager. Others?

Pick one from each.

 

[Emberashh]

The pillars of play should have roughly equal mechanical weight. Combat has way too many dedicated rules. At most combat should be as involved as social interactions as detailed in the DMG

If combat was as involved as social interactions you wouldn't have any design space for different roles for either.

All three pillars should have explicit roles you choose when making your character. Tank, DPS, and heals are not dirty words. Nor are face, scout, sage, or various others. Roles are great design that works well. The combat roles have existed in D&D from the beginning. That’s where CRPGs got the idea. Just making roles explicit would go a long way to improve game play and show obviously lacking design space

Roles should be an emergent property of an indepth system, which requires having an efficient amount of rules that provide an exponential amount of interactions and choices.

Making them explicit is both too prescriptive and is likely, design wise, to pidgeonhole the game's possibilities towards rigidity rather than freedom. This is how you end up forcing people to play the healbot, which isn't good design when you, ostensibly, say that players can be anything.

Roles will always emerge organically if the system is in-depth enough. There is no need to be explicit about them, and designing towards them purposefully isn't a good approach.

And thats just for combat. Doing this in other kinds of gameplay is going to manifest these problems even worse, as you'll have to thread the needle on making roles not only robust enough to matter but simultaneously not required in order for it to not become abrasive to players.

That is considerably harder to do when you try to force a role to exist.

Now, that being said, once the system is designed examining it and identifying the Roles that emerge from it, and then discussing those as examples is another thing entirely. But thats not something you can or should be trying to do ahead of time, even if you're noticing one emerging as the design is being created, because as said, trying to force a role to exist is going to pidgeonhole the game, and start affecting the overall design and impacting the freedom it can allow for.

If you try to force Healer to be a role, you're very likely to end up creating a system where Healer is required, and so someone will be forced to fill it. And even if you try to counteract this, you're just going to flip to the other side of the coin, and now the role doesn't actually matter, so players are going to keep hounding you that its underpowered, and trying to fix that you'll again just flip the coin over.

Its not a cursed problem; you just have to not do that, and let the role emerge from the system you created. If the system is robust enough, players will define the roles for themselves.

 

[Aldarc]

Arguably, the OG Thief Role was for the Exploration pillar.

It would be really something if you could choose your Social, Exploration, and Combat Roles independently...

Interestingly enough, this was kinda how a short-lived MMORPG called Wildstar worked. Players would pick a class, but then they would pick a second specialty additionally focused on either Exploration, Lore, Combat, or Social/Housing.

With D&D, especially if WotC wants to make everyone decent at combat, then I would consider having players select their non-combat specialty. The issue of course is Wizards (and other casters). As the Wizard niche shows, there many who earnestly believe that the Wizard should be good at everything and at all pillars and at all times.

 

[pemerton]

With Galadriel, I am not the biggest Tolkien fan so people will have to forgive me if I get anything wrong, but their longevity seemed to be a hugely important physical difference between elves and characters of other races.

<snip>

The point is, if you are going to have races in the setting, and they are clearly not meant to be human, it makes sense that they should have mechanical differences. Those don't have to be stat bonuses or infra vision, like I said. I like those things, but there are plenty of ways to do this so that the physical differences have some kind of expression in the game that matters.

I don't see why a physical difference - longevity - demands a mechanical expression. It may just be part of the character's description.

being different from the baseline in that particular way (bonus to Dex) helped define the set of characteristics that makes elves elves in D&D. And removing it loses some of that distinction, including the trade-offs in choosing one ancestry over another.

Trade-offs in choosing race/ancestry are a purely metagame thing. It's weird if that metagame is supposed to be part of the in-fiction nature or "feel" of those different sorts of peoples.

 

[deganawida]

Interestingly enough, this was kinda how a short-lived MMORPG called Wildstar worked. Players would pick a class, but then they would pick a second specialty additionally focused on either Exploration, Lore, Combat, or Social/Housing.

With D&D, especially if WotC wants to make everyone decent at combat, then I would consider having players select their non-combat specialty. The issue of course is Wizards (and other casters). As the Wizard niche shows, there many who earnestly believe that the Wizard should be good at everything and at all pillars and at all times.

Wildstar was great, so much flavor. I loved the spellslinger or whatever it was called, and I hate playing magic users.

 

[Aldarc]

Wildstar was great, so much flavor. I loved the spellslinger or whatever it was called, and I hate playing magic users.

It's a shame that it's no longer available to play, even as free to play. I don't think that the "hardcore" focus on end game was really my thing, but the general leveling and aesthetic of the game would still be appealing to me and likely my partner.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't see why a physical difference - longevity - demands a mechanical expression. It may just be part of the character's description.

Longevity doesn't necessarily require a mechanical expression, except for something like the age chart. But that still matters mechanically because if you say get aged by a ghost or something, then the longevity comes into play in a potentially significant way

Also, physical differences don't have to. They can be whatever the game wants (description, mechanics, etc). My point is just D&D loses something if races don't have mechanics to back up the physical differences (I think it runs into the humans in funny hats problem).

Trade-offs in choosing race/ancestry are a purely metagame thing. It's weird if that metagame is supposed to be part of the in-fiction nature or "feel" of those different sorts of peoples.

It can be both meta game and feel. Those bonuses, special abilities etc are concrete things that add to the feel of playing a particular race