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<blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5976462" data-attributes="member: 2067">Only for one very specific and narrow value of &quot;D&amp;D&quot; that defines classes by their primary combat utility and stops. And at that, one that was never exactly built for that. Thieves weren't strikers, they were scouts. Wizards weren't controllers, they were problem-solvers. Fighters weren't defenders, they were combatants.The view that D&amp;D always had the 4e roles is overly simplistic and reductionist when actual play experience and the design of the games is taken into account. Cool story, bro.4e's definitions and effects-based powers made things super easy in comparison to games based on earlier editions which have always been limited in comparison to what is possible away from a monitor. Definition is better than ambiguity when you're coding, but it's not necessarily better than ambiguity at the table. It's not a zero-sum kind of thing, necessarily. But software has a much easier time parsing a powers card with its defined fields than it does parsing 3e's ambiguous paragraphs. No offense, but I trust the words of actual designers much more than I trust the words of some dude on the message boards. So when you say something that directly contradicts them, I'm afraid I'll have to defer to them. Again, it's smart to draw from videogames. What's not smart is to allow that to trump things like flexibility and hackability and ambiguity and open-endedness that leverage the strengths of the tabletop medium.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="I'm A Banana, post: 5976462, member: 2067"] Only for one very specific and narrow value of "D&D" that defines classes by their primary combat utility and stops. And at that, one that was never exactly built for that. Thieves weren't strikers, they were scouts. Wizards weren't controllers, they were problem-solvers. Fighters weren't defenders, they were combatants. The view that D&D always had the 4e roles is overly simplistic and reductionist when actual play experience and the design of the games is taken into account. Cool story, bro. 4e's definitions and effects-based powers made things super easy in comparison to games based on earlier editions which have always been limited in comparison to what is possible away from a monitor. Definition is better than ambiguity when you're coding, but it's not necessarily better than ambiguity at the table. It's not a zero-sum kind of thing, necessarily. But software has a much easier time parsing a powers card with its defined fields than it does parsing 3e's ambiguous paragraphs. No offense, but I trust the words of actual designers much more than I trust the words of some dude on the message boards. So when you say something that directly contradicts them, I'm afraid I'll have to defer to them. Again, it's smart to draw from videogames. What's not smart is to allow that to trump things like flexibility and hackability and ambiguity and open-endedness that leverage the strengths of the tabletop medium. [/QUOTE]

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