Classes ... Much Less Flexible than Advertised

[helium3]

Also all the stuff "not being everything to everyone" carries with it an implicit surrender of, well, sales. The game is popular because it can be so many things. You want the new edition to sink, that you may direct disappointed would-be players to GURPS or whatever, well, good for you, because the game designers seem to be on board with that plan.

Oi. Yeah. Why would I want people to stop playing D&D and start playing GURPS?

I'm talking about playing D&D when you want combat heavy skirmish play, an old fashioned White Wolf product when your group just wants to tell a story and god only knows what when you want a good old game of resource management that's more complicated than a round of Settlers.

 

[JohnSnow]

I wonder if the problem may not lie in two schools of thought on class roles.

In the flexible class role school of thought, while your main class grants you certain abilities it doesn't limit you, and you can build similar characters using different classes through adding feats, skills etc.

In the not-flexible class role school of thought, your main class defines who you are - your niche is "protected" - the spellcasters can't use spells to emulate you, the warriors can't use feats to emulate you etc.

Thoughts?

I think you're spot-on.

However, I think that Third Edition put the designers firmly in the "not-flexible" class role - to an extent. Without some form of niche protection, you end up with classes like the bard, who have no niche, and therefore no role. They're suboptimal at everything, which is hardly conducive to play. At the other extreme, there are classes like the cleric and druid, who can outdo everyone else.

Fourth Edition aims to change that, I believe, by protecting a niche for every class. That way, the rogue can't easily subsume the ranger's role, or the bard's, and make those classes utterly unnecessary. Likewise, the fighter just isn't going to be as good an archer as the ranger.

To some extent, the wizard and cleric have always had this niche protection (maybe even TOO much). Nobody tramples on the wizard's mastery of the arcane, and nobody can heal quite like the cleric.

But for the martial characters, it's always been a bit more of a free-for-all.

 

[Campbell]

Also consider that the rogue gets 10 skills total, not 6. Theivery, stealth, any four skills, and four from a list. Perhaps even more, if you get more skills for your inteligence bonus. (perhaps they haven't mentioned it because every character gets it, kind of like languages in 3rd edition... the extra skills are a benefit of your intelligence, not your class, so it isn't mentioned in the class.)

I don't think that is correct.

Trained Skills: Stealth and Thievery plus four others. From the class skills list below, choose four more trained skills at 1st level.

I think you're misinterpreting the meaning of 'plus four others' there. By my reading the second sentence is elaborating on the first. Hey look ma ! the rules forum will still be necessary.

 

[Cadfan]

If I try to use the same class to build 'smart rogue' or 'charming rogue' or 'tough rogue', the best I can do is try to cobble something together through general feat choices.

You're mixing combat issues with non combat issues.

Or to put it another way, NOTHING makes a "charming rogue" incompatible with a stealthy guy with a dagger. Neither is a "smart rogue" incompatible with a stealthy guy with a dagger. Neither is a "tough rogue" incompatible with a stealthy guy with a dagger.

We can keep going. Nothing makes a "lawyer rogue" incompatible with a stealthy guy with a dagger. Nothing makes a "sausage factory owner rogue" incompatible with a stealthy guy with a dagger. You aren't being stopped from using non combat roleplaying possibilities by the fact that your combat roleplaying possibilities are non infinite.

If, upon release of 4e, I read the PHB and discover that intelligence is of ZERO OR NEARLY ZERO VALUE to a rogue, and that therefore a rogue for whom "smart" is a character descriptor is no longer viable, I HEREBY PROMISE to come to this forum and issue a mea culpa. But until then, I'm going to be convinced that "smart rogue" is fully compatible with "brawny rogue," creating the lovely hybrid "smart brawny" rogue. And that any other similar combination is AT LEAST as viable as it was in 3e, if not more so.

 

[I'm A Banana]

3e rogues had required skills too. They just had to buy them with skill points instead of getting them for free. Search and disable device, for example, are so necessary to party survival that they are essentially required. It's nice that we are getting them for free now.

This is a fallacy. It works that way in your games, maybe, but definately not everywhere.

I still say it's only a preview. The class is going to appear narrow when we only have a narrow view of it.

Do you see any hints of depth anywhere?

If so, point 'em out.

If not, then it's just wishful thinking that runs directly contrary to at LEAST what the designers have been hinting that they're doing.

I can tell the Mona Lisa is a person with brown eyes....

 

[Arkhandus]

1) As there are two builds for the rogue, I suspect there will two builds for the ranger – ranged or TWF.


2) As there power source is Martial, not Primal, I don't think it will be overtly so.

As for the first part, that would still leave a gap for any other kind of agile warrior; either be an agile archer with some wilderness skills, or an agile twfer with some wilderness skills, or an agile thief with some limited backstabbin' and limited snipin'.....etc.

No general agile warrior or ranged fighter. And no sneaky backstabbin' thug with a big club or somethin', among other things.

The second part is likely to be covered by stuff like getting the Nature skill automatically, filling for wilderness lore/survival, I would hazard a guess. And maybe also an animal-handling skill automatically, perhaps (I forget what skills they've mentioned/revealed so far besides just a few).

They might still get an animal companion or camouflage or other such thing automatically...

 

[Zamkaizer]

Nothing makes a "sausage factory owner rogue" incompatible with a stealthy guy with a dagger.

The smell.

 

[AllisterH]

Just something else about what weapons are useful: multi-classing. The rogue gets sneak attack at first level for +2d6 damage, which means a fifth level ranger might be able to take 1 level of rogue and be able to sneak attack.

So a rogue 6 does the same sneak attack as a ranger 5/rogue 1, but the ranger can use better weapons for it.

The same for the fighter. A fighter takes 1 level of rogue and can sneak attack as well as a rogue with better weapons.

Being that there is no longer a difference between rogue levels in sneak attack damage, that there should be a restriction on what weapons can be used to keep every class from grabbing one level in rogue for the sneak attacks.

Also, note the sneak attack damage section:

As you advance in level, your extra damage increases.
Level Sneak Attack Damage
1st–10th +2d6
11th–20th +3d6
21st–30th +5d6

It doesn't say "as you advance in rogue levels" or in any other way say that these levels correspond to rogue levels. I could be reading way too much into what isn't said...but it could be that even a ranger 21/rogue 1 might have a +5d6, and therefore the weapon restrictions are necessary or else sneak attack just becomes too good for people to not take it.

Well, that's kind of what we have now with weapons and the 3.5 version of sneak attack.

There's no damn good reason for a rogue NOT to simply take one level of FTR and then simply use a greataxe for sneak attack/damage. Thus, for the non-TWF rogue, getting the biggest weapon made mechanical sense.

Of course, the optimal solution was use TWF which gave birth to the 3E TWF rogue.


The only question is, "do you consider this a problem?" For some people, no, for others, yes.

 

[Spatula]

Why? If it gives your rogue a feat-worthy mechanical advantage under the new rule set... then why not? It allows you your concept, and keeps the game balanced.

Sneak attacking with a club or sap will unbalance the game?

 

[Celebrim]

I wonder if the problem may not lie in two schools of thought on class roles.

There definately appear to be two schools of thought, but I'm not sure that you've pinned them down.

In the flexible class role school of thought, while your main class grants you certain abilities it doesn't limit you, and you can build similar characters using different classes through adding feats, skills etc.

In the not-flexible class role school of thought, your main class defines who you are - your niche is "protected" - the spellcasters can't use spells to emulate you, the warriors can't use feats to emulate you etc.

That's interesting because one of my fears since they moved to the 'everyone is a spell caster with per encounter powers' model, is that there would be extensive mechanical overlap between different classes abilities and that classes would primarily be differentiated by flavor. For example, I think it is likely that we'll see something like this:

Perfect Position
Warlord 1: Encounter: 1[W] + strength, move the target a number of squares equal to your int bonus

Arcane Shove
Wizard 1: Encounter: 1d6 + intelligence, move the target a number of squares equal to your int bonus
11th 2d6 + intelligence, move the target a number of squares equal to your int bonus
21st 3d6 + intelligence, move the target a number of squares equal to your int bonus

Positioning Strike
Rogue 1: Encounter: 1[W] + dexterity, move the target a number of squares equal to your charisma bonus

Slam
Fighter 1: Encounter: 1[W] + strength, move the target a number of squares equal to your constitution bonus

And so forth.

There isn't anything wrong with that per se, but it does suggest that 'niche' protection isn't something necessarily a feature of 'not flexible'. You can have classes that aren't flexible and don't have 'niche protection' either. In fact, I'm pretty sure that 4E does not consider niche protection to be a particularly important thing. I strongly suspect that we will see alot of niche overlap in the class designs so that you can compose a balanced party without the need for a particular class.

I think the difference in thinking is how much complexity you want in a class. The more flexible a class, the more complex it tends to be.

Think of the space of all possible character types. You are designing a class system for it. At one extreme, you could create a single class flexible enough to handle any possible character. However, such a class would be extremely complicated and have a very high design burden (it would be very hard to balance all possible builds, for example). The system is elegant, but the individual class is not. At the other extreme, you could create a very large number of highly individualized classes so that for each concept there would be a class. Each class itself may be quite elegant, but the overall system with its 100's of class with unique rules is not. D&D has traditionally used this latter model. In 3E though, there was at least some attempt to move in the direction of a more elegant set of classes so that in theory you'd only need a few to realize any possible class concept. That is to say that 3E classes were somewhat more universal and generic than thier predecessors. Virtually all the third party products that tried to revise the character creation rules moved D20 even further in this direction, creating more generic and more flexible classes in an effort to fix the percieved flaws of the 3E core classes. Quite a few went down to a model of just three highly generic classes, which may have been to few but was quite elegant. So I think there was an expectation amongst alot of us that dabble in design that 4E would be another attempt to achieve what 3E tried to achieve - a set of design space spanning flexible classes that would empower characters to create and play any sort of character that they wanted. Instead, what we seem to be getting is the exact opposite, a move back towards D&D's roots where every profession or archetype required its own class with its own highly individualized rules.

The thing is that alot of us got away from D&D precisely because of 'features' like that. We didn't see them as features. We saw them as bugs. We don't want dozens and dozens of books of kits and classes, which is exactly what this sort of preview promises. We've been there. Done that. Thank you very much, but you can keep it.