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

[Nagol]

I disagree with you on what the original D&D classes did. Even in 2e there weren't really skills, and the NWPs were actually mostly given to the INT classes preferentially. So the breakdown was Fighers were ONLY good at melee combat (and maybe STR based ability checks, assuming your fighter was strong, something that was far from guaranteed). Thieves good ONLY at backstabbing in combat and had a narrow group of 'sneaky thief' skills outside of combat. They certainly weren't skill monkeys. The 2e bard was basically a thief that could cast, again not really a skill monkey though his bardic musical/lore abilities make him somewhat of a know-it-all. Clerics ONLY head and buff, with a few specialized attack spells that are rarely taken because they waste precious heal slots. Wizards get all the NWPs AND all the best utility spells. Druids are not bad, but they are not nearly as good at healing as clerics.

4e fighters can focus on damage, but you can also just make a different character that is a striker or near-striker (avenger, slayer, barbarian, ranger, BRV fighter, tempest, or many of the two-handed FWT fighter builds). However 4e fighters are less one-dimensional and weak than previous e fighters. Rogues work EXACTLY like AD&D thieves, except better. Clerics again are much like 2e ones with heavy healing and some rarely used spells moved off to the ritual list. Wizards are definitely less completely overpowered in 4e, but what can you do?

I'm not saying 4e characters are JUST LIKE 2e ones, that's patently not true, but I don't see where they have radically different roles or capabilities. In fact you can make a wide variety of 4e characters that simply can't exist in 2e (at least not without delving far into the later and more questionable supplemental material). 3e allows for most of what 4e does, but comes with some really serious issues and STILL has effectively some of the same limitations that 4e doesn't.

You also have a wide variety of characters in 2e that 4e doesn't do very well, especially specialty clerics -- a character that focuses on buffs/debuffs, for example which really isn't a Leader or Controller. Other difficult to emulate characters include a character that literally can't fight or a divination specialist that has very few combat options.

 

[jsaving]

I don't actually see a big difference between 4e's roles and the traditional fighter/thief/cleric/MU paradigm AD&D has used from the very beginning:

Fighter/defender - "Tank" with the strength and durability to protect other party members

Thief/striker - "Commando" with the stealth and DPS to take down single targets

Clerlc/leader - "Healer" and morale-booster to whom the rest of the party has an incentive to stay close

Magic-user/controller - "Blaster" who dishes out ranged area-of-effect damage and impedes enemy progress on the battlefield

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. Some people like that because it helps players enter the game more quickly and helps the design team focus on tactical gameplay. Other people don't like it because it restricts character customization and makes gameplay seem more like an army combat simulator than role-playing.

I'm not sure there's a "right" approach here, but I do think it's in the enforcement rather than the existence of roles where 4e truly differed from editions past -- for better or for worse.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

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?

Again, it REALLY depends on the build of the defender. Lets assume a two-hander FWT fighter build for a minute. Now you will apply the feat that adds +WIS to his OA attacks. This guy has a CS that enhances his OA (up two one use per enemy turn), and CC which he can use once a round. His normal standard attacks are about 1.5x baseline (where a good pure striker is around 2x baseline), AND he'll unleash an attack that is around .8 of baseline (his MBA) when provoked, PLUS another similar one potentially that is his CC attack. If whomever you concentrate on that isn't the fighter has any wits and moves away a bit then you HAVE to provoke to follow, so you WILL be taking something like 2.3x baseline, more than striker damage PLUS the mark effect, PLUS any other ancillary effects like CS effect and whatever the fighter's actual powers do outside of damage.

My experience with a vanilla dwarf two-hand axe-based FWT fighter with a high wis was that he was absolutely the most damaging character in the party, beyond even the rogue and about equal to a bow ranger IF he was ignored. If he wasn't ignored then he just sucked up a lot of damage and still did considerable damage and was easy to heal. Monsters really were in a sucker lose/lose with this guy and replacing him with another striker would have surely caused the party problems. You CAN build a party without a defender, it works, but its a much different tactical game and if the enemy manages to pin down and hammer on the strikers its a very fast bloody road to a TPK.

 

[Nagol]

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".

I would expect both to play differently from a game where the roles are defined specifically around combat regardless of the defined combat roles.

 

[Nagol]

I don't actually see a big difference between 4e's roles and the traditional fighter/thief/cleric/MU paradigm AD&D has used from the very beginning:

Fighter/defender - "Tank" with the strength and durability to protect other party members

Thief/striker - "Commando" with the stealth and DPS to take down single targets

Clerlc/leader - "Healer" and morale-booster to whom the rest of the party has an incentive to stay close

Magic-user/controller - "Blaster" who dishes out ranged area-of-effect damage and impedes enemy progress on the battlefield

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. Some people like that because it helps players enter the game more quickly and helps the design team focus on tactical gameplay. Other people don't like it because it restricts character customization and makes gameplay seem more like an army combat simulator than role-playing.

I'm not sure there's a "right" approach here, but I do think it's in the enforcement rather than the existence of roles where 4e truly differed from editions past -- for better or for worse.

Well for one thing, a 1e Thief didn't have the DPS to drop a serious threat. Backstab is a really poor tool. If you were lucky and actually got into an appropriate position and somehow managed to hit then your damage that round was almost as high as a decent Fighter.

The "roles" aka individual capabilities affected non-combat situations at least as heavily as combat and typically informed the delving strategy a party would adopt more than the encounter tactics.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You also have a wide variety of characters in 2e that 4e doesn't do very well, especially specialty clerics -- a character that focuses on buffs/debuffs, for example which really isn't a Leader or Controller. Other difficult to emulate characters include a character that literally can't fight or a divination specialist that has very few combat options.

I played an awful lot of AD&D, 20 years of it, and a lot of 4e. I don't really see it. If you wish to make a cleric with say a high WIS and a high INT and focus on rituals and buffs/debuffs you can do it. In fact you could make a pacifist that makes almost no attacks. In both 4e and 2e your character WILL be competent with a weapon, at least at low levels, you can't change that in either system. Of course in either one you can ignore weapons and be relatively ineffective with them, especially at high levels, but I don't see that as unique to either system.

In fact with 4e it is actually EASIER to make truly supportive non-combat characters in the leader role than in 2e. The weird thing with the 2e character is, you can transmogrify him in 24 hours into a combat dreadnaught just by changing his spell selection and equipment. The 4e character is much more tied to feat choices that can't easily be undone.

4e can do a LOT of off-label types of characters. You can do a sneaky fighter for instance, or a smart 'brain' rogue for instance. You could mix ritual casting into ANY of those concepts to create for instance the 'guild thief' that plays the support role for a team of high end burglars, etc. 2e lacks even the basic rules systems to build on for this kind of thing. Obviously you COULD design kits to cover each concept but kits are quite narrow and you literally have to create one for each new concept. The 4e classes are vastly more flexible. This is what lead to 3e and its free-for-all of MCing.

This was also what makes 4e able to tie specific classes to specific roles. You just don't HAVE to be a certain class in 4e to fill a specific concept. If you want to be a 'warrior' that is a striker you can pick from many different martial/weapon-using striker classes and build from there what you want. Its very tricky when you start talking about what a given 4e class can and cannot do because you really have to compare each SYSTEM in total.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well for one thing, a 1e Thief didn't have the DPS to drop a serious threat. Backstab is a really poor tool. If you were lucky and actually got into an appropriate position and somehow managed to hit then your damage that round was almost as high as a decent Fighter.

The "roles" aka individual capabilities affected non-combat situations at least as heavily as combat and typically informed the delving strategy a party would adopt more than the encounter tactics.

AD&D was definitely designed around 'delving' vs combat, that's true. 4e is actually organized around 'action' and not combat. This may actually be an area where you can say the 4e roles don't quite match up with what the game ended up being good at.

I think critically WotC never understood what 4e was good for. Its a very good action-hero type system with larger-than-life heroes who can do all sorts of daring things. Its not a dungeon-crawl game, and its not really a good pure combat game. They just failed to understand what they had designed and didn't FOCUS on its strong points and make the game revolve around the action properly. All the tools are there, but the very people who designed it and wrote the DMGs and such didn't actually see what they had done. They just kept trying to make it so you could play AD&D with it, and that square peg never fit in that round hole.

So, by THAT measure, maybe the argument would be that the 4e roles should relate more to general action than to strictly combat (and other game elements would also likewise). I'm not sure what that would look like exactly. It would be akin to the 4e design we have, but a little different.

 

[Chaltab]

I think critically WotC never understood what 4e was good for. Its a very good action-hero type system with larger-than-life heroes who can do all sorts of daring things. Its not a dungeon-crawl game, and its not really a good pure combat game. They just failed to understand what they had designed and didn't FOCUS on its strong points and make the game revolve around the action properly. All the tools are there, but the very people who designed it and wrote the DMGs and such didn't actually see what they had done. They just kept trying to make it so you could play AD&D with it, and that square peg never fit in that round hole.

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.

Dungeon Delves, I can see, to an extent. 4E forgoes or softens many of the logstics rules for delving, beyond even 3E levels, so that treasure aquisition and tangible resource management are shunted to the back and tactical combat is moved to the front. Resource management's tangibles are things with no numerical value in world--HP, surges, expended dailies, which can make for good tension over long-haul delves, but not something that fits smoothly into the game's routine. And you're not want to actually use the combat rules for clearing a room of weak monsters because it slows the game down and carries little risk for the players, which on the other hand can make dungeons feel somewhat empty and lifeless.

But Delving has long since not been a primary focus of D&D rules, so that's nothing particular to 4E. It rather cleared up/cleared away many vestigial rules that (in Rob Heinsoo's opinion) were relics of a much earlier game that nobody (supposedly) was going to use.

 

[Nagol]

I played an awful lot of AD&D, 20 years of it, and a lot of 4e. I don't really see it. If you wish to make a cleric with say a high WIS and a high INT and focus on rituals and buffs/debuffs you can do it. In fact you could make a pacifist that makes almost no attacks. In both 4e and 2e your character WILL be competent with a weapon, at least at low levels, you can't change that in either system. Of course in either one you can ignore weapons and be relatively ineffective with them, especially at high levels, but I don't see that as unique to either system.

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.

In fact with 4e it is actually EASIER to make truly supportive non-combat characters in the leader role than in 2e. The weird thing with the 2e character is, you can transmogrify him in 24 hours into a combat dreadnaught just by changing his spell selection and equipment. The 4e character is much more tied to feat choices that can't easily be undone.

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. Even for Wizards, the cost of such transmogrification can be staggering if the character doesn't have the spells already in their books. In 1e that was even worse since spells known per level was a serious limit even for 18 Int characters.

4e can do a LOT of off-label types of characters. You can do a sneaky fighter for instance, or a smart 'brain' rogue for instance. You could mix ritual casting into ANY of those concepts to create for instance the 'guild thief' that plays the support role for a team of high end burglars, etc. 2e lacks even the basic rules systems to build on for this kind of thing. Obviously you COULD design kits to cover each concept but kits are quite narrow and you literally have to create one for each new concept. The 4e classes are vastly more flexible. This is what lead to 3e and its free-for-all of MCing.

This was also what makes 4e able to tie specific classes to specific roles. You just don't HAVE to be a certain class in 4e to fill a specific concept. If you want to be a 'warrior' that is a striker you can pick from many different martial/weapon-using striker classes and build from there what you want. Its very tricky when you start talking about what a given 4e class can and cannot do because you really have to compare each SYSTEM in total.

I don't deny it. The focus of the game engines is different and that difference does leak into the character capabilities and expectations for play though. You can play similar campaigns in both versions, of course, but you'll find yourself fighting each system at different points.

 

[Nagol]

AD&D was definitely designed around 'delving' vs combat, that's true. 4e is actually organized around 'action' and not combat. This may actually be an area where you can say the 4e roles don't quite match up with what the game ended up being good at.

I think critically WotC never understood what 4e was good for. Its a very good action-hero type system with larger-than-life heroes who can do all sorts of daring things. Its not a dungeon-crawl game, and its not really a good pure combat game. They just failed to understand what they had designed and didn't FOCUS on its strong points and make the game revolve around the action properly. All the tools are there, but the very people who designed it and wrote the DMGs and such didn't actually see what they had done. They just kept trying to make it so you could play AD&D with it, and that square peg never fit in that round hole.

So, by THAT measure, maybe the argument would be that the 4e roles should relate more to general action than to strictly combat (and other game elements would also likewise). I'm not sure what that would look like exactly. It would be akin to the 4e design we have, but a little different.

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).