This is a part of sports (primarily American ones) where a very high degree of specialisation in position or "Role" are in effect. Other sports do not operate the same way. You don't have a defensive team, an offensive team, and special teams in rugby, and a player is not able to concentrate solely on the particular speciality they have. I had occasions to pass, to take a pass, to run with the ball, make tackles, even kick the ball (I was a Prop forward, it went as well as you might expect), take part in line outs, rucks and mauls; and I had my particular skill (scrummaging), which was the area where I shone or at least glowed a little more. For that matter a game like basketball has a much higher rate of substition than rugby yet the players on a basketball team don't sit out situations when they're active - even if they do have particular areas where they shine.
D&D 5E Why Balance is Bad
This is a part of sports (primarily American ones) where a very high degree of specialisation in position or "Role" are in effect. Other sports do not operate the same way. You don't have a defensive team, an offensive team, and special teams in rugby, and a player is not able to concentrate solely on the particular speciality they have. I had occasions to pass, to take a pass, to run with the ball, make tackles, even kick the ball (I was a Prop forward, it went as well as you might expect), take part in line outs, rucks and mauls; and I had my particular skill (scrummaging), which was the area where I shone or at least glowed a little more. For that matter a game like basketball has a much higher rate of substition than rugby yet the players on a basketball team don't sit out situations when they're active - even if they do have particular areas where they shine.
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
Nope! I think the goblin king should be a longer fight (still not much more than 10-15 minutes real-time, but longer).
The point is more that not every fight needs to be a major, extended fight, in order to be important. Because the game about the overall challenge of the adventure, the fight with Goblin #1 and Goblin #2 serves a purpose in that overall challenge by costing some resources (limited-use abilities and HP). That fight doesn't need to last more than a roll or two, but it should have a lasting effect on how the party performs in the rest of the adventure.
If ALL challenges, including combat, were as fast as that minor combat, I could support a more binary, rock-paper-scissors class balance (Fighters beat Combat, but Interaction and Exploration beat Fighters). Because I want some more variation in timescales, what with the Goblin King and whatnot, I'd like more of a continuum (Fighters vs. Combat = A; Fighters vs. Interaction = D; Fighters vs. Exploration = C), where everyone has a minimum level of contribution. Thus, we might have a thief who "sucks at combat" in that they contribute mostly through ranged attacks with a bow and keeping their distance. They're not doing fancy stunts or racking up big damage, but they're contributing in their own way. They can put a few arrows in the Goblin King, but combat is not their "time to shine." I want a game that supports a character who isn't quite as great at one of the core adventuring activities as his compatriots, vs. a 4e-style "everyone is awesome at everything in different ways" kind of paradigm.
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n00bdragon
First Post
That's understandable. Thanks for the clarification. I can't say I agree but at least I understand your point of view.
The Human Target
Adventurer
As regards to 4e, everyone isn't awesome at everything all the time.
Fighters as standard are crap at interaction, and only marginal at exploration.
They can get better at those things by expending resources (mainly feats.)
But they're still probably never going to touch the "face" classes at interaction.
Fighters as standard are crap at interaction, and only marginal at exploration.
They can get better at those things by expending resources (mainly feats.)
But they're still probably never going to touch the "face" classes at interaction.
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
The Human Target said:
Why do they have Streetwise and Intimidate as 2/5 of their 3 possible skill choices, then? I mean, I know 4e's got some issues with skill DC's, but presumably the intent is that if you can get training in a skill, you can be pretty good at it (otherwise it'd be one of those 3e-style "system mastery" trap choices). And one of the things I keep hearing from some 4e fans is how awesome it is that their Fighter doesn't have to be pigeonholed into the Dumb Throg The Brute territory.
(which, as an aside, isn't to say that I'd want to necessarily return to that territory; I'd personally much rather that characters who are supposed to be awesome at interaction get a whole suite of powers and abilities that they can tap into when faced with non-hostile NPC's, and Fighters can continue to contribute by making Intimidate and Streetwise checks (or whatever) that work like the rogue-with-a-bow I talked about above)
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
Interaction isn't the same thing as Diplomacy (Intimidate can get just as efficient results -- sometimes more so!). And in 4e, whether or not you succeed at an Interaction challenge is couched in the Skill Challenge system so ultimately all that matters is if you succeed at skill checks or not. If training in a skill means you usually succeed at those skill checks (which it probably should), then being trained in Intimidate means you'll usually succeed at Interaction checks. And if you're not trained in any social skill whatsoever, you've still got a really good chance of success thanks to the 1/2 level bonus and the no-ability-scores-below-8 giving you a roughly 45-55% chance even if you're not focused.
Yeah, it's probably possible to build a 4e fighter who is Dumb Thog the Brute, who *only* succeeds on about half his Interaction checks rather than about 3/4, but it's not true to say that 4e fighters as a whole are crap at interaction. They're solid. They can do pretty much what bards can do: succeed most of the time at Interaction checks. Bards do it a little more often still (like, 3.5/4 times), and with more variety (Diplomacy!), but in a party without a Cha-monkey, a Fighter could totally be your face, Intimidating every challenge into submission by standing in the corner and being a badass at all the non-hostile NPC's.
Which is only really ultimately to say that class equality is very important in 4e, and anyone who even dumps a stat shouldn't suck at contribution to any Challenge or combat, because these things should eat up significant chunks of table time, by design. 4e was designed with the assumption that encounter-level balance was key because encounters (especially combat encounters, but to a lesser degree others) were where most of the play time should be spent, because that's the fun part of the game. This all is a good idea, assuming the underlying assumptions are true.
Personally, I'd dispute those underlying assumptions and assert that adventures are the fun part of the game and encounters are just stones along the road that takes you there and back again. That changes the assumptions you might have about balance among the classes (it's not about how Samwise and Aragorn both contribute to that one fight against the orcs, it's about how Samwise and Aragorn both contribute to the adventure to throw the One Ring into Mount Doom), but there's still plenty of room for debate about that!
(As an aside, this plays more into the issues with skills and Skill Challenges in 4e, and I think that steps like the 4e Bard's Words of Friendship are getting toward what I'm looking for, with 5e's more detailed interaction system being pretty much the grist I might want for this mill).
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The Human Target
Adventurer
This is true.
However the chances of a fighter having a decent Cha is fairly low. And as Hussar said they basically lack any other built in options for interaction boosts.
Which again is not to say they can't do so, but...
The fighters lack of skill choices/proficiency us actually a holdover from previous editions that should have been jettisoned.
After all, if a Rogue and a Fighter have different but comparable combat prowess, why don't they have different but comparable skill power?
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
The Human Target said:
That doesn't really make 'em crap, though.
It might help to think of it this way: the way that you show that you are good or bad at the Interaction pillar of 4e is via Skill Challenges. If there's a dragon you need to talk with, or a king you need to persuade, Skill Challenges are how 4e wants you to handle that.
In that format, say our Level 1 Fighter has an 8 CHA and no training in Diplomacy and they're up against a Moderate DC 12.
But then, this is a 4e Skill Challenge, so why do they need to use Diplomacy? Or Intimidate? Or any Cha-based skill? That player can use any skill she or he can convince the DM to let them use. Why can't they use, say, Endurance to show that they're not sweating the dragon's heat, or Athletics to impress the king by bench pressing his throne with him in it? One of the elements of the 4e Skill Challenge is that you don't have to make Diplomacy checks if you're not very good at it -- making a check with a skill you've got a high rank in is just a matter of selling the DM on it (and the DM is encouraged to say yes).
Since successes are what a Skill Challenge cares about, your successful Athletics check is pretty much the equal of the Bard's successful Diplomacy check. And even if, for some reason, you decided to roll your Diplomacy check and had only a 35% chance of success, that's still a 35% chance to have exactly the same effect that a bard would have doing the same thing. Once you make that check, it doesn't matter how high your modifier was, there's no way to affect the outcome of the scene aside from making successful checks.
So even if you make a non-talky Fighter, you're probably not going to suck at Interaction, because you can use whatever skill you'd like with a little thought. And even if you insist on making checks that you kind of suck at (2/5 win/loss ratio is not 0!), if you win, you're the equal of the talky characters. A successful Diplomacy check from Throg Smashly and Lllywendyr Charmington Diologus III has the same effect, even if Throg's got a lower chance of doing it.
Again, this is kind of more about the Skill Challenge design at this point. But if the SC is designed to eat up a big chunk of table time, it's actually smart to let everyone be roughly the same in terms of achieving success -- you don't really want the Fighter's player twiddling their thumbs for a half hour while everyone else rolls dice around. Get in there, engage, come up with a way to contribute! So the equality is a good thing, if that's the point.
I'd argue that it's not the point, that the dialogue with the king is there so that the Interaction characters can shine, and it's OK if other characters don't shine there, because when it comes time to kill some bandits or discover secrets in a dungeon, that's their bailiwick. Which is why each challenge needs to be short and sweet, and why even in those, a minimum, boring way to contribute is needed for everyone.
I come back to the LotR comparison. Samwise might have not done much in many of the fights, but his ability to be the team cheerleader was critical for the success of the overall adventure. If I want to play my character like Samwise, I don't want to bugger around with mighty fightin' time too much, but I really want to have a lot of options for dealing with keeping the party's courage and morale up over the long haul. And Gimli's going to be pretty useless there (though he'll be exactly who I want to kill goblins).
For D&D, it's not one-for-one, since we don't want Sam's player doing nothing while his character runs and hides, but it'd be nice to approach that dynamic, because it allows for interestingly differentiated characters. That kind of dynamic is only possible if Jackie's dwarf fighter CAN'T use Endurance to do the same thing my Halfling Gardener uses Craft (cooking) for. Under the Skill Challenge rubrick, you lose that distinction, and Fighters are the equal of Bards at Interaction challenges (even without high Cha), because Endurance and Diplomacy do the same thing in a Skill Challenge, and using either one is just a matter of giving the DM a reason to let you.
keterys
First Post
My first 4e D&D character was a fighter modeled as a mix of Captain Hammer and the Tick, and made _many_ an interaction check (Insight, Diplomacy, Streetwise, you name it) and was often considered the party face.
Even by people who were more skilled than he, but I was willing to take the risk, make the check, and make it happen. Usually successfully. To the point where people thought I must have really invested in it. Which was a little odd, given that I was RPing him as an utter idiot who mostly got by on other people strangely going along with his outlandishly silly requests*.
* Like getting a town to fight off a fear demon with a rousing chorus of everyone's a hero, or snapping Corellon out of madness by giving him haircare tips, both of which were crit successes
Even by people who were more skilled than he, but I was willing to take the risk, make the check, and make it happen. Usually successfully. To the point where people thought I must have really invested in it. Which was a little odd, given that I was RPing him as an utter idiot who mostly got by on other people strangely going along with his outlandishly silly requests*.
* Like getting a town to fight off a fear demon with a rousing chorus of everyone's a hero, or snapping Corellon out of madness by giving him haircare tips, both of which were crit successes
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