L&L: These are not the rules you're looking for

[Savage Wombat]

And Pathfinder, BTW, just says that the Level 7 Barbarian is only a CR 5 opponent. So 4 lvl 7 Barbarians fighting 4 lvl 7 PCs would only be a CR +2 encounter.

 

[Janaxstrus]

Yeah, if the example was instead "a level 7 monk" then we'd see more problems.

CR isn't perfect, that is for sure. Substitute CR6 Chraal and that level 7 party is in more trouble than they are from the Hill Giant.

That is on the designers, in that instance though and MMIII and IV (fastest way to have the players groan...pull out MMIII or IV for an encounter)

 

[JamesonCourage]

CR isn't perfect, that is for sure. Substitute CR6 Chraal and that level 7 party is in more trouble than they are from the Hill Giant.

That is on the designers, in that instance though and MMIII and IV (fastest way to have the players groan...pull out MMIII or IV for an encounter)

Or even the CR 3 Allip from the first MM. Incorporeal (50% miss chance even with +1 weapons), 1d4 Wisdom drain as a touch attack (against my barbarian's 10 Wisdom and touch AC of 10), gains 5 temp HP per Wisdom drain attack, and a group fascinate ability for 2d4 rounds vs Will (with about 50% chance to affect the barbarians). This is an all barbarian party, though, so more things can challenge it than normal.

At any rate, the CR system definitely needs a major overhaul from what 3.X had if it's going to get used. I think that's something must people agree on. Good place to start, bad place to stop.

And, I actually think the 3.X CR system's the opposite of what Mr. Mearls wrote: it's potentially better than nothing for experienced players/DMs, but it's probably bad for new players/DMs who don't know what they should be looking to ignore. Let's get that reversed, yeah? As always, play what you like

 

[hanez]

I can think of three more solutions. 1. When the adventurers first encounter each other in the tavern, the others say, "Hmm. Thanks Mr. Evil, but we will leave the spot open for another cleric." 2. The Paladin leaves an opening for some gnolls to slip past and eat Mr. Evil. "Too bad I did not have Divine Challenge." 3. Another player chooses to play a class in a weird role to complement the cleric: "Hi. I am a Wizard who uses his staff in melee. This should be fun."

I am not 100% sure if your being sarcastic here. I see #3 as a suitable option and #1 and #2 as examples of whiney players who might be close to getting kicked out of my gaming group. The example you provided had a cleric summoning undead, a not uncommon occurrence in D&D. As long as your DM does not have a houserule to ban non good characters, I would propose that sabotaging the player would be a bit of an extreme way to play out the tension. There are many reasons why characters of different alignments might work together, perhaps you or your DM could think of some ( there are many other examples in fiction).

As for option #1 I believe it is always the DMs job to give players a reason why they are working together. So if my DM was silly enough to let the players in the tavern "not want to work with me" and have no negative consequences to the game for doing so, I would be sure to immediately role up a lawful good character who didn't want to work with the other characters because they don't meet his standards. The other player can be just as difficult as you are being.

Again your group might have a rule about only playing good characters, thats not uncommon, but if it doesnt have that rule I don't exactly see what your problem is. One of my most memorable campaigns involved a wizard who summoned legions of undead, and a druid working in the same party. We ended that campaign at epic levels and when we get together over beers the wizard player always brings up his mammoth spiraling evil tower overshadowing the druids grove, while the druid jokes about how he used the wizard to save Gaia (a plot theme in the campaign).

 

[Hussar]

Not exactly.

Each 4e role comes first with Role Mechanics -- Defender's Mark (or Aura), Striker's Additional Dice (or extra damage), Leader's Word, and a controller with an area-affect ability and maybe some (save ends) or EoNT status effects.

This is how 4e ensures that any character can "do their job" in a party.

Secondly, and a bit more subtly, a class's 500 powers reinforce this role. There is much more variety to be found here, but many of a fighter's powers are still defensively-oriented, and those are, mechanically, the more optimal choices -- as a fighter you will have the best defensive powers around, so unless you want your entire party to suffer more, you choose defensive powers.

What Mearls seems to be talking about for 5e is the lack of explicit role mechanics -- no longer will every fighter have a mark -- and instead general advice on playing a given class -- telling you that fighters have the highest AC, so a good strategy is to get monsters to direct their attacks against the fighter, preserving the more vulnerable members of the party.

You might also get advice for the Bard that tells the player to try and solve their problems through diplomacy and deception and interaction rather than brute-force, too -- this doesn't need to be combat advice, per se. There are three pillars of D&D nowadays.

This means that roles aren't something the system puts on you. You can still play with de facto roles if you want -- no one is going to stop you from making a tanky fighter, a blasty rogue, a disabling wizard, and a healy cleric and going junk-to-the-skunk with some dragon. This DOES mean that no longer are the four combat roles the beginning and end of your character's purpose in the party. And it might also mean that fighters can be blasty and wizards can be healy and rogues can be controly and clerics can be tanky, too.

Thing is, while the verbiage might be different, it really isn't a huge shift. Sure, the fighter might not mark. Ok, fine, so, you've just made a Slayer and called it a fighter. OTOH, even in the PHB, you can make a fighter that isn't really a defender (or not a great one) pretty easily.

The argument has always been that role foces you into a single type of character. All defenders MUST be the same, because they're defenders right?

About the only role that I would argue is forced is the leader one. Other classes just don't get the healing abilities. And that should be changed. I have no problems with the healer wizard. But, pretty much all classes have their primary role and can, with very little work, be competitive in any other role.

So, if you're new to the game, you can stick to the role that's given and have a solid character that does what it says on the box. Or, you can deviate from that and make a character that maybe isn't as good as another specialist in that area, but, is certainly competitive with any other role.

Yes, role means that the majority of powers for a class of that role will be focused on that role. But, there are more than enough options, even in core, to not have to follow that.

Thus, role is more simply advice than actual straight jacket. You certainly aren't forced by the mechanics to follow a single role, nor, given easy retraining and the sheer number of powers, are you forced into a single role for the career of the character.

OTOH, by saying what he's saying, it makes all the critics deliriously happy. Look at the responses in the first three pages of this thread. The biggest 4e critics have all chimed in on how fantastic it is that role is being changed in 5e. But, when you get right down to it, nothing is really changing, just the verbiage.

Presentation was always the biggest issue in 4e.

 

[pemerton]

There has been roles before, I insist, on Prestige Classes and Kits, but never on classes.

I don't believe this is true. 1st ed AD&D had them in the training rules. After each adventure, the GM had to give each PC a rating from 1 to 4 (lower is better), based on how well the PC fulfilled it's role. Fighters who cowered and refused to enage the enemey, MUs who went toe to toe with monsters, Clerics who refused to heal and/or buff, and Thieves who failed to rely upon stealth and subtlety are all given by Gygax as examples of POOR (ie 4) performance. Upon gaining enought XPs for a new level, the GM then had to average the ratings given, which in turn determined how many weeks the PC had to train to gain a level.

There is also the discussion in the 3E PHB2 which a poster (I can't remember who, sorry) referenced a couple of times upthread.

I think the problem you illustrate in your post has nothing to do with an argument for or against roles. It has to do with your party not talking with one another and making sure you had concepts that fit well with one another.

OK, but roles are one of the devices for making sure that conversation takes place. If you strip away roles, you still have to have the conversation. Roles are, in part, just a handy vocabulary with which to have it.

That discussion should be in the new PHB. Something like this:

<snip>

6. Advice for parties lacking a role. Character types that can fill two roles. Using henchmen or hirelings, etc. Give examples of parties lacking one or two roles completely, with brief discussion of how a campaign like that might work.

From memory, the Moldvay Basic book has an example party in which a cleric retainer has been hired to round out the party (Sister Rebecca, to complement the Fighter, the Elf, the Dwarf and the Thief). The Puffin book from the early 80s, "How to Play Dungeons & Dragons" also has a cleric retainer being hired to round out the party (the PCs are a wizard, a fighter and a halfling thief).

The idea that the default D&D party is a well-rounded one is hardly new to 4e!

And doesn't the 4e DMG also have advice for running a game in which not all the roles are present? (I ran a game with no leader for 6 or so levels, and it was hardly rocket-science. I made no changes on my end, and the players had their PCs take more healing abilities via power selection, multi-classing (at one stage we had two multi-class clerics, a multi-class bard and a multi-class warlord). When the player of the ranger rebuilt his PC as a hybrid ranger-cleric, some of those other healing abilities were gradually retrained away.)

You illustrate one of my favorite things about d20/3.x./PF. It is awesome that you can make a Palpatine cleric, a healing cleric, a fighting focused cleric, a master of the undead type. Or a little of all of it. With the additions of domains and subdomains into pathfinder they have ensured that you can deviate away from "healbot" as a character theme and play the cleric in meaningful ways.

But should these all be variants on the same class? Or should they be different classes?

The thing is, some of us want the option to include the non buff, few heal cleric in a party.

By the way, 4e has a non-heal, non-buff cleric: the Invoker.

Right. A lot of the debate about roles straitjacketing classes really seems to be about whether the game should provide many classes, each reasonably well-defined, or few classes, which are sprawling and ill- or non-defined.

I share the concerns of several others in this thread that the latter approach will produce caster dominance, because magic knows no inherent limits, whereas martial types will have someone or other's intution of "realism" or "verisimilitude" used to impose limits.

If we want a "useless" party;

Bard (playing as sage-like thief)
Quarter Staff Fighter
Wizard (Alchemist)
Rapier Fighter (displaced nobleman)

then we should have the option and the DM and players adapt.

I think there are other, and maybe easier, ways to make this work. As a very simplistic example, the GM doubles all monster hit points, and/or monster damage. Now the game has the feel of being a combat-useless party, but the actual mechancial adjustments required to achieve that are minimial.

Similarly, a game in which everyone is tongue tied doesn't need special rules for building PCs that are useless at the social pilllar. It just requires easy guidelines for the GM to up the difficulty of social encounters while leaving everything else untouched.

 

[pemerton]

Roles are about giving classes identity. They are about niche protection. They are about making each character a part of a whole, rather than either the whole itself or an unnecessary tag-along. Put simply, they are about building the game around cooperation and encouraging it to the point of necessity. D&D is, supposedly at least, a cooperative game. Roles encourage and support cooperative play.

<snip>

Advice completely devoid of mechanics and rules is just empty verbiage that has no bearing on reality. It is little different than a lie. It can't support cooperation, good class design, balance, and fun gameplay the way that a role system can.

Agreed.

What Mearls seems to be talking about for 5e is the lack of explicit role mechanics -- no longer will every fighter have a mark -- and instead general advice on playing a given class -- telling you that fighters have the highest AC, so a good strategy is to get monsters to direct their attacks against the fighter, preserving the more vulnerable members of the party.

You might also get advice for the Bard that tells the player to try and solve their problems through diplomacy and deception and interaction rather than brute-force, too -- this doesn't need to be combat advice, per se.

The question is, will this be good advice or not? If there are no marking mechanics, then how does the fighter get the monsters to direct their attacks against him/her? If the answer is "by engaging them", does that imply that the game is going back to a norm of non-mobility rather than mobility? If the answer is "via free roleplay between player and GM", what does that say about the role of the GM in the game? And will all classes be reliant on the GM in the same way?

Similar issues arise for your bard. Will there be social conflict resolution mechanics for the player of the bard to take advantage of? If not, does the player of the bard have to engage in free roleplaying to make anything happen?

I see this relating back to TwinBahamut's points - advice without mechanics to support it is pointless, and if free roleplaying is to be a major part of the action resolution mechanics, then the rulebooks would want to have a pretty good discussion of how it is meant to work!

 

[malkav666]

1.OK, but roles are one of the devices for making sure that conversation takes place. If you strip away roles, you still have to have the conversation. Roles are, in part, just a handy vocabulary with which to have it.


2.But should these all be variants on the same class? Or should they be different classes?

I hope you don't mind that I snipped your post down to the bits discussing the parts that you quoted from my earlier post. In response to your offerings:

1.I don't necessarily have an issue with roles from a thematic standpoint. A role based lexicon makes a lot of sense to me. I just happen to dislike them from the mechanical perspective. I feel that with a predetermined mechanical role precedent that you end up with classes that kind of get shoehorned into that role at the expense of classic representation of the trope the class was based on or ignoring things that it could do in previous editions for no other reason than just to fit better into the role.

But I will say that roles in and of themselves were not a deal breaker for me with 4e, I just feel they were partially responsible for some of the "saminess" vibes I took away from the edition.

2. On your second point; I am not certain whether they should be separate classes or not TBH. I tend to prefer much larger sets of options for a class and working with different builds than to have classes minced down to a single "role". But I could definitely see folks wanting it the other way. In the end with that particular question I find I cannot really answer it in a way that would promote a productive debate. I could tell you which I prefer (in this case it would be for the more broad class instead of many classes with a narrow focus), but I couldn't say which way is how it "should" be done. But it is an interesting question. Maybe even one that would deserve its own thread.

Thanks for the discussion.

love,

malkav

 

[pemerton]

I hope you don't mind that I snipped your post down to the bits discussing the parts that you quoted from my earlier post.

Not at all.

I feel that with a predetermined mechanical role precedent that you end up with classes that kind of get shoehorned into that role at the expense of classic representation of the trope the class was based on or ignoring things that it could do in previous editions for no other reason than just to fit better into the role.

Fair enough.

I'm not really able to compare 4e to 3E in this respect, as I don't have enough experience with 3E. Likewise for full bells-and-whistles 2nd ed AD&D.

When I compare 4e in this respect to Basic D&D and 1st ed AD&D, I would see the biggest changes of this sort are in respect to wizards, rangers and druids. Rangers and druids in AD&D are quirky enough (and arguably overpowerd enough) that the changes are tolerable - one set of oddities is replaced by another, and rangers - especially archer rangers - make for an easy class to play.

The changes to wizards are a different matter, but I'm personally from the "classic D&D wizards need to be evened out" school.

I am not certain whether they should be separate classes or not TBH. I tend to prefer much larger sets of options for a class and working with different builds than to have classes minced down to a single "role". But I could definitely see folks wanting it the other way.

In 4e, one of the benefits of broader classes with "sub-builds" is that it opens up space for the sharing of utility powers (and in some cases attack powers as well), which reduces power bloat. 5e seems unlikely to have a 4e-style power system for non-spellcasting classes, which makes me curious about what, if at all, is at stake in this issue.

For example, if (i) the fighter class has 3 build options, and (ii) being a fighter doesn't involve any mechanical choices other than choosing one of those 3 builds, then why call it one class rather than 3?

For clerics and wizards choosing spells it probably will matter, but I worry a bit about a return to pre-4e overpowered, in part because overly broad and flexible, spell casters.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Yeah, I noticed that too. I'm a pretty experienced 4e DM (going back to AD&D times) and XP budgets are very useful to me for encounter design.

I wonder why Mearls seems to be so out of touch on this point.

Frankly, I think this is one of the few times I've ever seen Mearls so on point. A lot of people don't use whatever the XP/CR system is (link); "no XP" is hovering a little below 50%). If it's being widely ignored, and even more widely altered, why not treat it as optional and make it simple and easy to modify? That's already the way it's being treated in practice.

And, I actually think the 3.X CR system's the opposite of what Mr. Mearls wrote: it's potentially better than nothing for experienced players/DMs, but it's probably bad for new players/DMs who don't know what they should be looking to ignore. Let's get that reversed, yeah?

I think experienced DMs are often the ones who know how to pace and balance a game without CR/XP. They are metagame rules that seem focused on teaching you how to do those things; I'm not sure what the use for an advanced DM is other than to quickly survey CRs when picking monsters. New ones need guidance a bit more, though I think the learning curve would be softened by the rules saying loudly and clearly "take this with a grain of salt".