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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6541431" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I don't get how backgrounds apply. Both for "how is this new?" and "how does this affect role?"First Q: 5e Backgrounds give a (gen. minor) fluff ability, and two skills. How are 4e's BGs+themes different? They weren't in at launch, true, but they arrived ~first year and became standard nearly immediately. Themes expanded options (additional choices for Utility powers, usually) and minor secondary benefits (very similar to 5e's background benefits); BGs, excluding cheesy module-specific ones, gave a proficiency or added a skill to your class skill list (or +2 to it, if your class already had it). For the latter Q: If the only differences between two characters are specific stats and BGs, does that really make them sufficiently different to count as different roles? (Obviously the answer to that question will be purely opinion, I'm just curious.) And if that IS enough, particularly when you add in four levels and a feat, why is 5e so dramatically different from 4e if you allow the latter's Themes, BGs, a couple of levels, and a couple of feats? (four 5e levels is very approx. equal to two 4e levels, scale-wise) Because even something like healer's kit proficiency doesn't demonstrate a radical change of role to me, despite being one of the most substantial differences I can think of between two 5e characters based purely on their backgrounds with all other character options being the same.If you allow for the Slayer, all of these are perfectly valid options--technically, all of them will be high Strength, IIRC, because 4e allows you to pump two stats rather than just one (its ABIs work like those in 5e, but you can't swap them for feats--you get both separately.) #1, 2, and 4 can all be (more or less) covered by the standard ("Weaponmaster") Fighter. There are also very good reasons to consider high Wisdom for a 4e (Weaponmaster) Fighter.I am distrustful of design that lets any given class do absolutely everything, but only one thing per day. It makes the five-minute workday more troublesome, and leads to the "planned transcendence/planned obsolesence" problem I mentioned upthread. That said, again, utility is still a thing Wizards are much better at than most, though 4e makes it possible for anyone to get at least some of that action (through Rituals and its more-broadly-interpreted skills)I'm not really sure how to respond to this; 4e lets each individual ability ("power" is the jargon term) determine what its hit and damage stats are, and everyone gets a +half level bonus to (basically) all d20 rolls, so...if you pick the right powers as you level, almost anyone in 4e would meet exactly the same definition, growing at the same rate. And, as I've said repeatedly, all it takes is a little investment (or thinking about what powers you choose) and most characters can do a little bit of whatever they want. They start off being good at one thing, and can become good at other things too, over time.Okay, I've said this a few times now, but I'll say it again as clearly and simply as I possibly can.4e defined a jargon term, "roles," which it used to refer to baseline combat abilities for each class. This has nothing to do with whether those classes also had non-combat stuff. All 4e classes have non-combat resources, or the option to acquire them through feats, utility powers, and trained skills (and Themes, too. 4e is not just about combat. It has plenty of mechanics for non-combat situations. However, the designers felt that non-combat was not something they wanted to make systematic and rigorously balanced (possibly because it depended too highly on table context; we may never know for sure), so the "roles" as 4e used the term were only about combat.If you prefer to think of "role" as something that includes absolutely all things a character does--that's fine. Perfectly, absolutely, and in every possible way, just fine--I cannot stress that enough. In so doing, however, it becomes fruitless to say much of anything about 4e roles, because 4e classes absolutely have archetype-influenced non-combat abilities of exactly the nature you describe, and many of these abilities can be acquired even if you don't have a "Wizard" in the party. (Not all, but many.) I would make an analogy, but I feel that all of them do a disservice either to your position or mine. Suffice it to say: 4e has all sorts of non-combat things, but its designers did not consider non-combat ability as part of balancing classes. 1: Role is still somewhat flexible in 4e, so this is a difference of degree and not kind. 2: "Pre-determined" makes it sound utterly fixed, which is not true--no more than it is in 5e, anyway, where it takes effort and/or building to make a Rogue that does something other than thief-y skills and skulking around the battlefield to shiv things in the back (or back-equivalent).Plus...you have to remember something. You're agreeing that roles existed, they were just loose, flexible, and adaptive. Other people, in this thread, and not that long ago, were adamantly insisting that roles did not exist whatsoever prior to 4e, and that 4e's roles are so alien, so completely different from anything ever seen before, that they make it a completely different kind of game, not even an RPG anymore but rather a "boardgame." I completely agree that the roles are not precisely-and-in-all-ways absolutely perfectly 110% equivalent across all the editions of D&D. What I deny is (a) that roles never existed in even the slightest degree prior to 4e; (b) that it is impossible to trace a reasonable lineage for all of 4e's roles back to the very beginning of the game; (c) that 4e's roles, when understood in a looser sense appropriate to the comparatively "looser"/"more flexible" combat of early D&D, do not reasonably describe how most classes were designed to work in combat (regardless of actual usage, which will always be more variable!); (d) that 4e had no out-of-combat components because its "roles" were about combat; and (e) that 5e has completely abandoned any and all sense of "this class is designed to be good at X" in particular arenas of play ("pillars," to use the preferred WotC term right now).</blockquote>

Verification