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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6513187" data-attributes="member: 42582">I didn't make any such assertion. I spoke expressly about 4e, and gave an anecdote from AD&D.I think we can take it as a given that 5e is a better-designed system than 2nd ed AD&D.What would be more interesting is if part of the design of 5e is such that any player, of whatever degree of experience, can build a character which will "automatically", as it were, make a valuable contribution to play however played.Bounded accuracy probably helps support this as a design goal, but it still seems a bit idealistic to me. In the Basic PDF, on p 8, there is a big table that sets out the ability scores, and which classes they are good for. That is exactly the same sort of advice as roles. STR is said to be important for fighters - does that mean that WotC is telling players of fighters who dump STR and favour DEX and CON (for an exploration/archery-oriented character) that s/he is doing it wrong? That all fighters s/hould have high STR?I'll leave it to some other budding sociologist to explain why roles cause outrage whereas the functionally near-identical ability score table is something I've never seen mentioned in a thread.So are you saying that WotC was wrong, and overly prescriptive, to include that ability score table?I can't remember who you were asking this of, but my answer would be that I"m talking about character builds - for practical purposes, sub-classes would probably be where I'd start.I'm sure some people didn't find 4e enjoyable.And I know that some people didn't find D&D's "heavy handed" class system, in which only fighters can wear heavy armour (and thereby achieve high ACs without magical assistance) or only fighters can wield the heaviest weapons (and thereby achieve maximum melee capability). So they played games designed to "capture the feel of an individual", such as RM or RQ (or, later, HERO or GURPS).The whole point of a class system is to channel character building so as to produce characters who "play to form". And of course it's no great surprise that different people like different forms.As I've mentioned a couple of times upthread, defenders can easily be seen as a special case of controllers, whose control requires putting their bodies on the line.The main reason for calling out this special case of defenders by their own moniker is to preserve the legacy contrast between fighters and wizards. (Similar legacy considerations explain why leaders group together force multiplication and healing; and explain why, especially in the PHB, "controller" is said to include both AoE hit point ablation (classic wizard artillery) and non-hit-point oriented control (classic wizard anti-personnel hit point bypassing effects).)Another 4e legacy in 5e.</blockquote>

Verification