Roles in Roleplaying Games

[Imaro]

Fact is, "character concept" is entwined with class, but it is not necessarily entwined with combat role. Combat role in 4e is entwined with class, entwining it with character concept. It doesn't need to be, and a pretty persuasive argument can be made to liberate them, making combat role something that is not dependent on your class choice (or even a choice at character creation, such as the idea of changing roles round-to-round).

This sums it up nicely KM... No one is asking for everything (contrary to the strawman being continuously thrown out by one poster). They are saying class and combat role shouldn't be intertwined because they feel one shouldnt dictate the other.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Fact is, "character concept" is entwined with class, but it is not necessarily entwined with combat role. Combat role in 4e is entwined with class, entwining it with character concept. It doesn't need to be, and a pretty persuasive argument can be made to liberate them, making combat role something that is not dependent on your class choice (or even a choice at character creation, such as the idea of changing roles round-to-round).

Here's the thing from the game design standpoint, though. Why is "character concept" being entwined with class some sacred part of the design? I've seen a lot of people in this topic say that they want it that way. I've seen a bunch assume that it is that way and/or should be (practically begging the question at times). I've yet to see anyone state a reason beyond personal preference why this is a good choice for game design.

Now, before anyone gets in a twist, I'll grant you that something (or several somethings) needs to be entwined with character concept. But why is "class" automatically the thing? Give me a good reason, beyond some people saw it that way from the beginning. (Because some of us saw it as an almost purely mechanical element from the beginning, with a thin veneer of character development tacked on for flavor.)

 

[Alaxk Knight of Galt]

This seems to be the equivalent, in 4e, of choosing a power source. Or have I misunderstood you?

Close. A Power Source in 4E provides a way to overcome combat challenges. If you want a non-combat answer to problems, skills and rituals are the only thing available and they are provided to all classes.

Yes, the Arcane Power source has spells and implements are needed for them all. However, the overwhelming majority of 4E spells are combat only. Ultimately, the power source only provides a way behaving in combat (much like role typecast you into certain behaviors in combat).

Prior to 4E, a class provided a set of tools for problem solving, both in and out of combat. Classes used to have a wide variety of answers available to them. Fighters got Fighter Feats which helped them to fight better (their niche, if you will, was combat prowess, so fighting for them is the right answer). Rogues got bonus skills that allowed them to do lots of different things outside of combat. Clerics and Wizards got a wide variety of spells. Some were purely for combat (magic missile, bless, etc). But the best spells were the ones that were put to creative uses for solving problems outside of combat.

Not every class got an equal helping of combat answers, but then again, combat isn't the only area of the game (simply the area of the game that has the most numbers involved with it). Now, every class gets the exact same piece of the combat pie. To make sure everything is balanced, no one gets out of combat abilities beyond skills.

 

[D'karr]

I've yet to see anyone state a reason beyond personal preference why this is a good choice for game design.

Now, before anyone gets in a twist, I'll grant you that something (or several somethings) needs to be entwined with character concept. But why is "class" automatically the thing? Give me a good reason, beyond some people saw it that way from the beginning. (Because some of us saw it as an almost purely mechanical element from the beginning, with a thin veneer of character development tacked on for flavor.)

And that's pretty much what it is, personal preference, and that's the way it's always been done.

The designers could decide that they want to decouple all these things and give you a "building block" type of game where your character concept is defined (built up) by:

2 Portions of Block A
1 Portion of Block B
3 portions of Block C

If you go into it and prefer to have 2 Portions of Block B that is workable but unbalanced. As you start adding more blocks the more knock on effects you can end up with.

If as a player you start your character concept with an intractable idea of what Block B should be, and the designers did not define that Block as what you thought it should be you are going to end up with complaints. But is that a designer issue or an expectations issue?

One of the problems with Classes is that they are labeled so that they are easily recognizable, but at the same time that can cause problems when the player expects class A to mean something other than what the designer put into the class.

I'd like class names to be evocative because I think it brings a lot to the game, but that also creates expectations that are not always being met.

The "roles" as they exist right now are so that the designer can easily design to them, and the player can easily identify what play style the role fits in combat. From teaching players how to play I can say that roles are a huge benefit for new players. They don't have to decipher 30 years of D&Disms to distinguish what a Bard does, or a Skald, or a Berserker, or a Fighter, or a Ranger.

The "role" only defines the "best" way, a roadmap if you will, that class operates in combat. You can follow the roadmap and get exactly what the role advertised. But that is all it should define. I particularly don't want roles to define what I can and cannot do outside of combat. That is where the game offers infinite flexibility. In combat, the most rules intensive part of the game, the rules cannot offer infinite flexibility. If they do then you end up with either every class/role stepping all over the other, or no balance, or too much balance and no flexibility. This is where a "balance" of flexibility, playability, and fun needs to be struck.

 

[pemerton]

Here is the difference in a very simple example... can I play a Ranger who fights with his powers unarmed?

There are (at least) two ways of interpreting that question, I think.

Can you build a 4e PC whose class is ranger, and who is a mechanically viable unarmed combatant? Not from the books that I'm familiar with (though there may be stuff in Dragon I don't know), although I personally don't think it would break the game if the GM let you swap your martial weapon proficiency for the Monk Unarmed Strike feature - and now you could be a two-weapon ranger who uses fists instead of longswords.

Alternatively, you could take Monk Unarmed Strike as a custom feat - it doesn't strike me as any more powerful, feat-wise, than a Superior Weapon Proficiency.

But a second interpretation of the question is - can you build a mechanically viable unarmed combatant who is a wilderness guide and tracker? And I think the answer to that question is "yes" - build a monk, or a brawler fighter, and take feats, background options, theme and/or multi-class options that get you Perception and Nature proficiency. Or even go for a hybrid brawler/ranger or monk/ranger.

I think that any of these PCs will be as viable, in the 4e play space, as a 3E PHB ranger using Improved Unarmed Strike would be in the 3E play space. Perhaps moreso, because I don't know of any way for that 3E ranger to get his/her unarmed strike up to the same power level as a longsword.

So I think the answer to your question is "Yes".

Hey pemerton, upon further reflection I decided I actually want to go more in depth with my answer to you...

IMO the difference is that of customization. In your first example I get an archetype and the details of both concept and gameplay are left up to me to decide upon. In the second example I have to hope that the individual details of a simgle package will line up with what I want in both concept and gameplay.

OK. There's little doubt that compared to 3E, 4e emphasises "single packages" more, and customisation takes the form of choosing from long lists of big packages, where the fiddly stuff (powers, feats etc) tends to happen within constraints already set by those big packages.

But I don't particularly see this as a "role" thing. Rolemaster, compared to classic D&D and 3E, has a similar approach to spells - a spell-user has to choose a class, which determines a bundle of spell lists that are learnable, and there is no way of mixing and matching different spells onto those lists. But in Rolemaster this is not in service of "role" in the 4e sense. It is in service of flavour, and also (at least arguably) balance - no single PC can get access to all the best spells. Rolemaster does not have D&D-style "generic" wizards.

I see the class power lists in 4e as doing something similar - they ensure a coherent flavour, and serve the interests of balance. The connection of powers to role is reasonably loose, at least in my view. Fighters, for example, have a good range of self-healing powers, and also condition alleviation, which means that they tend to act as their own leaders (and given that they take a lot of the damage, obviate the need for more specialised leadership on the part of another PC). Fighters and sorcerers are also quite controller-y in certain respects, getting good forced movement effects. And I know from experience that a drow sorcerer using cloud of darkness plus force movement effects can play much the same role as a defender - locking down the front line without dying.

From my point of view, the objection to 4e's approach to classes isn't "roles". It's class bloat. WotC's sub-class solution is an interesting compromise (although capable of producing clunkers like the Binder) on this front, because it both reduces bloat and opens up more role flexibility. The conern for me is that it runs the risk of making certain classes "universal" classes - able to do everything - which then runs the risk of killing off other, more flavourful, options. The witch being a wizard rather than a warlock I think is a possible example of this, although I'm yet to learn more about the class than what the WotC previews have shown.

A Power Source in 4E provides a way to overcome combat challenges. If you want a non-combat answer to problems, skills and rituals are the only thing available and they are provided to all classes.

<snip>

Prior to 4E, a class provided a set of tools for problem solving, both in and out of combat. Classes used to have a wide variety of answers available to them.

<snip>

Now, every class gets the exact same piece of the combat pie. To make sure everything is balanced, no one gets out of combat abilities beyond skills.

I find that the class skill lists, combined with player choices in respect of skill selection, tend to support out-of-combat roles in 4e also. And because rituals are linked to either class or particular skills, which themselves have overtones of spell use and mystical education (Arcana and Religion), I find that rituals also tend to travel with particular power sources and flavours of PC.

I also think that it's just not true that no one gets out of combat abilities beyond skills. Some PCs get rituals, which are not skills, and which are out of combat abilities. And some PCs get utility powers which are not combat abilities. For example, of the 21 wizard utility powers in the PHB, at least 9 have obvious or primary non-combat utility, and of the 18 warlock utilities, at least 11 have obvious or primary non-combat utility.

And there are also feats that confer non-combat abilities. The wizard PC in my game, for example, has two of them: Skill Training (Dungeoneering) and Deep Sage. The sorcerer PC in my game has the Arcane Familiar feat - which, even more than rituals, is something that tracks power source - in order to get an air mephit, in part for the bonus to Bluff (which he uses to hide in combat) but also so that he can read and speak Primordial, and have an invisible flying scout.

It may be that some players choose not to select powers or feats that enhance their out-of-combat capabilities. But I don't think it's fair to say that the game doesn't provide them.

Why can't any class support being a "first rate striker" (or whatever)?

If it does this by having a menu of class features, chosen as part of the build process, then we're back in sub-class territory.

If it does this by having certain powers that are inherently stiker-y (like the Barbarian powers with bonus dice) then we're either just in a different sub-class territory (with power selection rather than feature selection being the focus of build choices), or we're in potentially overpowered territory - if I get to combine my striker-y power with my defender-y class feature, for example. No doubt this issue of balance can be handled with care - someone upthread already mentioned the STR paladin 4W powers, for example. But the greater the care, probably the less the striker feel.

If it is done not as part of build but as part of play - changing stances, for example, from defensive to agressive - then I'm sure it's viable. (Burning Wheel has a stance mechanic, for example, allowing the use of an action to shift between defensive, neutral and agressive stances - with the non-neutral stances giving bonuses and penalties to the appropriate sorts of actions.) I'm personally not sure it's better. Nor worse. It would be different from what I'm used to in D&D, or expect from a class-based system, but that's not necessarily an objection.

 

[pemerton]

The "roles" as they exist right now are so that the designer can easily design to them, and the player can easily identify what play style the role fits in combat.

<snip>

The "role" only defines the "best" way, a roadmap if you will, that class operates in combat. You can follow the roadmap and get exactly what the role advertised. But that is all it should define. I particularly don't want roles to define what I can and cannot do outside of combat. That is where the game offers infinite flexibility. In combat, the most rules intensive part of the game, the rules cannot offer infinite flexibility. If they do then you end up with either every class/role stepping all over the other, or no balance, or too much balance and no flexibility.

I agree with this. Intricate rules like the 4e combat rules depend, for the interesting play that they generate, upon having different players doing different things with their PCs. This is just one part of the various features of 4e that make it very different, in the way it plays, from the buff-ambush style that is optimal play in earlier editions of D&D, in Rolemaster, etc.

If the game included action resolution rules for non-combat activities of the same degree of intricacy as the combat rules (eg something that bore the same relation to Burning Wheel's Duels of Wits as the D&D combat rules bear to BW's Fight!) then we would need out-of-combat roles, and out-of-combat powers/features, of the same degree of intricacy as the combat ones that we have now.

 

[Tayne]

No it isn't. A rogue, with Sneak Attack, can reliably dish out extra damage every round, like a 4E Striker. A Paladin can Smite Evil a maximum of 5 times per day by 20th level without spending feats to increase this. It's more like a specialized attack spell with linited targets than a Striker mechanic.



Yes. Wizard and Clerics and Druids, oh my! They stepped on the toes of everybody else's role. In my humble opinion the game was entirely busted and near-unplayable by those that abused the Mary Sue classes. In my humble opinion 4E is the only edition to move in the right direction of given character classes a unique identity. In my humble opinion anyone who champions for these unbalanced classes is playing the game wrong.

You're equivocating harder than I've ever seen anyone equivocate. Initially you defined a striker ability as the ability to do lots of damage and stated that sneak attack was the only example of this... then you state that, because it has limitations (5/day) smite evil isn't a striker mechanic... well -

A) Sneak attack has limitations too, you can't necessarily do it every single round and you definitely can't do it at all versus a wide array of opponents
B) I'm familiar enough with 4E to know that there are striker mechanics with X per Y limitations as well, and that does not prevent them from being considered striker mechanics.

Then you seem to admit that spellcasters (against which it sounds as if you have a bizarre grudge) "step on everybody else's role," presumably including strikers.

So... I guess sneak attack isn't the only "striker mechanic" in 3E?

Wouldn't it be easier to just say "Oops I guess I mis-spoke?" Are you capable of that?

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

Huh? In 3.5 there were specific conditions that had to be met for the Rogue to sneak attack... and certain groups of monsters were immune to it... so I don't think I'd say it was anywhere near reliable that the rogue got this every round.

You're equivocating harder than I've ever seen anyone equivocate. Initially you defined a striker ability as the ability to do lots of damage and stated that sneak attack was the only example of this... then you state that, because it has limitations (5/day) smite evil isn't a striker mechanic... well -

A) Sneak attack has limitations too, you can't necessarily do it every single round and you definitely can't do it at all versus a wide array of opponents

Sneak Attack required flanking or flat-footedness. Easy to achieve. Yes, if your DM faced your Rogue with Undead, Constructs and Oozes in abundance you'd be out of luck. Your paladin's out of luck merely by changing the E to an N on the alignment line.

B) I'm familiar enough with 4E to know that there are striker mechanics with X per Y limitations as well, and that does not prevent them from being considered striker mechanics.

You are correct. Some Essentials build have tried some limited striker mechanics and I'm not as familiar with the Essentials material.

Then you seem to admit that spellcasters (against which it sounds as if you have a bizarre grudge) "step on everybody else's role," presumably including strikers.

No, because I was referring to 3E. I have no 'bizarre grudge' against 4E spellcasters. (Actually I don't really have a grudge against the 3E ones either, just a bout of curmudgeonly behavior on my part.)

Wouldn't it be easier to just say "Oops I guess I mis-spoke?" Are you capable of that?

I misspoke about some 4E Essential Strikers, although I can't imagine how they compete as viable strikers when non-Essentials classes can perform the job every round.

 

[Tayne]

Sneak Attack required flanking or flat-footedness. Easy to achieve. Yes, if your DM faced your Rogue with Undead, Constructs and Oozes in abundance you'd be out of luck. Your paladin's out of luck merely by changing the E to an N on the alignment line.



You are correct. Some Essentials build have tried some limited striker mechanics and I'm not as familiar with the Essentials material.



No, because I was referring to 3E. I have no 'bizarre grudge' against 4E spellcasters. (Actually I don't really have a grudge against the 3E ones either, just a bout of curmudgeonly behavior on my part.)



I misspoke about some 4E Essential Strikers, although I can't imagine how they compete as viable strikers when non-Essentials classes can perform the job every round.

Actually you misspoke by saying sneak attack was the only way to do lots of damage in 3E. That was your initial definition of a striker mechanic, which you later amended once you were proven hilariously wrong.

Even if we discard that initial careless definition, lots of abilities in 3E can be considered generally analagous to "striker" mechanics. You admitted that with the line about wizards, druids, etc stepping on the toes of all the other roles.

Keep moving the goalpost if it makes you feel better, i guess, but keep in mind how bad it makes you look to anyone paying attention.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Why can't every class cast magic missile?

Every game has trade offs. If I want to cast magic missile I choose a class that offers that as a feature. I don't pick fighter as a class and then complain that I can't magic missile.

Right, but that's shifting the goalposts. Combat role doesn't need to be one of those trade-offs. It hasn't always been one of those trade offs. It's a choice to make it one of those trade-offs, and that choice has features that are both positive and negative for various different players.

Instead some are arguing that the game does not support their concept, which has no trade offs, by coming up with ridiculous expectations.

The expectations aren't ridiculous. They come from what the game was able to do before the most recent edition change. Expecting what you like about the game to remain intact is hardly a ridiculous expectation.

Here's the thing from the game design standpoint, though. Why is "character concept" being entwined with class some sacred part of the design? I've seen a lot of people in this topic say that they want it that way. I've seen a bunch assume that it is that way and/or should be (practically begging the question at times). I've yet to see anyone state a reason beyond personal preference why this is a good choice for game design.

It's a psychological thing. It's really about managing expectations.

Classes are contained within conceptual archetypes rather than mechanics because that's how we think of them. "Ranger" isn't about the particular mechanics the class has (like favored enemy or two-weapon fighting), it's about the particular feel those mechanics generate (an agile wilderness warrior!).

You can dissociate those, but people generally don't think of classes as faceless bags of mechanics. Your warlock in WoW has the trappings of a dark wizard of eeeeevil because that's the conceptual archetype it is meant to embody. The mechanics of the class -- pet summoning and the like -- reflect that conceptual archetype. They are a secondary addition. The conceptual archetype is the important part.

This is because when we first approach an RPG, we don't approach it saying, "I want to maximize my attack rolls with my bow, so I'm going to be a ranger!", we say, "I want to be like Robin Hood, so I'm going to pick the ranger!" If my character isn't like Robin Hood, I don't want to be a ranger. I'm not going to pick the Ranger class if I'm interested in being a cultured, urbane mercenary for hire, even if my cultured, urbane mercenary for hire still wants to maximize his attack rolls with his bow.

Dissociation also has other risks (seekers, battleminds, runepriests, etc.), but this thread largely isn't about that.

This instinct to follow archetype -- in a game based around fantasy archetypes like knights, dragons, dwarves, and elves, is part of why the dissociation of mechanics and flavor is not an approach I generally encourage. Sure, it makes re-fluffing a cakewalk. But it also means that, fundamentally, mechanics are meaningless. If the exact same player ability can be the healing words of a deity and some jerk shouting at you, it's not great design, IMO, because quite evidently there should be a difference in those effects, since they are quite distinct in flavor. The inability of the mechanics to demonstrate this difference mechanically makes them lousy at creating the immersive fantasy game I want from my D&D.

If it does this by having a menu of class features, chosen as part of the build process, then we're back in sub-class territory.

Sounds mostly like semantics to me.

It would be different from what I'm used to in D&D, or expect from a class-based system, but that's not necessarily an objection.

I don't think everyone expects classes to have an automatic combat role.

Because of that, I think that flexibility in a combat role for every class is something to pursue.

I also think it's something to pursue because of the "someone's gotta play the X" problem when you're missing a role. If everyone can be the X, whenever they need to be, regardless of their character concept, then it's the best-case solution to that problem, I think.