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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6511986" data-attributes="member: 42582">The roles were clearly about combat; other roles (eg "face", "trap guy", etc) were left mostly (not exclusively) the province of the skill and ritual systems, and there is a lot of flexibility across classes in respect of these. (In my 4e party the paladin is the face, the sorcerer/bard the slightly nastier face, and the invoker/wizard is the skill monkey.)Within combat, I think they were building off the base of 3E, which itself was built of the base of AD&D, but also looking at the D&D legacy of the four dominant classes, and trying to reach some sort of accommodation between mechanics, fiction and function that fit within the constraints imposed by these various considerations.For what it's worth, I think the most important thing to keep in mind about 4e-style roles is that if you change the mechanics you change the roles; so you can't identify roles just by thinking about what is happening in the fiction. Striker and controller, for instance, are different only because hit point damage in D&D mechanics is different from condition-imposition. Change the legacy and you change the roles too, I think: 4e vacillated on whether AoE damage is striker or controller because of the legacy tradition of wizards being both condition-imposers and artillery; and as I've been discussing with [MENTION=6777649]Nergal Pendragon[/MENTION], defenders can be seen as a sub-set of controllers who are called out as distinct because of a legacy desire to distinguish fighters (with their high AC and hp) from wizards (who use magic to keep threats from directly targeting their AC and/or hp).I'm glad you found the post helpful. Do you have experience of the Thief-Acrobat ability in AD&D? Mine was long ago, and I was not anywhere near as good at understanding and deploying RPG mechanics as I am (or think I am!) now.</blockquote>

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