D&D 5E (2014) What are the Roles now?

[pemerton]

AD&D also had a broader role for priests

This is AD&D 2nd ed. It is (at least in my view) a major departure from 1st ed AD&D. I think it is also the prelude to 3E CoDzilla.

 

[BryonD]

WI don't, really, and particularly not in this thread, which is about the mechanical structure of systems and the consequences of that structure, not about who buys what.

Interesting parsing of the topic.
I've been involved in this thread quite a bit and the "how mechanics work" and FEEL and who buys what are (aka "who likes what based on how it actually works for them") have been quite tied together.

I'm not going to play the Gygax quoting game with you.

My point is not that people ignored rules. My point is that people using the rules had experiences that directly contradict the experiences you are strongly implying the rules dictate. But guidelines, suggestions, and specific rules taken out of the full context of gameplay fail to capture that experience.

Again you are ignoring the experience and trying to win the word games.

4E did a very poor job of capturing the feel of other editions *as experienced by myself and many other people*. This does not dispute that many people found 4E to do a BETTER job of delivering the experiences they enjoyed. But suggesting that it comes to down ignoring rules is just completely disingenuous. Perhaps GMforPowerGamers should chastise you for just being intentionally disagreeable. Because grasping the concept is something you consistently go out of your way to avoid.

 

[BryonD]

But...if the roles have always been there, and the only change was that in 4e they were just explicitly called out (and they weren't mechanically enforced)... that begs the question why one of the authors of the 4e PHB felt it necessary to point out that the design and design philosophy behind the classes was different from every edition before...

Andy didn't read enough Gygax quotes.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

After you Disengage you can then move. That is a move-and-a-half, making it hard for enemies to follow. That is very different from AD&D, where you cannot move further then your speed, and if you do so you eat a rear-attack attack sequence.

AFB but that's not how I understand Disengage. It doesn't grant move-and-a-half, only your regular move. Enemies can follow you and hit you just fine unless something stops them, or you have a higher move. This is why Longstrider and Expeditious Retreat are such good spells--they are the only way to accomplish the maneuver you mention here without inherent abilities like the Mobile feat.

 

[Tony Vargas]

But...if the roles have always been there, and the only change was that in 4e they were just explicitly called out (and they weren't mechanically enforced)... that begs the question why one of the authors of the 4e PHB felt it necessary to point out that the design and design philosophy behind the classes was different from every edition before...

The design was a common class structure - different from every edition before - and the design philosophy included the classes being balanced as a high priority (likewise).

The idea that the classes would each contribute something different to the success of the party - roles - was nothing new, it was just more clearly and formally stated, more refined, more focused on combat performance, and better implemented.

But, 4e roles were /certainly/ mechanically supported - mostly by class features. They just weren't straightjackets, since classes tended to have a secondary role, and builds might be customized to emphasize an alternate role.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Say you have 4 Human Fighters in your party. One has the soldier background, one has Criminal, one has Acolyte, the last has Folk Hero. Same race, same class, 4 very different "Roles" based on their backgrounds. Add in Feats, skill proficiencies and alignments and the math gets ridiculous as far as options.

Its actually pretty cool to see IMO.

I don't get how backgrounds apply. Both for "how is this new?" and "how does this affect role?"

First Q: 5e Backgrounds give a (gen. minor) fluff ability, and two skills. How are 4e's BGs+themes different? They weren't in at launch, true, but they arrived ~first year and became standard nearly immediately. Themes expanded options (additional choices for Utility powers, usually) and minor secondary benefits (very similar to 5e's background benefits); BGs, excluding cheesy module-specific ones, gave a proficiency or added a skill to your class skill list (or +2 to it, if your class already had it).

For the latter Q: If the only differences between two characters are specific stats and BGs, does that really make them sufficiently different to count as different roles? (Obviously the answer to that question will be purely opinion, I'm just curious.) And if that IS enough, particularly when you add in four levels and a feat, why is 5e so dramatically different from 4e if you allow the latter's Themes, BGs, a couple of levels, and a couple of feats? (four 5e levels is very approx. equal to two 4e levels, scale-wise) Because even something like healer's kit proficiency doesn't demonstrate a radical change of role to me, despite being one of the most substantial differences I can think of between two 5e characters based purely on their backgrounds with all other character options being the same.

Let me add a follow up to my point earlier. In Basic D&D, the same class (a fighter) could be (and was, depending on how the player wanted to play him or her)

* Strength based. The brutal warrior who focused on doing as much damage as possible
* Dex based. Either the heavy armor&shield type to be as hard to hit as possible, whose role was to be on the front line taking the brunt of the attacks.
* Dex based. Ranged weapons. The bow or javalin. Hit and run fighter
* Con based. Has as many HP as you could get to extend your survivability.

If you allow for the Slayer, all of these are perfectly valid options--technically, all of them will be high Strength, IIRC, because 4e allows you to pump two stats rather than just one (its ABIs work like those in 5e, but you can't swap them for feats--you get both separately.) #1, 2, and 4 can all be (more or less) covered by the standard ("Weaponmaster") Fighter. There are also very good reasons to consider high Wisdom for a 4e (Weaponmaster) Fighter.

Or you could play a cleric that also fit all of the above if you wanted, in addition to a healer, protector, smiter, etc. I don't think there is any need to talk about how a MU could focus on damage dealing spells, or utility spells, or control spells, etc, etc--filling any number of roles that could change literally every day.

I am distrustful of design that lets any given class do absolutely everything, but only one thing per day. It makes the five-minute workday more troublesome, and leads to the "planned transcendence/planned obsolesence" problem I mentioned upthread. That said, again, utility is still a thing Wizards are much better at than most, though 4e makes it possible for anyone to get at least some of that action (through Rituals and its more-broadly-interpreted skills)

This allowed classes to take on these "roles" you associate with different modern classes. <snip> Everyone got better at the same rate when they hit level 4.

I'm not really sure how to respond to this; 4e lets each individual ability ("power" is the jargon term) determine what its hit and damage stats are, and everyone gets a +half level bonus to (basically) all d20 rolls, so...if you pick the right powers as you level, almost anyone in 4e would meet exactly the same definition, growing at the same rate. And, as I've said repeatedly, all it takes is a little investment (or thinking about what powers you choose) and most characters can do a little bit of whatever they want. They start off being good at one thing, and can become good at other things too, over time.

When I talk about roles in D&D, I'm talking about the entire game. If 4e changed that to mean that roles only mattered in combat, then that's a HUGE disservice to the game. Because like the thief in early D&D, your role wasn't combat focused for one. You still had just as much importance to the group as anyone else overall, so placing the value on combat seems to short change yourself, because D&D is sooo much more than combat.

Okay, I've said this a few times now, but I'll say it again as clearly and simply as I possibly can.

4e defined a jargon term, "roles," which it used to refer to baseline combat abilities for each class. This has nothing to do with whether those classes also had non-combat stuff. All 4e classes have non-combat resources, or the option to acquire them through feats, utility powers, and trained skills (and Themes, too. 4e is not just about combat. It has plenty of mechanics for non-combat situations. However, the designers felt that non-combat was not something they wanted to make systematic and rigorously balanced (possibly because it depended too highly on table context; we may never know for sure), so the "roles" as 4e used the term were only about combat.

If you prefer to think of "role" as something that includes absolutely all things a character does--that's fine. Perfectly, absolutely, and in every possible way, just fine--I cannot stress that enough. In so doing, however, it becomes fruitless to say much of anything about 4e roles, because 4e classes absolutely have archetype-influenced non-combat abilities of exactly the nature you describe, and many of these abilities can be acquired even if you don't have a "Wizard" in the party. (Not all, but many.) I would make an analogy, but I feel that all of them do a disservice either to your position or mine. Suffice it to say: 4e has all sorts of non-combat things, but its designers did not consider non-combat ability as part of balancing classes.

To me, roles are based more on archetypes you want to play. And in Basic, the roles are very basic (no pun intended) and loose. Nothing so narrowly defined as striker, controller, healer, etc. It was "magic user" and "fighter" and "thief" and "cleric" because each of those classes could do one of several different roles, depending on you choose to play them. Not something automatically predetermined when you choose the class.

1: Role is still somewhat flexible in 4e, so this is a difference of degree and not kind. 2: "Pre-determined" makes it sound utterly fixed, which is not true--no more than it is in 5e, anyway, where it takes effort and/or building to make a Rogue that does something other than thief-y skills and skulking around the battlefield to shiv things in the back (or back-equivalent).

Plus...you have to remember something. You're agreeing that roles existed, they were just loose, flexible, and adaptive. Other people, in this thread, and not that long ago, were adamantly insisting that roles did not exist whatsoever prior to 4e, and that 4e's roles are so alien, so completely different from anything ever seen before, that they make it a completely different kind of game, not even an RPG anymore but rather a "boardgame."

I completely agree that the roles are not precisely-and-in-all-ways absolutely perfectly 110% equivalent across all the editions of D&D. What I deny is (a) that roles never existed in even the slightest degree prior to 4e; (b) that it is impossible to trace a reasonable lineage for all of 4e's roles back to the very beginning of the game; (c) that 4e's roles, when understood in a looser sense appropriate to the comparatively "looser"/"more flexible" combat of early D&D, do not reasonably describe how most classes were designed to work in combat (regardless of actual usage, which will always be more variable!); (d) that 4e had no out-of-combat components because its "roles" were about combat; and (e) that 5e has completely abandoned any and all sense of "this class is designed to be good at X" in particular arenas of play ("pillars," to use the preferred WotC term right now).

 

[Sacrosanct]

When the 4e rulebooks talk about role, they are talking about the fact that "Each character class specializes in one of four basic functions in combat: control and area offense, defense, healing and support, and focused offense" (PHB p 15).

In other words, "role" in 4e is a technical term to describe a class's default, mechanically supported combat function. It is not synonymous with your usage.

That doesn't mean characters in 4e don't do other things; just that the designers didn't think it was helpful to call out these other functions, in part because they are not associated in a default way with character class. (4e uses a very loose and open approach to non-combat resolution.)

The quote I was responding to was talking about Basic D&D. Not 4e.

I've mentioned Charm Person multiple times upthread. And it absolutely counts as control: it combines powerful anti-personnel with summoning.

Um, no, not really. If you have a charmed NPC, how does that count as control vs any other encounter? It's not summoning because you didn't summon anything. You were dependent on a charmable creature being there. And once the charming has happened, you're not doing any sort of control for any other encounter thereafter. You simply have an extra body to help you out, in a myriad of ways. You're not actually prohibiting or forcing (key requirements of controlling) the enemies in any way. All you're doing is giving them another target to hit (if they choose), and another body to attack them. That is not control. You're bending over pretty far to try to get these scenarios to fit your definitions, but they don't. Control means just that. If you're not impacting the enemy or the environment in any way, shape, or form, that isn't control.

As was well discussed in the magazines of the time, you also didn't play a magic-user to play a Gandalf-like character. Gandalf was more often modelled as a cleric (in part because he was strong in melee, in part because his magic was mainly supportive/restorative rather than artillery). To get the divinatory abilities of Merlin you also have to play a cleric.

I'm beginning to think you haven't even been around in the 70s and early 80s, nor actually read any of those magazines. They quite clearly, and sometimes explicitly, say that magic users were modeled after literary wizards, including Gandalf and Merlin. Heck, in the early Dragon issues, there was even a flamewar (as well as one can be with snail mail in the letters section) about just what level Gandalf was as a magic user. I have literally never seen a Dragon article or supplement that put Gandalf's primary class as a cleric. Even Merlin's highest class is a magic user, and not druid, in AD&D. Christ, Gandalf was a wizard, which is a title for a magic user once 11th level is reached, not a cleric.

 

[Imaro]

In AD&D melee targetting is randomly determined. So if a fighter injects him-/herself into a melee, s/he can reduce the chance of a "squishy" in melee being attacked.

I'm going to disagree here, because of this sentence... "If characters or similar intelligent creatures are able
to single out an opponent or opponents, then the concerned figures will remain locked in melee until one side is dead or opts to attempt to break off the combat."

This tells me that characters and opponents who are intelligent enough to discern differences in their targets can choose who their attacks hit... If not what does the above mean and when does it come into play?

Also, by forming a front line fighters can draw enemies who come within 10' into melee.

AD&D melee is actually very sticky.

I'm unfamiliar with this rule... do you know exactly where in the AD&D books is it mentioned?

The parry manoeuvre gives an extremely modest AC bonus (equal to the STR bonus to hit). If you are referring to a 2nd ed AD&D option then I'm not familiar with that - I'm talking about Gygax's AD&D.

Aren't most of the bonuses in AD&D "modest"? Serious question not much experience playing the game. I'm certainly not saying escaping in melee in AD&D is as easy as 5e... but there is precedence for getting out of melee with minimizing risk.

As for fighting withdrawal, it is at half speed and permits an opponent to follow.

And? Disengage, while providing you with full movement in 5e doesn't stop your opponent from following you (and attacking you) either... I gues AD&D is slightly more stick here but it still doesn't seem like that great a difference.

I'm responding to posts that were made. The AD&D "parry" manoeuvre doesn't have anything directly to do with 5e either, but you talked about that!

Well I thought we were comparing the stickiness of AD&D combat with 5e... weren't we?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Um, no, not really. If you have a charmed NPC, how does that count as control vs any other encounter? It's not summoning because you didn't summon anything. You were dependent on a charmable creature being there. And once the charming has happened, you're not doing any sort of control for any other encounter thereafter. You simply have an extra body to help you out, in a myriad of ways. You're not actually prohibiting or forcing (key requirements of controlling) the enemies in any way. All you're doing is giving them another target to hit (if they choose), and another body to attack them. That is not control. You're bending over pretty far to try to get these scenarios to fit your definitions, but they don't. Control means just that. If you're not impacting the enemy or the environment in any way, shape, or form, that isn't control.

So...controlling an NPC's mind, either to remove them from the battle entirely or to add them to your forces, is not "controlling." Okay. That's not really the definition I'd use, and it's not really consistent with 4e (where the Wizard, a Controller, eventually got an entire subclass built around "puppeting" enemies and making them attack their allies...)

I'm beginning to think you haven't even been around in the 70s and early 80s, nor actually read any of those magazines. They quite clearly, and sometimes explicitly, say that magic users were modeled after literary wizards, including Gandalf and Merlin. Heck, in the early Dragon issues, there was even a flamewar (as well as one can be with snail mail in the letters section) about just what level Gandalf was as a magic user. I have literally never seen a Dragon article or supplement that put Gandalf's primary class as a cleric. Christ, Gandalf was a wizard, which is a title for a magic user once 11th level is reached, not a cleric.

Literary characters rarely, if ever, correspond nicely to D&D classes. Conan, for example, had to have ungodly stats and, IIRC, a mishmash of class features. Aragorn is a "Ranger," yet he fights with a two-handed sword and is clearly a leader of men (implying high Str and Cha) and, to the best of my knowledge, never once uses a bow nor has an animal companion. Gandalf is a powerful wizard, yet we rarely see him do much magic...other than casting out Saruman's influence from Theoden and bringing blinding light, dawn, etc. While he has a lot of the iconic trappings of a D&D Wizard, he doesn't much have the mechanics to back it up (he almost never uses any spells, wields a magical longsword in combat, fights in melee frequently and comes out unscathed, etc.)

Merlin is a bit better, but not much. Both Gandalf and Merlin come from a much more ancient conception of magic, the Wisdom/Great Work type thing, which to modern audiences has been almost wholly absorbed by alchemy and such. Neither of them performed magic from spellbooks, typically, though Merlin at least tended to have a library.

 

[Imaro]

The design was a common class structure - different from every edition before - and the design philosophy included the classes being balanced as a high priority (likewise).

But this isn't what Andy Collins is commenting on...

The idea that the classes would each contribute something different to the success of the party - roles - was nothing new, it was just more clearly and formally stated, more refined, more focused on combat performance, and better implemented.

Again this isn't what his comment is addressing... there is a difference between designing a class that is supposed to be a rogue in a D&D world vs. designing a striker that is supposed to be called a rogue in a D&D world... I'll agree they were more combat focused than any other editions, and more focused on the roles they created... As to whether they were "better" implemented I guess that would be determined by whether you thought the 4e roles were or were not always there. IMO the Defender fighter was much more restricted as well as generally worse than his less focused and more versatile brethren in 5e...

But, 4e roles were /certainly/ mechanically supported - mostly by class features. They just weren't straightjackets, since classes tended to have a secondary role, and builds might be customized to emphasize an alternate role.

I've already demonstrated the straight jacket that this role enforcement placed on the fighter when it came to ranged combat so let's just say I remain unconvinced by your general assertion here