D&D 5E What are the Roles now?

[Nergal Pendragon]

After some thinking, consulting, drinking, and asking a few of my players... The following are the roles my group agrees actually exist.

General Custer: You are the leader of this ragtag bunch of misfits, and despite any failings you may have in other areas all of your plans are tactically sound and, based on the information you have, would go off without a hitch. Inevitably, due to things outside of your control, your plans go horribly, horribly wrong and you end up taking all of the blame.

Leeroy Jenkins: You're probably a front-line fighter who likes combat. A lot. And you're usually why General Custer's plans end up failing. Despite this, you're an utter combat monster, so the group keeps you around simply because the sheer amount of unrelenting pain you can unleash on enemies cannot be matched. Even if they would love it if you didn't greet the king with "a traditional crotch kick of hello."

The Succubus: Whenever they need information or someone convinced, they send you. It doesn't matter if you're male or female; only the demonic representatives of lust can resist the seductive tones of your negotiations. You might be a bit useless in combat or you might be capable of beating an orc to death by using a bugbear as a club, but what everyone's going to remember is how you flirted with the big bad until they surrendered.

Backstab McBetrayaparty: Everyone with any common sense knows you'd murder your own family for a ham sandwich. Most people with any lore at all suspect you'll sell the entire party out to the first demon or devil you come across just to get better clothes. Your sudden but inevitable betrayal is accepted and known by all. Yet, somehow, you're still adventuring with them. Must not have met someone willing to pay the right price yet...

Healbot 9000: You have a name. You are a person. You can do a lot more than just use spells/class abilities/magic items to heal people. And the party keeps conveniently forgetting every single one of these facts. The good news is the party doesn't really expect you to contribute to combat or endanger yourself... in fact, they'd prefer it if you didn't. After all, you're pretty much their lifeline.

Elan: You are almost completely useless. It doesn't matter what class you are; you manage to make it look worse. You are utterly loathed by the party, most of them wouldn't miss you if you died, you've just barely avoided waking up on fire a few times, and it's a complete mystery why they keep you around at all. And then comes that one certain circumstance where you're amazingly useful...

 

[SirAntoine]

Warriors include the barbarian, the fighter, the paladin, and the ranger.

Wizards include the sorcerer, the warlock, and the wizard.

Priests include the cleric and the druid.

Rogues include the bard, the monk, and the rogue.

 

[Imaro]

The player, by choosing to activate his/her class feature, is making it true that somewhere within a week or so's journey there exists a suitable mount, complete with backstory, level-appropriate guardian, etc. The GM gets to fill in the details, but the player establishes the broad outline.

You still didn't answer my question... What is he actually authoring? You're telling me everything that has laready been pre-created by the rules, by the acceptance of the paladin class into the particular campaign and so on, but you're avoiding the actual question... in having his character call for his mount what is the player actually authoring?

It is different in 3.5, where using the power has the ingame effect of summoning a mount down from the heavens.

The only difference I'm seeing is the amount of stuff invoking the ability forces the DM to create. in both situations I am seeing nothing original created by the player and added to the setting...

 

[pemerton]

You still didn't answer my question... What is he actually authoring?

The existence, in the fiction, of a horse within a certain geographic distance of the PC, which has a history, and has a level-appropriate guardian.

This changes the fiction - for instance, it makes it true in the fiction that this horse was born N years ago, for some value of N probably greater than 3; it makes it true that that horse came into the possession of an evil guardian (or found itself running loose in the wild needing to be tamed, or whatever challenge the GM sets); etc.

But for the players decision to have his/her PC call for a warhorse, none of that fictional content would be part of the shared gameworld and backstory.

You're telling me everything that has laready been pre-created by the rules, by the acceptance of the paladin class into the particular campaign and so on

I don't understand the point of this. Yes, by having a paladin class available it is accepted that the player has the authority, when his/her PC reaches 4th level, to dictate the existence of a warhorse with a guardian, a location etc.

But that doesn't tell us that it is not player authorship. It's not as if player authorship is defined by being something not permitted in the rules.

Suppose I wrote up an "Explorer" class, and that class had, as a name-level capstone ability "Lost World: at any time after reaching this level you may declare that your character has heard stories of a lost world. Consult your GM for details of the rumours in question, but the lost world will be one which your PC can reach (with some difficulty) and which contains lost treasures worth discovering."

That would be a class feature which came into the game because everyone at the table agreed that the Explorer class was a permitted origin. It would also be a rule that permitted player authorship - when the player chooses to use the power, it thereby becomes true that the gameworld contains a lost world, with treasures worth discovering, of which rumours come to the PC in question.

The AD&D paladin's power to call for a warhorse has the same basic structure.

the amount of stuff invoking the ability forces the DM to create.

The player forcing the GM to create certain stuff is player authorship - especially when the stuff is that a horse having certain properties is in a non-trivially-defused situation within a week or so's journey. The GM gets to fill in the details, but that's unremarkable. Most player authorship mechanics leave it to the GM to fill in the details - part of a GM's job is to flesh out elements of the fiction created by the players, and integrate them into the rest of the gameworld backstory. For instance, if a player - as part of writing up his/her PC background - describes the village that his/her PC comes from, the GM might be the one who places it on a map, decides which local lord has control over the village, etc. But the creation of the village by the player is still an instance of player authorship.

Another example a bit like this came up in my session this past weekend. One of the players in my (non-D&D) game added some extra backstory onto his PC, as part of fleshing out the PC's goals and motivations. It had already been established that the PC has a brother who is a powerful sorcerous rival, and is trying to turn himself into a balrog; the player added that the trouble had begun when the two of them were helping in the defence of an ancient besieged city ("Byzantium" was the label the player gave) and the brother had tried to cast a mighty spell to destroy of an onrushing horde of orcs: the spell had mis-fired, and as a result the brother had become possessed by a greater demon - hence his turn from the light to the darkness, and the quest to become a balrog.

The fact that I will be the one who actually names the city and places it on the map (given that I am using the Greyhawk maps, I think "Byzantium" is either Verbobonc, Dyvers or Greyhawk) is not relevant to the question of whether or not this is player authorship. The player's choices about his PC's backstory introduced new content into the shared fiction of the campaign world, which otherwise would not have been there.

This also happens when the player of a paladin calls for his warhorse - new content (most importantly, the existence nearby of a warhorse who is not easy to take or tame) is introduced into the shared fiction of the campaign world.

 

[pemerton]

I hope this post wasn't addressed to me because I don't know what it means. You seem to be saying that fighting 5 trolls at 7th level in 5E is somehow equivalent to an "all-minion" encounter in 4E, and then something about how that makes the "roles not emerge."

The equivalence consists in being departures from the system norms. The fact that the departures are potentially in opposite directions of deadliness (although not necessarily - it is quite possible to build a very deadly all-minion encounter) doesn't change this.

Upthread I suggested that one mechanical feature of 5e relevant to the possible emergence of roles out of that system's combat mechanics is the short (2 to 3 round) mechanical duration of its combats. You replied by saying that combats in 5e aren't necessarily short - and then went on to elaborate that the typical non-double-deadly encounter lasts fewer than 4 rounds.

I don't think that double-deadly encounters are typical for 5e. They are not the sorts of encounters the designers built the system around. (Just as all-minion encounters aren't the sort of encounters that the 4e designers built that system around.) So the fact that they lead to encounters lasting 4 or more rounds doesn't strike me as having much bearing on my initial contention: namely, that the typical combat length in 5e being 2 to 3 rounds is one mechanical feature of the system that is relevant to the emergence of roles in the system.

To add to previous examples, here is another difference that might make: if combats are only 2 to 3 rounds long, a free round makes a huge difference. Hence, one might expect a role to emerge of being the "surprise enabler" (perhaps a scouting/stealth role, probably by default filled by a rogue, ranger, monk or illusionist). In 4e, by way of contrast, the mechanics do not engender such a role, in part because the surprise mechanics don't give a full free round, and in part because the greater mechanical duration of the typical encounter dilutes the impact of an initial free action.

 

[SirAntoine]

Anything a player wants to author has always been subject to the approval of the DM. I would agree with Imaro about the horse example. The game itself establishes the existence of the horse.

 

[pemerton]

AGAIN, you are misrepresenting.

The post to which I replied stated the following:

If you as a player have powers that your character can not have then it is defacto true that you are not immersed in "being that character".

I then gave some instances of cases in which I, or players whom I GM, have powers that their characters do not and cannot have - namely, the power to dictate religious truths which, in D&D, include truths about the disposition of certain divine beings.

Perhaps that wasn't the sort of power that you had in mind, but given that you seemed to be intending a general attack upon the compatibility of player authorship with immersion in character, I'm not sure how I was meant to know that.

As I just described, knowing things the character would know is not at all the point.

Given that these are the sorts of examples that [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] gave, they are precisely the point. And the use of the word "knowledge" causes needless confusion.

In the fiction, the PC knows the tenets of his/her religion. But at the table there typically is nothing to know - the gameworld is a fiction, with no real existence, and the bulk of things that are true within that fiction obtain that status by being authored. So when a player wants to "know" what it is that his/her PC knows, s/he can't just introspect - s/he has to make stuff up. Which is player authorship - a player authoring material that becomes part of the shared fictional content.

if I happen to know some fact that the player does not and the player declares "my religion believes "this" when it would contradict that fact, they they get trumped.

The question of GM veto is also orthogonal. Nearly all RPGs that permit extensive player authorship also preserve GM veto. This is because, in anything like a traditional RPG, it is the GM who has overall custody of the gameworld and its backstory, and is responsible for making the whole thing fit into a coherent whole.

For the best discussion I know of this responsibility, and the relevant considerations on how it can be discharged, I recommend Luke Crane's Adventure Burner. (I think it is more insightful that FATE Core, or than anything I've read from Robin Laws.)

If you are playing a character but solving problems through impacting the world in the way that this character could not then you are NOT immersed in *being* that character.

This is a new claim - about solving problems.

Take literally, it is always true that a player solves problems in ways that his/her PC could not - for instance, the player solves the problem by rolling dice and talking to people, whereas typically for the PC this would be ineffective.

If you mean that a player using mechanics that don't correspond to things his/her PC is doing in the fiction must break immersion in character, then I know this to be false too. And I know it to be false even if the mechanics in question are player authorship mechanics, because I have seen players use player authorship mechanics as part of action resolution without losing immersion in character. There is no simple connection between the psychological state of immersion, and the psychological process of using RPG mechanics.

 

[Iosue]

I know you weren't making a point about 4e, or at least not directly, in your reply. But it was in the context of a comparison to 4e that I made my original remark about AD&D fighter's missile capability, and despite your cogent posts I still incline to the view I started with: a typical AD&D fighter, favouring STR and CON, is notably better at melee than missile, especially post-UA; and that while it is possible to build a bow-oriented fighter, or a mixed-mode fighter, these possibilities also exist in 4e (but under the "ranger" rather than the "fighter" umbrella).

I agree with your earlier post that 4e builds in a relatively high degree of specialisation as a default, but when it comes to mixed melee/ranged combat I think that the STR/DEX ranger is a perfectly viable option for straddling those two modes. The overall play experience shouldn't be radically different from playing a mixed modes AD&D fighter (except to the extent that 4e, in general, is different) with one exception: the mixed mode ranger won't be very sticky in melee. But for a mixed mode character, who is likely to want to play as a skirmisher rather than a "tank", that is probably a net benefit.[/QUOTE]

I'm not sure how much a STR/DEX fighter in AD&D is a "boutique" build. Given the lack of an explicitly defined "defender" role for AD&D fighters, I think it's just as likely for a player -- new or veteran -- to put their second highest stat in DEX for both the AC bonus and the missile to-hit bonus, as it is for them to stick it into CON.

But ultimately, I'm just trying to get you to rephrase "mediocre". Would you agree that an AD&D fighter has decent-to-good ranged ability as a default, with options for players to make them highly effective melee specialists or alternatively into missile specialists?

As for 4e, needless to say, I'm a fan. But I think you bring up one of my (admittedly entirely personal and subjective) issues with it, in that the mixed mode character must be a ranger, rather than a fighter, and that ranger won't have the stickiness of a fighter -- nor will he have access to chain or scale mail without a feat. (Let alone plate; any ideas why this was denied even to fighters, and given only to paladins?) It's a different way of looking at the game and its classes, which can cause some friction for someone looking for continuity.

To be honest, I don't think this is specifically a 4e thing. It's a fighter thing. The fighter's heyday was the 70s (and of course the Basic/Expert lines). There's been movement throughout history to chip away at the class's versatility to give derivative classes bells and whistles. Barbarians, Cavaliers, Paladins, Rangers are all classes that have taken away from the fighter, and when a new edition comes out they have to find away to make those classes shine, it's often at the fighter's expense. This wasn't so bad in core AD&D, when the Paladins and Rangers were just fighter subclasses, with most of their uniqueness coming from magic and non-combat features (or obviously non-fighter combat features, like divine smiting). Once the cavalier and barbarian showed up, it's been a slow slide down hill. I think some aspects of 4e are symptomatic of that, but I don't think 4e was the cause.

 

[SirAntoine]

The archer has always been a fighter in D&D, and I think dexterity was always valued a little higher than constitution because the better your armor class the fewer hits overall you'd receive. That would make more difference in the long run than a few more hit points.

 

[Minigiant]

By far one of my favorite house rules poof 4e was the "Free Power Source Power Swap" were you could swap any power from the same power source as your class.

So the STR DEX fighter could take a ranger or rogue powers for bow or crossbow back up and have a strikerish option.
Or a ranger can take warlord powers and "lead" part time.

Worked well early one as the powers were balanced to each other. Fighter power worked with any weapon and could go striker or defender. Rogue powers only worked with rogue weapons but did more Ws and pushed striker. Ranger powers pushed striker. Warlord powers went all over.


Fighter with 75% ranger powers and 255 fighter powers for the archer fighter. Worked well.

The later PHBs and power books screwed it up a little . But If you wanted a Int/Cha wizard with some big fat sorcerer boom spells, it still worked.