Quote from: Seanchai;386687No, I'm saying roles have been around for a while now. If you disagree, by all means, let's hear why.

I don't disagree.  I'm failing to understand.  Are you saying you can map the 4e roles to specific classes in previous editions?

Quote from: FrankTrollman;386711I'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

I think we are looking for different things, which is why you are concerned with 'fixing' 4e and I think that ship has long since sailed

The old classs structure went through an expansion in AD&D and was made more elegant in 2e. I am not really interested in D&D and a combat simulation tool per se. I can see that in a tactical sense Roles are very useful but they are, you can not deny, almost totally combat focused. If you were to expand them out to non-combat play the number and type would expand exponentially.
I hate roles becuase I don't want to play a controller who fills this tacticial niche. I want to play a wizard who has spent their youth training themselves in the way to control and manipulate the minds of men. Now these things might well be the same but for me the characters tactical role in combat defines from their background, skills and their personailites as opposed to their skills, backgrounds and personalities being defined by their Role.
In the framework of a simple class sytem I can play anything. Kits provided some mechanical advantages but really they were roleplay aids that encouraged you to think about variety and backgrounds for your PCs. In Doing so you also removed the need for niche classes like Barbarians, thief acrobats, illusionists, druids etc as these were specific implementations of the 4 main classes. The bard, paladin and ranger survived as they were hybrids, although I would have liked to have seen these roled into the main classes as well. The attempt was made in skills and powers to do this albeit in a failed way (although this implementation seems to work far better http://www.mindspring.com/~ernestm/classless/) .

So My issue with Roles is fundamental to how I approach RPGs whcih is from the character to the rules as opposed to fromt eh rules to the character. Whilst I am in favour of balance as a goal it should be holisitic and not focused purely on combat, combat, combat.

Quote from: jibbajabbaSo My issue with Roles is fundamental to how I approach RPGs whcih is from the character to the rules as opposed to fromt eh rules to the character. Whilst I am in favour of balance as a goal it should be holisitic and not focused purely on combat, combat, combat.

With all due respect, that doesn't make a fuck width of difference. You might as well be bitching about how weapon proficiencies in 2nd Edition AD&D don't help you build a barn. Or bitch about how nonweapon proficiencies don't decide combats.

The 4e concept of the "Role" is a combat role. And asking it to do anything else is fucking unreasonable. Yes, people should have something more than that. Whether it's layering on "noncombat roles" or "backgrounds" or whatever. Because yes, the game isn't very good as a role playing game if everyone's abilities only modify combat. But that's not the fault of combat abilities or classification of combat abilities. That's the fault of not having noncombat abilities.

As for character creation flow sheet direction, that doesn't make any god damn difference either. At the end of character generation, you will have one character and one set of numbers on your character sheet. Changing the number of decisions to make during character generation or presenting the choices in larger or smaller lists can change how long it takes for a player to grok their options, and it can change how long it takes to make a character. But once the character is made, it seriously makes fuck-all difference whether they are technically a Thief Class with the Thief Acrobat Kit, or a Thief Acrobat Class, or a Rogue Class with the Thief Acrobat Build. All that shit is back end on the system based on how to impart the information that ultimately Thief Acrobat is one of your options.

As far as that goes, there is good psychological research indicating that people are better able to handle lists that are 4-7 items long, and that longer lists are better managed when they are divided into sub-lists. So personally, I got no problem at all with people dividing up the character possibilities into completely meaningless subcategories like the 4e "Power Sources." They don't do anything except create artificial mental folders to stash character options in. But if someone wants to make that presentational stylistic choice, that's their artistic prerogative.

But the bottom line is: 4e doesn't have very much depth, has no particular playable game system outside of combat, has very long combats that take up most of the evening, and few playable character concepts relative to previous incarnations of the game. That's a shame, and it's bad for the game, and it's bad for the hobby as a whole because it drives people away from roleplaying who would be interested in storytelling and puzzle solving, because the current edition of D&D is very likely to be the first thing a new player sees. But get a grip dude. The fact that people have combat abilities or there are classifications of combat abilities, or powers are selected from lists or not or whatever - none of that shit is responsible for those problems. These are completely tangential affairs.

The 4e rules for mounted combat are vague and contradictory. That has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that there isn't a chart for NPC attitude adjustment. Both are problems, but neither causes the other. And claiming it does makes you come off like the guy from A Beautiful Mind.

-Frank

Quote from: jrients;386713Are you saying you can map the 4e roles to specific classes in previous editions?

In a sense. We might not have called a Fighter a Defender or a Wizard a Controller, but they did basically perform those functions.

Seanchai

Quote from: FrankTrollman;386873With all due respect, that doesn't make a fuck width of difference. You might as well be bitching about how weapon proficiencies in 2nd Edition AD&D don't help you build a barn. Or bitch about how nonweapon proficiencies don't decide combats.

The 4e concept of the "Role" is a combat role. And asking it to do anything else is fucking unreasonable. Yes, people should have something more than that. Whether it's layering on "noncombat roles" or "backgrounds" or whatever. Because yes, the game isn't very good as a role playing game if everyone's abilities only modify combat. But that's not the fault of combat abilities or classification of combat abilities. That's the fault of not having noncombat abilities.

As for character creation flow sheet direction, that doesn't make any god damn difference either. At the end of character generation, you will have one character and one set of numbers on your character sheet. Changing the number of decisions to make during character generation or presenting the choices in larger or smaller lists can change how long it takes for a player to grok their options, and it can change how long it takes to make a character. But once the character is made, it seriously makes fuck-all difference whether they are technically a Thief Class with the Thief Acrobat Kit, or a Thief Acrobat Class, or a Rogue Class with the Thief Acrobat Build. All that shit is back end on the system based on how to impart the information that ultimately Thief Acrobat is one of your options.

As far as that goes, there is good psychological research indicating that people are better able to handle lists that are 4-7 items long, and that longer lists are better managed when they are divided into sub-lists. So personally, I got no problem at all with people dividing up the character possibilities into completely meaningless subcategories like the 4e "Power Sources." They don't do anything except create artificial mental folders to stash character options in. But if someone wants to make that presentational stylistic choice, that's their artistic prerogative.

But the bottom line is: 4e doesn't have very much depth, has no particular playable game system outside of combat, has very long combats that take up most of the evening, and few playable character concepts relative to previous incarnations of the game. That's a shame, and it's bad for the game, and it's bad for the hobby as a whole because it drives people away from roleplaying who would be interested in storytelling and puzzle solving, because the current edition of D&D is very likely to be the first thing a new player sees. But get a grip dude. The fact that people have combat abilities or there are classifications of combat abilities, or powers are selected from lists or not or whatever - none of that shit is responsible for those problems. These are completely tangential affairs.

The 4e rules for mounted combat are vague and contradictory. That has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that there isn't a chart for NPC attitude adjustment. Both are problems, but neither causes the other. And claiming it does makes you come off like the guy from A Beautiful Mind.

-Frank

Calm down tiger!
My point, and perhaps it was poorly expressed, I was somewhat distracted, was that the Roles are combat roles and that they allow this to define the classes. effectively what you play is defiend by its reference to combat there isn't space int eh game for anythign else. Now here I think we agree only your point, and correct me if I misinterpretted it, is that you have to accept that 4e's Roles are combat roles that is part of the game. I would say that that heavy a focus on combat is a step too far for me.

On the position of the creation of charcters I think we agree to disagree here as I think it does make a difference how you get to the end point as I get the impression that a 4e characters evolve from how can this character be effective in combat as the classes in 4e evolve from how would this class be effective in combat. Whereas I prefer to evolve from the charcter and maybe once I have a concept I like I might consider effectiveness in combat as one element (or I might not even think about it at all). This is particularly clear from Doom's posts on the unplayability of certain race class combos and the importance of having max stats etc (can't find the thread link but I am sure that anyone who got this far in this thread is familiar) .... all of which I find puts me off hugely.

Quote from: jibbajibba;386922My point, and perhaps it was poorly expressed, I was somewhat distracted, was that the Roles are combat roles and that they allow this to define the classes. effectively what you play is defiend by its reference to combat there isn't space int eh game for anythign else. Now here I think we agree only your point, and correct me if I misinterpretted it, is that you have to accept that 4e's Roles are combat roles that is part of the game. I would say that that heavy a focus on combat is a step too far for me.

The roles are combat roles, yes. We agree on that point. Where we don't agree is that this is in any way important. The roles don't actually do anything. You don't get to be allowed in to the secret "Strikers' Hall" for being a Rogue, Sorcerer, Ranger, or Warlock. The label "Striker" doesn't have any in-game meaning at all. It's just a label. You might as well get pissed because in the 2nd Edition PHB the Paladin and Ranger were listed under Fighter and the Bard was listed under Thief. In fact, you'd be on firmer grounds making such a case, because the "roles" in the 4e PHB don't even change the order that the classes are listed in or group their experience charts or really associate the class listings in any way.

Some things about characters will be about combat. Especially for a game where one of the classes is actually named "Fighter." I know you haven't really given 4e D&D a shot, and frankly I wouldn't ask you to (because I am bitterly disappointed in it). But the reality is that you are being unfair with regards to the relative importance given to the combat roles labels in the actual books.

QuoteOn the position of the creation of charcters I think we agree to disagree here as I think it does make a difference how you get to the end point as I get the impression that a 4e characters evolve from how can this character be effective in combat as the classes in 4e evolve from how would this class be effective in combat. Whereas I prefer to evolve from the charcter and maybe once I have a concept I like I might consider effectiveness in combat as one element (or I might not even think about it at all). This is particularly clear from Doom's posts on the unplayability of certain race class combos and the importance of having max stats etc (can't find the thread link but I am sure that anyone who got this far in this thread is familiar) .... all of which I find puts me off hugely.

On the subject of race/class determinism, yeah. It's a big problem. But again, it's not a problem that is related to the roles. It has to do with how math works in the 4e game. Coming at it from the standpoint of a 2nd Edition AD&D player, you doubtless know how hard core a Fighter can be if they roll up the natural 18 Strength and then take a Strength Bonus race (such as Wood Elf, Orc, or Minotaur). This is because there is a major breakpoint between 18 and 19. And you know the attraction to taking one of those strength boost races if you actually roll up that sweet 18 for Strength. For 4th edition, there is a major breakpoint every two points of every stat. Every class is dependent upon two stats, and every race gives a +2 bonus to two different stats. Therefore it's like that allure of the precious 19 Strength, twice for every character no matter what their actual starting stat line is. The end result is that if you are a Bow Ranger, you are probably an Elf. If you are an Orb Wizard, you are probably a Gnome. And yeah, I have a huge problem with that, but it's still related to very different and separable design decisions from the ones that gave us the combat roles.

The reality is that in 4e D&D you pick your race and class combination, then you pick your "build" (which is kind of like picking a kit or a specialization for a 2nd edition Magic User). It's basically the same flowsheet as picking race and class and then kit for a 2nd edition character. There are labels of "role" and "power source" on those classes for 4e, but they don't actually do anything.

There are problems. Real problems. Deal breaker problems for me. But the fact that character classes have one line dedicated to telling you what "combat role" the writers envisioned the class performing most of the time just isn't one of them.

-Frank

Quote from: jibbajibba;386922My point, and perhaps it was poorly expressed, I was somewhat distracted, was that the Roles are combat roles and that they allow this to define the classes. effectively what you play is defiend by its reference to combat

The fact that each class is designed to fulfill a role IN COMBAT only is relevant for combat. Roleplaying is more influenced by the mechanicless flavor text that everything in 4e comes with. Granted there not often much to work with and sometime flies in the face of common sense when trying to relate to real world actions.

What you are seeing is that so much of a 4e session is devoted to combat. If you spend 1/2 to 2/3 of your time fighting encounters then the player's is going to pay a lot more attention to the combat mechanics and how his character relates to it.

In a 4e campaigns where only one combat encounter is run per session the players will be considering other aspects of their character more. The game can encourage certain styles of play by offer more support for it but in the end it is up to the referee and the players as to what get emphasized. Certainly Wizards has focused a lot on the combat aspect of 4e.

I've said this before, but I think 4e combat is ideal for running set piece combats like the battle with the Medusa in (either version of) Clash of the Titans.

Quote from: Aos;386944I've said this before, but I think 4e combat is ideal for running set piece combats like the battle with the Medusa in (either version of) Clash of the Titans.

From a tactical point of view sure, I can see that working out well indeed.

I ran a spelljammer adventure last night.

There was a battle that started out with the PCs scrambling to rig together the remnants of an Eladrin Crystal Ballista before the Nagatha Dragonship arrived. When they burned out the magical core, the warforged warlock suggested it be connected directly to his life-force. A heal check and an endurance check later and we had a living contruct connected to a stationary piece of artillery.

When the nagatha finally got there, the bad guys got on their flying mounts (the Dragonborn leader was mounted on a Snaketongue wyvern.. the rest were original creations- Nagatha mounted on Glidewings.. set up as minions-with-a-twist*! Suck it minion haters..) and swooped down on the party below, who were stuck on the ground trying to defend the emplaced weapon.

At one point, the cleric used "Command" to force the dragonborn leader's wyvern-mount to crash, but the rider tumbled free, drawing his greatsword in the process. At one point the air was literally filled with swooping and clawing Gliders mounted by lancers, while the PCs tried to maintain a defensive circle. Meanwhile..berserk dragonborn with a greatsword charges the line.

Even after the PCs got the upper hand, the dragonborn captain called in one of his support ships to hit the area with a fireball. The warforged had to tear himself free from the artillery piece, which was on the verge of destruction anyway..suffering healing surges worth of damage.

Finally they managed to isolate the dragonborn captain and bring down most of the nagatha mounted on gliders.

Great battle.

Oh, and before that battle? There was a lot of roleplaying involving stuff going on at a wine festival, negotiations with an elven delegation, a bagpipe performance by the bard, and learning that the Eladrin princess rescued from the crashlanded tradeship was actually a dancer who was meant to unlock a sacred portal to the Feywild in Myth Drannor.

Fun adventure.

* Minion with a twist: A glider killed in the air was a minion. A glider killed within 20' of the ground dies and it's rider becomes a non-minion skirmisher as it leaps from the saddle. So the idea was to kill the Gliders in flight.

Reminds me of a fight I ran once in my Hawkmoon campaign. The PCs had been invited to a ball by the local Countess, and ended up messing around with Granbretan officers there. A fight broke out, started on the dancing floor, and went on in the citadel's gardens as opponents fought, fenced, trashed each other through windows, etc.

Some Granbretan Crows went back to the stables of the Countess and stole a bunch of Giant eagles there. They flew back to the gardens, one of them swooping down to catch one of the PCs. The PC instead grabed the Eagle's claws, used the momentum of the swoop to jump on the mount's back, knocked the Crow out of his saddle and took control of the beast. Flew around, while the PCs fought for their lives. The PC on the Eagle fought a battle in mid-air with the remaining mounted Granbretan officer, and ended up swooping to the ground, redressing the eagle's trajectory at the last moment, exploding another soldier's (an officer of the Order of the Bull) vertebral column as he flew past his friends, while his flying opponent crashed to the ground in pursuit, not able to follow and correct his flight trajectory in time. The PC on the eagle flew past the crystal palace in flame, another PC jumping from a balcony and grabbing the eagle's leg, they landed outside the property's gates, just in time to catch up with their companions, and left before the rest of the Granbretan garrison in town could reach the site of the fight.

Yeah. Epic battle indeed.

I like 4E...I really do. Thus far it's my favorite iteration of the game.

However, there are some things about it that just bug the piss out of me.

I hated...absolutely hated the optimization culture that surrounded 3rd Edition, and the initial reports of 4th Edition suggested that they would be mitigating that to a large degree, which made me excited for the game. What 4E does instead, is makes charop mandatory and tells players fromt he get go what they need to do to achieve it. The baseline assumptions of 4E's math is that all players are going to be highly optimizing their characters, which leads to borked game math at higher levels.

My theory concerning 3rd's design, is that since random ability generation was the game's default method...and the stat boosts at every 4th level was meant to mitigate poor scores. Instead, players used it to minmax their characters and I think that this phenomenon made it's way into 4E's design.

It really, really annoys me that the game all but requires characters to boost their primary stats at every opportunity or be rendered ineffective. I mean, in previous editions the base line that the design assumed was average, not super optimized (which led to it's own problems). Why do there even need to be regular ability increases at all? It seems to me that the game would be better off if all characters stayed roughly where their attributes were at the creation stage.

Magic items are borked. Once again, the game assumes that every character is going to have the required enhancement bonuses at the appropriate levels, making the numbers even bigger (a more petty irritation is the idea of adding +37 to a d20 roll. Maybe it doesn't make as much of a difference in game play, but if the static modifiers are far and away larger than the random number generator I take it as a sign that things are getting out of hand).

What's more, magic items have been reduced to just another character optimization option, just like feats and powers. They were supposed to be fixing the whole christmas tree thing in 4E, but it's just more of the same. The problem here being that if a DM let's his/her players select their own items, then I can guarantee that you will see the same dozen or so items on everybody...items like the Iron Armbands of Power, which add a blanket bonus to ALL melee damage rolls are just too tempting for any melee character to pass up...just as every Archery Ranger will have bracers of archery.

In my ideal game, characters are pretty much bound to the gameworld physics, but magic items allow them to break the rules. In essence, they should be the strongest examples of exception based design in the game. At this point, do we really need +1,2,5, whatever longswords? What's more interesting for players to find in a long forgotten crypt...a +1 longsword, or Frostfang, sword of the vanquished north king Edvar One-Eye?

If it weren't for mandatory enhancement bonuses and ability bumps, then monster stats could scale along with players and the game could return to assuming a baseline of average for players, and the game math wouldn't be so borked at higher levels.

Skill challenges. When I had first heard about skill challenges, I was excited because I thought it meant that we would finally be getting hard-coded guidelines for rewarding out of combat roleplaying challenges. What they devolved into, was one player rolling the relavent skill again and again until that minor hurtle has been removed. Worst of all, it incentives players to fall back on the mechanics completely, rather than what they are supposed to do, which is involve all the characters in every facet of the game, from combat to roleplaying and get them to actually think about their characters and who they are when they are not fighting.

And the character generator...very handy tool...but every player falls back on it to make their characters and the program isn't very friendly to houseruling at all. The problem being, that I tend to houserule the fuck out of all the things I've listed above.

Quote from: Shazbot79;387034I like 4E...I really do. Thus far it's my favorite iteration of the game.

However, there are some things about it that just bug the piss out of me.

I feel your pain, Shaz.

I also liked some of the ideas of 4e. It's a fun game, but (for me, anyway) requires an investment of time, money and attention to minutiae (including the CharOp which I also generally dislike) that precludes anything other than short, limited sessions. The mechanics in general, and the Powers system in particular, does feel boardgamey, or MMO-like (again, to me). I'd never run it, but I can be persuaded to play.

On the other hand, between pevious editions of D&D and their retro-clones, Savage Worlds*, MRQ2 and Legends of Anglerre, it's not like I need another fantasy game in my life.

*Even though the Fantasy Companion was kind of meh, there's Sundered Skies, and Hellfrost, and I'll be running The Day After Ragnarok pretty much as D&D with Nazis and submachineguns and extra helpings of Norse myth, real-world occultism and Fortean weirdness.

Quote from: Shazbot79;387034The baseline assumptions of 4E's math is that all players are going to be highly optimizing their characters, which leads to borked game math at higher levels.

Here's a houserule I've been toying with lately. Let me know what you think of it!

1. All players roll stats 3d6 in order.
2. Each player can re-assign one of his racial +2 ability bonuses as he wishes at char-gen.
3. PC attack and defense values are NOT calculated based on PC stats and items but auto-generated as follows (source: 4E Player's Strategy Guide, page 112):

DEFENSE VALUES: AC = your character level +15 ; Fort/Refl/Will = level + 13

ATTACK VALUES: attack vs. AC = level +6 ; attack vs. Fort/Refl/Will = level +4

This would do wonders. For one, the game would now allow (again) the possibility to have stupid wizards beating clever fighters in arms wrestling matches - the world will be richer for this! For another, GMs could totally randomize treasure without falling into the trap of risking PCs from performing below the expected numbers.

The numbers above come literally from a 4E book section saying the game EXPECTS these values to function properly. If so, then why not have an option to cut out all the optimization bull shit and number fiddling and simply GIVE the PCs those numbers?  I totally understand WotC wants to cater to number crunchers, but the exclusivity of it all is maddening. That thing in the Player's Strategy Guide should have been in PHB 1. It's also exactly the sort of information that speeds up char gen WITHOUT access to the Character Builder. I can literally distribute non-filled in Power Cards to 5 players at my table and we can get the game running in 5 minutes.

Quote from: The Butcher;387041I feel your pain, Shaz.

I also liked some of the ideas of 4e. It's a fun game, but (for me, anyway) requires an investment of time, money and attention to minutiae (including the CharOp which I also generally dislike) that precludes anything other than short, limited sessions. The mechanics in general, and the Powers system in particular, does feel boardgamey, or MMO-like (again, to me). I'd never run it, but I can be persuaded to play.

On the other hand, between pevious editions of D&D and their retro-clones, Savage Worlds*, MRQ2 and Legends of Anglerre, it's not like I need another fantasy game in my life.

*Even though the Fantasy Companion was kind of meh, there's Sundered Skies, and Hellfrost, and I'll be running The Day After Ragnarok pretty much as D&D with Nazis and submachineguns and extra helpings of Norse myth, real-world occultism and Fortean weirdness.

I'm still questing for my perfect fantasy system I guess.