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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ccooke" data-source="post: 7895293" data-attributes="member: 6695890">I'm amazed that I've read through this entire thread, and nobody has made the obvious "Bard" joke¹.More seriously... "Leader" is too ambiguous a term. In many parties, there will be someone who "leads" in social aspects - the party face, if you will - and there may be someone who "leads" in terms or tactics, and there may be someone whose talents in combat fit some defined "Leader" role. I always through that the Leader role was least satisfying of the 4e meta-names. It just doesn't have enough distinctive presence - or, to put it another way, if you say "4e classes are categorised by their role in combat: Defender, Striker, Controller and Leader"... then it's much easier to understand intuitively what it is exactly that the first three do. The 4e definition of Leader fits the term - it's not a bad game term. It's just fundamentally unsatisfying in the sense that if you don't already know what 4e's Leader role is, you're less likely to be able to guess the set of abilities that a Leader is expected without some additional context. It's clear that the game design space that 4e carves out for the "Leader" role works and makes sense along with the other roles, but maybe there's too much cultural baggage to have a good name for that?Not that I have a better idea. "Support" is both underwhelming and would be confusing if you also have "Controller", since that's also support in a way. "Healer" is accurate, of course, but also plays into one of the big anti-tropes. Maybe I just prefer the roles to be less designed-in? I find that people playing any party-based RPG very often naturally fall into playing characters that are mostly one of the 4e roles, but that a chargen system that doesn't enforce a role (and no, I'm not saying 4e did that entirely - but I do think that calling it out as an explicit feature of chargen has an impact on the decisions that people will make; it takes more effort to go against well-communicated defaults) will encourage more characters that are "Mostly X, but can Y". This essay brought to you all by "Oh, hell, I've been debugging the network for how long? I need a break. And to leave the office."¹ Then again, maybe I failed perception. I think at this point my WIS modifier must be in the negatives, based on how long I've rambled here.</blockquote>

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