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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 3870887" data-attributes="member: 2067">Well, that's kind of the point. I never said these roles were exclusive. Quite the opposite, I imagine they wouldn't be. Different roles for different uses. Combat roles, social roles, etc.I didn't say I'd vastly expand the classes, just that I'd vastly expand the use of the "role" idea. You missed the part where I said combat wasn't going to be that important in these political or horror campaigns. If it was, then yes, Noncombat Nellie would have to stand around being unamused for quite a while. But that's (a) why they don't have to be exclusive, and (b) why you don't really have combat in these games.I've got a hypothesis about the combat focus that relates to combat being D&D's particular obsession. The reason combat is fun is because you're rolling a lot of dice and using a lot of abilities and you've got some risk and some reward. D&D has typically thrown all it's eggs in the combat basket, and ignored the noncombat basket as "role playing." Which lead to things like the 2e proficiencies system and the 3e skills system, which aren't really the most nuanced ways to portray the noncombat aspect of a game. If you take what's fun about combat and add it to noncombat things (such as politics or survival horror) you can have fun doing that, too. The fact that 4e plans on having "social encounters" is support for this hypothesis: independent research varifies it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> But I think the strongest argument for that house rule coming in is that they don't have to be exclusive. What is a Negotiator during a political encounter can still be a Striker during a combat encounter. I'm confused. Let's start at the end: "combat" and "noncombat" abilities, you say, should be entirely separate. I don't really know what you mean by that, or how I implied that they would somehow entwine by saying that vastly expanding the roles system is something I plan on doing with 4e. Before that, you say that D&D is not well suited for campaigns without combat, but the d20 system was used for everything from horror to romance to vehicular combat to biblical era armada marching to...well, things that are really not just about combat. Furthermore, you say that as if it is self-evident, when obviously in my games (where I've mentioned a desire in this thread to play things politically or horrifically as examples of where I take D&D) the game isn't quite limited to combat and dungeon crawling exclusively. Also, you say that the game has a "fair amount of combat," ignoring that individual DM's will, of course, vary on the amount of combat in the game. I mean, obviously the designers of 4e realize combat isn't all D&D does, though it is something D&D keeps getting better at doing. My hope is that they don't loose sight of the other things D&D does in pursuit of combat excellence. Part of the reason I'll be houseruling the expansion of roles is because I realize the designers will focus on combat, and want to appropriate the notion of roles (really, archetypes) for more than just combat. In fact, in FFZ, I already have "roles" for the typical FF-style storyline in the form of Character Concepts. Do you understand, or is this somehow still me somehow proposing that 4e should morph itself into Blue Rose?</blockquote>

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