NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 9166921" data-attributes="member: 996"><img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🤷‍♂️" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937-2642.png" title="Man shrugging    :man_shrugging:" data-shortname=":man_shrugging:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" /> the basic defender idea was to give the enemy a bad choice  - either stand and fight the high-Defense, high-hp, lots of big surges defender or try to get away or attack someone else, with a reduced chance of success, and probably take more damage.A lot of electrons were spilled in debating which bad choice the player had to force on the enemy to optimize the role.The point was, they're both meant to be bad choices. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🤷‍♂️" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937-2642.png" title="Man shrugging    :man_shrugging:" data-shortname=":man_shrugging:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />As with all things D&D[ATTACH=full]312034[/ATTACH]And, really, this does go all the way back to the OG Fighting ManMore philosophically, for a cooperative game, it helps to give the different players different contributions to make.  Classes may or may not have been consciously conceived for that purpose, but they served it.Roles fairly quickly, if informally, emerged from that class system.Perhaps if the iconic fighter, tank, or defender role seems ill-advised or ineffectual, it's because the fighter has gotten such short shrift most of the time?  It's certainly not a great role to try to build for in 5e.  Not only is it mechanically poorly supported, but as a primarily melee approach, it's just broadly disfavored by the system.  All sorts of things add up to make melee a surprisingly bad idea for, y'know, a genre with all sorts of images of heroes weilding swords &c.True.The very nature of D&D hit points, the fact they don't come with a death spiral for being wounded, makes the simple tactic of focus fire - burn down one enemy to remove it from the enemies' action economy first, then start on the next - very effective, optimal, even.The defender role can simply break up focus fire, whether anyone 'needs' to be defended, at all.(in legit 4e discussion, you'd hear about a defender who was over-optimized and got dog-piled by the whole encounter)</blockquote>

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