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Ben Matchstick
Montpelier
Vermont
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I'm liking this discussion- very balanced.
ROLES:
I think the only role I have trouble with is the leader. I enjoy the tension that comes up when my adventuring party must appoint a leader, or when a leader steps forward. I would suggest that maybe a leader could gain a minor benefit in combat- morale boosts when scoring crits for example.
Lets not forget that monsters are also given roles to play. What does everyone think of those? For me, I've always been confused by the lurker.
BALANCE:
I'm appreciating cosine's take on balance being crucial to the fun.
The house rulings of Critical Hits and Misses can make the combat much more enjoyable because it offers that imbalance...At my table, there is no real rule, only the understanding that "something happens". Usually that something shifts the balance.
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BFL's going down (under)
Australia
ACT
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dugatrench wrote: I'm liking this discussion- very balanced.
ROLES:
I think the only role I have trouble with is the leader. I enjoy the tension that comes up when my adventuring party must appoint a leader, or when a leader steps forward. I would suggest that maybe a leader could gain a minor benefit in combat- morale boosts when scoring crits for example.
Lets not forget that monsters are also given roles to play. What does everyone think of those? For me, I've always been confused by the lurker.
BALANCE:
I'm appreciating cosine's take on balance being crucial to the fun.
The house rulings of Critical Hits and Misses can make the combat much more enjoyable because it offers that imbalance...At my table, there is no real rule, only the understanding that "something happens". Usually that something shifts the balance.
That is another failure of 4e's presentation. The combat role 'leader' and the PC who is in roleplay terms, the party leader are two separate concepts (and it is stated so in the PHB). It's confusing terminology. Perhaps 'enhancer' would have been a more accuarate, although blander term for the combat role.
I agree that the starting point for the game should be balance and roles. This doesn't mean the exact balance of 4e, nor the roles of 4e necessarily, but something so that the players and GM know what to expect of their characters, the other PCs in the party and the encounter difficulty. It's a lot easier to throw out these concepts and create an unbalanced encounter from a balanced starting point than the other way around.
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King of the Dead
United States
Portland
Oregon
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bigfluffylemon wrote: 4e 'roles' are (IMO) an explicit codification of something that's been a feature of the system (at least to some extent) from the day classes were invented. After all, why have different classes if they're not supposed to do different things?
I guess you can argue that 4e's innovation was to have every class have an active combat role. Arguably an OD&D thief may not have done much in combat, but backstab rules and fireballs suggest that even thieves and wizards were expected to contribute in combat sometimes in every edition. Roles simply clarify the way in which the are expected to contribute.
I agree five million percent with this.
I will never understand the thinking of those that fail to see this.
It's so obvious. It really seems like intellectual dishonesty to deny it as fact. It seems that people that do are so intent on capturing the feeling of some Shangri-La idealism of RPGs that they can't see that they've been playing with roles as they role-fucking-play despite their vehement denial of it.
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King of the Dead
United States
Portland
Oregon
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wavemotion wrote: Stix_Remix wrote: A system needs to be mechanically balanced so a GM knows how balanced something is. Or a system doesn't need to be mechanically balanced and the GM may have to adjust on the fly. Non-balanced systems are quite fun and I prefer them to the balanced 4e system. Dave
I've found that the extremely tightly balanced system that is 4e has allowed me to adjust on the fly much more comfortably than I ever would have done in another version.
There's adjusting and then there's throwing random numbers at the players.
If you see what I mean.
4e allows for fine adjustments on the fly. Other, more opaque games, only allow for throwing random things out and seeing what happens. Some people like that. I don't.
I feel that if I am going to run a game I want complete control over it, even if that control is to steer it straight into randomness and chaos.
I don't know how crazy I'm being if I can't see under the hood of the mechanics. 4e allows this and from now on I will always want its level of transparency when I'm behind the DM screen.
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Tiwaz Tyrsfist
United States
Gladstone
Missouri
Behold in amazement as my wife demonstrates the proper way to clean your cat.
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dugatrench wrote: I'm liking this discussion- very balanced.
ROLES:
I think the only role I have trouble with is the leader. I enjoy the tension that comes up when my adventuring party must appoint a leader, or when a leader steps forward. I would suggest that maybe a leader could gain a minor benefit in combat- morale boosts when scoring crits for example.
Lets not forget that monsters are also given roles to play. What does everyone think of those? For me, I've always been confused by the lurker.
As far as I could ever tell, "Leader" in 4e meant Healer. They just didn't want, for some reason, to call the healers "HEALER", so they went with the euphemistic "Leader". Because it's pretty clear when every "Leader" class has, as a class feature, a twice per day free heal, that they are THE HEALER...
I also never understood why the 4e designers were SO INCREDIBLY ADAMANT that there could NOT be a Martial Controller class. But I digress.
Monster roles were a good idea, to a point, but I think that what they REALLY needed was more focus on explaining monster TACTICS and less on applying labels.
As for "Lurkers", the best I understood it, IIRC, the idea with a Lurker was that it should have some sort of power to basically EXIT COMBAT for a couple rounds, then pop back in and do a large attack. Things like amphibious monsters that dive under water, gargoyles that turn to stone, or monsters that phase out for a turn then pop back in on top of you to do a power attack.
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Andrés Santiago Pérez-Bergquist
United States
Mountain View
California
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Nazhuret wrote: There's adjusting and then there's throwing random numbers at the players.
If you see what I mean.
4e allows for fine adjustments on the fly. Other, more opaque games, only allow for throwing random things out and seeing what happens.
Agreed. With 4E and the Monster-Manual-on-a-business-card formulas, I can come up with new monsters, including two or three cool powers, in literally under a minute and have a very good idea of how they'll play out in practice. This works out very well given my reactive style of GMing an the tendency for players to do the unexpected routinely.
TiwazTyrsfist wrote: As far as I could ever tell, "Leader" in 4e meant Healer. They just didn't want, for some reason, to call the healers "HEALER", so they went with the euphemistic "Leader". Because it's pretty clear when every "Leader" class has, as a class feature, a twice per day free heal, that they are THE HEALER...
4E Leaders heal, but they also do more. Healing is in addition to attacking, not instead of it, and they provide their comrades with bonuses or with additional attacks, all of which yield a much more active role than the traditional healer who stands in back and pumps hit points into other people.
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Eric Jome
United States
Milwaukee
Wisconsin
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Nazhuret wrote: I've found that the extremely tightly balanced system that is 4e has allowed me to adjust on the fly much more comfortably than I ever would have done in another version.
I agree. In earlier editions, it was an art form. Some GMs learned to do it well, some not so much. There was little in the way of mathematical or practical help. This edition has been fantastic in improving that situation...
Too fantastic maybe. They never really explain the value of not following the formula. As a result, encounters can be a bit homogenized. A more effective presentation of "How To Be A Good GM" would have included how to build a fair fight... and when to build a fight that isn't fair. And how to resolve that encounter when the fight isn't fair.
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Eric Jome
United States
Milwaukee
Wisconsin
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TiwazTyrsfist wrote: As far as I could ever tell, "Leader" in 4e meant Healer.
One of the apparent design goals of 4ed is that no one has to be the healer because clearly everyone hates being healers. So, lots of rules are added to allow for "no healers" - you can heal yourself every fight, you can get the much cooler sounding Leader to heal you, you can have lots more hit points to need it less often, you can freely heal yourself to full between fights.
All this was, like a lot of 4th, a mixed blessing. It was great if you really didn't like healers. But it also made everything feel less dangerous, less unique.
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Dave Bernazzani (@rpggeek)
United States
Plainville
Massachusetts
I wish to provide legendary service to the RPG community to help grow our hobby and enrich the lives of gamers everywhere.
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Nazhuret wrote:
I've found that the extremely tightly balanced system that is 4e has allowed me to adjust on the fly much more comfortably than I ever would have done in another version.
No question - after having DMed more than 100 hours of 4e, I can say that DMing 4e is easier than any previous version of D&D. But the balance was boring to me and, eventually, my players. Same-samey. I couldn't tell Wizard from Fighter or one NPC (mechanically) from the next - they all had abilities which I can only classify as 'spell-like'. There was no unique feel to anything. One spell/power/ability that did 2W felt just like another. It's cool that you enjoyed 4e - sounds like they will keep some aspects of it for 5e.
-Dave
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Neil Carr
United States
Barre
Vermont
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What I see as the real challenge is that when you dramatically highlight roles and balance it can really shove things towards gamist style of play. All well and good if you want that, but want that de-emphasized then it can end up being an uphill battle.
I'm rather torn on it all. There is plenty of good design work in 4e, but it all just goes down with a bad taste in my mouth. I want that organic feel to things, which I suppose to me would be a ruleset where the numbers are well assembled, but buried in such a way that you'd need to dig and disassemble things a bit to see the highly tuned engine.
The above has more to do with balance. The roles... for me at least it's just something that's intuitive. Formalizing things, embedding the metagame into what previously had been informal tags, such as "who's the tank?" just gives more license for everyone at the table to babble in metagame chatter, rather than getting into immersion.
I can see the value of roles in encounter and monster design, but once again I'd want it to be presented in such a way that it's somehow veiled a bit. Player's shouldn't be identifying the roles of the monster opponents and thus understand the mechanical implications. It should be visceral and immersive.
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Eric Jome
United States
Milwaukee
Wisconsin
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echoota wrote: somehow veiled a bit
Huzzah. And that is where the great games are separated from the crappy ones.
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Kevin H.
United States
Crescent City
California
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cosine wrote: echoota wrote: somehow veiled a bit Huzzah. And that is where the great games are separated from the crappy ones.
Along those lines, I'd like to see something kind of in between "minions" and regular monsters. Like an ability that makes the monster die if it ever takes an odd amount of damage, or something like that. I hated when someone would try and figure out who the minions were mechanically instead of story wise.
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King of the Dead
United States
Portland
Oregon
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cosine wrote: echoota wrote: somehow veiled a bit Huzzah. And that is where the great games are separated from the crappy ones.
I suppose you could just present the information to them in a different way.
But I guess this discussion is more about rules as written.
Much of this and another thread could be answered thusly.
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Aleksander R. Nordgarden Rødner
Norway
Oslo
Oslo
Proud father of Sarah Arwen
Live long and prosper.
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A lot has been said, which I have read, but will not comment on directly (as in quoting it).
Regarding roles in 4e; I think it's the wrong way of doing it. A game that inherently forces me to make a character that is not what I will call internally balanced (I'll come back to that) is not a game I am willing to spend time on.
Likewise, I think there is an inherent weakness in saying that "these characters should be balanced". Sure, within the party, there should be a general equality of level. Not necessarily so for stats. A rogue is inherently more dextrous than a fighter. Nothing wrong with that.
Internal balance: When I run a game, I ask my players to create well-rounded characters. In other words, a min-maxed character will only be allowed at the players explicit insistence, and will usually only meet challenges to the weaknesses.
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Scott McGougan
United States
Texas
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TiwazTyrsfist wrote:
I also never understood why the 4e designers were SO INCREDIBLY ADAMANT that there could NOT be a Martial Controller class. But I digress.
I so very much wanted the 4E Monk class to be a martial controller.
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