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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
What if 5e had 2 types of roles
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<blockquote data-quote="catastrophic" data-source="post: 5702920" data-attributes="member: 81381"><p>Yes, that is my entire point. No matter what criticism you can make about people stepping on each other's toes in 4e, it pales compared to the outright niche destruction of previous editions, and yearning for the days of knock, charm person, and suggestions, while dissing a simple skill swap, is absurd.</p><p> </p><p>The benefits of letting skills swap into different roles is that it alllows you to keep the basic skill mechanic balanced, at least in theory. In pratice, 4e skills are prone to inflation and skil monkeys tend to either dominate skill events, or get no utility from the build resources they spent on skills past a certain point. </p><p> </p><p>Which brings us to the point. Put noncombat actions in their own, robust system, and you can put limits on how much the persuasive wizard, or the diplomatic bodybuilder can do to interupt other, more narritive uses of that design space. </p><p> </p><p>For instance, arcane mutterings lets you use your arcana for social skils and iirc, it's an encounter power. But that doesn't really matter, you might have three skill rolls in a whole skill challenge, boosting one of those by that muhc is huge, and only mildly less viable than an 'at will' skill.</p><p> </p><p>But in a more coherent, substantial system with it's own roles, you can have a power like that, but balance it with truly limited scope, or, for instance, greater risk or other factors. For instance, you could have your suggestion spell, but it comes with a chance of backfiring, or has a high 'heat' rating, meaning the group can only do a few such actions, before your opponents realise what's going on.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="catastrophic, post: 5702920, member: 81381"] Yes, that is my entire point. No matter what criticism you can make about people stepping on each other's toes in 4e, it pales compared to the outright niche destruction of previous editions, and yearning for the days of knock, charm person, and suggestions, while dissing a simple skill swap, is absurd. The benefits of letting skills swap into different roles is that it alllows you to keep the basic skill mechanic balanced, at least in theory. In pratice, 4e skills are prone to inflation and skil monkeys tend to either dominate skill events, or get no utility from the build resources they spent on skills past a certain point. Which brings us to the point. Put noncombat actions in their own, robust system, and you can put limits on how much the persuasive wizard, or the diplomatic bodybuilder can do to interupt other, more narritive uses of that design space. For instance, arcane mutterings lets you use your arcana for social skils and iirc, it's an encounter power. But that doesn't really matter, you might have three skill rolls in a whole skill challenge, boosting one of those by that muhc is huge, and only mildly less viable than an 'at will' skill. But in a more coherent, substantial system with it's own roles, you can have a power like that, but balance it with truly limited scope, or, for instance, greater risk or other factors. For instance, you could have your suggestion spell, but it comes with a chance of backfiring, or has a high 'heat' rating, meaning the group can only do a few such actions, before your opponents realise what's going on. [/QUOTE]
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What if 5e had 2 types of roles
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