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

[Neonchameleon]

So I'm taking 3.5x damage per round and I'll move that up to 4.5x damage if I try to take out someone other than the steel wall. That someone is also causing more than half the damage I'm taking each round and that will fall to about half while I try to take him out. So if I'm likely to last a few rounds, I should try to drop the other guy if I think I can do it in 1/3 the rounds I have before I drop.

And then you're taking -2 to hit the person who's not a fighter, meaning that they are about as hard to hit and the fighter isn't that much tougher than whoever you're actually attacking.

In terms of approximate value, squishies (Wizards, Sorcerors, Invokers) get 4hp/level, strikers and leaders get 5hp/level, and Defenders get 6hp/level. (There are exceptions - for example the warden gets 7). A level 1 squishy has an AC of 13-16, a striker or leader 16-17, and a defender 17-20.

Martial characters (except the PHB Ranger and Warlord (and Executioner)) all get +1 to attack one way or another over non-martial characters, although the fighter can trade this out for a couple of alternative bonusses. (Primal characters have +1hp/level, and Divine characters get an Encounter Power called Channel Divinity; Arcane get a grab bag that's different class by class).

Strikers as a general rule get +d6 damage/tier over non-strikers with roughly the same powers. Sometimes this is expressed as +[Secondary Stat]+[level based modifier]. It works out at about the same.

The big difference comes at higher levels with leveraging feats; Defenders are normally taking a pounding so they get feats to help them survive, whereas Strikers go for damage feats to help them kill things faster.

I thought the Paladin mark burst affected a single target inside the burst - the burst is just so he can catch someone around a corner or otherwise untargetable?

The PHB Paladin is too weak to be fit for purpose. There just isn't enough power behind their challenge (and from memory there is no Strength-based Level 9 daily). Divine Power gave Paladins some not so stealthy buffs - the main one for Charisma-paladins involves spraying marks everywhere. A second level Charismadin is quite capable of marking everyone in close burst 3 two turns in a row just using Encounter powers.

Where I do think 4e differed from past editions was in making the value judgment that characters ought to be restricted to a single role to ensure players wouldn't inadvertently gimp their PCs.

Except that it didn't do this. A friend and I have a running joke that no matter which official role we pick all her characters are strikers and all mine are controllers.

The roles that are defined help drive play inside the game engine.

I can imagine a game where the roles are "Hitter", "Talker", "Planner", "Sneak", and "Builder" like the show Leverage.

That game will typically play differently (different expected obstacles, table focus, goals, and different expectations on how they are achieved) than one with the roles of "Hitter", "Detector", "Healer", "Gadgeteer", and "Commander"

As a matter of fact the official Leverage RPG is class based with the classes being Hitter, Hacker, Grifter, Mastermind, and Thief. And it's an excellent game that plays very differently from D&D

Could you elaborate on that? I'm not sure what you mean at all. What distinction are you making between 'action' and 'combat' here because I'm not seeing any way that 'not really a good pure combat game' is true. Combat is what even detractors agree 4E is best at.

4e combat is like running with a big budget and excellent Sfx for your film. If you run All Combat All The Time then you end up with something resembling a Michael Bay movie. You're there for the big explosions. 4E is a much better game if you treat it more like Raiders of the Lost Ark - yes you've a nice special effects budget, but the game is about the adventure rather than seeing what the Sfx department can do as a visual spectacle.

Just because the Sfx department is very good doesn't mean you should base the whole film round Sfx. 4E also (once we got over the first draft skill challenge rules that were published in 2008 and started using either the 2009 or 2010 rules) provides a much smoother and better experience than any other version of D&D where skills are relevant. You have big but not absurd differences in skill level (4E was doing Bounded Accuracy before 5E was thought of) combined with an ability to go above and beyond normal abilities through sheer skill in a way that no other edition can. A second level rogue who chooses the right encounter power can 1/scene manage to pickpocket with a brush pass (making a thievery check as a minor action - I think the power is called Deft Hands) so they barely appear to even break step as they walk through the crowd. Also you can't often use magic to make skill irrelevant.

And 4e doesn't do logistical play that well - but it does do extended pressure a la Die Hard extremely well. Deny the PCs their extended rests!

So your tools out of combat are a bit better for an action adventure. If you leave the Sfx department where it belongs (supporting the film rather than being the de facto stars of the film) 4E works really well. If not "it is a tale told by an idiot; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Sfx and combat are meaningless without making sure they signify things (or you want to play a board game), and you seldom get the significance in the middle of combat. But you sure get a lot of sound and fury which if you already have investment increases them.

Or to put things another way, 4e combat is like top quality home made ice cream. It tastes delicious (if you don't let it melt by taking too long) but try and replace a full meal with it and you'll be full, and possibly sick.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I can see that. I remember one of my thoughts when I read the first books was this is an attempt at fantasy superheroes (I like superhero games).

Ironically, 4E's pretty terrible for fantasy superheroes - the PCs just aren't that powerful and can't operate in that style. What's it's great for is fantasy ACTION heroes, which is a different genre entirely.

I suspect the frequent mis-identification as "fantasy supers" comes from the common binary viewpoint where a game is either "supers" or "gritty" (something which was actually largely true pre-1990, game-design-wise!), which unfortunately ignores the vast post-1990 middle-ground fiddled with stuff like Shadowrun, Earthdawn (4E's closest comparison, really), Feng Shui, and so on. That and the including of Epic Destinies in the PHB, I suspect - in previous games, such things were exiled to some poorly-balanced extra sourcebook.

It's similar to the common "4E is like an MMO!" mis-identification - actually, it isn't - the resemblance is very superficial indeed, but 4E's combat did resemble a computer game genre - "Tactics RPG" - Final Fantasy Tactics being the prime exemplar of this.

So your tools out of combat are a bit better for an action adventure. If you leave the Sfx department where it belongs (supporting the film rather than being the de facto stars of the film) 4E works really well. If not "it is a tale told by an idiot; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Sfx and combat are meaningless without making sure they signify things (or you want to play a board game), and you seldom get the significance in the middle of combat. But you sure get a lot of sound and fury which if you already have investment increases them.

Or to put things another way, 4e combat is like top quality home made ice cream. It tastes delicious (if you don't let it melt by taking too long) but try and replace a full meal with it and you'll be full, and possibly sick.

This very very true - combat in 4E needs to have an actual context and reason for happening to really be worth it. This is quite a change from, say, 2E, where the purpose of combat was partially simply to gain XP or access to loot (which might have been worth XP, depending on your optional rules, in 2E), and thus combats which had no real meaning or context still seemed valuable.

I would go as far as to admit that this change significantly changed how D&D felt, and how I approached adventure design as a DM - unless an encounter would actually challenge the PCs and matter to the story, I rarely included it - whereas in 2E/3E, it was pretty much a given that you'd bump into a lot of meaningless and not-very-scary encounters (or even actively seek them out!).

Back on the roles, I'd agree with those saying the roles were chosen, not identified, and I think they were smart choices, personally. Leader was definitely the smartest extrapolation (followed by Defender), because it showed a real understanding of the kind of people who actively want to play a class that helps and supports others, and an understanding that many of those people don't want to play some variant of Cleric. The Fighter-as-Defender was as astonishingly good piece of design, because it let people playing Fighters genuinely and forcibly protect the party without robbing them of their glory as a warrior or making them seem very artificial (something MMOs have continuously failed to do with their "tank" designs). Some of the other Defender designs were a bit sub-par, sadly (early Paladins, as you note - both MAD and crummy ability designs - it's hard to believe the same people worked on the Fighter and the Paladin). Leaders and Controllers had, I think, the most consistently good class design, in terms of being able to do their job without requiring the player to go out of their way.

 

[Neonchameleon]

You can change basic competency with weapons in 2e. One of the 2e campaigns I ran was based on the Deities and Demigods Celtic mythos. One of the specialty priests I ran was a priest of Diancecht, a pacifistic healer. Part of the package was a negation of to-hit increase -- they started on the Magic-User chart and didn't get better at combat as they leveled. They also didn't get any damaging spells on their spell list.

Another player built a Magic-User as a Diviner type that probably knew maybe 3 combat spells by the time the campaign ended (characters were ~9th level). He was focused on knowing and figuring out stuff.

No damaging spells for a 4e magic user or clericother than your second at will is perfectly possible. And I've played both loremasters and detectives in 4e with some quite absurd levels of knowledge. My most recent was a Bard who not only knew stuff, if he'd spent time in the town he was in he could always find the person most likely to know and convince them to tell him even if they themselves had forgotten or hadn't put it together. He had the Secrets of the City utility power that allowed him to use Streetwise in place of any knowledge skill. He had Skill Focus: Streetwise. And he had Bardic Lore (IIRC) - a utility power that allowed him to take 20 on any knowledge skill 1/day. Oh, and a set of divination rituals (of course). His combat skills ... mostly involved digging up their dirty secrets and the childhood taunts used against them so they lost their cool (Vicious Mockery as an at will, and Blunder as an encounter power). When you can use childhood nicknames that people want kept secret on the fly, that's divination and loremastery even if it was a specialist subject for him.

Depending on initial choice you certainly can't transmogrify that way in 2e -- your specialty cleric is locked in and those choices can only change for the worse unless a major quest is undertaken to change deity.

This is a huge advantage 2e Speciality Priests have flavourwise over every other non-4E incarnation of the cleric.

 

[Nagol]

Ironically, 4E's pretty terrible for fantasy superheroes - the PCs just aren't that powerful and can't operate in that style.

I came to a similar conclusion during my review of the game -- power wasn't the problem per se. Limited access to common trope abilities such as flight, long-distance travel, wide-ranging effects, and long-ranged attacks was.

What's it's great for is fantasy ACTION heroes, which is a different genre entirely.

I suspect the frequent mis-identification as "fantasy supers" comes from the common binary viewpoint where a game is either "supers" or "gritty" (something which was actually largely true pre-1990, game-design-wise!), which unfortunately ignores the vast post-1990 middle-ground fiddled with stuff like Shadowrun, Earthdawn (4E's closest comparison, really), Feng Shui, and so on. That and the including of Epic Destinies in the PHB, I suspect - in previous games, such things were exiled to some poorly-balanced extra sourcebook.

It's similar to the common "4E is like an MMO!" mis-identification - actually, it isn't - the resemblance is very superficial indeed, but 4E's combat did resemble a computer game genre - "Tactics RPG" - Final Fantasy Tactics being the prime exemplar of this.

For me, it was because I like and run superheroic games and I don't often run cinematic action-adventure games.

This very very true - combat in 4E needs to have an actual context and reason for happening to really be worth it. This is quite a change from, say, 2E, where the purpose of combat was partially simply to gain XP or access to loot (which might have been worth XP, depending on your optional rules, in 2E), and thus combats which had no real meaning or context still seemed valuable.

I would go as far as to admit that this change significantly changed how D&D felt, and how I approached adventure design as a DM - unless an encounter would actually challenge the PCs and matter to the story, I rarely included it - whereas in 2E/3E, it was pretty much a given that you'd bump into a lot of meaningless and not-very-scary encounters (or even actively seek them out!).

Or actively work on discovering alternative ways to bypass those combats in 1E and less so in 2E. 3E is where I saw players specifically looking for extra combats to bolster their xp. A couple of the characters were fond of loudly discussing as they traveled through the woods "Oh, we're just a pair of dwarves laden down with all the treasure from the dungeon! Too bad we're so injured and weak! We may have to drop all this treasure!" in an effort to increase wandering monster encounters.

Back on the roles, I'd agree with those saying the roles were chosen, not identified, and I think they were smart choices, personally. Leader was definitely the smartest extrapolation (followed by Defender), because it showed a real understanding of the kind of people who actively want to play a class that helps and supports others, and an understanding that many of those people don't want to play some variant of Cleric. The Fighter-as-Defender was as astonishingly good piece of design, because it let people playing Fighters genuinely and forcibly protect the party without robbing them of their glory as a warrior or making them seem very artificial (something MMOs have continuously failed to do with their "tank" designs). Some of the other Defender designs were a bit sub-par, sadly (early Paladins, as you note - both MAD and crummy ability designs - it's hard to believe the same people worked on the Fighter and the Paladin). Leaders and Controllers had, I think, the most consistently good class design, in terms of being able to do their job without requiring the player to go out of their way.

They were smart choices if the intent was to design an action-adventure game though I'd probably have broadened the choices to cover action more than they did.

They were poor choices if the intent was to design a game closer to D&D roots where combat was a thing that was threatened constantly, happened frequently, but where the characters could and should work to limit it to fights of value.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Or actively work on discovering alternative ways to bypass those combats in 1E and less so in 2E. 3E is where I saw players specifically looking for extra combats to bolster their xp. A couple of the characters were fond of loudly discussing as they traveled through the woods "Oh, we're just a pair of dwarves laden down with all the treasure from the dungeon! Too bad we're so injured and weak! We may have to drop all this treasure!" in an effort to increase wandering monster encounters.

It started in 2E, for me with, I remember, the players loudly complaining that they never got any random encounters any more (I had, in fact, been forgetting to check for them), and they just needed a little XP. I also saw a lot of "Let's go kill it for XP/treasure!" in 2E, or "Let's take the dangerous route!". Whereas in 4E, because you explicitly get XP for bypassed monsters, this was no longer a thing (3E actually had a similar deal, but I think it was couched so much as a suggestion that a lot of people didn't do it).

I find that in 4E I often do put in "potential combats" that only add a little to the story, with a number of ways to avoid them - hell, last major adventure arc, the PCs managed to bypass about a half-dozen encounters, and ran from another one (because their goal was achieved, so why hang around?), which in 2E would definitely have been a "fight to the finish", all of which seemed very dramatically appropriate and cool.

Again though, it's certainly "not how D&D used to be!", for better or worse.

They were smart choices if the intent was to design an action-adventure game though I'd probably have broadened the choices to cover action more than they did.

The big gap, for me, was that they didn't balance non-combat abilities the way they balanced combat ones. There's no reason, in 4E, that a Fighter should have less non-combat potential than a Rogue - different, certainly, but not less - yet he did, because of unspoken sacred cows - this sometimes undermined the "action-adventure" feel.

They were poor choices if the intent was to design a game closer to D&D roots where combat was a thing that was threatened constantly, happened frequently, but where the characters could and should work to limit it to fights of value.

Yeah - I actually think 4E could have had "the best of both worlds" if they'd decreased HP all round (monsters and PCs), and reduced PC Healing Surge numbers (not values - how many you have, not how big) by 30-50%. Thing is, I don't feel like 3.XE was very close to that, either, and it felt like 4E was an attempt to progress D&D towards what they thought then was the future of gaming, rather than to move back to 2E-style stuff, which wasn't something being wide-ly begged for in 2007/8 (again, they had no reason to believe this was wrong, given the reactions from fans - like the massive GenCon cheer when Vancian casting was said to be dead). Still, insufficient market research and playtesting, I think, WotC!

 

[Hussar]

I have to ask. How often do your players want to play noncombatant characters? In thirty five years of gaming, I can't say I've ever seen a player intentionally come to the DnD table with a non combat character.

Is it really that common?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I have to ask. How often do your players want to play noncombatant characters? In thirty five years of gaming, I can't say I've ever seen a player intentionally come to the DnD table with a non combat character.

Is it really that common?

I'm guessing your asking Nagol, but in D&D, totally non-combat-oriented PCs? I've seen one, played by me, in 25+ years of D&D. They lasted two sessions before I was overwhelmed by boredom. I have seen hundreds of PCs in that time, so it's less than 1% in my experience.

Outside of D&D, I've seen more (still below 5%), but at lot of them that appear superficially non-combat-capable actually have a single combat skill at an "acceptable" level, so are just quiet combatants, or tertiary combatants, not actual non-combatants. I did play with a hilarious and charming pacifist werewolf in W:tA for a fair while. Eventually the PC got shot and horribly maimed by a Pentex security guard, though.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Or actively work on discovering alternative ways to bypass those combats in 1E and less so in 2E. 3E is where I saw players specifically looking for extra combats to bolster their xp. A couple of the characters were fond of loudly discussing as they traveled through the woods "Oh, we're just a pair of dwarves laden down with all the treasure from the dungeon! Too bad we're so injured and weak! We may have to drop all this treasure!" in an effort to increase wandering monster encounters.

Showtime, Storytime.

In the beginning was oD&D and 1E. And the primary source of XP in both games was 1GP = 1XP. If you could loot the dungeons without fighting the monsters you gained XP faster and more safely than if you fought the monsters. (This is true to the point that Gygax, when he heard people were fighting low level monsters for XP divided the low level XP rewards by 10 - and 75% of the XP in most modules was for looting the place).

Then along came 2E. 2E demoted the status of the XP for GP rule to optional and IIRC hit it somewhere in the DMG. They added an XP for behaving like a stereotypical member of your class rule instead. Which meant that either way fighters gained XP by ... killing things. And there were few other ways for fighters to gain XP. So because killing things rather than gathering loot was what it rewarded, people looked for monsters to kill. But groups who had been playing 1E tended to keep playing the way they had before and either ignore or just not pay attention to that rule.

Next up was 3.0. XP for GP was long gone. Not even an optional rule any more. The only explicit source of XP was overcoming CR based encounters, and opinions differed on whether sneaking past a patrol counted as overcoming it (in which case you could farm it ridiculously by being not seen the next time it came round) or just avoiding it. And 3E was a clear cut shift so inertia from 1E didn't apply so much (as well as being far further from the time 1E was common).

4E came along and made a couple of huge changes to the XP system. The minor one was explicit Quest XP. (You sometimes had Quest XP in earlier editions of course). The enormous one was Skill Challenge XP. You explicitly gain XP in 4E for carrying out non-combat plans. And it's both codified and a lot safer than fighting. And because combat takes so long if you want to level up fast, you want skill challenge XP rather than combat XP.

So if you want to level up in 4E with a GM who follows the rules the best way to do it fast is once again by avoiding combat and instead running con games and tricks on the enemy to get them utterly confused or fighting each other.

They were smart choices if the intent was to design an action-adventure game though I'd probably have broadened the choices to cover action more than they did.

What they were trying to cover in my opinion was the playstyle indicated although not actually terribly well supported by 2E. Which I would call action-adventure, complete with encounter based play. And they took the explicit roles from 2E and just filed the serial numbers off.

I find that in 4E I often do put in "potential combats" that only add a little to the story, with a number of ways to avoid them - hell, last major adventure arc, the PCs managed to bypass about a half-dozen encounters, and ran from another one (because their goal was achieved, so why hang around?), which in 2E would definitely have been a "fight to the finish", all of which seemed very dramatically appropriate and cool.

My normal method is to put in potential combats and let the PCs wriggle their way out of them.

The big gap, for me, was that they didn't balance non-combat abilities the way they balanced combat ones. There's no reason, in 4E, that a Fighter should have less non-combat potential than a Rogue - different, certainly, but not less - yet he did, because of unspoken sacred cows - this sometimes undermined the "action-adventure" feel.

Yup

Yeah - I actually think 4E could have had "the best of both worlds" if they'd decreased HP all round (monsters and PCs), and reduced PC Healing Surge numbers (not values - how many you have, not how big) by 30-50%. Thing is, I don't feel like 3.XE was very close to that, either, and it felt like 4E was an attempt to progress D&D towards what they thought then was the future of gaming, rather than to move back to 2E-style stuff, which wasn't something being wide-ly begged for in 2007/8 (again, they had no reason to believe this was wrong, given the reactions from fans - like the massive GenCon cheer when Vancian casting was said to be dead). Still, insufficient market research and playtesting, I think, WotC!

When I look at 4e I see a lot of filling the promises made by 2E and a lot of regularising the adventure path style play that happened in late 3E. Both popular.

But the first set of books were short a year of playtesting, complete with both bugfixes and very bad presentation. They threw out Orcus just over 10 months into developing 4e, put all the usable parts into the Book of 9 Swords and then started completely from scratch. And 4E was still delivered exactly to time, having been created in 14 months rather than the 24 initially allowed for its development. This was one of the four critical failings of 4e on arrival (the second was pissing off the third parties, the third was providing the terrible Keep on the Shadowfell as the initial adventure, and the fourth was writing the rulebooks like instruction manuals rather than like books you read for pleasure - and not showing how AEDU worked with fluff rather than against it).

 

[Nagol]

I have to ask. How often do your players want to play noncombatant characters? In thirty five years of gaming, I can't say I've ever seen a player intentionally come to the DnD table with a non combat character.

Is it really that common?

It strongly depends on the campaign I'm running. I'd say it is typical that out of a group of 6 (about average for my table over the years though it is smaller right now) I'd get one strong non-combat focus character per campaign on average. Some campaigns will have multiple; other campaigns -- particularly ones with an announced slant towards combat action I'll get none. Even in CHAMPIONS, I've had players bring in characters that really had little to no combat capability.

Right now, I'm running a small group in an X-Files style modern day campaign. It started with two very heavy combat focused characters and one whose combat is secondary among the PCs plus a non-combat NPC specialist of their choosing. It since changed into a single combat focused, one secondary combatant, and one not quite incompetent at combat plus one non-combat specialist of their choosing.

 

[Remathilis]

I have to ask. How often do your players want to play noncombatant characters? In thirty five years of gaming, I can't say I've ever seen a player intentionally come to the DnD table with a non combat character.

Is it really that common?

In my experiences, its not common, but it does happen.

I've seen a few wizards who took invocation as a banned school, or clerics (usually specialty priests) who focused on healing and weren't plate-and-mace style. I also saw the archetypical "coward halfling theif" once, as well as a really dandy/prissy bard. However, Few of them really made an impact, but they did exist in both 2e and 3e.