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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8622040" data-attributes="member: 18">I used to think similarly until I ran 4E.We had a player who'd always played Rogues because he liked them thematically. In 2E and 3E, you as the DM had to go out of your way a bit to make sure they were included, had proper opportunities to shine and so on. It was quite difficult in 3.XE, because we usually had a Wizard in the party too, and with the best will in the world, a Wizard tends to do a lot of stuff that negates the need for a Rogue. But working hard at it with the right magic items, the right situations, and so on, I thought I was doing pretty well.Anyway, after we'd been playing 4E for a bit, I noticed the Rogue player was just drastically more engaged during combat, and it turned out he was just having way more fun. And this was directly because Rogues in 4E had so much more they could do in combat. Instead of focusing entirely on trying to get off a backstab occasionally, and doing poor damage with mediocre AC and bad HP the rest of the time, he had a ton of cool abilities he could use constantly, which made his character feel very active and dynamic to him. He absolutely adored 4E because of this. And again, this was after spending a lot of effort in 2E/3E to try and make sure his Rogue had plenty to do - the problem was Rogues in those editions were flatly boring and ineffective in combat, and a lot of D&D is combat. That they get to do scouting/defeating traps/etc. outside combat just doesn't make up for that, at least for some players. And there was no real alternative class which had the same theme/vibe but a more involved playstyle in combat.The same was true to a lesser extent for the player who habitually plays Fighters, I note.And both of them reacted to 5E pushing things back in a 3E direction, albeit not all the way, by stopping playing those classes.The player who played Rogues now plays Warlocks and Sorcerers, largely, which can have a vaguely similar theme/vibe but aren't as relatively dull. He has played a 5E Rogue a lot - a Swashbuckler at that, one of the most interesting and engaging Rogues in combat, I'd suggest - but he told me that it was just drastically less fun than 4E.The Fighter player now plays Barbarians mostly, and he's less articulate about why, but has several times complained that 5E Fighters are dull (I think I've mentioned this before). He's also really annoyed that they turned Battlerage Vigor into a weird Dwarf-specific class about spiked armour.So I think it's easy to think this doesn't matter, that you as a DM can easily just overwhelm it, and you can certainly make a difference - I feel pretty sure if I hadn't put effort in, the Rogue player would have got bored completely in 2E/3E - but balance in the sense of everyone having something valid and engaging/interesting to do/think about in combat does matter, I'd suggest, particularly in a game as combat-centric as D&D.</blockquote>

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