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<blockquote data-quote="Mattachine" data-source="post: 5862003" data-attributes="member: 6678226">I liked the first part of his article, mostly because it seemed targeted at the veteran DM, like me. Everyone likes to be told he's awesome, right?The second part I read as unmitigated 4e bashing, as has happened in some other L&amp;L articles. I felt like Mike was saying, &quot;You are an idiot not only for buying 4e, but for buying into it.&quot; I think the same idea--roles can be choices, not hard-coded--could have been said without disparaging the current system. In addition, the first big discussion of roles that I remember reading was in the 3.5 PHB2. Roles were discussed, as well as what to do when a role wasn't covered by a character. There was a whole section of the PHB2 on this, with example builds for 1st level characters. It was wonderful stuff. Too bad it was in a book that new players would likely never buy, at the tail end of an edition.If 5e explicitly discusses roles, with suggestions on how different characters can fill those roles, I think the game will do fine. If 5e has a sidebar of &quot;Advice&quot; in a paragraph about &quot;Make sure you cover your bases,&quot; the game won't do fine. As a final note: AD&amp;D put out role advice, too. Unfortunately, it wasn't in the PHB--it was at the beginning of most AD&amp;D adventure modules. A suggested party size and composition was typically described, often with example characters in the back. Oh, and those 4-10 characters were usually described in 2-3 pages. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink&nbsp; &nbsp; ;)"&nbsp; data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="Mattachine, post: 5862003, member: 6678226"] I liked the first part of his article, mostly because it seemed targeted at the veteran DM, like me. Everyone likes to be told he's awesome, right? The second part I read as unmitigated 4e bashing, as has happened in some other L&L articles. I felt like Mike was saying, "You are an idiot not only for buying 4e, but for [i]buying into it[/i]." I think the same idea--roles can be choices, not hard-coded--could have been said without disparaging the current system. In addition, the first big discussion of roles that I remember reading was in the 3.5 PHB2. Roles were discussed, as well as what to do when a role wasn't covered by a character. There was a whole section of the PHB2 on this, with example builds for 1st level characters. It was wonderful stuff. Too bad it was in a book that new players would likely never buy, at the tail end of an edition. If 5e explicitly discusses roles, with suggestions on how different characters can fill those roles, I think the game will do fine. If 5e has a sidebar of "Advice" in a paragraph about "Make sure you cover your bases," the game won't do fine. As a final note: AD&D put out role advice, too. Unfortunately, it wasn't in the PHB--it was at the beginning of most AD&D adventure modules. A suggested party size and composition was typically described, often with example characters in the back. Oh, and those 4-10 characters were usually described in 2-3 pages. ;) [/QUOTE]

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