I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
Scribble said:
You're getting bogged down in semantics. Here, let me try and clarify:
Rules Mastery(insofar as I use it in this thread): Intimite knowledge of how the game is played. That is, mastery (control, knowledge, awareness) of the rules. This can exist for any game.
Rules Mastery leads directly to increased success. This is also true of any game. Once you know what causes a foul, you're less likely to provoke one. Once you are familiar with the hands you can have and the cards in a deck, you're more likely to make good choices.
D&D is concerned with providing a challenge that will consume almost all of your characters' resources over a number of encounters. This is where the "challenge" of D&D comes from -- how many resources, how quickly they are depleted, and what you have left to face the next encounter. When you run out of resources just as you end an adventure, and, depending on luck, not earlier, this is "good pacing," because it creates that tension between failure and success, that chance that you might not "win," that your heroes might fail. This is fun.
As a D&D player gains rules mastery, they are able to make decisions that decrease the consumption of their resources. Namely, they end encounters faster and increase their own ability to defend their resources.
This decreases the challenge of the game. This results in ending an adventure with a larger share of your resources. This is "poor pacing" because it doesn't create that tension between failure and success, your victory is almost assured, and you know your hero won't fail unless you roll absurdly low over and over again. This is not so much fun.
Thus, in order to maintain the same pacing, and to retain the fun of the game, you need to be able to challenge a player with a high level of rules mastery. This is largely done through increasing the rate at which your resources are sapped: damage is increased, attack values go up, etc.
Now, this causes problems when someone with little or no rules mastery uses the same challenge. They loose resources FASTER than they should. This results in "poor pacing" on the other side: your defeat is almost assured, and you know you will fail unless you roll absurdly high over and over again. This is pretty much the opposite of fun.
Other games avoid this by being competitive and giving high randomization. If your rules mastery is about the same as your buddy's rules mastery, then you'll be a pretty good challenge for each other. But get a novice and an expert in the room, and it'll be less fun. Randomization also helps because it makes rules mastery irrelevant. No matter how many +1's you can eke out, they won't matter when the d1000 rolls.
In D&D, the competitve angle is basically erased. This is a co-op game. At low levels, randomization is okay. A 1st level character won't have a much greater advantage than their friend, regardless of how familiar they are with the rules. However, as your level increases, it reaches the point (historically, at around level 10) where your bonuses can affect your character more than the d20 roll does.
This has been a large part of why high-level D&D has been such a pain in the dragonbewbs for 3 editions.
This means that, starting at mid-levels, but potentially even earlier (depending on how big and how frequent and how stack-able the bonuses are), a player with rules mastery will either be adequately challenged, or using the game as a cakewalk, while, perhaps in the same party, a player without rules mastery will either be completely outclassed, or they'll be adequately challenged.
4e has claimed that they won't be very concerned with "rules mastery," presumably leveling the playing field. If mastering the rules doesn't give you any remarkable advantage over someone who is just into the game, you can both be adequately challenged.
However, a game that does that CANNOT also reward "effective tactics" very highly. Because "effective tactics" come from mastery of the rules.
And if the Controller rewards effective tactics highly, then it will re-introduce this really vile problem into the system again.
So if the reason that the there is only one Controller in the PH is because they are somehow a "more advanced" role, by the end of 4e, we will undoubtedly have problems where the masters will continually outclass the less-masterful. Wizards will be the most powerful class in the game "if played right." The monster system will break down as wizards get more effective spells and as people get more familiar with the rules. Wizards and other controllers will become more essential, because they can take on more threats without suffering the same problems. And when people new to the game play wizards, it will be disasterous as the system ASSUMES that a wizard player will use good tactics, and they don't, and they get crushed.
Because that is one of the core problems with the game that 4e is trying to fix, I really don't think that they're going to go down that route.
Rather, I think that the reason there's only one controller is because by the time the initial class layout was done, there just happened to be only one controller, and they didn't bother to fix it because of the idea of avoiding needless symmetry. Whereas specifically creating a cleric alternative was probably a high priority, not due to symmetry, but to fix the problem with "needing a cleric." Because there wasn't a problem with "needing" any other class, it's been overlooked. Because the designers might not have identified the REAL problem hiding behind the "needing a cleric" problem until it was too late to go back and re-assess the list of classes. This problem is fixed "in post," or in the second PH or online, or whatever.
If the reason is more because "Wizards are slightly harder to get REALLY good at playing!", the problem will run a whole heck of a lot deeper than there only being one controller in the PH.
