Quote from: DeadUematsu;386593Look, if you want to run a game because the actual running of a game is FUN, great but I have a problem with a lot of people here essentially saying that they run games because they have control, it's thier way or the highway, etc. and that's the ultimate incentive. Which frankly explains why a lot of GMs just shouldn't run games and why the best GMs tend to be referee-like (and not the OD&D bastardization of the term).

The problem you're talking about is in your mind.

Quote from: Shazbot79;386559I can't help but wonder if people would be complaining about roles as much, if they were kept implicit rather than being made explicit like in 4E.

'Course they wouldn't. They didn't in previous editions, where that was the case.

Quote from: Shazbot79;386559The only problem that I see is when the actual class mechanics don't properly promote the intended role. At best, having a clearly defined tactical role gives newer players an idea of what the class is supposed to be good at.

The problem I have with them is players using them as kind of weird shorthand. "I'm going to play a Striker next." Or "I'm best at playing Strikers." What the hell does that mean, really? There's a million different types of characters that are Strikers. Or when they try to get a good or "balanced" party just by looking at Roles. I'd rather folks just play what they want regardless of what others are playing, but even if they don't, just throwing a Leader in there 'cause you're missing a Leader probably isn't going to be as effective as you'd like.

Seanchai

Quote from: FTThe end result is that a Fighter does about as much damage as a bow ranger but they have completely different and counter syngeristic fighting styles. Add a bow ranger to a party full of Fighters, and the rest of the party will be annoyed. The fact that the bow ranger is hanging back and avoiding melee means that the other party members are taking more fire - and he isn't putting enemies down any faster. Add a Fighter to a party of Bow Rangers, and he'll just die. Because while everyone else splits up and focuses fire on enemies that threaten to box the players in - the Fighter has to just charge into the fray. And so he'll get focus fired upon and torn to shreds. Paladins have very high defenses, can only "draw hate" from one enemy at a time, and do shitty damage. Add one to any balanced party and everyone groans. But a party of all Paladins is fucking cash. Each Paladin grabs hate off one enemy, all of them take forever to kill, and if one Paladin gets a run of bad luck for a while they can all pool their healing surges.

Because the Roles were so poorly designed and incompletely concepted, the optimum play is almost exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to be. We all know that you're supposed to want a party composed of a Fighter, a Cleric, a Wizard, a Rogue, and a Bard. And the Roles were supposed to make you actually want that. And if they had delivered that as a good strategy, we'd be OK with them. But they didn't.

We are angry at Roles not because they were pushed so hard, but because they don't do the things we were promised.

I think you are looking at a terminally ill cancer patient and focusing on a pimple being caused by the cancer.

The problem with this supposed 'roleplaying came' is not that they screwed up the combat balance, it's that they made combat the only balance that matters.  That is why after trying it out early on, I realized that the parts of the game that players move on to as players and personalities develop were left out of the game.
You just spent a bunch of letters and typing time on a combat assessment that I agree shows some real broken-ness.  But the old roles in roleplaying games (and frankly, the reason some games went skill-based) were based on the suppostion that there were more 'dimensions' to create role-balance in.  

I think you are correct (to a large degree) when you say that if the game as delivered had balanced the archetypical roles/classes, most people would be OK with that.  But I consider your reasoning as to what makes the roles unbalanced as missing the main point.  
look at the ealy magic-user spells.  Or cleric spells.  They aren't all about combat.  Look at the original description of the thief and their abilities.  Many have nothing to do with combat.   Yes, the earlier game tried to make these roles useful in combat, as it is an important part of the game, but the multidimensional nature of the different roles (as explorers and adventurers) is purely what made the roles work and what seperated the role playing game from a tactical combat game.

Quote from: FTWe are angry at Roles not because they were pushed so hard, but because they don't do the things we were promised

That is your view, and may be very pertinent.  I feel like many gamers are angry at the roles as written (to play on the title) because they remove not merely balance, but they remove many of the dimensions that made the roles pertinent in the first place.
Many of us could care less about the different tactical damage permutations, we are more pissed that our thief who picked locks and pockets has become a 'Brawny rogue' or a 'trickster rogue', and that what the rules as written used to focus on is now an afterthought.

Quote from: Seanchai;386660Yeah. And I actually find it irritating.

Seanchai

Even if WotC today decides to change the license to something just as open as the OGL and provides a 4E SRD which is just as extensive as the 3.5E SRD, I doubt there will be many companies jumping on the bandwagon and suddenly producing tons more 4E 3PP stuff.  The hegemony of the DDI character builder, pretty much cuts off at the legs the market for crunch heavy player options type splatbooks (assuming WotC still does not allow any non-WotC 4E crunch into the DDI character builder).

Perhaps some 3pp companies who are module heavy types, may go back in and produce more modules.  Though with the recent experiences of Goodman not producing as many Dungeon Crawl Classics 4E modules as frequently, this may dissuade others from going back into the 4E market.

There's been attempts at producing games with 4E style mechanics without much (or any) direct use of the useless 4E SRD, such as Amethyst.  How well it is doing in sales, is unknown at the present time.

http://www.goodman-games.com/4370preview.html


With a completely open gaming type license and useful 4E SRD, I doubt things will change much at this point.  The window of opportunity to capture the "hearts and minds" of 3pp companies, has come and gone already.  The time to capture "hearts and minds" would have been back in late 2007 to 2008.  By the time it was early-mid 2009, it was probably too little too late.

Quote from: Seanchai;386668'Course they wouldn't. They didn't in previous editions, where that was the case.

Are you saying that thieves have always been primarily defined by their ability to backstab?

Roles are excretia of the highest order.
They take the concpet of classes which some feel are a bit restrictive but serve to create niches in a design sense and to stop all PCs blurring into a mess, and they restrict them still further. The rogue who can't fight but is great at sneaking or opening traps or running a con, the fighter that covers their body in wode and goes into battle skyclad, the pirate, the wizard that focuses on glyphs and wards, the cleric that focuses on divination. These were all valid options within the 4 class strucutre that was established in 2e (using Kits to provide mechanical colour).

In the new order the narrowness of roles resticts roleplaying options whilst spawning multiple classes each of which have an increasingly narrow focus so in the end it just spawns more noise and is inelegant.

What would be amusing is if they release a 4E Unearthed Arcana book, similar in style to the 3.5E Unearthed Arcana.

Wonder what they will say about designing a generic class of the four types.

Quote from: jrients;386679Are you saying that thieves have always been primarily defined by their ability to backstab?

No, I'm saying roles have been around for a while now. If you disagree, by all means, let's hear why.

Seanchai

Quote from: ggroy;386677The hegemony of the DDI character builder, pretty much cuts off at the legs the market for crunch heavy player options type splatbooks (assuming WotC still does not allow any non-WotC 4E crunch into the DDI character builder).

What I would hope if that WotC would allow non-WotC content into the Character Builder in some fashion.

Seanchai

Quote from: Seanchai;386689What I would hope if that WotC would allow non-WotC content into the Character Builder in some fashion.

A time when something like this could be done easily, would probably be when 5E D&D is being released, and WotC drops all support for the 4E DDI character builder.  By then, it will probably be the hacker types playing around with it and reverse engineering it to add in all kinds of non-WotC 4E style crunch stuff.

Quote from: LordVreeg;386675You just spent a bunch of letters and typing time on a combat assessment that I agree shows some real broken-ness.  But the old roles in roleplaying games (and frankly, the reason some games went skill-based) were based on the suppostion that there were more 'dimensions' to create role-balance in.  

I think you are correct (to a large degree) when you say that if the game as delivered had balanced the archetypical roles/classes, most people would be OK with that.  But I consider your reasoning as to what makes the roles unbalanced as missing the main point.  

Oh definitely. I personally think that the design team's failure to make the skill challenge system a priority was probably their biggest failure. It reduced the game to moving chits around in squares and wasting things with your crossbow. Which I think is a shame.

But some people like that. Make no mistake, the last game I wrote was a World of Darkness Clone. It has a skill base and dice pools, and a limited combat system where a powerful weretiger will just contemptuously rip you in half and get on with its life, because combat is generally not even the point. But in 4e D&D it clearly is. And you can't evaluate 4e without taking it as the game that it is.

I mean, I like modern horror and investigation games, and 4e D&D is none of those things. But if I complain about 4e on those grounds, I'm being a dick head. It's a fantasy hack-n-slasher. And so things that make it better are things that make it better as a fantasy hack-n-slasher. Not things that would make it a better game for investigations in modern horror.

So yeah, I think that 4e D&D would be a different and a better game if it did things that weren't combat related. But it doesn't. And it being a better combat game would make it a better game while still being essentially the same. That's why I try to confine myself to complaints like "The Roles Don't Do What They Are Supposed to Do." rather than complaints like "Where is my fucking Rope Trick and Rock to Mud, you fucking fuckers?!" Because the first is an objective flaw and the second is just something that subjectively pisses me off.

-Frank

Quote from: ggroy;386694A time when something like this could be done easily, would probably be when 5E D&D is being released, and WotC drops all support for the 4E DDI character builder.  By then, it will probably be the hacker types playing around with it and reverse engineering it to add in all kinds of non-WotC 4E style crunch stuff.

Well techncially they could release the specs for a DDI API and invite 3rd parties to create an 'app-store' for addons. They won't of course

Quote from: jibbajibba;386703Well techncially they could release the specs for a DDI API and invite 3rd parties to create an 'app-store' for addons. They won't of course

Agreed, it will never happen.  The SOP for pretty much any business these days seems to be a bunker mentality, where they seek to protect their product at all costs.  Even to the point of the larger companies buying legislation to protect their interests.  What happened to competition and the free market?  

Quote from: FTSo yeah, I think that 4e D&D would be a different and a better game if it did things that weren't combat related. But it doesn't. And it being a better combat game would make it a better game while still being essentially the same. That's why I try to confine myself to complaints like "The Roles Don't Do What They Are Supposed to Do." rather than complaints like "Where is my fucking Rope Trick and Rock to Mud, you fucking fuckers?!" Because the first is an objective flaw and the second is just something that subjectively pisses me off.

I get your point.  But I consider the reduction of dimensionality and the 'encounter bias' as objective a flaw as anything.  It's not like I'm asking for a flying car, or asking for something that has not been done in previous versions.  Of course asking why it can't be an investigative horror game is somewhat spurious; asking why part of the game that used to be more prevalent is not.
Because in that context, Rope Trick's existence is directly related to the role the character is built around.

But I can also see your point of, "OK, you reduced the game primarily to this one dimension...and you couldn't even balance one dimension???"

Quote from: jibbajibba;386682Roles are excretia of the highest order.
They take the concpet of classes which some feel are a bit restrictive but serve to create niches in a design sense and to stop all PCs blurring into a mess, and they restrict them still further. The rogue who can't fight but is great at sneaking or opening traps or running a con, the fighter that covers their body in wode and goes into battle skyclad, the pirate, the wizard that focuses on glyphs and wards, the cleric that focuses on divination. These were all valid options within the 4 class strucutre that was established in 2e (using Kits to provide mechanical colour).

In the new order the narrowness of roles resticts roleplaying options whilst spawning multiple classes each of which have an increasingly narrow focus so in the end it just spawns more noise and is inelegant.

I'm going to disagree with you strenuously here.

Sure, I agree that classes in 4e D&D are far too restrictive, I just don't think Roles created that problem. At its simplest of foundations, a role simply states that members of Role X can do Thing Y. A well designed role system would ensure that there was good protection for each Thing, such that characters of Role A, B, or C wouldn't be doing Y (it was a protected Thing for Role X). Also they would ensure that each Thing that a Role did was identifiable and desirable for the party to have access to.

But a role system does not demand or predict any particular way of handling each Thing will be restrictive. Sure your Brute Role character has access to special devastating but inaccurate attacks such that he synergizes well with characters who can stun and opponent to set you up for a hit. But those special attacks could have any skin at all. Maybe you're a Minotaur with a pole axe. Maybe you're a Mortal Kombat style Ninja with a heart freezing touch. Maybe you're a Dark Elf with a poison kiss. The role system does not inherently make any restrictions on that at all. All it says is that you selected a "Brute Role", so if your allies can set an enemy up, you can knock them down.

There is a real problem in 4e with the number of playable Paladins being very small in number and all of them looking pretty fucking similar besides. But that's not there because the Defender Role exists. Hell, that's not even there because the Defender Role is badly designed (although, it is). It's that way because 4e went for narrow classes and didn't print very many classes.

If they had made much broader classes, or they had printed a very large number of narrowly defined classes, then the narrowness of available character archetypes wouldn't have been a problem. All independently of whether they had fixed their roles system or not.

-Frank