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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6504174" data-attributes="member: 2067">Again, I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case "most of the time at most tables," but where I'd be cautious is in expanding that to mean "this is how the game was played except by isolated groups." You wouldn't have to swing a dead cat very hard to hit a bunch of exceptions. The point is that the D&D player-base is diverse in how they play this game, so when folks say "roles were a 4e invention that isn't in the history of D&D!", they're not ignorant or marginal, they're just from one of those multitudinous traditions where roles weren't A Thing before they hit 4e. They're also *wrong*, because they're narrowing the game to their own experience, too, and ignoring other large swaths of how the game was played. But 4e only served a narrow subset of the game's fanbase.Arguably, it was because magic items had an economy where wands were arguably under-valued, magic items were considered part of character construction, and CLW appeared on a lot of class lists. Combine this with a tendency to "swingy" encounters and there's a lot of things to look at, design-wise, in addition to an "everyone needs a healer!" mantra that not all groups consider relevant.The way backstab was used functionally was wildly variable. It ranged in effectiveness from "we literally never use it because it's too hard to set up" to "I use it in every fight, sometimes more than once!", depending on DM interpretation and flexibility. So plenty of tables never saw the thief as a huge source of damage -- indeed, it was often considered one of the first "underpowered" classes because its skills just replicated 1st-level or 2nd-level spells with less of a chance of working, and its other abilities weren't any great shakes. Again, D&D is diverse. The gameplay isn't something done largely the same way at every table.</blockquote>

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