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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteveC" data-source="post: 5813617" data-attributes="member: 9053">I think this is another case of showing how the sausage is made.D&D has roles, and has had them right from the beginning. It has roles that you need to use in order to survive the Fantasy Vietnam of dungeon adventures.The Magic User is a squishy. If left unprotected, he'll die, almost immediately. The only reason he's there is for his artillery effects.The Fighting Man has a lot of hit points, and the best armor class in the game. He's a shield of meat that stands in front of the squishies.The Cleric is a hybrid role: he has access to healing spells, but also can take a fair bit of punishment. The reason he's there, however, is to keep the group alive and moving. He's the person who looks up when the fighter says, "heal, please!"The Thief, well in combat, there's a question as to what the Thief is doing there. Depending on the GM, he might get to use his backstab, which can do a fair bit of damage (it's swingy, but with a good roll, he can do the most damage of any of the classes). The Thief is there, however, to pick the locks and deal with the traps. And, oftentimes at low levels, to die to those traps.Those are pretty basic roles that were used in the game since it started, and people who didn't want to use the character generation system a lot paid attention to them. Over time, when computer games were developed, those were the roles they took from D&D. I have to laugh at the notion of the roles being from computer games and ask... where do you think the computer games got them from in the first place?It seems like when we talk about things, they lose some of their mystery and wonder ... and a lot of their appeal (that's my "knowing what's in the sausage," comment). My take on D&D next is that a lot of the discussions about how and why the game works will be removed from it so as to leave the mystery of the sausage intact.If D&D is only concerned with the current audience and existing gamers, there's not a huge reason to describe the roles in detail: we can rely on people basically figuring it out for themselves, or already knowing them from decades of experience. That seems to be what D&D next is try to do. I'd argue, however, that if we bring new people into the game, they're going to want to know what they're character is expected to do in the game. That's what 4E tried to do. And using the terms that 4E spelled out is very useful in that case. The anger it created, however, means it's likely to end as a design goal.</blockquote>

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