Were the four roles correctly identified, or are there others?

[Sanglorian]

Hi folks,

I was wondering whether people who've been playing 4E for a while now think that the four roles of leader, defender, striker and controller were correctly identified, or whether there might be more (or fewer).

For example, I know Sacred Barbeque splits the controller role into controller and blaster, with the controller imposing conditions (and area effect conditions) but the blaster doing large damage in an area.

Or even the monster roles suggest some expansion: you could split the striker into skirmisher (high mobility, moderate damage), brute (high HP, low defences, high damage), artillery (high damage at range, low defences, low HP) and lurker (high stealth, high damage), could treat leader as a rider applied to other roles instead of a role in its own right, etc.

I've never played League of Legends, but looking at its roles you can see a different way of divvying stuff up: assassin (high mobility, high stealth, high damage), fighter (generalist), mage (ranged, area effect, conditions), marksman (ranged, low defences, high damage), support (buffs, heals, crowd control), tank (absorb hits and lock down enemies).

What do you folks think?

EDIT: And reading a bit more about the League of Legends jungler, it looks like that serves another role: the long game. Minimising the risk of a decisive win from the enemy team and increasing resources for own team.

 

[1of3]

They were not identified at all. They were defined. Of course, then, you can do things differently.

The four roles in 4e are, as you point out, very broad. If you look at typical Leader abilities there is healing, buffs, extra movement, extra attacks.

Furthermore the Controller is weakly defined compared to the others. While strikers have some means of extra damage, defenders have some kind of marking and leaders get a Word, there is no unifying type of ability for the controller.



As for League of Legends, there are two layers: Roles and Positions. Jungler is not a role, but a position. You can take a Tank into the jungle, or a Fighter. If you are daring, you can also do it with any other champ.

So there is a certain correlation between positions and roles, but they are not fixed. There is also a certain correlation with champs and position and roles.

The roles work like this:
Fighter - Melee, kills you with attacks.
Assassin - Melee, kills you with abilities.
Marksperson - Ranged, kills you with attacks.
Mage - Ranged, kills you with abilities.
Tank - Melee, has traded some offense for defense.

Again that is a bit rough. While mages usually deal magic damage, there are some characters that work like mages but deal physical damage. With assassins you cannot even tell. You certainly want some physical and some magic damage on a team, so the enemy team cannot specialize in one defense.

Support is mostly a position but also kind of a role. You babysit the other guy at the botlane (usually a Markswoman), ward the map, remove enemy wards. Healing, shields and crowd controll are typical for support champions.

 

[MarkB]

It's certainly true that the Controller role is least defined. I've always thought of it as being, primarily, "tactical disruption". If the enemy is reduced to trying to react to what the party is doing, rather than vice versa, then you probably have a Controller on your side.

It's also worth bearing in mind that, while 4e sorts its classes according to their primary roles, most classes - or particular class builds - tend to also perform well in a secondary role. For instance, Warlords are Leaders but can have Controllery abilities, and Fighters built for damage can be Striker-like.

 

[Mercurius]

"Identified" assumes that they were assigned to the different classes after the fact of class design, but my sense is that they were used as design templates - that the designers thought about what the main roles in combat were, created basic templates, and then designed classes around those.

This, I think, is why (to me and many) the 4E classes feel kind of homogenous; this is an over-simplification, but it is as if there are four classes with only variations of flavor. I know, I know, it isn't that simple but I think the underlying design architecture of roles and power sources gave it this tone.

It was a worthy goal - to streamline the game, giving it greater consistency and structural integrity - but in the end it had a probably unforeseen negative outcome, that of homogenization and loss of flavor.

IMO, of course.

 

[Hussar]

Mercurious, that might have been true at the outset of 4e, but, within a pretty short time, you had so many bloody classes, I'm not really seeing how you can claim homogeneity. Two strikers can be completely different, despite the fact that they both have "extra damage" dice. A thief and a warlock are very different classes. A warlord and a bard are very different classes that play completely differently.

I can kinda see the point, in that the underlying architecture of 4e classes is all the same - everyone progresses at exactly the same rate, but, I think it's a very superficial analysis to say that they are too close. It really doesn't hold up under scrutiny, particularly later in the game.

 

[HardcoreDandDGirl]

If I was asked by WotC to define roles (because why wouldn't my experience as a pizza delivery girl, bar tender, striper, and security guard totally qualify me ) I would say you need to expand them and then add to them.

take the 4 roles and rename them combat roles, and then add subcombat roles so lurker and artillery are both strikers then add in noncombat roles based on the 5 man band archtypes... then label classes as major and minor in each...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Hi folks,

I was wondering whether people who've been playing 4E for a while now think that the four roles of leader, defender, striker and controller were correctly identified, or whether there might be more (or fewer).

For example, I know Sacred Barbeque splits the controller role into controller and blaster, with the controller imposing conditions (and area effect conditions) but the blaster doing large damage in an area.

Or even the monster roles suggest some expansion: you could split the striker into skirmisher (high mobility, moderate damage), brute (high HP, low defences, high damage), artillery (high damage at range, low defences, low HP) and lurker (high stealth, high damage), could treat leader as a rider applied to other roles instead of a role in its own right, etc.

I've never played League of Legends, but looking at its roles you can see a different way of divvying stuff up: assassin (high mobility, high stealth, high damage), fighter (generalist), mage (ranged, area effect, conditions), marksman (ranged, low defences, high damage), support (buffs, heals, crowd control), tank (absorb hits and lock down enemies).

What do you folks think?

EDIT: And reading a bit more about the League of Legends jungler, it looks like that serves another role: the long game. Minimising the risk of a decisive win from the enemy team and increasing resources for own team.

I think they did an excellent job. The 4 roles fall directly out of the most fundamental basic combat roles. If you read and understand basic tactical theory 4e's 4 roles are direct abstractions of the FUNCTIONS of tactical units.

What the other breakdowns you give examples of do is confuse function with means. 'Sniper' and 'Assassin' aren't functional roles, they modus, ways of accomplishing the function of delivering firepower. Thus the 4e striker role is more fundamental because it is a functional role, delivering damage, of which there are many means, such as ranged attacks, etc. Likewise the other LL categories aren't functional roles (though some of them correspond more or less closely to 4e roles). Again something like 'tank' isn't a role, its a method of accomplishing the role of defender, but 4e illustrates a number of other ways to accomplish that such as the swordmage's damage deflection and enemy teleporting.

'Blaster' isn't a role, again, its a method, barbeque is just confusing the two as well.

Monster roles are a bit different kettle of fish. They are built around specific tactics, not goal/function. This is nice for the DM as monsters are purely one-dimensional tactical constructs that are intended to do exactly one thing each. Leader is an 'add-on' because its not really a thing that monsters do very much of. In short monsters are highly stereotyped tactical units which each emphasize only a very specific tactic. MOST PCs are considerably broader and have several different tactical options. Monsters have one tactic each.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

"Identified" assumes that they were assigned to the different classes after the fact of class design, but my sense is that they were used as design templates - that the designers thought about what the main roles in combat were, created basic templates, and then designed classes around those.

This, I think, is why (to me and many) the 4E classes feel kind of homogenous; this is an over-simplification, but it is as if there are four classes with only variations of flavor. I know, I know, it isn't that simple but I think the underlying design architecture of roles and power sources gave it this tone.

It was a worthy goal - to streamline the game, giving it greater consistency and structural integrity - but in the end it had a probably unforeseen negative outcome, that of homogenization and loss of flavor.

IMO, of course.

I never really got the 'homogeneous' thing, but I agree, they are design templates for classes, and for parties. One of the key things to note with 4e is that class design was VERY successful, there are really no 'broken' unusable classes. Even the 'worst' classes have a clear design function. The 'worst class in the game' (usually considered to be the Binder IME) is perfectly playable and can pull its own weight unless you have a group filled with hard-core tactical optimizers.

Clearly roles did something for the game. They VERY clearly helped class designers focus their efforts and made them think about the tactical dimensions of their designs right from the start. It also let them think about THEME and not worry as much about the details of the tactical dimension.

I'm sad to see WotC throwing out such an excellent design technique. I predict we will get a raft of poor quality 5e classes as a result. Ones that don't clearly do anything well and lack anything remotely like tactical effectiveness.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Here's the deal. As I've said before, any game that has hitpoints really only has 3 options for things you can do in combat:

Make enemy hitpoints go down
Make allied hitpoints go up
Prevent allied hitpoints from going down

Now, you can accomplish these 3 things in different ways for sure. It depends how you want to subdivide them as to how many "roles" you can make. The more you subdivide them the more the roles bleed together, however.

4e divided it thus:

Striker (Make the enemy hitpoints go down using any method possible)
Defender (Prevent allied hitpoints from going down by focusing attacks on themselves then reducing the damage either using high defenses to prevent being hit or abilities that give them temporary hitpoints or restore their own health)
Leader (Make allied hitpoints go up through healing. Also prevent allied hitpoints from going down through buffs and debuffs on enemies)
Controller (Prevent allied hitpoints from going down by hindering the ability of the enemy to move and act. Make the enemy's hitpoints go down using AOE powers)

Unfortunately, the roles weren't well defined and therefore caused a lot of bleedover. It meant that a lot of classes didn't fit one role very well. It appeared that WOTC had no idea what they wanted to define Controller as and kept changing it. Ditto with Leader.

Technically, these could be defined into 50 or 60 roles by dividing them into roles like: (melee damage which prevents damage by hindering enemies) and (ranged healing with defensive buffs attached). Because you can use Ranged, Melee, Defenses(high or low), Hitpoints(high or low), healing, buffs(damage or defensive), debuffs(lowering damage, lowering defense, preventing actions), burst or sustain, and likely a few I'm not thinking of all as descriptors for roles. Any way you choose to combine these descriptors technically makes a new role as long as you prevent other roles from precisely duplicating it.

In theory, the best way for them to define the roles would be to only have 3 of them: Defender, Healer, Striker. It's no real coincidence that this is also the Holy Trinity of MMORPGs: Healer, DPS, Tank. It would be the most clear.

Unfortunately, it would also mean classes we don't really recognize as D&D anymore. Defenders would include both wizards who trapped enemies in webs, priests who put up damage shields on their allies, fighters who tanked, and rogues who disarmed their opponents. However, none of these classes could also do the things we normally expect them to ALSO be capable of. Wizards who threw fireballs around would end up being classified as strikers. And it would mean that there would be a fairly boring set of classes called Healers who did nothing but make hitpoints go up.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Eh, I don't think I agree with you M. O. The 4 roles aren't about hit points at all. They are about tactics in general. ALL tactics are about control of a situation. Violence is the imposition of the will of one group upon another by force. It generally presumes that the opposition has its own plan to do the same (maybe just defensively by thwarting your plan, but nonetheless).

So all tactics serves the ultimate goal of controlling the enemy. Controllers do this in the most direct way possible, they force the enemy to do or not do specific things. Leaders do this by bolstering their allies and degrading their enemies. Defenders do this using a specific type of countrol (close in melee level mobility control coupled with some sort of punishment mechanism and usually high defenses/hit points). Strikers of course simply deprive the enemy of hit points directly, though they might have a variety of specific characteristics (range, area, melee, etc).

Now, I don't think that you are wrong about the 'three things to do with hit points', this is true, and 4e generally emphasizes hit points as the core mechanic to measure the defeat of enemies by. Its far from being the be-all and end-all of tactics though. Controllers ESPECIALLY deal with the enemies means of fighting very directly. IMHO the 4e controller is the most defined and most central role (though you really MUST have some striking capability to actually win most 'knock down drag out' type fights that tend to predominate in your run-of-the-mill adventures).