D&D 4E 4e and teamwork...will it support it or not?

[Brother MacLaren]

In actual play, there is no difference between "encourage" and "require" because players that have a clue will insist on maximizing performance.

I consider myself quite lucky to have generally avoided such groups in my 23 years of gaming. I know they're out there, but it's just not my style.

Improvising a plan on the spot in response to some unexpected development -- that's fun.
Having your PC do something impulsive, daring, and heroic, with a real chance of failure, at a dramatic moment -- that's LOADs of fun, even if the PC fails.
Being forced to be "sub-optimal" and finding a way to still muddle through -- that's actually LOT of fun in my experience.

Maximizing effectivness? Not so much fun, for me at least. I can certainly do it, but it means dragging the game down a painstakingly slow pace.

If anything, I think 4E will encourage teamwork. True teamwork. As in, instead of the fighter getting creamed and *needing* the cleric to heal him, he can decide to "take one for the team" and rely on his selfheal, thereby allowing the cleric to throw down a Flamestrike.

This brings up a point about teamwork that I recognized in 3E. If the fighter chooses to use options that sacrifice defense for offense (2-handed weapon, charging, raging, Enlarge), he gets to dish out a LOT more damage, but also requires much more healing -- thus forcing the cleric to spend her actions healing the fighter. A more balanced sword-and-board fighter does less damage, but also takes less damage, thereby allowing the cleric to do the "cool stuff" that she wants to do. I assume this tradeoff will still be there to some extent in 4E. Even if other classes can self-heal, and even if the cleric can heal while taking other actions, it is my guess that the most effective healing will be something the cleric does as a standard or full-round action.

Is the specialization ("I hit things, you heal me") teamwork? It can be.
Is the distribution ("We all hit things") teamwork? It can be.
Baseball and basketball are both team sports, but they have very different balances of roles and "spotlight time."

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

How do you setup the cleric to make a critical hit?

You're right, you also don't know if the critical hit had anything to do with the healing in that playtest article. I still think it didn't. He just activated a power that hit the enemy and healed someone at the same time. He just happened to crit.

Not at all. That simply gets us to discuss the meaning of "teamwork".

And this is the key point of the discussion. I think that teamwork means "Using your powers to help the group succeed." If you are healing teammates so that they can continue fighting, adding ac or bonuses to others, attacking the enemy who is hurting your friend, providing tactical positioning to your allies, etc....all of those things are teamwork.

Hitting one enemy over and over again when it would help the team better to heal them isn't teamwork. I think it's just that 4e is going to make more of your options teamwork oriented so that someone won't accidentally play counter to the team. It's still possible to do it on purpose. Keep in mind that the Paladin smites we've seen so far can all be used to protect yourself or heal yourself rather than someone else.