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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6547745" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think you misunderstand.I know there are people who play fireball slinging wizards and, because the mini or the character sketch has a grey cloak and a floppy, conical hat, think of themselves as Gandalf.To generalise slightly, these are the same players who play mercenary PCs who pile up chests of gold and thick of themselves as playing Conan.I'm not in a "bubble" as to the existence of these players. I just don't think they exhaust the possibilities of the game. Gandalf and Conan, as literary creations, are not just superficial collections of tropes.Iron Crown Enterprises published a Middle Earth RPG for over 10 years in the 80s and 90s. A constant point of contention about that game was that its wizards - who were functionally comparable to D&D wizard - were not a good match for Gandalf et al.And when the invoker debuted in 4e, it was widely recognised as the "Gandalf" class - divinely inspired, wielding a staff, and using radiant powers to inspire allies and strike down enemies (particularly the radiant-vulnerable undead).Which connects to roles, and to my remark upthread about mechanics to which you responded quite critically. If you play AD&D having regard to the mechanics, the different character classes will tend to yield discernible roles. Conversely, the more that PC building is treated as collecting a bundle of tropes and flavour implications, which the GM is then expected to somehow meld into outcomes in action resolution, the less roles will emerge in play. A lot of 2nd ed AD&D in particular was played in this latter way. I think 3E/PF has an interesting relationship to that playstyle: it tends to preserve that approach to PC build and then append mechanical resolution on to the tropes/flavour implications.5e is, I think, a different take on this same approach, trying to use some non-class-build mechanics (eg bounded accuracy) to mean that this approach doesn't lead to some of the mechanical disparities that many (by no means all) experienced in 3E. The discussion of this has just been opened up on [MENTION=6680772]Iosue[/MENTION]'s L&L retrospective thread.</blockquote>

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