Mishihari Lord
First Post
Other. Toss roles out. I'd like to see some classes that aren't even combat oriented.
Well, it's the way some people like to pretend 4e is to make it easier to criticize.If everyone is supposed to have parity in all situations, then why not just have one class, and one race. "D&D character". You can each do the exact same things at all times.
There, done.
But that's not the way the game is.
Right. But you can give them mechanical 'parity' while still letting each one be different. That's exactly what 4e did - in combat.Some classes are supposed to excel at certain things. The cleric is a better healer than any other character. The wizard is a better blaster. The fighter is the best at armed combat. The bard is supposed to be one of the characters with the best social skills.
You can't make them all exactly the same in terms of capabilities in particular roles, because they're *supposed* to be different.
Well, certain social situations. Court intrigue, getting a free meal at an inn, that sort of thing. Getting the help of an acetic old hermit or getting a band of bugbears to back down, maybe not.The bard should excel in social situations, with better abilities at influencing NPC and monster behaviour than any other character.
But, the bard probably should be good at cunning tricks in combat - flustering an opponent and getting him mad to create an opening, misdirecting an enemy attack, feigning weakness (or strength).But, the flip side is that he shouldn't be as good at ripping them into meat gibbets as the fighter is.
Which is the point of broader balance. Not every game will have equal measures of combat and non-combat, so you /can't/ balance combat resources vs non-combat resources, they have to be balanced independently.If your game is just a dungeon crawl, then yeah....a focus on pure combat balancing makes more sense, as might roles.
But many games aren't just simple like that.
If that's the case, then what did a fighting man, a magic user, a cleric and a thief do in a dungeon adventure?I disagree. Classes have been around since the beginning, but the four role of leader, defender, striker and controller simply havent. That is a new interpretation of the game.
If that's the case, then what did a fighting man, a magic user, a cleric and a thief do in a dungeon adventure?
If the cleric didn't heal, who did?
If the magic user didn't take out group targets with sleep, who did?
If the fighting man didn't keep the magic user alive, who did?
I'm not saying this was the only way to play the game early on, but to say that it wasn't there, and it wasn't intended to be there is rewriting history. If computer games didn't take these concepts from RPGs, where did they come from?
Now you can certainly argue "I didn't play the game that way back then, and I don't want to now," and I'd agree with you. Your game, play it your way. But to say that wasn't the general idea behind the early classes, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I don't know if you actually played back in the day, but if you did, I'd love to hear how your group was different.
' .
This whole thing smacks of rejecting a concept /only/ because it's found in 4e.
I must have missed it, maybe it was hidden behind all the revisionist history...I think we have made clear this isn't te case at all.
I must have missed it, maybe it was hidden behind all the revisionist history...
Technically, there weren't formal roles in early D&D. If you've ever heard someone say 'we need a cleric' (or fighter, or theif or magic-user), though, you know that roles existed, even if they weren't called that.
I?
That's more a matter of the classes being balanced than roles. Fighters got a lot of new toys in 4e, because they'd never had many toys. Wizards got paired down substantially because they'd had far too much. Rogues got to be useful in combat, because being useless in combat really sucked.
Roles helped in class design, clearly, but they aren't solely responsible for the changes to classes - improvement in class balance was a major factor, too.
If 5e wants to return classes to more familiar forms it doesn't have to abandon formalized roles - which are a useful construct - to do so, it just has to use /different/ formalized roles...
... well, and abandon class balance.
Yes but the roles are why wizards are so narrowly defined.
No, that was going to happen regardless. When the decision is made that no class should be able to do everything, the class that could previously do everything is going to have its options curtailed and its definition narrowed. That's just how it is.
'Formal roles' is a distinction without a difference. There have been different classes with different roles throughout D&Ds history.
Yes, 3e first formalized them as iconic class roles, and 4e first formalized them independent of class. In between MMOs adopted formalized roles - in immitation of D&D!
Roles are nothing new, only the labels are new. To argue otherwise is absurd - and, really, whats the purpose of doing so, anyway? If you get role excised from the game, you'll still have characters who are tanking, healing, blasting, and so forth, anyway, it'll just be a tad harder to explain to new players, and require a little more circumlocution to pull a decent party together.
This whole thing smacks of rejecting a concept /only/ because it's found in 4e.
Early D&D had no roles except healer, blaster and meatshield.
What I don't want for example are three defender builds, or three controller builds. I want to be able to take a class and use it's options to build whatever I can think of with what I have. If I want an archer type fighter I don't want to be told I can play a ranger and flavor it to be a fighter.
Sure a fighter could pick up a bow and use it but why would you when you have all these other powers that enable you to do more damage, nevermind the fact that those powers are designed for melee and not archery.
Yet this is no different than before, see my example of my AD&D Ranger. He became a "fighter" after we started using UA and then when 2E came along, and had to remain that way in to 3E as when UA came out the Ranger became a dual-wielder. He was still the same character from edition to edition, some of his descriptive keywords just changed.
If you want to play an archer character, play the class that supports the character concept regardless of whether it's called a fighter, a ranger or a jackolantern.
Heck, for the vast majority of the game's history the Ranger is explicitely a specialized fighter.
I don't like those style of games I'm afraid. When I want to play an archer fighter I want to play an archer fighter like in 3.5/Pathfinder. When I want to play an archer ranger I will play an archer ranger.