Roles in Roleplaying Games

[Plane Sailing]

A recent quote from the "Rule of Three" article from Rich Baker on the WotC website has me wondering if the designers of D&D are rethinking the trend in the last decade or so of thinking in terms of "roles" being codified as the role a character plays in combat.



How does this affect your own sense of the game? Have your games always had "roles" tied to their combat role (regardless of edition)? Does codifying "roles" as combat roles affect the way players approach the game? How so, in your own experience?

I hope they do buck the recent trend. I think it does tend to be restrictive more than anything, and don't think it added anything to the game. Worse, it provoked the creation of cookie cutter fill in the blank classes rather than ones with strong iconic themes.

Obviously some people like it, but I don't

 

[Summer-Knight925]

Roles are useful when building a party. Just think of all those movies with the dramatic phrase "I've been forming a team"

You need someone to take the bulk of melee
Someone to heal
Someone to do crowd control
Someone to hit hard at one foe
And someone to have the 'skills' side covered

Traditionally, the roles have been
Fighter (bulk of melee, the 'tank', somewhat hit hard at one foe)
The Cleric (Healer, crowd control [turn undead anyone?])
the Wizard (Crowd control, hit hard at one foe, sometimes 'skills' side)
The thief/rogue/burglar (Hit hard at one foe, skills)

That being said, they have helped get groups together or give me character ideas based on what is needed, with the OODLES of classes we now have in D&D, the roles are (IMO) fairly pointless, of course, that is saying 4e is 'now'

Sometimes I have, however, done the same character to build to suit as many roles as possible.

For instance
Human Fighter, focuses on archery.
Able to fill the role of 'controller' and 'striker' not to mention hold his own in melee, granted he doesn't enjoy it as much.

That was 3e

In AD&D I was able to pull of the same character, human fighter, focuses on archery, ect. ect.
Still did what he had to do
Even with the White Box I could do this.

I could mix wizard and fighter to make, thats right, and arcane archer (IF he was an elf instead) but I quickly figured that roles are less about combat, more about surviving the dungeon itself.

A spell like fireball can kill a lot of kobolds, as can my bow, but my bow cannot grant me the ability to use scrolls or wands. I can strike hard like a sneak attack, but never can I open doors and disable traps. The roles are not just about combat, but character design.
You need the hard as nails merc fighter, the sly and devious thief, the wise and preachy cleric and the intelligent know-it-all wizard to get through a good dungeon, and a good dungeon is just as much thinking as it is fighting

 

[Stormonu]

That the designers are still hung up only on the class's combat roles, I say they still don't get it.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I don't play 4E, but I've never gotten what all the hand-wringing about explicitly stating the roles was about. Yeah, the cleric has a healer role -- this shouldn't be big news to anyone. Yeah, the rogue's role in combat is to stab things until they stop moving -- what else would he do?

Well, that's right about what 4e thought about the roles when adopting them.

But there's a few problems.

1. Roles describe your place in combat, but they don't describe your place in the adventure. The game not being about combat exclusively, a combat roles system makes the game seem mostly about combat. More traditional D&D roles were the roles of the character in the adventure: the cleric talked to folks (and helped out others when they failed), the fighter killed things, the rogue explored ahead of the group, and the wizard figured out what the dragon was weak against and what path to take in the maze.
2. "Everyone Wants To Be A Striker." Damage is fun and effective and everyone gets to deal it and wants to deal it, so strikers become the sexiest classes and the sexiest abilities and the "support" roles (everything other than the striker) get marginalized.
3. You still need someone of each of the 4 roles to make a "balanced party," forcing a player to often choose a class or character they're not as interested in just to balance out the party's role system. This is pretty undesirable. If the characters could shift back and forth in roles depending on the given round in combat (or whatever), that would make combat more tactical and interesting, while allowing a player to play whatever character they wanted.

I'd prefer a system where a character could swap combat roles each turn, and where the role you played in the adventure was more important than the role you played in the combat minigame portion of the adventure. Maybe something like:

Role Stance
As a minor action, choose your role from the list below. You gain the benefits of the role you choose until you choose another role.

• Medic: At the end of your turn, one ally within X squares of you gains Y hit points.
• Guardian: At the end of your turn, one enemy within X squares of you is provoked (-2 penalty to hit any allies)
• Ravager: At the end of your turn, one enemy within X squares of you is vulnerable (+Y to damage rolls against them)
• Strategist: At the end of your turn, one enemy within X squares of you is cursed (-2 penalty to defenses).

Certain classes then have mechanics that key off their stance. For example, Fighters might be able to deal damage to provoked enemies that hit allies, and Paladins might also grant a defense bonus with their medic hit point power.

 

[Nellisir]

Mythic Heroes, from Bad Axe Games, was a d20 add-on that explored the idea of narrative roles drawn from real-world myths & etc - the ones I recall at the moment are The Shadow and The Maiden. I liked the idea, and it has potentially broader role-playing implications than the 4e role concept.

 

[tuxgeo]

< KA-snip! >
I'd prefer a system where a character could swap combat roles each turn, and where the role you played in the adventure was more important than the role you played in the combat minigame portion of the adventure. Maybe something like:

Role Stance
As a minor action, choose your role from the list below. You gain the benefits of the role you choose until you choose another role.

• Medic: At the end of your turn, one ally within X squares of you gains Y hit points.
• Guardian: At the end of your turn, one enemy within X squares of you is provoked (-2 penalty to hit any allies)
• Ravager: At the end of your turn, one enemy within X squares of you is vulnerable (+Y to damage rolls against them)
• Strategist: At the end of your turn, one enemy within X squares of you is cursed (-2 penalty to defenses).

< KA-snip! >

Those bonuses and penalties are untyped.
So if you have a party of five (5) PCs, each having that power; and if, on the second combat round, they each (separately) select the "Ravager" stance against the same, selected enemy, then that one, selected enemy would be at Vulnerable (5 * Y) against all damage.

You would need a bonus/penalty type, at the very least, to keep that from stacking. Might I suggest, "rolevary" as the bonus/penalty type?
(Yes, that's terribly unimaginative of me. Blame the scotch. Actually, blame me for drinking it; but that's another issue entirely.)

 

[I'm A Banana]

So if you have a party of five (5) PCs, each having that power; and if, on the second combat round, they each (separately) select the "Ravager" stance against the same, selected enemy, then that one, selected enemy would be at Vulnerable (5 * Y) against all damage.

Ya, if I was adding this to 4e as it exists, I would limit the overlap.

But if I were making the structure from the ground up, I would be inclined to let them stack those damage boosts, because at that point, they're not recovering HP, or being defended against attacks, and enemies attack them at full damage capacity. They might KO an enemy in that one round of all-out damage, but chances are strong they'd get KO'd in return, when the enemies are all at +2 to hit, you're at -2 AC, and they're doing effectively +Y damage.

At any rate, the upthrust is that you aren't locked into your combat role at character creation, but can choose it dynamically as combat changes.

And that combat role becomes simplified, so that you can have adventure role trump it in most circumstances.

 

[Umbran]

Using the 4e framework though... this isn't true. You see there are only 4 recognized roles in 4e... striker, defender, controller, and leader. So at most on a high level one needs 4 variations of a particular archetype and that's assuming that the archetype is considered to encompass a certain role. the rest is individual customization through skills, feats, etc.

I think if you try to develop a set of powers for, say, all possible martial striker characters, the powers would either be so abstract as to carry no flavor in and of themselves, or the list of them so long as to be intractable for casual players. Either way, you are then losing one of the strengths of classes.

 

[Imaro]

I think if you try to develop a set of powers for, say, all possible martial striker characters, the powers would either be so abstract as to carry no flavor in and of themselves, or the list of them so long as to be intractable for casual players. Either way, you are then losing one of the strengths of classes.

I don't get this.... I would think it wouldn't be any different than selecting powers in 4e or spells in 3.x...

Off-hand for a martial striker I could see starting with 4-5 basic styles in the corebook... single weapon, ranged weapon, two-weapon, two-handed weapon and weapon and shield powers... this would be the equivalent of 5 builds in 4e. From there you would expand of course, but again... no different than the current situation except more streamlined. Now I can play a two weapon rogue, a fighter with ranged weapon and two-handed weapon powers or whatever combination I want. I don't see how this diminishes flavor any more than it already is... or how it wouldn't be more streamlined as opposed to more bloated.

 

[pemerton]

If you want a Paladin striker why don't you just create a Lawful Avenger and play it as a Paladin?

Or even play a paladin but use the Ardent Vow alternative to Lay on Hands (from Divine Power).

Aragorn uses a 2handed sword so not a defender he would be classes as a striker. Gimli uses a 2handed axe so again another striker.

Using a two-handed weapon doesn't automatically make you a striker. You can use two-handed weapons and still be a defender

Yep. The fighter in my 4e game uses a two-handed weapon (a polearm) and is not a striker. He is a melee controller (lots of multi-target attacks, pull, push, slide, prone, OAs that stop movement, etc).

I was trying to show how absurd it would be if someone used the defined combat roles in rpg's in a book setting.

It was not a represent of how i or anyone else plays an rpg.

My point is that you can not use the defined roles for characters in novels as they are more than just tanks or strikers.

My point was that, because your example has nothing to do with how anyone plays an RPG, it doesn't shed any light on the effect of roles on play or on story.

If you, as GM (or players) want a story about bodyguarding a prince, then (i) build your bodyguards as defenders (or perhaps defenders and ranged strikers/controllers), and (ii) build your prince as a warlord (I think "lazy warlord" is the technical term).

Conversely, if you build the prince as a defender and the bodyguards as skirmishers, then you haven't got a story about a prince and his bodyguard at all. You've got a story about a knight sallying forth with a group of commoner retainers. And in that story it makes sense that the "prince" holds the line while the skirmishers go off and do their skirmishing. (And if the prince ends up half-dead in a pool of blood, then it wasn't a very good defender build. Or was overwhelmed by numbers, as happened to Boromir - a defender "prince" - in LotR.)