Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 4571226" data-attributes="member: 3424">For the player, roles are descriptive, not prescriptive. They give you a basic idea of how the class works best in combat, but they don't force you to play your character that way. However, roles are prescriptive for the game designer. A class's role should inform the types of powers and abilities it gets, and it is incumbent on the game designer to ensure the class is able to perform its basic role reasonably well. Essentially, roles enable the player to make more informed decisions, which is almost always a good thing. For example, if you want to play a character that is highly mobile and deals large amounts of damage in combat, roles will tell you that you are probably better off choosing a class with a striker role instead of a class with a defender role. The roles of individual character will also inform how the party as a whole is likely to do in combat. Certainly, there is an incentive for all the combat roles to be filled, as it makes the party better able to handle a wider variety of challenges. However, while roles may make the lack of certain abilities more obvious, the lack will remain even if roles are not specifically called out. In addition, a party that lacks a character with a particular role can find other ways to plug the gap. A party without a controller may look for other ways to gain area attacks instead of insisting that someone plays a wizard, e.g. by having a dragonborn character, or by obtaining the right magic items.It seems to me that any problems that arise are more likely to result from the mis-application of the concept of roles than anything inherently negative about the concept of roles itself.</blockquote>

Verification