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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5965426" data-attributes="member: 54877">It's not a direct comparison, but I think this is highly analogous to how 4E monsters work. The difference being, of course, that 4E goblins and kobolds are a bit different mechanically, even if you strip out the roleplaying. That does not make stripping out the roleplaying a good idea! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> I think this also reconciles what I was trying to get at above with your other responses. From a mechanical perspective alone, you could say that the roles are prescriptive. There are more monster roles than character roles, and more overlap, so this isn't as true as it is for a completely mechanical look at characters. That's why some people have suggested that defender/leader/controller/striker should get dropped for the monster roles. OTOH, characters get a lot more abilities to pick from, which can blur the roles, and every character has a bit of a secondary role, which blurs it further. As I've said many times, if you play 4E as a tactical skirmish minis game, it will play like a tactical skirmish minis game. If you play it like a roleplaying game, it will play like a roleplaying game. In this, 4E is exactly like every version of D&D that precedes it--except that some of them would have made better operational or strategic games than tactical ones, were you inclined to do this. I should know. Circa 1983, a friend and I used to play the random dungeon tables in the 1E DMG with a few house rules as an operational fantasy game at times--when we couldn't get anyone else to play the much more fun, 1E as roleplaying game. What I was aluding to earlier about the encounters is that how the DM structures the encounters is also going to affect this. If you throw a bunch of 1st level AD&D characters against an ogre magic, he can kill them quickly using his full range, or he can be a "brute" and kill them slightly slower that way. The same thing would apply to a 1st level 4E party versus a much higher level controller from a "brutish" race. You might say that the monster roles are prescriptive, but only in relation to other monsters of about the same level. If you then play the encounter guidelines in the DMG as overly literal, and run with nothing but balanced encounters, you'll collapse this distinction and make the roles more prescriptive than they otherwise would be.</blockquote>

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