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Message: <blockquote data-quote="nnms" data-source="post: 5502754" data-attributes="member: 83293">And for the cleric, the intention was to create a type of class that can heal without having to stop contributing in other ways in order to do so.  They succeeded to a degree, making healing something you can do in addition to attacking, for example.A couple of the people I play with really love pushing the role system to breaking point.  They take a character class that is one role, and choose feats, equipment, abilities, etc., to do their best to fill another.  The PHB even had secondary roles already listed for lots of classes. You can do it, sort of.  A defender usually has some sort of mechanic that punishes an enemy for attacking someone other than themselves (I believe the Pathfinder Cavalier does this as well).  So unless you specifically take feats or powers that let you punish people for attacking your friends or allow you to take their blows for them, then it's not going to happen.  You'd have to a) intentionally want to develop that secondary role and b) understand the system well enough to choose the right feats, powers and abilities.This is a good example of where system mastery can limit 4E.  It would be challenging to make a defender ranger if you were just a casual player.But, perhaps it's best to ask what you're attempting to accomplish in making the Ranger a defender.  Do you want a wilderness warrior who taps into some nature magic and fights in melee, protecting his friends?  What if you considered the Warden class instead of Ranger?  A couple two weapon fighting feats and maybe a high dex for using missile weapons and you could be pretty much there. Why isn't the meta plot spontaneously formed out of the player actions?  They might bump into situations that are unfolding, but why is it a pre-decided "meta-plot" and not simply a situation that not even you as the DM knows the results of yet because you don't know how the players will get involved with it?Yes.  If someone wants to run 4E that way, the game will more than support them.  Even the best of 4E published modules are terrible in this regard.  I had heard such good things about Logan Bonner and Orcs of Stonefang Pass and then when I finally saw the thing, it was literally a straight line pass through the mountains full of orcs.  With the players always arriving on scene at the dramatic moment to save the dwarves and learn about how to defeat an ancient evil.  I integrated it into my campaign, heavily modified the dungeon to make it non-linear and had the situation unfold in response the the players.  End result, all the dwarves died before they could arrive "just in time" and they stopped the ancient evil with a solution not present in the module.4E absolutely supports an approach where the DM has a bunch of scenes they are going to frame prepared in advance no matter what the players do.  But it works so much better when you don't do that.  When you set up situation and respond to it by framing scenes on the fly based on what happened.  And the low prep DMing it allows heavily, heavily supports this.  I think I posted about this in this thread where I talked about using the Story Now "bangs" technique from Sorcerer and how 4E supports that so well.The difference is how well 4E supports the improv DM with it's low prep nature.  In the example of 3.x, when a DM has a problem with "gotcha" spells, the system doesn't support resolving that issue very easily (or at least I never got it to work and neither did anyone I else I ever gamed with in a few different cities).EDIT:  Also, there's a factual error in the above quote.  An author of DMG2 is also an author of Forge type games and developed some of the techniques in question.  It's not just from people outside of the 4E community.Because that's a poor dungeon crawl.  Going back to OD&D, good dungeon crawling was about players making meaningful decisions.</blockquote>

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