Quote from: Christopher Brady;907837Not just entertainment, but real life as well, most jobs have a niche they want their employees to fill.  Military/commando teams, civil engineering, construction work, I could go on.

The big problem with D&D's niche protection is that they present and then, from the first day, mucks it up by making Magic more useful and reliable than a sword to the face.  Early editions it wasn't noticed so much, because everyone was wowed by the new shiny!  But as they iterated and changed it, especially when certain magic loving designers touched it, destroyed any sense it had of players being specialists in their field, because magic could easily fill it for a little while.

Actually At least pre 3e D&D showed you that the Fighter had niche protection as the combat specialist and if the Magic User wanted to get in on the act they had to A: Live long enough and B: luck out and get all the spells, and C: Not get whacked while trying to cast. D&D is all about niche overlap in the end. Niche un-protection?

But players keep trying to enforce each niche. bah.

Im looking forward to this upcomming 5e session where we are all Fighters.

Quote from: Omega;907845Actually At least pre 3e D&D showed you that the Fighter had niche protection as the combat specialist and if the Magic User wanted to get in on the act they had to A: Live long enough and B: luck out and get all the spells, and C: Not get whacked while trying to cast. D&D is all about niche overlap in the end. Niche un-protection?

I dunno.  Every where I've read (which I admit is purely anecdotally) there's always been this 'gentleman's agreement' to not attack the magic user until the meat shields were dead/removed.

Quote from: Omega;907845But players keep trying to enforce each niche. bah.

Im looking forward to this upcomming 5e session where we are all Fighters.

Well, you all have a lot more healing available to you, unlike the previous renditions.

Quote from: daniel_ream;907842I wanted to comment on this one point: wanting to play a specific genre and understanding the genre conventions are two different things.  I often have players that want to play a specific strong genre game (Indiana Jones-style pulp adventure, Modern Age superheroes, Conan-esque sword & sorcery) but don't consciously understand the genre conventions and so tend to fall back on D&Disms because that's what they're familiar with.

Mechanics that enforce genre conventions, up to and including "character classes", are a convenient way of channeling the players into behaviour that gives them the experience they want.

My one attempt at running The One Ring with my local group failed for this reason. My players didn't real grok the Tolkien style, they were playing D&D in Middle Earth. The TOR rules mechanically enforce Tolkienesque play. It was not a good fit.

Now I am running Metamorphosis Alpha, a game which does have character niches, but adventuring success does not depend on a party having all the niches filled. Pure Strain Humans are natural leaders and have greater recognition from computers and robots, mutants get mutant powers and special abilities. Because mutations can vary widely from one mutant to another, sometimes randomly, it does not break down neatly into a Leader-Fighter-Healer-Defender-Rogue paradigm.

I think early D&D had less niche protection than it does now. In the early days the assumption was that everyone could try to do anything but some character classes were much better at doing certain things.  The Fighter and the Magic User could both try to climb the Cliffs of Insanity, search for secret doors, force open a stuck portal, swim a river, or disarm a trap. Their chances of success were generally left to the DM to decide.

I think players are more niche protective than game designers in general. Players are the ones who even when given a free form point based character generation system will divide up the roles and duties. "You be the Face. I'll be the Bruiser."

I completely ignore niche protection. If everyone in the group wants to play a thief, then I come up with some heist for them. If they all want to be rangers (which is awesome) then I come up with a forest adventure. All fighters or monks? Well that's easy enough. Sure it would be nice to have a complete skill set among the group but you can't expect it to work that way. Maybe if I was running Leverage where niches are built in, but the odds of my running Leverage are astronomically low when I can hack Marvel Heroic into something more versatile.

It's definitely an aggravated problem by video game training. Class or skill based system has zero-bearing as both can produce (hyper-)specialists. The big issue is adventure design, namely mission-based adventures.

Now, Mission-based adventure design is not a culprit inherently, but it does one thing very well compared to other adventure designs -- it allows spotlight time. Missions are fun in narratives (as daniel_ream noted: A-Team, Oceans Eleven, etc.) because, you guessed it, you can create elaborate Rube Goldberg scenarios where everyone has a chance to be a discreet star of the show -- their own moment to shine as a solo -- yet contribute to a larger, more spectacular whole. RPGs have a real challenge in emulating such narrative tricks however without somehow funneling player choice.

Missions can, and often are!, played where they are not so tenuously balanced upon such "Mouse Trap"-like board game intricacy.

However, what other medium thrives on funneled character choice? Video games. In giving the CRPG illusion of needing every character in the roster, even if for just that special dungeon (I won't lie, I love Edward from FFIV,) you get to pander to every beloved character in the CRPG narrative.

Late this converges with party optimization in case of "trick bosses." Eventually you hit a critical mass of "trick combats" that players build parties to handle as many contingencies as possible. Then comes the rise of the hyper-specialist.

With the hyper-specialist you get to the point where you should be able to "solo" "trick combats," thus minimizing party expenditure and maximizing party throughput. Those who do not excel in their niche weigh down parties in the face of the unexpected, and thus are sidelined as matter of course. Then you start getting into MMORPG-level stratospheres of efficiency micromanaging.

These issues are not new. You saw them develop in miniatures as people waited on bated breath for their "next codex to make their armies more viable." But video game training (and CCG training; MtG has done immense things for hyper-efficiency ganming calculations) has ramped this to its event horizon and it bleeds out everywhere now.

If you're not first in at least something, you're last. If your something doesn't come up often enough, you too are also "last," by your situational mastery being too situational: a.k.a. "cornercase." (This term derives from CCGs for rare cards that were not useful enough as mainstays, but still solid for those rare situational match-ups. And thus these somewhat valuable due to rarity, yet not all that useful, cards ended up in the "corner of the glass display case" for trade. Hoser cards, that which penalizes a particular faction or trait, are notorious "cornercase cards.")

And Mission-based adventure structures tend to be the most salient of RPG analogs to this hyper-efficiency mindset. Given it is also the easiest way to write structured adventures -- and slip frustrated novelization within the packaging -- it is an obvious progression of past dots connecting to a current image.

Quote from: Omega;907845Actually At least pre 3e D&D showed you that the Fighter had niche protection as the combat specialist and if the Magic User wanted to get in on the act they had to A: Live long enough and B: luck out and get all the spells, and C: Not get whacked while trying to cast. D&D is all about niche overlap in the end. Niche un-protection?

Quote from: Christopher Brady;907850I dunno.  Every where I've read (which I admit is purely anecdotally) there's always been this 'gentleman's agreement' to not attack the magic user until the meat shields were dead/removed.

O_o "Gentleman's agreement" to lay off the 'squishies'? Wholly and utterly the very opposite of what I experienced and heard about in TSR D&D.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;907850I dunno.  Every where I've read (which I admit is purely anecdotally) there's always been this 'gentleman's agreement' to not attack the magic user until the meat shields were dead/removed.

Interesting. And I'll bet I've played that way in the past. Didn't realize that.

Of late, though -- and can only speak for myself -- when the enemy notices someone is throwing spells, they immediately yell, "Wizard!" and go for the caster (especially if they have savvy leaders). I'm also guessing there might be some situations where seeing a spell cast also causes the bad guys to beat feet outta there. To take it one step further -- and, only IME -- an enemy intimately familiar with the party would make plans to shut down spell casters right off the bat. Capstone event I never got to in one campaign had the party being spied on for weeks while the ultimate enemies plotted a "foolproof" ambush. Never got to it, though.

Of course, the thing about ALL that is, you have to actually get to them in some way for any plan to work.:-)

I'm going to take some ideas in OpaOpaJr's post (that I agree with) and approach them in a different way: The badness that is niche protection is being encouraged by bad adventure design. Adventures are being designed as a series of puzzles or challenges aimed at a single solution. This is your set-piece battle, this is your diplomacy challenge, this is where the thief gets to pick some locks and disable some traps, and this is your magic challenge. And GMs, taking those cues, try to force players to solve the problem the way it's supposed to be solved, shooting down other proposed solutions.

But your typical orc-with-pie encounter is not necessarily a one-solution problem. You don't have to fight the orc. You could negotiate, you could use a Charm spell, you could keep him busy while the thief sneaks behind and steals the pie, you can trick the orc into chasing you while colleagues go back for the pie, and many other solutions. The statue puzzle that opens a door could be solved by figuring out the puzzle... or the strong guy could smash his way through the door, or the thief could try to trigger the mechanism directly, or the M-U could try a Knock spell or turn ethereal, or if the door is in use, the party could hide and wait to see how someone else uses the door...

Sure, you could be pig-headed about creative solutions to problems. Computer adventure games tend to have just one solution for each challenge. But that is because it's easier to program just one solution than it is to allow for multiple solutions. The whole point of playing a game with a live referee instead of a computer program is so that the referee can figure out whether Unforeseen Solution X will work. And once you allow that kind of play, niche protection becomes unneeded. You can have parties that don't have a thief or healer, or parties that are all fighters with just a few personality differences, but all the same skills. It's actually more fun that way.

Quote from: Opaopajr;907871RPGs have a real challenge in emulating such narrative tricks however without somehow funneling player choice.

I'm not entirely certain what that means, but the Leverage RPG is easily the best RPG treatment of the heist genre I've ever seen.  Admittedly, it's largely a narrative game.

Quote from: talysman;907885I'm going to take some ideas in OpaOpaJr's post (that I agree with) and approach them in a different way: The badness that is niche protection is being encouraged by bad adventure design. Adventures are being designed as a series of puzzles or challenges aimed at a single solution. This is your set-piece battle, this is your diplomacy challenge, this is where the thief gets to pick some locks and disable some traps, and this is your magic challenge. And GMs, taking those cues, try to force players to solve the problem the way it's supposed to be solved, shooting down other proposed solutions.

This is a great argument for open design, or scenario-based adventures. If there is not set reaction, then both player and GM can be more innovative.

I'll dredge up our latest here: Had what was basically a set piece raid on a festival the PCs had been planning to attend after the last adventure (the Druid PC was to perform a blessing ceremony, while the others had their own agendas to fulfill over the course of 5 [planned] days there. Lots of clues as to what was about to happen, which would all come together during and after the raid. I was looking forward to bringing back an old nemesis, eventually.

However...

...the PCs hit the road post-haste, pick up a trail from a clue-hook I'd thrown in there, previously, followed their noses and found the raiders' base by, ultimately, getting captured, then escaping (in what had to be the most ridiculous bit of poor decision-making-and-execution-plus-lucky-dice-rolls that I've ever seen).

BUT...

...they never found out what the raiders' plans were, because of the poorly planned (yet, ultimately successful) escape (2 of the three PCs died, but it's Dungeon World, and those crazy bastards managed to cheat death).  

SO...

...when the PCs finally DID attend said festival, penniless and clueless, they didn't bother to stay long enough to even BE there during the raid. Their imprisonment lost them all their fancy ass gear, and they had beaten feet after discharging their ceremonial duties, and raced off to find a cheaper place to regroup and get new gear (and since the blessing occurred on day #2, well, no reason to stay, right? [maybe that was poor GMing on my part, but maybe not--I didn't force them to stay--I just pointed out that stuff was expensive there, with the captive festival audience and all [like a Ren Faire, I figured]).

Nutshell: the aforementioned raid was a success, but the PCs don't know about that (yet). They also do not know they are now more or less in a race to get back to the lair where they were imprisoned to get their stuff back (including an item on loan to the Druid, who needs it to return to the loaner to get back the magical staff he exchanged it for) before the raiders decamp and hide somewhere else.

PHEW!

Anyway, the obvious point:

That's the prime advantage of a basic scenario and a couple maps, plus, basically lazy-GM'ing the adventure (which is the way the system we're using [Dungeon World] is written actually). We ended up with a better session, mainly because the players directed the action, and used their abilities in ways they saw fit, rather than waiting for a pre-planned challenge to pop up. I know that type of play isn't for everybody, but it seemed to me (as it has over the course of our early campaign) that me reacting to them (within the confines of the basic scenario, its actors and their motivations, plus world gears turning all the time, etc.), it seems to me to be a great way to run things. It helps, too, that the party is small, and that skills are more or less non-existent. The players protect their own "niches" by proceeding on the basis of their motivations, both individually and group-wise. Of course, there is absolutely class niche protection built into the system (no multi-classing, and minor crossover between classes). But, on the whole, their choices are being driven by their capabilities and experiences. So far, anyway. On the whole, everyone seems to like it. Well, so far...

I guess the question, then, is, whether a designer would be criticized for producing less-detailed adventures? We get into the habit of designing challenges. Some of those challenges are mechanical, depending on the system. Some characters are better at said mechanics. I assume, then, that designers of such adventures are just using what the system gives them. I might also assume that many players prefer it this way? (I really don't know, but D&D 5E/PF, in all that mechanical splendor, is such a behemoth in my area that I assume this is what the majority wants).

Quote from: Opaopajr;907876O_o "Gentleman's agreement" to lay off the 'squishies'? Wholly and utterly the very opposite of what I experienced and heard about in TSR D&D.

Really?  Then there must not have been a lot of wizard/magic user players then back in your day.  I've found that if you target the magic user first, you tend to turn off players from ever playing one ever again.  After all, what's the point if on a bad initiative, you're down because everything targets you.  ANd back in TSR and 3e D&D there was no mechanism to prevent the usually higher numbered enemies from mobbing the PCs quickly, even with hirelings and henchmen.  When you have monsters numbering between 20-200 or 40-400, that's a lot of potential damage spreading around.  And First Level Wizards, clad in their light clothes/robes would obviously be the first target to savvy goblins and kobolds.

In my travels (I moved a lot when I was a kid, and which again, I will stress, is purely anecdotal) the few games that used to be run with the bad guys being smart enough to target the squishies, tended not to have any in their gaming group, so after a while, a silent 'gentleman's agreement' came up where you took out the fighter types first.

Very MMO like, now that I think about it.

Not targeting the MUs is the tactical equivalent of having the opponents use only front charges sans missile support or flanking movements. It certainly simplifies the tactical situation for the PCs if all the opponents are stupid like that, but it isn't something I ever saw a lot of. But then your experience of D&D always seems to be 180-degrees from anything I've ever seen or wanted to see. I wonder how much of that difference was due to the acquisition of D&D by Wizards of the Coast and the CCG influence on 3E and later games.

Also if no one you played with ever targeted the MUs, it's no wonder you think they are overpowered compared to fighters.

Quote from: Opaopajr;907876O_o "Gentleman's agreement" to lay off the 'squishies'? Wholly and utterly the very opposite of what I experienced and heard about in TSR D&D.

Seriously.  The correct answer to " the magic users keep dying" is "so learn to protect them, shit-for-brains."

Never played with a 'gentleman' before. Heh not target kill the MU's? That's crazytalk.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;907911Seriously.  The correct answer to " the magic users keep dying" is "so learn to protect them, shit-for-brains."

HOW?  There are NO tools to keep them alive.  All goblins and koblods (and that's all that needs to be, the small pathetic monsters) can simply lob objects at the Wizard, like arrows, sling stones, and there's nothing any other classes can do.

You go ON YOUR TURN, the Monsters go on THEIR TURN.  That's how the game is built.  You should know, you were there, right?

You'd need to be able to move as an interrupt, but that would break the action and resource economy, leading to every single fight being so draining that most parties will not want to continue until the recovery.