Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 5352610" data-attributes="member: 5143">I disagree.  The roles were always part of D&D.  The number of arguments we had in 3e games about the Cleric who insisted on buffing himself instead of other people or healing(thereby not being a very good Cleric) or the Rogue who concentrated entirely on defense and didn't contribute damage who everyone complained wasn't being very useful to the group(because they weren't being a very good Rogue).We didn't have the words to properly explain what was going on back then, but the problem was that the further someone decided to drift for the role their class was designed for, the less powerful the group was on the whole.  Clerics needed to do the Leader thing, Rogues needed to do the Striker thing, and so on.  The game system let you break the mold and go a different route, but it almost always punished you for doing so.4e's explicit roles were just an acknowledgment of this and an effort to save people from themselves.  If removing all offensive capability from a Rogue caused them to be a liability to the group, then they simply removed the ability to take that option.I think that they created a game they thought would work well(and it does, IMHO), but that a decent amount of the public complained about certain aspects(all of the classes being too similar to each other was one of the big ones).So, they all sat around and discussed how they could make some classes different from other classes without imbalancing the game.  They ended up trying out some of these ideas in the psionic classes.  When the response was mostly positive they realized they could go a little further and make classes even more different.  And they ended up with the Essentials classes.I don't think their plans were this nefarious.  They made a game they thought everyone would like.  When everyone didn't like it, they examined it to see what could be changed in order to address people's concerns without changing it so much that the fans of the system would revolt.  They simply made a compromise.I serious doubt that anyone sat in a room and said "There's going to be some gullible people out there that are easy to sell to, even if we sell them crap.  After they've all bought our crap, we'll get their feedback and use it to convince smart people".</blockquote>

Verification