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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 5862118" data-attributes="member: 27160">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, <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/5e.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":5e:" title="D&D 5th Edition    :5e:" data-shortname=":5e:" /> designers, be clear what character classes in the new system are for.</blockquote>

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