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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 6308776" data-attributes="member: 18">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.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.</blockquote>

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