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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 5862515" data-attributes="member: 32536">Wow. So many pages in just half a day. Hard to keep up with all of this, but I may as well replay to those who replied to me...Like some others in this thread, I don't think RPGs need to focus on things like in-character play, creativity, or story-telling. Or at the very least, I don't believe that those thing have anything at all to do with roles and class design. Those things don't need rules, and rules can't do a thing to inhibit them, if you ask me. Maybe it's because I play pure freeform roleplay games (more often than I play D&D, actually), so when I want to play D&D I do so for the mechanics. All those things you list will happen regardless of what mechanics I use, so I want mechanics that are actually good. Roles and game balance are a part of what lets mechanics be good.In other words, if the mechanics for D&D are not good, then there is quite literally no point on me even using the rules at all.As for your second point, I'll be addressing that in my response to the next quote.I think you are focusing WAY too much on my reference to balance and far too little on my other point: that roles are essential to good classes and good class design. They help with balance, but that is far from being even their most important purpose.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. Editions prior to 4E quite frankly didn't, and a large part of that is their failure to embrace the idea of roles. 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.There is also the point that "play your class any way you like" is itself, an impossibility for any version of D&D. D&D has always been and will continue to be a class-based game. No class-based game will ever permit a true "your character can be anything it wants" kind of game. A 3E Fighter will never be a buffer. In fact, a 3E Fighter can't really be much of anything at all, because it doesn't have the mechanics needed to do anything. A Ranger will never be able to create walls of fire in order to isolate certain parts of the battlefield. Even an overpowered 3E Wizard will never be an effective healer.The moment you choose a class, you are giving up the freedom to do whatever you want. No class will be that flexible, and neither should they. Mixing limitations and advantages is the very point of a class-based system. Restrictions are just as much a part of classes as anything else.Overall, D&D is a cooperative class-based game, and an essential part of any cooperative class-based game is a role system. If you don't want roles, than you don't want D&D to be a cooperative class-based game.Well, as I said just above, the idea of Knights only doing some things and a Thief doing other things is essential to a game where you pick between classes. D&D has always been exactly that kind of game. Fighters have their class features and Rogues have different class features. These different class features create mechanical advantages and disadvantages, and it is impossible for players to play outside the limitations of their classes.Anyways, roles have been a part of D&D ever since the belief that a balanced party consisted of a Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, and Cleric came about, and that belief started very, very early on in the game's history. Back then there was no identification of roles as such because the classes were the roles. The ideas of classes and roles only separated because of the proliferation of many new classes that broke down the old equivalency. In other words, the Rogue's ability to sneak and open chests used to be both a class mechanic and a role mechanic, but in 4E it is a class mechanic, since there is no "thief" role. In a theoretical 5E that embraces roles, it might very well be a role mechanic for a "thief" role.If you want to go back to a game where there are no explicit roles, you need to go back to a game where there are only as many classes as there are players at the table. I rather like having lots of class options, however, so I'd much rather have explicit roles and a variety of options.</blockquote>

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