Quote from: LordVreeg;368505So I agree that being part of a team does not preclude roleplaying; but being forced/nudged into a team means less roleplaying options.

Which, to my mind, comes back to knowing the table you're sitting at. If you're in a group who is going to expect you to be part of the team and you don't want to be, don't play at that table.

Seanchai

Quote from: Seanchai

Quote from: Originally Posted by LordVreegSo I agree that being part of a team does not preclude roleplaying; but being forced/nudged into a team means less roleplaying options.

Which, to my mind, comes back to knowing the table you're sitting at. If you're in a group who is going to expect you to be part of the team and you don't want to be, don't play at that table.

Well, yes.  I could not have said it much better.

It's more like having more tables to choose between.  One table, you can play the team game or play the diabolist, or something in between.  The other table, "Play it this way or don't sit at the table".

Quote from: Seanchai;368572Which, to my mind, comes back to knowing the table you're sitting at. If you're in a group who is going to expect you to be part of the team and you don't want to be, don't play at that table.

Seanchai

:hmm: What if the game system being used, and thus the tools given to the DM to provide entertainment at the game table, assume that there is a perfect synergy and willingness of cooperation between the player characters, though?

Quote from: Seanchai;368572Which, to my mind, comes back to knowing the table you're sitting at. If you're in a group who is going to expect you to be part of the team and you don't want to be, don't play at that table.

Seanchai

And what if you have no idea who these people at your table are going to be, like at a convention or RPGA event? Do you then not play?

Quote from: LordVreeg;368508Good points.
Always depends on the makeup of the group, and the level of decption involved.  I've had and actually still do have groups that some of the major party leaders are deceiving some of the members as to what they are actually doing.
In one group, most of the party believes the group is following clues and a trail of knowledge in discovering the origin of a plague of undeath.  They have no idea the party leaders actually part of a group that actually unleashed a vampyre behind the plague, and the 2 leaders are trying to cover up their own complicity.  The Leaders have 'culled' 2 party members who learned the truth.  This particular party is about to go into yr 10 (real time).

Well as you say, it very much depends on the group and the game. You're example is a good one where deception is part of the challenge. As long as the playes are happy, then it can't be wrong I'm just trying to approach the issue from a combination of my own gaming point of view and how I would feel about the issue if it came up in "real life", so it's very much a YMMV issue.

Quote from: jibbajibba;368511The campaign goals are the campaign goals. Even if all the party are professional adventures whose skills complement each other and who work well as a team you still need to provide them with a reason why they would take the fat, bald, holy kid all the way to India to collect those scrolls, or why saving Princess Ophelia is a better propostion of just heading back to the that old dungeon complex again.

As  DM each player will have a roleplay hook that means that completing the campaign is in their interest. I have even taken the evil assasin that a PC built and gvien them the mission of killing all the PCs and stealing the once the party have obtained it which is at the end of the campaign.

But getting back to the roleplay bit. Just cos my fighter is a coward and runs away from stuff doesn't mean he is a bad guy he's still the guy that makes great jokes round the campfire and would go out of his way for you and he is really good at solving those puzzles and stuff. Its just he's a cowardly little shit. So just like you have mates in real life, or people you work with that get on your nerves but you stay with so its the same in a game with a party.

I mean this isn't rocket science. This is roleplaying. It really is basic 101 stuff. Create a believeable character with realistic motivations and personality.

True, but if I were in the party I'd at least want a competent fighter (or other defender) to stand in front of me (if I were playing my wizard, for example), because I wouldn't last long if they didn't. On the flip side, I would put up with lot of guff from a fighter who was also really good at his/her job and kept me safe. I could be mates with the cowardly fighter, but still not want to engage in life-threatening adventures with him, if I had the choice. My idea of a believable character is one who, if competent at his job, would want to work with others who are competent at their jobs, especially if what we did was inherently dangerous.

Quote from: Benoist;368526So yeah, if the game strongly supports the idea of me playing a completely balanced character, these are that many unbalanced role playing options/choices I will not have, or won't be allowed to even consider, and it sucks.

Actually, Mearls basically came out and admitted on RPGnet that if you want to play that type of character, then yes, it's a valid complaint that 4e is getting in your way of role-playing.  The game does assume at least competent characters (although I think there's quite a bit of wiggle room between competent and completely twinked out, even in 4e...not as much as 3e, but it's still there, and even then, the group as a whole sets the par).

Quote from: jeff37923;368583And what if you have no idea who these people at your table are going to be, like at a convention or RPGA event? Do you then not play?

I guess if you are playing with strangers the trick is to try stick to some sort of middle ground and keep flexible; the roleplaying equivalent of polite conversation. Likewise I guess the GM should try to pitch a game with a broad appeal with a little bit of everything. And then again, many times the deicsion of just not playing is the best option.

Quote from: Peregrin;368592Actually, Mearls basically came out and admitted on RPGnet that if you want to play that type of character, then yes, it's a valid complaint that 4e is getting in your way of role-playing.  The game does assume at least competent characters (although I think there's quite a bit of wiggle room between competent and completely twinked out, even in 4e...not as much as 3e, but it's still there, and even then, the group as a whole sets the par).

Which is exactly what I'm talking about when I'm saying that 4e "frames" role playing options. And also addresses my question to Seanchai above, since it is part of 4e's implied game play to mix, mash and combine powers in a ultimately cooperative, team-spirit fashion.

At a convention my usual deal is DMing 7 slots. These are nearly always full tables (6 players, 1 DM), and there is rarely any overlap, so 42 players (strangers usually!) over the course of a weekend. I often manage to DM a slot or two before the con as well, but I'm not counting those... Often enough those are friends or other DMs.

At the local weekly gameday there are 105 names on our signup site, and I don't really know from week to week which players will show up or what characters they are going to play. I have kinda hedged my bets with special projects (like the drow campaign), but once again- we allow people to sign up once they understand what the project is about.  

Having disruptive or jerk players has been a fact of life for D&D since the beginning- and it's not just because you were in middle school or whatever.  There's a whole section about dealing with troublesome jerks penned by Gygax in the AD&D1e DMG. But if you show a bit of social leadership and encourage the concept of team play.. you  can probably eliminate an entire host of issues that have plagued this hobby since the day the first maladjusted sociopath wrote "chaotic neutral" on his character sheet and preferred to speak to the DM exclusively by using handwritten notes.

There's a better way! And thank Bahamut for that...

Quote from: Sigmund;368502Along those lines, I'm curious about something. Forgive me if I'm wrong, I haven't played as much 4e as some of ya'all, and I have only played a wizard so far, not a fighter, but are fighters not "defenders"? As such, wouldn't constitution not be just as if not more important for a fighter? I thought "strikers" were the ones meant to do the major damage. Seems to me that, independent of their ability to deal damage, the dwarven racial abilities are ideal for both absorbing damage and at the same time not as susceptible to being moved out of the way so enemies can get at the more vulnerable members of the group.

I'm going to quote myself here because I have not seen where anyone has addressed this issue and I'm still curious about whether I'm reading the rules right or not. Is str as important to a "defender" as con? Honestly, it looks to me like a dwarf would be ideal for a fighter since the class is one meant to assume the "defender" role. Thing is, though, that it appears all the fighter's powers rely on str, so this would tend to support Doom (to a point), although I still don't see where it's as big an issue is it's made out to be.

Quote from: Sigmund;368598I'm going to quote myself here because I have not seen where anyone has addressed this issue and I'm still curious about whether I'm reading the rules right or not. Is str as important to a "defender" as con? Honestly, it looks to me like a dwarf would be ideal for a fighter since the class is one meant to assume the "defender" role. Thing is, though, that it appears all the fighter's powers rely on str, so this would tend to support Doom (to a point), although I still don't see where it's as big an issue is it's made out to be.

Ok, this is how it works. A defender's role isn't primarily to hit, but to (for instance) stand in the way in a narrow 5-foot corridoor and block monsters getting to the rear where the fragile magic-users of his party are. His role is basically to buy the rest of the party enough time to place themselves advantageously and get their artillery attacks ready.

Now, just going by this description all our dwarven fighter needs is good defenses, right? Right. He also ought to have a shit ton of hit points and ways of healing himself during combat without the cleric always having to pad him on his shoulder (not that the degree to which healing spells require the cleric touching the target is as heavy in 4E as it was previously - with the new warlord-build going even further, as that's a buffer who's doing ranged attacks to land heal spells). But here goes. A lot of the fighter's abilities to do all this stuff - soak up damage, slide foes on the front-line further back, kick up his defenses even higher, and generating temporary hit points even without the cleric being near - are effects which only kick in if he scores a hit with one of his attack powers. So, in short, the fighter can't just stand there and dig his heels in. He really must score hits.

I'm personally not very happy with this design. Doom mentioned upthread that one of the AM's fighter builds was using the "Invigorating" keyword, which was badly "broken" to begin with before the errata fixed it. Thing is, what happened here is that initially an "invigorating" fighter (a "Battlerager") could generate temporary hp just by getting hit. Since that was too easy on the player of the fighter, the errata changed that round, so that he only gets those extra temporary hp when the fighter hits a foe. See how they turned that round? That's how "defenders" work in 4E.

Historical aside: the first design on a defender class which can pump itself up by getting hit was the Armiger in Mike Mearls' Iron Heroes. Really, what D&D needed was someone with very good math abilities to look at IH's design ideas, and implement them with great rigor. Didn't happen. Instead we got 4E, which got quite some math issues in some quarters (Doom mentioned a couple) and doesn't even implement the great ideas of Iron Heroes very creatively. Getting rid of the Armiger class concept would be a good instance of this. At first they kept the original concept, but delivered shoddy math. Then they fixed the math - by blowing up the underlying class concept. It really seems as if 4E can't get both things right at the same time.

Quote from: Windjammer;368605Historical aside: the first design on a defender class which can pump itself up by getting hit was the Armiger in Mike Mearls' Iron Heroes. Really, what D&D needed was someone with very good math abilities to look at IH's design ideas, and implement them with great rigor. Didn't happen. Instead we got 4E, which got quite some math issues in some quarters (Doom mentioned a couple) and doesn't even implement the great ideas of Iron Heroes very creatively. Getting rid of the Armiger class concept would be a good instance of this. At first they kept the original concept, but delivered shoddy math. Then they fixed the math - by blowing up the underlying class concept. It really seems as if 4E can't get both things right at the same time.

The Armiger is easily the mechanical class concept and flavor I love the most out of Iron Heroes. This design also had a lot of issues when IH was first released, but got fixed later on by Adam Windsor (and was ultimately included in Iron Heroes Revised). It seemed to satisfy a lot of the math-inclined players who loved the idea of the Armiger at the time. I still want to adapt the Armiger to O/AD&D. As a fighter sub-class, it'd be a blast.

Quote from: Windjammer;368605Ok, this is how it works. A defender's role isn't primarily to hit, but to (for instance) stand in the way in a narrow 5-foot corridoor and block monsters getting to the rear where the fragile magic-users of his party are. His role is basically to buy the rest of the party enough time to place themselves advantageously and get their artillery attacks ready.

Now, just going by this description all our dwarven fighter needs is good defenses, right? Right. He also ought to have a shit ton of hit points and ways of healing himself during combat without the cleric always having to pad him on his shoulder (not that the degree to which healing spells require the cleric touching the target is as heavy in 4E as it was previously - with the new warlord-build going even further, as that's a buffer who's doing ranged attacks to land heal spells). But here goes. A lot of the fighter's abilities to do all this stuff - soak up damage, slide foes on the front-line further back, kick up his defenses even higher, and generating temporary hit points even without the cleric being near - are effects which only kick in if he scores a hit with one of his attack powers. So, in short, the fighter can't just stand there and dig his heels in. He really must score hits.

I'm personally not very happy with this design. Doom mentioned upthread that one of the AM's fighter builds was using the "Invigorating" keyword, which was badly "broken" to begin with before the errata fixed it. Thing is, what happened here is that initially an "invigorating" fighter (a "Battlerager") could generate temporary hp just by getting hit. Since that was too easy on the player of the fighter, the errata changed that round, so that he only gets those extra temporary hp when the fighter hits a foe. See how they turned that round? That's how "defenders" work in 4E.

Historical aside: the first design on a defender class which can pump itself up by getting hit was the Armiger in Mike Mearls' Iron Heroes. Really, what D&D needed was someone with very good math abilities to look at IH's design ideas, and implement them with great rigor. Didn't happen. Instead we got 4E, which got quite some math issues in some quarters (Doom mentioned a couple) and doesn't even implement the great ideas of Iron Heroes very creatively. Getting rid of the Armiger class concept would be a good instance of this. At first they kept the original concept, but delivered shoddy math. Then they fixed the math - by blowing up the underlying class concept. It really seems as if 4E can't get both things right at the same time.

Ah, gotcha. Thanks. I can tell just by looking at the fighter power list that str is important, but they hype the dwarf warrior in the fluff so much it seems they're aiming at the fighter being "favored" for dwarf. However, whether one thinks the lack of str bonus is really important or not, it appears that in reality dwarves are much more aimed solely at cleric. Even paladin relies too much on str and cha. Ah well.

Working in harmonious conjunction with your party, in 4e, is more or less exactly equivalent to building an optimized character. The system doesn't demand it; you'll be more effective in combat if you do it.

I have seen huge variance at con RPGA events. Everything from quick adaption to strangers to complete lack of teamwork. I keep going to RPGA cons and enjoying myself; make of that what you will.