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

[Crazy Jerome]

I like good advice in my RPG books, even if it is good advice aimed at beginners. A game with good advice in it, even if stuff I already know, is a game written by people that not only know what they are doing, but how to communicate it to someone that has no prior experience. This is generally a sign of something well done.

I dislike bad advice, even if easily ignored or not aimed at me. It indicates a severe misunderstanding on the part of the author--or more likely in gaming books put out by a group of authors, unresolved disagreement about how the game is supposed to work. IMHO, this is why you sometimes see advice that is not in sync with the mechanics that supposedly work with this advice.

Every version of D&D has had some of both. 4E, however, is particularly distinctive in rarely having neutral advice--nothing especially sharp or awful. When its on, it's on. When its off, it's off. If we are going to have advice in the place of mechanics, it had damn well better be written by a group of people who agree on how it works.

 

[malkav666]

I thanked God for roles in the Fourth Edition. It made explicit the needs of the party.

I am playing Pathfinder now and our party cleric has decided to change his channeling into negative damage energy and to concentrate his spells on commanding undead. So now we have no buffs and few heals. And his evil ways mean I feel unable to play a Paladin or Good Cleric. Because he is "creating a character out of an image in his head" rather than worrying about what is necessary. (I wish we could just leave him at the dungeon entrance. Heh.) At least a Fourth Edition leader can always heal at range with a minor action a couple of times per encounter regardless of his feats and powers.

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. The Palpatine cleric you describe is actually super effective at most levels. Several selectively AoE attacks a day with the same damage as sneak attack? yes please. Undead pawns to control movement on the battlefield (That also as a side effect get healed by previously mentioned AoE)? Yes please. Add in the clerics buff spells and pretty good melee options and you have a very formidable and useful toon.

Now of course the rules support "healbots" as a play choice as well. One of my roommates who just started playing PF the other day while making a cleric to play said they wanted to make the "healing monster" And he made an awesome one and has had a blast playing the toon. I think its awesome that many types of play can come from the same class. If you lock the classes mechanically into a role what you are really doing is making the roles the class. Sure you could have a primal defender, a martial defender, and a blueberry defender, but by making the role a mechanical implementation it doesn't really matter what you call it, it still washes out the same. This sameness is one of the things that made 4e less enjoyable to me. In addition to all of the powers kind of feeling the same to me , a lot of the classes did as well. And it made me like the game less.

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. Obviously you have an alignment issue. Usually in most games I play in or run alignment is always a topic that is discussed at the start of the game and with the addition of a new player. My usual way of handling it get a majority vote from the players on wether they want to be good guys or bad guys. Once the paradigm of alignment had been stated I alert the players that they can make a toon of any alignment they wish but outliers must find a way to hide in the paradigm or make it workable.

The cleric you presented is obviously evil, of course you can no longer make a paladin or cleric that is good aligned and travel with this fellow. But you could make a neutral cleric and still have great healing and do it. There are also druids, witches, oracles, alchemists, rangers, bards, and inquisitors that also have access to healing spells.

The thing is PF is a group experience. If this was a new player your party should have alerted him/her of what your group of toons was really good at and what they needed help with. If this was a player that was with the group from the start he/she should be allowed top make the character "from an image in their head" The idea that one player is responsible for buffing/healing based on class choice is silly. Why should the player of this cleric have to sacrifice playing the toon in their head, so you can be buffed healed and get to play the toon in your head? Group cohesion and getting all the bases covered has more to do with players being able to talk with one another than it does packaging forced concepts into classes to get them to fit into a role. My groups discuss not just class but also concepts at the start of character creation. So if one of my parties fails to have someone heal or stand up from and get beat. Then its a group problem not a problem of a particular player.

The only area of RP games that I could see any benefit for roles is in organized play where you don't necessarily get to enjoy all the benefits and social contracts of a group that meets regularly. But I have found that the alignment issues you mention work themselves out. I have to step in every now and again if folks get poutyfaced. But in general if an outwardly evil toon tries to roll with a posse of all good toons its a short love affair at best. But I don't try and prevent it from a game standpoint, because sometimes the interactions from these toons with drastically different views is very good and fun to play through. I only put on the referee hat if it looks like folks aren't having fun as a result. But if the group is having fun with it then I let it go and even nurture it.

On the idea of parties going out with a glaring weakness like "very few buffs and heals". This a party weakness, not a player problem. While in the groups I run I don't usually force anyone into roles. If they are glaringly missing something I might mention that they have no melee fighter or no one who could even cast a healing spell. Sometimes they are like "dang we forgot about that" and someone changes concept, sometimes they roll on without the missing component. Once they start adventuring in earnest one of two things usually happens:

1. The party suffers a defeat/partial defeat/lack of success that sees one or more toons dead or retired and new toons joining the group shoring up the weaknesses.

2. They party attacks the game with a handicap and has a great time because of it and gets some level of success from their adventure and keeps at it missing role be damned.

It doesn't sound to me like your group really needs roles to succeed. If I had a player come to me after the game was started and say "Malk, I come from a 4e environment where choosing to play a cleric has mechanical assumption of healing so I assumed the cleric would fulfill that role. When I made my toon I thought we had a healer, I can see we do not. I do not feel good about our group going into a dark hole with poor healing. I would like to retire my toon and roll up something with better healing capabilities for our group. IS that cool?"

I would totally let them swap out. I think most DMs would let this go down. I would also let the group go into the hole with no cleric, to be chewed up by the encounters or to perhaps succeed against stacked odds and coming out feeling like a baddass.

The removal of mechanical roles is a good thing. It allows people to play more different things with smaller amounts of splat required. The issue you painted doesn't have anything to do with roles other than perhaps an assumption on your part. You need to talk to your party to find out if there is a want for a healer. Let Palpatine be, if your group can't survive without a dedicated healer, the dice will sort it out for you. Or you can take one for the team and roll the healer yourself.

love,

malkav

 

[Szatany]

Thank God.

You should say thank Mearls, but I've seen people confuse those two before.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Well to me, every class has to be go at something in combat as the basic description of D&D is a dungeon/cave dive where you kill monsters, take their stuff, and maybe encounter a dragon. Not everyone has to play heavy combat but combat is an inherent part of the game.

Plus the idea of a noncombatant purposely going in a place where they are expected to be attacked having no combat skill but doing this for a living... never made sense to me.

But you aren't the only person playing D&D. Many of us want more from the game than combat focused characters.

That said, even if we accept your premise that D&D ought to be dungeon and cave dive focused, that doesn't mean every character should be built for combat. And historically it hasn't meant that. Thieves were not good at combat until at least 3E (they were good at thieving, detecting traps and sneaking around--backstab was a good bone to have in combat but didn't balance them out against other characters that ar exceeded their combat skills).

For me though the bottom line is this, treating D&D like a combat board game, where everyone needs to be good at something in combat limits my options and reduces my enjoyment of the game. Far better to open up the game to charcaters good at exploration or social situations, and have optional add-ons to make every good at combat if that is your goal. Ever since I started playing in the 80s, non combat charactes have been a feature of our games.

 

[Mattachine]

Again, I really liked the discussion of roles in the 3.5 PHB2. Whether or not anyone wants to admit that their PC has a role in the group, the roles exist. The game has combat, exploration, and social interaction--at the very least, these create some basic roles. If the game is combat-heavy (and most D&D games are), then combat roles should be discussed--not everyone does the same thing in combat.

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


1. For most campaigns and adventures, it is helpful for certain roles to be represented in the party. Parties in which the characters have similar capabilities will sometimes be stymied by certain types of encounters. Some DMs, however, will design a campaign to fit such groups.

2. The most common roles are A, B, and C. A party covering these roles will be able to handle a wide variety of challenges and situations. Also, some parties will have roles D or E, but these are not always needed.

3. Role A is usually handled by <class1>, but often by <class2> and <class3>. It's possible for other classes to handle this role. For example, . . .

4. Roles B and C are described as above.

5. Discuss less common roles D and E.

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.

7. Example builds showing different ways to fill given roles, for 1st level characters. These could actually be part of each class write up.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Plus the idea of a noncombatant purposely going in a place where they are expected to be attacked having no combat skill but doing this for a living... never made sense to me.

makes perfect sense to me. Any expedition is going to have non combat specialists (people who are good at navigation, wilderness survival, interating with locals, etc). We see this in books and films all the time. It all comes down to the specifics of the party and the chafacter's motovations. let the players and Gm decide this for themselves. If it is as essential as you say, then people will only play combat focused characters.

 

[Mattachine]

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

In AD&D, non-heal, non-buff clerics were generally the province of the various "NPC only", unofficial classes presented in Dragon Magazine.

 

[Bedrockgames]

By

In AD&D, non-heal, non-buff clerics were generally the province of the various "NPC only", unofficial classes presented in Dragon Magazine.

in AD&D is was pretty much dependant on spell choice. The only thing an AD&D cleric was assured was turning undead.

 

[Balesir]

Interesting article. On "advice", I want to see it, not only for beginners but for a very specific role with veterans, too. The "advice" given on designing what I'll call "first order play material" (i.e. adventures, characters, encounters, locations and scenarios) performs a function beyond that of "guidelines" - it represents a communication from the designers to those generating much of that first order play material concerning how they envisaged the game working as they wrote the design. It conveys to the GMs something of their design aims and philosophies as they designed the "second order play material" (i.e. rules, spells, monsters, classes, magic items and so on). When I create first order play material, this is excellent information to have.

On roles, as others have pointed out, roles have always existed. Given the (excellent) spread of game focus to include the "pillars" of social and exploration challenges as well as combat, the logical extension is that there will be roles for these fields, too. Whether these roles shouls be explicitly described in the rulebooks - I think they should. They will be useful to anyone beginning to play the game and form a useful design concept for that "first order play material" stuff. Should they be tied to specific classes or similar game elements? Not necessarily. As long as they are understood, and no character can realistically dominate in all of them, it should all work out. To be clear, I want each character to have a role in combat and a role in social encounters and a role in exploration situations. A character whose "role" is to be useful in only one of those classes of encounter is a suboptimal character to play, period. If a player just dislikes combat, say, then let them be the healer/buffer or something, but making them the "swooning non-com" just seems daft, to me.

If roles are to be de-coupled from class, however, then that raises another issue. What is class for? If fighters just have to be "the guy that hits stuff with a sword", or the thief gets to be "the guy that uses percentile dice", of the magic user gets to be "the dude who gets awesome spells", then I think the seeds of dysfunction are soundly sown. If the only "meaning" of character class relates to the "fluff" - the psychological archetype of the character in the game world - then I think you have a different set of issues looming. Complaints of 4E that "all the classes play the same" (barf) when the new edition's classes have no systemic meaning at all will seem like supreme irony.

So - decouple roles from classes by all means, but please, designers, be clear what character classes in the new system are for.

 

[Harlekin]

No. No it wasn't. Mearls said absolutely nothing like that.

This is exactly this kind of overreaction in regard to perceived slights that caused all of the bile and vitriol when 4E was initially released, and why the game couldn't be discussed anywhere without some internet chucklehead going: "Hurd durp...4rry ain'it not D&D an' whotsee called 3rd edition players the N-word durp".

Let's try and avoid that this time around, shall we?

Well he used a false internet meme, suggesting that the role restricts the ability to role play his character to indicate that roles are only useful to beginners. I would call that using misleading statements and hyperbole to disparage other people's playstyle. Add: Even if this is not what he means, he appropriates the language of some of the uninformed 4ed bashers. That makes it look like he endorses their argument.

I think his arguments about roles go exactly in the wrong direction. If the fan base is allergic to spelling out a concept that has existed since the game was first played, then drop the names. Use the character description to explain what a character is good at without ever mentioning the terms. If we believe the SA, the designeres are already working hard to hide all 4ed influences.
But keep using roles internally as part of the design process to give each character focus and to avoid bad classes like the Monk, Bard, Hexblade, Spellthief, Soulknife, Duelist, Marshall, Healer (of the top of my head, I'm sure there are many more)