Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Irda Ranger" data-source="post: 3980060" data-attributes="member: 1003">It wasn't my intent to suggest that all PC's will be all things to all encounters.  Perhaps I overstated my train of thought.No, the thought was more related to the Roles.  Has D&D defined itself as a game where only these four Roles are need, and all four are needed all the time?  What if you step outside a normal dungeon situation and fifth Role is needed?  For instance, I bet the Warlord (despite the name) only provides benefits to combatants in his immediate vicinity. Where's the master of logistics and grand strategy that can lead the legions to victory?  Where's the master of court intrigue?And what happens when you suddenly don't need one or more of the Roles (like in my Assassins vs. Thieves on Rooftops example)?  Has the DM violated a social contract by not providing the Defender with a nice flat dungeon floor to make his stand on?  What do any of the combat-roles do if the opponents are insubstantial, immune to weapons, and only want someone to play them a harp?  What happens if your group's striker is a Rogue and the group finds itself stranded in the wilderness.My point is that every campaign is different.  Every quest is different.  The shared-imagined-spaces are so vast that Mearls (no matter how brilliant) cannot create a Role Graph with 4-5 equal sized quadrants that cover all possibilities.  So maybe 4E should stop pretending that "You only need the 4 roles, and if you have all 4 roles you'll be fine."  Maybe they should just be a little more honest and say "Here's a bunch of roles we have designed.  Pick any two (but not more than one combat-role) to make the character of your choice; but make sure he's appropriate for your campaign. You need to talk to your DM and co-players to make sure everyone's on the same page."And yeah, this is what a lot of us do anyway.  No one allows someone to make a human PC only to tell them on the second sessions "Most of this campaign takes place under water (hence why the rest of us are all water genasi).  Why don't you go play Wii while we talk to the merfolk."  If the basic assumptions are different we are sure to communicate that.  But the 4E design team & marketing seem (to me) to have a very limited scope of campaign possibilities, and they're "Not doing what everyone else is doing."  They made halflings taller and tieflings core to recognize standard conventions and popular choices.  But they're narrowing the scope of the play-space.  It feels to me that before Roles were defined as being four in number we had more flexibility in imagining new character concepts.  They're nice as training wheels, but a hindrance to the advanced player (which most people become pretty quickly) who wants to push the system (not everyone, admittedly).At least, that's how I feel at the moment.Sing me a song I don't know. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification