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

[Ruin Explorer]

Right, and if you look at the feats and other add-ons for fighters you see that a LOT of them are there to help punishment. There's a feat that adds +CON to OA damage, another one that adds an attack bonus, several that add damage or other perks to CC and CS, etc. The whole point is to make it HURT when you provoke defender punishment. Anyone who thinks a fighter can't hurt you BAD with OAs and CC really hasn't played one. A good solid fighter should be already doing close to striker damage, and being ignored will up that character's damage output by EASILY 50%. Then you get into the builds that can shove an enemy around using an OA (great in combo with zone damage BTW), etc. Its just not at all fun to ignore a well-built fighter. Now and then it DOES make sense to provoke, say if you can take down the nasty rogue for the price of one OA, but its fairly rare.

Plus he may have horrible riders on his attacks - our Fighter has Takedown Strike, for example, which remains a constant threat until he uses it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Plus he may have horrible riders on his attacks - our Fighter has Takedown Strike, for example, which remains a constant threat until he uses it.

Yeah, and then you get into things like the sword and board fighters with all their pushing and knockdowns, and the pole arm fighter that you CANNOT move away from if he doesn't let you, etc. You can build equivalent Warden builds too. The warden does tend to be a bit more 'tank-like' than the fighter, but then he can unleash a form and do a real wallop of focused damage, and/or tie down multiple enemies suddenly for a round or two. PERSONALLY I think the fighter is overall a bit more potent, at least at low levels, but they're both good. Paladins are weaker in the defender role, but they do add in a good side-dish of leader that helps. Shielding Sword Mages are sort of the best, they're kind of foolproof, you just always prevent a bunch of damage every single round and there's squat the bad guy's can do except run after you instead of their real targets, at which point you go clobber the artillery or something. The other SM variants are not so great, but they do have fun uses as hybrids.

I've never really played with much else in the way of defenders, so I'm not sure about the Battlemind really. I've seen it played a couple times, but it seemed like it was not really as good as a warden, but similar.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Well, it kinda sounds to me like your saying that if you set up a scenario where the only logical course of action is to slay the dragon, where that is the whole object of the adventure then the PCs won't skip that (not always true actually). Of course this argument is tautological. However, if you design your adventures to have multiple possible solutions, or at least extrapolate and allow for and encourage non-linear thinking in your players, then they will certainly do different things, and this is true in ALL editions of the game.

That is what I'm saying. However, I'm saying that D&D plots are most often set up that way. I don't write my own adventures, I run ones written by other people. They are all written that way.

Even when I think about it, however, the plots that D&D does well are precisely the kind that need to be set up this way:

-Cultists of a Doomsday god want to bring him back, they are insane and fanatical...stop them
-Followers of a powerful imprisoned god want to collect the Rod of 7 Parts before you in order to release their god. The pieces of the Rod are scattered throughout the world but they mind control people to not give them up at any cost.
-A dragon's eggs have been stolen by cultists and blackmailed into helping them steal an item. The PCs don't know this but are tasked with getting the item back. It's possible to negotiate if they find the eggs. However, the Dragon doesn't know where they are and is in a bad mood.
-The PCs are tasked with finding their way through an ancient dungeon filled with traps, oozes, constructs, undead, and summoned elementals to find something at the end.
-One of the PCs was tasked with tracking down a murderer from their country. The murderer turns out to be a Vampire who has everyone convinced that he is a powerful noble with a lot of influence.

Those are just a couple of the examples of adventures I've played in or ran. I can tell you that each and every one of them ended in combat. Most of them started, middled, and ended in combat.

Even when I design my own adventures, I don't "design solutions" into them. I don't know how the PCs will solve something before I start. But I'm not going to write a non-combat solution into a game where there logically would not be one. Sometimes you just HAVE to fight. Sometimes no amount of "non-linear thinking" gets you out of a situation and combat is just the only way. In fact, this is often the case. PCs better be good at fighting, because when they eventually get stuck in that situation, they need to be able to fight their way out.

I'm sure it's perfectly possible to specifically set up a situation where sneaking past people makes the most sense or where negotiating makes the most sense. In which case, my players will sneak or negotiate. But 90% of the time that ends in a bad roll and someone failing horribly and attracting the attention of the monsters or insulting them enough that it turns into combat anyways.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Shielding Sword Mages are sort of the best, they're kind of foolproof, you just always prevent a bunch of damage every single round and there's squat the bad guy's can do except run after you instead of their real targets, at which point you go clobber the artillery or something. The other SM variants are not so great, but they do have fun uses as hybrids.

I'm going to quibble here. Shielding Swordmages used to be the best. But when damage was increased with the MM3 the Shielding Swordmage's ability to deflect damage was left unchanged, so at high levels it becomes more and more irrelevant.

 

[Manbearcat]

Quick (well maybe...ok, not likely) personal anecdote in my last game that touches on Defender-ing and GM targetting. I've run tons of play time with a Fighter PC (and about 25 hours of play with an epic level Paladin) so understand that I'm well versed in the brutal action economy punishment of Combat Superiority; if movement provokes OA, the move action ends immediately upon provocation of CS. The below anecdote doesn't entail actual CS but the tactics as a whole create a collage somewhat mimicking it.

My game that recently finished possessed no true Defenders. It did possess (i) an Eladrin Bladesinger, (ii) a Human Dueilist Rogue, and (iii) an Elven Swarm Druid. Obviously only one pure striker amongst them; Rogue. However, all 3 of them were outrageously survivable with the Druid having huge passive DR, the Bladesinger having passive Defender AC, the Rogue approaching it, and both the Bladesinger and Rogue having tons of activatable defenses to up their defenses dramatically (or adding DR). Any of them could handle several enemies (or worse) by themselves.

In play, a common power play for the group was to have the BS (who basically had perma-Bladesong due to all of his extending or recall abilities; + 2 power bonus to all defenses, + 2 to hit, + 15 damage.)

1) Have Stoneskin or Mass Resistance (giving him the equivalent of a Defender + HP pool) on.
2) Perma Bladesong on so

a) MBA's were extreme (2d8 + 39 *.8 hit vs 45 AC on OA - item bonus - 38.4 mean damage.)
b) He would (at his discretion - very common early in fights but not all the time) drop his guard and eat a melee attack (but mitigating 10 or more damage with Stoneskin or MR) in exchange for an auto-riposte (Steely Retort) as an OA (triggering a above).

3) Have Lightning Ring's secondary control effect on the target to punish movement; 11 lightning damage on movement from the target's current square.

Now, like a good swashbuckler/duelist should, the Rogue had (i) means to shift in and out of a combat skirmish constantly and (ii) multiple encounter power immediate actions to either bump his defenses up dramatically or to deftly evade attacks entirely when the enemy approached him to try to attack him (immobilize + shift away). And he had AC just below standard Defender AC.

So consider the catch-22 above imposed on a GM. Brutes, Skirmishers (and even many Lurkers), Minions are getting their brains kicked in due to this setup. It was somewhat akin to what its like to GM a Fighter with Combat Superiority. If they move away from the Bladesinger and attack the Rogue, they're taking a ton of damage to attempt to do so (roughly 50 or 1/4 to 1/6.5 of a level 30 NPCs total HP) with a very good chance of being totally unproductive (net loss in action economy). The Rogue is still difficult to hit (akin to the creature being marked - especially with mark buffing that goes on at that level) and has activatable defenses galore to be near impossible to hit or to just not be there (sort of an inverted Combat Superiority). The better option is almost always to just go after the Bladesinger. In 2 - 3 rounds the target would be dead. Wasting a single standard action uselessly chasing down the Rogue is asking to be laughed at.

This is basically the Defender concept at work. The idea that this had little to no function on my tactics as GM and that the better option would almost always have been to go after the Rogue is risible (at best).

Now imagine that the Bladesinger is a Fighter with Combat Superiority and without Steely Retort. No punishment for attacking the Fighter (outside of the higher HP pool), the defenses would be similar (or favoring the Rogue depending upon how the Fighter and his mark are built) with the mark effect, you eat a (surely buffed) MBA and endure an action economy beatdown with Combat Superiority or Combat Agility (OA triggers shift Dex + MBA + prone)...which pretty much universally amounts to a net loss for your side. That isn't even counting various builds (such as Polearm/Spear + relevant feats) which synergize with the Fighter's base abilities such that they end the conversation entirely.

The melee control of a well built Defender, or team-synergized Defender concepts, dominates a battlefield. I can only assume that people who are disputing this have only dealt with paradigms where the Defender PCs they faced were poorly played + incoherently/poorly built and the Striker PCs they faced were optimized as one-trick-pony, paper tigers (which is difficult to do given how many ridiculously good, damage/lockdown avoiding utiltiies there are embedded in the Striker classes, PPs, and EDs) who could nova considerably and not much else.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That is what I'm saying. However, I'm saying that D&D plots are most often set up that way. I don't write my own adventures, I run ones written by other people. They are all written that way.

I certainly don't disagree. This is why I largely write my own adventures. The commercial adventure writer is faced with a number of problems that basically result in MOST adventures being pretty linear. Even games like CoC don't REALLY have severely non-linear adventures (think of 'Masks of Nyarlathotep' a very classic CoC adventure). This is because skipping a lot of material reduces the value to the purchaser, they want to USE what they got, and the lowest-common-denominator of GMs is "I can run one combat/encounter after another in a row". There are exceptions of course, and the classic Dungeon Crawl was BASICALLY a response to this. It was non-linear (in a trivial sort of way where anything you do leads to more rooms and corridors, with maybe a choice of monster de jeur), but the players would almost always go through ALL of it.

Even when I think about it, however, the plots that D&D does well are precisely the kind that need to be set up this way:

I don't think they NEED to be set up this way, I think they ARE usually set up this way. Again, most GMs are just not that skilled at writing really good adventures, and they haven't been exposed to many either. However, I think its quite POSSIBLE to do with D&D.

-Cultists of a Doomsday god want to bring him back, they are insane and fanatical...stop them

The PCs could use several approaches here. They could use an all-out assault, they could infiltrate, or they could research various types of specific countermeasures. This could lead in various directions. They might even ally with an unsavory force (maybe some orcs for instance) who also feel threatened by the cultists, etc. This CAN go in a variety of directions. Its even possible it could be a plot-twist where the supposed 'evil cultists' are really just suffering from a curse, actually the good guys, etc. That's under 2 minutes of thinking about it, and ALL of those ideas are quite possible in a D&D game.

-Followers of a powerful imprisoned god want to collect the Rod of 7 Parts before you in order to release their god. The pieces of the Rod are scattered throughout the world but they mind control people to not give them up at any cost.

Well, again, there can be plot twists, allies, betrayals, various tactics employed (maybe the PCs simply take one part and bunker down, KNOWING the bad guys will have to try to take it from them for example, vs the expected "get all the parts first" strategy).

-A dragon's eggs have been stolen by cultists and blackmailed into helping them steal an item. The PCs don't know this but are tasked with getting the item back. It's possible to negotiate if they find the eggs. However, the Dragon doesn't know where they are and is in a bad mood.

This already seems quite non-linear to me, with even a slight bit of work.

-The PCs are tasked with finding their way through an ancient dungeon filled with traps, oozes, constructs, undead, and summoned elementals to find something at the end.

Obviously they can follow various paths, research, find people that know the dungeon, etc, or just plow through. There are a few approaches at least. The actual 'crawl' is going to be a crawl, but at least there are choices of direction to take, presumably.

-One of the PCs was tasked with tracking down a murderer from their country. The murderer turns out to be a Vampire who has everyone convinced that he is a powerful noble with a lot of influence.

Again, this seems to me to be a very non-linear adventure repleat with possibilities for different plot twists and tactics. Its hard to imagine it being reduced to a linear adventure.

Those are just a couple of the examples of adventures I've played in or ran. I can tell you that each and every one of them ended in combat. Most of them started, middled, and ended in combat.

I'm sure they can and have been written that way. I observe however that ALL of them can definitely be written as more 'action adventure' or 'plot and intrigue' and that 4e could handle any of them in these various modes. Several possible endings suggest themselves for ANY of these adventures and they need not end with combat per-se. I think its nice to allow various possibilities for the players to choose. Maybe they WANT combat, or maybe they're happy to have a riddle contest with the dragon or whatever.

Even when I design my own adventures, I don't "design solutions" into them. I don't know how the PCs will solve something before I start. But I'm not going to write a non-combat solution into a game where there logically would not be one. Sometimes you just HAVE to fight. Sometimes no amount of "non-linear thinking" gets you out of a situation and combat is just the only way. In fact, this is often the case. PCs better be good at fighting, because when they eventually get stuck in that situation, they need to be able to fight their way out.

I'm sure it's perfectly possible to specifically set up a situation where sneaking past people makes the most sense or where negotiating makes the most sense. In which case, my players will sneak or negotiate. But 90% of the time that ends in a bad roll and someone failing horribly and attracting the attention of the monsters or insulting them enough that it turns into combat anyways.

Well, I think you might be making it too tough to sneak by or something. I think in 4e the idea was an SC would be invoked that could be approximately the same difficulty as the combat (IE you WILL win 99% of the time but you may use a lot of resources if you screw up badly along the way).

What 4e does EXCELLENTLY well is the 'shoot the rapids' or 'escape from the erupting volcano' or 'cross the rickety bridge', etc type scenarios. They can be really thrilling and cool. Its the first D&D that can do 'Indiana Jones' basically at all. You could ALMOST do it in 3e, but the skills were too hard to get right and low level PCs were still too easy to get killed by one bad die roll. 4e is both challenging and forgiving at the same time and that's a fun combination for mixing up the types of adventure elements.

I understand what you mean about combat, its an easy and relatively stock sort of element to throw into an adventure, and it features often in mine as well as those of other people. I just don't think it is the only thing you can do in 4e. It isn't even the BEST thing 4e does.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm going to quibble here. Shielding Swordmages used to be the best. But when damage was increased with the MM3 the Shielding Swordmage's ability to deflect damage was left unchanged, so at high levels it becomes more and more irrelevant.

Ah yes, they never got around to adding in a scaling factor or at least some paragon/epic feats to buff it up. It was still working well at 12th level, but I don't think we went beyond that with a Swordmage after the MM3 era updates. In any case the other 2 Aegis just never seemed really workable to me. Ensnaring was HIGHLY situational at best, and often you were worse off invoking it than not. The Aegis of Assault was ALMOST entirely strictly inferior to a fighter's capabilities. There were contrived situations where it could be handy, but it wasn't worth building a character around.

I have some ideas for different ways to make the swordmage work, but as it stands they have some serious flaws. Shielding is easy to fix though. The other two should probably just be dropped in favor of other concepts like maybe a 'loremaster' swordmage that uses his great knowledge of fighting styles and enemies to create defender type effects. There were options that were just not pursued, probably because the SM wasn't really playtested well enough, being an early non-core class.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Ah yes, they never got around to adding in a scaling factor or at least some paragon/epic feats to buff it up. It was still working well at 12th level, but I don't think we went beyond that with a Swordmage after the MM3 era updates. In any case the other 2 Aegis just never seemed really workable to me. Ensnaring was HIGHLY situational at best, and often you were worse off invoking it than not. The Aegis of Assault was ALMOST entirely strictly inferior to a fighter's capabilities. There were contrived situations where it could be handy, but it wasn't worth building a character around.

I have some ideas for different ways to make the swordmage work, but as it stands they have some serious flaws. Shielding is easy to fix though. The other two should probably just be dropped in favor of other concepts like maybe a 'loremaster' swordmage that uses his great knowledge of fighting styles and enemies to create defender type effects. There were options that were just not pursued, probably because the SM wasn't really playtested well enough, being an early non-core class.

Ensnaring was pointless. Plain and simple.

I think you really underestimate Assault though. It gets stronger at higher levels because the fighter's mark punishment only triggers against adjacent enemies, and the fighter has no means of preventing teleportation. They are also not quite as vulnerable to forced movement as the Knight, but not that far off.

And I think if I were writing a Shielding Swordmage (and I partly am - I need some trifold classes to go with my Trifold 4e) I'd simply say "The target is weakened until it makes an attack roll against you or until you bind someone else". End of story.

 

[GSHamster]

I guess I just don't understand the idea that the Defender is the most dangerous. Isn't deadly attacks on an enemy who isn't paying attention the province of the Striker? Isn't that the iconic power of the Rogue with Backstab?

Also, doesn't this idea make 2+ Defenders insanely powerful? The enemy can only focus on one Defender at a time, so the other Defender becomes the most dangerous, and promptly destroys the enemy.

Under this formulation of "the Defender is too powerful to safely ignore", isn't Defender + Defender significantly better than than Defender + Striker?

 

[Neonchameleon]

I guess I just don't understand the idea that the Defender is the most dangerous. Isn't deadly attacks on an enemy who isn't paying attention the province of the Striker? Isn't that the iconic power of the Rogue with Backstab?

Also, doesn't this idea make 2+ Defenders insanely powerful? The enemy can only focus on one Defender at a time, so the other Defender becomes the most dangerous, and promptly destroys the enemy.

Under this formulation of "the Defender is too powerful to safely ignore", isn't Defender + Defender significantly better than than Defender + Striker?

Two Defenders get in each other's way. Only one mark at a time. So no it isn't insanely powerful. They can tag team very well especially on big foes, but it's tag teaming. And the rogue with backstab is very different from a wall of muscle and steel that you can not ignore.