D&D 5E How would you like 5e to handle combat roles.

[Minigiant]

I disagree.

Early D&D had no roles except healer, blaster and meatshield. The thief was there to deal with enviromental hazards like traps and locks and was usually considered the most disposable 'role' in a party IME.

There was no explicit controller, although either the Mage or Druid could serve as one with the right spells. There was no explicit defender although a Fighter or Cleric could tank if needed. There was no striker at all, although a high level mage was unquestionably the big guns of the game. We called him a blaster.

There was no leader, that term did not exist until 4e invented it as a fig leaf to cover the term "healer".

3e formalized the Fighter, Wizard, cleric and rogue as the iconic 4 classes. That's not the same as roles. They upped sneak attack damage to make the Rogue more attractive which led to his serving as a striker, and led to later "Glass cannon" variants like the Ninja.

There was no such thing as a leader in the 3e lexicon. There was a non-critical job as a buffer. That role could be filled by a Cleric or Bard or possibly a Mage. Later the Artificer.

There was also a Healer. This was a Cleric or druid or maybe a Bard. Later there was the ... Healer.

3e design space was not constrained by roles and was richer for it. Totemists, Binders, Monks, Bards, Druids, Beguilers, Duskblades, Dragon Shamans, Warlocks, Sword Sages.

You could generate some pretty good arguments trying to pidgeonhole those classes into a 4e style role. Does that make them bad classes?

Again, the 4 explicit roles are straightjackets that suit one specific style of play under a specific set of circumstances. Outside of that "Kick-in-the-door" tactical map dungeon crawl they are nothing but a hindrance.

The roles were always there, they just were renamed and evolved.

The meatshield was the guy who hit enemies and took hits from enemies. It evolved into the tank in 3e when actively halting enemies was added. In 4e, its name was changed to defender.

The blaster of older edition just dealt a lot of spell damage. In 3e, it was turned into a lot of any sort of damage and became damage-dealers. 4e turned them into strikers and gave them "escape from threat" abilities.

The healer just healed. It wasn't until 4e where it was combined with the noncritical role of buffer to make the leader role.

Controller was another noncritical role. It evolved into a strong role when control abilities started to match damage in strength.

The noncombat roles was first given to the thief. Then the role was marginalized and the classes that got it was given the other combat roles.

And there was no problem until 3e showed up. Before each class could be tailored into only 1 or 2 roles. Then roles were given to whatever class matched the fluff. The role distribution was changed and players started to question the point of any class that only got one and/or got the one everybody had access to (damage-dealer). So 4e went the other way and enforced roles.

Role were there and always will be. They just evolved and were renamed as the importance of each role moved with the edition.

My own homebrew rpg had its role change when I changed it. Damage dealer and healer were weakened in importanced and I get complaints how fighters are broken and saints stink.

 

[Andor]

The roles were always there, they just were renamed and evolved.

Functions were always there. But that's not the same thing as explicit roles.

A Fighter was a fighter. He could serve as a defender, he could serve as a striker. In 3e he could even serve as a controller. Spec how you please. He also had the classic "Fighter's lockpick."

4e? Defender. With carefully defined power ranges to avoid him stepping on the Rogue or Wizards toes.

Explicit roles limit PC options, player creativity and game design options.

Lets suppose for example you want to make a character who (to borrow an MMO term) does debuffs.

In 3e you might make a Duskblade, or a Binder or talk your GM into allowing Bard who applies his bard buffs as malus to the badguys instead of bonus to the good guys. Or pick a spell caster and gun for debillitating spells. Necromancer would work well.

In 4e? You are outside the accepted design space. Possibly you could shoehorn that into the controller role. Maybe they even did that later on, I don't know.

Look at d20 Modern. Does that fit with the 4 roles? It does not. You might make a charatcer to fulfill one of the functions of that role. Or you could make a hacker who like to jetski.

Look at 7th sea. Dungeon crawls were solidly supported by the worlds design. The 4 roles of D&D? Almost completely absent. (I say almost because you could go for an arnoured fighter and try to tank. Still no healers to back you up though.)

Like I've said, I think roles are a useful tool for design when used implicitly to inform the game. I think they are a terrible thing to make explicit and hardcoded.

Frex, one of my favorite late 3e classes was the Dragon Shaman. With hindsight it shows clear signs of being an early dabbleing with 4e design philosophies. He's got some heal, some buffing, minor area damge. A leader/controller then.

You know what I did with them? 1 level as a Knight or Fighter to get heavy armour and martial weapons and turn them into frontline Defender types.

Easy in 3e with no explict roles, but the same functions. In 4e? Not doable, because of the rigidity of the design specifications.

 

[FireLance]

As a number of people have mentioned, roles have existed from the earliest incarnations of the game. What has changed in 4e, and what seems to have ruffled quite a few feathers, is the tying of specific classes to specific roles. Not that this actually constrains the characters very much, since each class has powers that blur the roles, and multiclassing makes individual characters even more flexible, but it is a mindset that the 5e design team should bear in mind.

Roles are supposed to tell you what your character is good at, but they aren't meant to be more constraining than that. They don't prevent you from doing things that you aren't good at, any more than being untrained in Stealth prevents you from hiding, or being untrained at Perception means you can't notice things. If you're not a striker, you can still deal out damage. If you aren't a defender, you can still get between an enemy and a badly wounded ally, and be no worse off than any character in any edition who doesn't have a mechanic to make the enemy want to attack you instead of your ally.

But back on topic. Tying roles to classes in 5e probably is not going to fly. Tying roles to powers/abilities/benefits might be a better approach, so that by picking the right combination of features, your fighter could (say) be a whole lot of striker, some defender, and a little bit of leader. Varying the way in which different powers approach the roles would also help: maybe shield other splits damage between the target and the user, while covering strike allows the user to make an attack against an enemy in melee reach who attacks an ally, and to impose a penalty on the attack roll if he hits.

 

[Lanefan]

But back on topic. Tying roles to classes in 5e probably is not going to fly. Tying roles to powers/abilities/benefits might be a better approach, so that by picking the right combination of features, your fighter could (say) be a whole lot of striker, some defender, and a little bit of leader. Varying the way in which different powers approach the roles would also help: maybe shield other splits damage between the target and the user, while covering strike allows the user to make an attack against an enemy in melee reach who attacks an ally, and to impose a penalty on the attack roll if he hits.

Interesting idea, but instead of going to these lengths wouldn't it just be simpler to go back to Plan A and abandon named roles entirely?

If your idea flies, my worry would be players picking features to suit a role rather than the actual character they have in mind. Ditch the formal roles; the informal ones will take care of themselves during play just like in 0-1-2e and to some extent 3e.

Lan-"like a roleing stone"-efan

 

[FireLance]

Interesting idea, but instead of going to these lengths wouldn't it just be simpler to go back to Plan A and abandon named roles entirely?

If your idea flies, my worry would be players picking features to suit a role rather than the actual character they have in mind. Ditch the formal roles; the informal ones will take care of themselves during play just like in 0-1-2e and to some extent 3e.

I omitted it from this post, but I also believe that explicit roles will be absent from 5e. However, I'm fairly sure, they are going to be there, "under the hood", in the background, eminence grises, exercising their subtle, intangible influence on the way that the game is designed and played, outside the direct view and notice of the gaming public, so that the designers can tell everyone, "Roles? What roles? There are no roles. These aren't the roles you are looking for. The roles are a lie. We killed them off in 4e. It's just your imagination. You're being paranoid. Get back to gaming. Nothing to see here."

5e's greatest triumph will be convincing everyone that roles do not exist.

 

[Tony Vargas]

4e? Defender. With carefully defined power ranges to avoid him stepping on the Rogue or Wizards toes.

Explicit roles limit PC options, player creativity and game design options.

In so far as the game fails to provide options for each role, sure. The Fighter is a very good defender, the defender role is one the fighter has always been meant to cover, but never done that well. The fighter's also often covered the archer role, now the ranger (scrubbed of druidy magic) is the pure-martial archer. The archer concept isn't lost because the fighter is no longer a good platform to create an archer, it's just done better by the ranger - ditto TWFing. The greatweapon fighter, even absent the Slayer, is a quite effective two-handed-style fighter, so that's covered. TWFing, Archery, Sword & Board, THFing, that's most of the old martial stand-bys done very well. Just not by only one class through deep system mastery, but by different classes and builds within obvious guidelines.

The point of failure was that the martial source didn't cover all the roles.

 

[Minigiant]

I don't think 4e's explicit roles were not as bad as people say it is.
I think the issue is all the variants did not come out. 4e was based on powers and starting class abilities. As new books came out, players could snag powers that dealt more damage to be strikers or grab variants and powers to be a controller. If 4e went longer, I could imagine a leader fighter or defender wizard. The Powers method just took too long.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Because before there weren't 4 solid roles. It isn't like defenders, leaders, controllers, and strikers have existed as concepts in the game since its inception.

No. 2e mysteriously classified all the classes in the PHB into Fighter/Cleric/Magic User/Thief (or whatever the exact wording was). With e.g. the Bard being a subcategory of thief. These are your roles. Rangers are a type of fighter, bards a type of thief. The four roles come from D&D's history (and from there were picked up by MMOs).

I am not answering the poll because it does not contain an option for "I would like to see explict roles die in a fire."

Quick, was Boromir a Striker or a Defender?
Was Aragorn a Leader or a Striker or Defender? He had healing...
Was Frodo a Striker?
Was Bilbo?

Name me their classes. Was Aragorn a Fighter or Ranger? Depends which edition you play. What was Frodo? D&D classes don't map well onto LoTR where Gandalf's no wizard.

Pick the fantasy series of your choice and pick out the defender.

Fafhrd. Paksenarrion. Caramon Majere. Jocelyn Verreuil (sp?) from the Kushiel series.

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.

Which maps onto the 2e rulebook and common playstyles.

Yes but the roles are why wizards are so narrowly defined.

Wizards are not narrowly defined. They simply don't have a good quarter of the PHB devoted entirely to them any more. They don't get to become walking gods any more than any other class does.

That is an issue of roles not simply an issue of balance. They cold have made a balanced version of D&D that let wizards do everything every other class does, but balanced it out in some other way. The roles are there to establish balance through parity and specialization.

I've yet to see this hypothetical "balanced version of D&D that lets wizards do everything every other class does". I don't believe it to be possible.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I've yet to see this hypothetical "balanced version of D&D that lets wizards do everything every other class does". I don't believe it to be possible.

with casting times, spell failure, and risks of casting spells it is entirely possiboe to do. For me 2E was as balanced as I needed. But you could certqinly take it further, retaining the wizard's breadth of options but imposing things like harsher casting times. I much prefer an approach pike this than the narrowing of class roles you had in 4E. I want my casters to be interesting and have lot of options.

 

[Bedrockgames]

No. 2e mysteriously classified all the classes in the PHB into Fighter/Cleric/Magic User/Thief (or whatever the exact wording was). With e.g. the Bard being a


Which maps onto the 2e rulebook and common playstyles.

Well, the role of the bard was jack of all trades in 2E, not so much a leader (though he had some abilities that allowed him to boost the parties performance a bit). The thief was a trap monkey and out of combat stealth/theif in 2e. Backstab was there to give them something to use in combat, but it wasn't their focus. The striker concept doesn't really line up with what they were unless you strip away essential elements. The mage had spells that might fall under the controller label but they were much, much more than that. They were basically rule benders. They could change the fabric of reality through magic. Summoning monsters, teleportation, unseen servant, fireball, lightning bolt, speak with dead, animate dead, divinations, illusions, etc. They were a colorful class that advanced slowly, died easily and cast spells at some risk. To me, the roles of 4E really dont match my experience of D&D over the years.