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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6505260" data-attributes="member: 6787650">Forgive me for not having read all 20 pages of this thread (only the first 4 or so), but one thing that I didn't see mentioned was that class "roles" are a construct for the game designers. D&D has had roles of a sort at least as far back as AD&D 2nd edition, which is as far as my experience goes. For example, you would have gotten pushback from most DMs if you wanted to research a 3rd level cleric spell that does the same AoE damage as Fireball, and you would likewise have gotten pushback if you wanted a 1st level wizard spell that healed like Cure Light Wounds. There was some kind of implicit role there that said, "Wizards shouldn't be about healing, and clerics shouldn't be about nuking." It was always possible to achieve the same goals (Flame Strike) but never as efficiently.Now, the mere fact that roles existed in the minds of TSR and most DMs doesn't mean it's easy to figure out what they were, but I'll venture a couple of guesses:* Clerics: healing, anti-undead, spiritual divination (i.e. asking a higher power), and sanctification (Bless/Prayer/Chant spells to grant divine favor) were all within the cleric's role. The Tome of Magic greatly expanded clerical roles into domains like Mathematics, Travel, and Mental.* Wizards: evocation, illusion, mind control, summoning/teleportation were within the wizard's role, as well as certain kinds of direct divination (i.e. seeking out information through magic).* Fighters: killing things to death all day long.* Rogues: sneaking into places you aren't wanted without being seen; disarming traps.* Druids: anything involving animals or plants; a touch of healing and cleric-like divinations.* Psionicist: manipulating/transforming your own body; ESP; mind control; teleportation; telekinesis and manipulation of kinetic energy.Etc. Sometimes these roles would change in a given setting: Athasian fire clerics probably wouldn't bat an eyelash at doing Fireball-like damage, although it would probably be considered bad form to have a spell that acted exactly like Fireball. Another dimension of variability is that the role of spellcasters vs. fighters is all about versatility or nova vs. consistency--in 2nd edition, there was no better PC for fighting all day long than a fighter with good stats and a Ring of Vampiric Regeneration which lets you regain HP from killing things, but no DM would ever have been insane enough (I hope) to create a Ring of Vampiric Spell Regeneration which restored spell slots from killing things: consistency is not a wizard's role (until very, very high levels) and therefore not in the idiom. This is also what distinguished Knock from the Open Locks percentage that Thieves had.It should be readily apparent that these roles have very little to do with MMO-style roles, which are only about differentiating classes in combat. AD&D treated combat as only one subcomponent of "adventuring" as an activity. Information gathering, travel, negotiation/trade, rest, and of course logistics management were all important too. Furthermore, the implicit roles seem to have been about the "how" as much as the "what". A cleric spell that does massive damage to undead with holy fire would be fine, but a cleric spell that does massive damage to undead via telepathic screaming would have been bizarre and wrong--no matter that a MMO player would call both of these things "striking" or "crowd control". Holy fire is in the cleric's idiom, but telepathy is for psionicists. That sounds like a role to me, from the game designer perspective.</blockquote>

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