Your Group is Missing a Role

[Insight]

I thought this might be a fun discussion.

Based on a recent conversation with a friend of mine:

Let's say you have a smaller group of 3-5 players and no one wants to play (X) role (Controller, Defender, Leader, Striker). Which one would be it be OK to miss and which would be crucial? How would you compose a party with one missing role?

For the sake of this discussion, let's assume that any races and classes (core and essentials) are available.

 

[Stumblewyk]

The role I think you can do without the easiest is the Controller. It's easy to compensate for by having a few people take a burst power or two just to handle minions. Nothing else really needs to change, IMO.

 

[Herschel]

My general rule: Start the party with a Leader and a Defender, then fill to taste. Those are the two roles it's really tough to get by without. Striker is generally the easiest to do without as you can build damage options in to the other roles. A Leader, Defender, Hybrid(ized) Striker/Controller is a a good three-person partyif one person is ranged and another has some ranged ability and at least two can go toe-to-toe in melee.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Controller: I'd half expect this to be missing. Unless the DM goes seriously mook-heavy this isn't too much of a problem and might even make the game easier.

Striker: You don't actually need strikers. But they are useful, speeding up combat by dishing out lots of damage while having weak defences. Expect combat to drag more.

Defender: How much does your DM go for the throat? The monsters are going to have a much easier time of things getting around to gank whoever they want. With some DMs that's scary, with others that's not much of a problem. Either way, to get round it all the party needs decent defences and to get used to getting bashed. You can't have the strikers or controllers concentrating on offence as much as they would like to.

Leader: Here's the huge issue. Without a leader, you have no panic button (and if you never want a panic button in combat it must be a complete cakewalk). You don't have a pooled resource of more than 50% of a character's HP per fight. So monster focus fire becomes a whole lot nastier because it only has to get through characters' individual hit points. Using second winds will be a lot more common - and people should multiclass into healing classes to grab some heals (especially Shaman if they have the feats).

 

[fba827]

there is the caveat that it depends on your DM and if he/she has a certain concious/unconcious preference for certain monster types.
I.e. if your DM likes to frequently do battles containing lots and lots and lots of minions, controllers become more important. whereas if your DM likes to use brutes and elites who can really dish out the pain then a defender is more important because that' the role that can take it (while another person could take it, they'd then need healing from themself or others, which is just using up more actions whereas a defender isn't put in dire straights as quickly from it).

Presuming a varying mix of enemy types, I'd say a controller is the one that could be left out of a party and have the least effect (plus that way, as a bonus you burden the DM less with status/zone effects that change and affect his tactics - and a less burdened DM is a happier DM ).

 

[Mengu]

As DM:

No controller is easy enough to deal with. No change necessary.

No striker is actually also amazingly simple to deal with, you chop a few hit points off monsters and you're good to go.

No defender is also not a big problem, but the number of encounters a party can deal with per day decreases significantly. Give everyone free durable and you're probably good to go.

No leader is the toughest to deal with. Encounters become very swingy without the ability to have a fallen PC rejoin the fight, especially in small parties. I'd want to always see a leader in a party.

As Player:

No controller is easy enough to deal with, everyone has controllery powers and between race, powers, and items, you can always have some minion control too.

No striker is easy to deal with, you just have a couple PC's lean toward the striker secondary role. Fighters, Wardens, Wizards, Druids, Runepriests, etc. have an easy enough time with this.

No defender makes it difficult to play certain kinds of support characters, narrowing the possible build options. A barbarian, a ranger, a monk, a runepriest, etc. can take point in a defenderless party, but the party won't have many good ways to avoid focused fire, which will burden the leader and tax the healing surges of one or two characters. I've been in a number of defenderless parties and fights always seem very chaotic to me without a defender, and it's hard to funnel the damage taken to the right characters.

No leader is again the toughest to deal with. If you go with an even split of defenders and strikers with a couple dwarves, and a multiclass or two for emergency healing, and maybe a secondary leader role, it can be manageable. For instance a party of 4 with Goliath Battlerager Fighter (MC Warlord), Dwarf Earth Warden, Dwarf Thaneborn Barbarian, Elf Archer Ranger (MC Cleric) could hold their own pretty well. But lack of leader does become a party design challenge.

 

[ggroy]

In player parties without a controller, I usually didn't bother using any minions.

 

[Ryujin]

The role I think you can do without the easiest is the Controller. It's easy to compensate for by having a few people take a burst power or two just to handle minions. Nothing else really needs to change, IMO.

Agreed. In fact we played such a party to 20th level, finding that each class was given some sort of minion clearer at one point or another.

 

[Rydac]

Another vote for easiest to do without a controller

 

[Larrin]

Our 22nd level 5 man party is composed of 3 strikers, 2 controllers. The swarm druid has many ways of not taking damage, the hunter just avoids enemies, my hexblade and the monk have little ways of avoiding attacks and the avenger gets beat on a lot. Perfectly workable so far, mostly because at epic you have enough tricks that you can survive alot more. At lower levels I'm betting we would have been totally squished in the first battle.

But in general, having played at level 1 with various roles missing: Defenders are vital, don't leave home without a defender! A leader can heal a wizard only so much, you need some one to say "stop hitting our wizard!" to keep the party alive. The red box game day had no defender and when the DM wanted to kill us, nothing stood in his way.

Leaders are very nice. you will survive most encounters without one, but you'll run out of surges twice as fast and falling unconscious is more dangerous.

Strikers are very very nice, but not very necessary. They make fights shorter, so that also decreases healing spent, and can save the team from some very nasty things, but they also often are the ones that need healing and run out of surges.

Controller are unnecessary. Completely. They make fights more awesome when you have one, but you only notice them missing when you see 3 or more minions, and then its just annoyance that they're still around after 3 rounds.