Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 6506703" data-attributes="member: 2011">Thanks for listing these. They illustrate one of my points better.4E roles are very generic combat oriented niches. The term is used in a general way and only describes combat.Roles before and after (if one were to use the term role) are more like specialized combat and non-combat job functions. The "face" of the group. The "scout" of the group. The "healer" of the group.Don't confuse the word role in the 3E PHB (which is used to describe specialized activities) with the word role in the 4E PHB (which is used to described generic combat tendencies). They really are two different things. Similar, but different. 4E roles primarily describe the job function that a given class mostly brings to the combat table.Since nobody made that claim, this is a strawman. The claim I made is that you could not come to your previous conclusion based on the time frame of the article.When you supplied your examples from the 3E PHB, then your conclusion that the concept of (specialized) roles (always) existing in the game becomes more supportable.You are jumping to a conclusion here that since the word role was used in the description for specific classes in 3E, that the generic use of that term in that article must be referring solely to existing editions of the game. That's like saying that even though scientists had not yet created the A bomb at the start of the Manhattan project, that they had no ideas at all on how to go about solving that problem. People were clandestinely starting work on 4E at the time Skip wrote that article. Roles are a big part of 4E. It makes total sense that he was focused on roles in that article because the 4E team was starting work on 4E at the time. Nothing indicates that the article is solely based on ideas from 3.5 and earlier. That's just your unsupported conclusion.The 3E use of the term is discussing specialized roles (or job functions if you will). The article erroneously claims that there are four basic roles when in fact, the 3E PHB that you quoted illustrate that roles can be specialized into more than four generic ones. Additionally, the very concept of the "sturdy brawler" from that articles morphed into a slightly different role concept called "defender" in 4E. These are not too far apart, but "arcane spell slinger" and "controller" are not as close. A 4E Sorcerer, for example, is an arcane spell slinger, but is considered a "striker". Obviously, role means different things to different people at different portions of time in the life span of D&D.The bard is a perfect case in point. He is a generalist. He doesn't fit the other four roles in that article directly, but takes a bit from several of them plus some more that those roles do not actually talk about. In 4E, he fit the leader role fairly well because a leader was defined as "healing and support".</blockquote>

Verification