Where I expect "It's what the character would do" to be the primary motivator behind everyone's play. You're playing the character, so have it do what it would do rather than what you would do.
I also don't demand or even expect them to function as a team all the time, and sometimes they don't even some of the time. I don't expect the characters to get along with each other -whether they do or not is entirely up to the players.
I mean, it's literally a game about cooperative adventure. Even if they don't always like each other, the point is to adventure together.
That "collectively" is made up of individuals, and it's individuals that I'd like to design for. Do that well, and the collective will either take care of itself or it won't, and it won't matter either way.
You cannot design for every possible individual; that goal cannot be achieved even in principle.
On some of it, yes. I don't see the avoidance of (what you see as) tedium to be as big a motivator as you seem to.
Check out video game design sometime. Particularly in MMOs. It's an
incredibly significant motivator in game design. As I said: people will optimize the fun out of your game if it's a possibility. It's a near-inevitability.
Curious: how can one do that and yet preserve the individuality of both players and characters? Put another way, how can that powergaming team player (as per the bolded) do his thing without in effect dragging the rest of the players/characters along for the ride, and thus preventing them from doing their own things?
Player individuality is not something you can meaningfully affect, so I can't really respond on that front--the players will be what they will be.
As for the other? By making it so that the most powerful things you have access to actually depend on someone else's contributions. To use a very simple example (meaning, most examples will be more involved) from 4e, the "Radiant Mafia" concept. Unlike in 3e and (most of the time) 5e, where optimization is almost exclusively about personal actions and personal power, 4e optimization was almost always about teamwork and cooperation. Sure, each player has things they can do to make their contributions better, but most of the time that optimization pales in comparison to what a team can achieve by collaborating. The "Radiant Mafia" does this by having all players work together to deal more damage through applying and exploiting vulnerability to radiant damage. While Divine characters are particularly good at this, almost everyone else can get in on the game with careful choice of powers, or (for Martial characters, who never get elemental/energy keywords) items like sunblades or holy weapons (in 3e that would have been a "brilliant energy" weapon).
For a more complex example, a power I used liberally on a Paladin I once played was
One Heart, One Mind. It telepathically links the party together, and makes "aid another" rolls stronger. Other players also invested into things (powers, equipment, consumables, rituals, etc.) that benefited from skill-sharing and aiding others. When we truly did work as a team to resolve a skill-based encounter, we could achieve things genuinely impossible for anyone to achieve alone. I couldn't roll Dex or Int stuff to save my soul, but the Barbarian and Wizard could. They couldn't persuade or deceive, but my Paladin and the Bard could. Our Shaman made use of banners and potions and all sorts of other tricks and doodads to grease the wheels even further. Was I "dragging them along" by using
One Heart, One Mind? Was she "dragging us along" by using such consumable resources? The individual characters' actions were carrying the day; I (and each of us) was simply helping
all of us to be better at it, and living up to the character's personality and ethos as a "father to his men" noble-soldier character (for whom the party really was a surrogate family.)
You make things work by building up synergies. One player sets up an opening, another exploits it. Without a powerful follow-through, the first player's setup is weak; without first being set up, the second player's follow-through is weak. Only together are they strong, and there's no meaningful sense in which one or the other is "dragging" anyone along. They're cooperating. In the ideal case, this is scaled up to the level of the whole team--each person contributes a piece of the puzzle. The Wizard blows away the little pissers that would have blocked other characters' approach. The Paladin locks eyes with the greater foe and issues a divine challenge, making it both likely to fail and costly merely to
try to fight anyone else. The Warlord nods to the Barbarian, and the two do their practiced maneuver,
hammer into anvil. Without the Wizard clearing the way, none of them could have approached so close. Without the Paladin commanding the foe's attention, the Warlord and Barbarian would have been grievously wounded. Without the Warlord, the Barbarian's blow couldn't have felled it in one strike; but without the Barbarian, the Warlord's strategy is useless, it
requires the help of another.
Who was the MVP? The Barbarian whose rage and battleaxe bit deep into the foe? The Warlord whose cunning strategies turned a powerful strike into a deathblow? The Wizard who toasted half a dozen kobolds? The Paladin whose steely glare and steely-er sword kept the foe distracted? I don't know if we can say
any of them did. Instead, their cooperation is the MVP. Each of them did what was wise for them to do--but the wisest thing they could each do was something that made
everyone better-equipped to face the threat.
That's how any actual small-unit tactics situation is going to play out. In actual battles, you can't afford to act as five individuals who all happen to fight in the same general space at the same time. You
need to be a team. And a well-designed game can--and should!--reward players who actually act and think like teammates, and punish those who act and think like lone wolves trying to be solo acts.
1e tried rewarding "good roleplaying" with its as-written training rules. Really bad idea, in that it was completely dependent on DM judgment and thus made it nearly impossible for the DM to maintain any appearance of not playing favourites. I don't know of any tables that used that rule as written.
Oh, don't get me wrong, you really do have to be careful with design in that space. 3e's attempt at rewarding good roleplaying resulted in the horrible mess that was Prestige Classes. But that doesn't mean it can't be done. Dungeon World's alignment moves, for example, are a great, straightforward way to reward roleplaying. They can't be ported over to D&D directly (due to being based on DW's
much different XP rules), but they show that roleplay rewards
can be all three of good, simple, and worthwhile if refined.
Thing is, some players' ambitions involve their character being better than the rest - sure they're on a team but they want to be the star of that team
"I can only be happy if I'm the absolute best, and everyone else is inferior" is not behavior appropriate to a cooperative teamwork game. That is the kind of game D&D is, that is the kind of game WotC has always presented it as, and that is the kind of game they continue to sell today. Those who can only have fun by being the best, the star, the most important person, the protagonist while everyone else is just a sidekick, should not be encouraged to play D&D. They only have fun by reducing others' fun, and that is not acceptable behavior in the D&D space. It's actively rude.
- and when several such players are in the same game cooperation and teamwork can quickly go flying out the window. Provided people keep it all firmly in character, the results can be highly entertaining and amusing for all.
But you've already said they haven't. It is the
player's ambition. Not the
character's ambition. A
character wanting to be the best is a totally different beast.
A Scout would combine the stealth, movement, and observation capabilities from the Rogue and Ranger but eschew the thievery, lockpicking, and woodland pieces those other classes get. It would be the best class at noticing things, and at remembering what it had seen. For combat, it would be a ranged sniper.
Still sounds like that makes the most sense as a Ranger subclass, if we simply make the Ranger a non-spellcaster and have a subclass that swaps out whatever "woodland" or "nature" features it gets for some other thing. It's a clear, coherent concept, it just has such complete overlap with the Ranger's fundamentals (moderate to heavy armored warrior who exploits observation, terrain, and pinpoint accuracy to both deliver devastating blows and guide his allies' efforts toward the most effective locations/targets/goals they can find) that I worry it would be widely derided as "oh, so it's just the Ranger with a different coat of paint."
E.g., what I would see for this is, assuming a 5e-like base...
Ranger 1: Baseline, get decent armor, good broad-range skill choices (so you don't
have to pick Nature and Animal Handling, you can pick Perception and Investigation), good weapon selection, and a Fighting Style
Ranger 2: Terrain focus, which would include Urban or something like "cross-country" (roads and travel focus, rather than any specific environment)
Ranger 3: Subclass, which could offer spells,
or a powerful animal companion,
or your sharpshooter/observer/encyclopedia Scout,
or etc.
So the same core base of a flexible warrior (Str or Dex) who can specialize in different styles of combat (Fighting Styles), who learns how to leverage some kind of terrain/situation/environment very effectively, with subclass then zeroing in on being a mystical tracker-hunter, a beast-tamer, an observer/sniper, etc.
A Swashbuckler would be a "light Fighter", getting all the Fighter-y combat benefits that the Rogue doesn't get without having to tank up in heavy armour. All offense, not much defense, but still a sub-Fighter rather than a sub-Rogue.
Ah. Fair enough. I personally see this as either a Rogue that gets Fighter stuff (like a Fighting Style and Extra Attack at higher levels) or a Ranger that gets rewarded for eschewing heavy armor and specializes in the art of the blade. But I recognize that both of those could feel like a bad fit; Swashbuckler
is its own class in many games, both tabletop and computer.
A War Cleric dials that up to ten (a Paladin takes it to eleven). Its battle-oriented spells are enhanced and it uses a better combat matrix but its cures are relatively poor and its divniations are cut back unless they relate to combat (e.g. in place of Detect Good/Evil they get Detect Enemies). But it's still a Cleric, without all the baggage of a Paladin.
I guess I just don't see the need for something that dials it up to 10 when there's already something that dials it up to 11 and something else that's hovering at a comfortable 7-8.
The existence of ranged healing pains me. It takes in-combat healing - which should be next to impossible even with the caster taking extreme risk - and makes it trivially easy.
The existence of healing that is neither natural (i.e. what you get from resting) nor magical (i.e. from a divine spell) pains me. 4e (and 5e) already have IMO ridiculously-too-fast natural healing, and that non-divine types can heal not only destroys the Cleric's niche but serves to makes healing way too easily available. (I don't like Bards being able to heal either)
That the Warlord does both at once: ouch.
Ah. That's a pity. With ranged
but limited healing, you can make combat highly volatile (status changes wildly from round to round, perhaps even from turn to turn) without needing to risk all that much lethality (that is, characters don't actually die all that often unless players make actual tactical errors.)
The key, of course, is the limitations. 4e limited healing in two ways: Standard healing powers (e.g. the ones Clerics, Bards, Warlords, etc. get at first level) could only be used twice per combat (three times for levels 16-30), and Healing Surges put a very strict soft cap on how much healing someone could get each day (so long as you correctly followed the "no bag of rats" rules--powers that give you healing from attacking an enemy actually require a real combat, not just a manufactured "I use this attack on a rat I pulled out of my bag!" type situation.)
Between the two, Leaders had to be cautious about not blowing through their resources right away, and players in general needed to avoid having one person always in front, always taking all the hits. You
needed those Cleric etc. heals because healing yourself was usually risky and tactically wasteful, but you also couldn't just leap blindly into the fray knowing that there was an endless font of healing behind you, neither tactically (only 2x per combat!) nor strategically (you only get ~8 surges a day, less for squishies, more for beefy classes like Barbarian or Paladin). A party running out of healing surges genuinely has to weigh whether it is worth the risk to engage in combat again,
regardless of who is bringing the party heals. That's part of why having stuff like Skill Challenges or environmental hazards (e.g. Dark Sun stuff) cost Healing Surges was so
useful--it was a way to heighten tension and force difficult, nail-biting strategic decisions without
directly just threatening characters with death.
Things are better in 5e than they were in 3e, but still flawed on the "forcing both tactical and strategic decisions" front, for a variety of reasons on both ends. No more wands of CLW (or, more typically,
lesser vigor), but conversely, still tons of low-level spell slots to dump on healing at high levels. No more ridiculous CL cheese, but now Life Cleric
goodberry cheese. Etc.