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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Andor" data-source="post: 5816262" data-attributes="member: 1879">Potions, time, npcs back in town.No one. The wizard had unique abilities. As an individual. In practice a dozen NPC henchmen with bows outgunned a wizard for about 6 levels.The cleric. The rogue. The magic users brains. Or no one. Adventureing is risky, that's why sane people hire adventurers to do it.In part from RPGs, in part from the tabletop games RPGs sprang from, in part from the unique requirements and opportunities of the genre. Aggro management was simply not a part of the game before MMOs made it part of the gaming lexicon. Oh the Fighter might try to keep the kobolds focused on him instead of the wizard by mocking their mothers, but the mechanical components to this originated in CRPGS and MMORPGs and then filtered back to the 3e Knights challange and 4e marking. Formal roles did not exist. Nobody told the wizard "You're a controller, take earth to mud, not acid arrow, or you can't fulfill your role." Likewise the Cleric was not a leader, he was a healer. And that was a problem because healing was vital. You needed a healer, and that was sometimes all he got to do because without that, everybody dies. Half of all game design since then has been a reaction to that. Combat is the key. In a game without combat, all these problems go away. But in the game, like in life, there is always a risk that someone will decide that the appropriate solution to the annoying people is a cludgel to the head. And it's more likely in a primitive, disorganized world without strong central authorities with an interest in order and wide ranging police powers. So we have to take combat in to account. And Players (escpecially now) want their PCs to surive.  I think this is a much stronger feeling today, driven, perhaps, by computer games where death is defeated by a reload, or a mushroom. So to sell a game to consumers who want pretty good odds for their PCs to survive most combats you need to give them the tools needed to do so. In old school games TPKs happened. We all knew it.In reality, this is gear, it is training, it is prep work, it is intelligence, it is not having fair fights in the first place. In a modern game the PCs want the illusion of a fair fight, but to not have a 50/50% shot at dieing. So. You give them a pool of hit points, and set them up against monsters that can drain that pool. But then you give them a healer to undo that damage. You give them a controller so they can determine when they get hit. You give them a meatshield who can't be dropped in one round to soak the damage for the rest of the team. And you give them a striker to take out those enemies while the rest of the team concentrates on survival. But at some point it becomes so remote and abstract that it stops feeling like an RPG and becomes a boardgame. That point of dislocation varies for different people. For a lot of people 4e was past that point, and the community split over that. So if 5e is supposed to be a uniting edition it needs to rope that in to where most gamers can suspend their disbelief and get into character without worrying if Sir Bitemous is supposed to be a defender/fighter or a striker/fighter.And to do that I think roles, as explicit components of class design, need to die. The concept of roles can inform design, but nobody at WotC should ever say "That's a cool idea for a fighter feat/ability/class feature but it's drifting into striker territory and blurring the roles."My 2¢.</blockquote>

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