- Fighter and Healer - An combat system with hit points has two obvious "roles": The guy who deals damage to the enemy (4E striker) and the guy who heals damage dealt to his allies (4E leader). 4E expands on this by adding a guy who inflicts status effects (controller). You could argue that a defender heals indirectly, because healing powers are more effective on him (they heal a percentage of his max HP, and he gets a higher total than others).
- Skill Monkeys were taken out of 4E - or rather, everyone is a bit of skill monkey since everyone gets a similar amount of skills.
- Holder of Win Buttons is the odd guy out. A Wizard in earlier editions get a limited number of spells that can solve problems when the party's fighting tactics or puzzle-solving skills fail. Sleep wins combats at low level, Fireball wins them at higher ones, Knock sorts out pesky locked doors if the thief is out of commission, and then there are all the divination rituals for when the party is really stumped. Of course, at high level, the Wizard get too many win buttons and goes from "useful party member" to "party leader with three pets".
Anyway, there are two oddities with the old roles, at least as they appear in D&D 3.
- Nonstandard classes don't fill the roles well (and don't come with instructions).
- The Druid is a worse healer than the Cleric - the same healing spells are higher level for him, and he gets no spontaneous casting of cure spells - but gets some win buttons to compensate.
- The Bard (and Monk) can't fill in for a Rogue - at least not in the trap disarming department.
- The Ranger, Paladin and Barbarian do well enough at replacing the Fighter.
- The Sorcerer can blast better than the Wizard, but is out of luck when he needs an obscure utility spell.
- The Druid is a worse healer than the Cleric - the same healing spells are higher level for him, and he gets no spontaneous casting of cure spells - but gets some win buttons to compensate.
- Splitting of spotlight. First the rogue disarms a trap and unlocks a door. Then the fighter rushes in to kill everything, while the cleric stands by to heal him. Then more traps - the thief gets the spotlight again. Meanwhile, the Wizard is standing by waiting for the best moment to step in and press one of his "win buttons". This is a design that's worked for 30 years, but not one I agree with, and plenty of other game systems have changed it.
Of course, D&D 4E missed an opportunity too. Everyone has a combat role, and is relatively competent in skill challenges. However, there is little differentiation in what skills characters have. There is some, in that Arcane characters are likely to have Arcana, Divine ones probably have Religion, Primal ones have Nature and Martial ones get... heck if I know. Still, the roles make it easy to get a good spread of combat roles when characters are rolled up, while skills still have to be doled out manually.
I don't have a better solution. The problem with delineated skill-roles is that the obvious division - Talker, Mechanic, Athlete and Living Encyclopedia - split the spotlight again. The Talker rules social encounters while the Athlete and Mechanic disarm traps. The best is probably to focus on the skills that your stats work with - a diverse group should cover most of the stats, and that provides a natural division of skills. Watch out if everyone plays Arcane classes, though - you'll rock at intelligence-based skills and be mediocre at the others.
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Some good stuff here, although I don't know that I would agree with everything you've said. Your comment about the Wizard as "Holder of Win Buttons" is one of the best summaries of their role in the game (and the attendant problems with that role) that I've yet seen.
But I can't help feeling that there's a big picture that people who talk about combat roles miss. 4e smoothed out differences between character classes into "balanced" combat roles, but it does a great disservice to the complexity of the class system. The focus of the classes need to be considered in the context of the larger game, not just combat - what they had was more of a paradigm than a role.
Yes, Fighters were the kings of combat, and had the best saves against the dragon breath and such. But they *also* had the ability to command the most political power and followers once they reached name level.
In addition to their healing, Clerics had a wide array of divinations, and spells to ward off harmful magic, effects, and creatures. Many of them were able to avert battles entirely, or enable the party to go places they couldn't normally tread. And of course, they reign supreme when dealing with dark powers and black magic.
And speaking of averting battles, there's the Thief. "Skill monkey" doesn't do justice to a character who (played cleverly) might walk off with the treasure and never even have to draw steel. When you can decipher the treasure map to the goblins' fort, slip past the guards in stealth or in disguise, pick the key to the treasure chest from the leader's pocket, locate and disarm the trap, pick the lock, and steal the treasure and slip out over the wall - all without being discovered - why would you even want to get *into* a fight, let alone play a particular role in one?
WRT the wizard, there was an additional balancing factor for them at high levels - although perhaps not one that went far enough - that has since vanished from the game. He could attract only a fraction of the masses of followers and underlings the other classes get, instead using his more powerful magic to make up for the lack of a strong support base.
A lot of the minor classes were built around a separate paradigm of this sort, *not* a combat role. Many of a Druid's "win buttons" were designed to only work in natural environs. In exchange for some of that healing power they *also* got the ability to change their shape, which is useful in a thousand thousand ways outside of mere combat. Bards were not just half-assed jacks-of-all-trades, they were masters of charm spells and knowledgeable sages, with reams of lore the rest of the party had no access to.
The real trouble when dealing with class "roles" and "balance" is in order for the idea to have any value, you have to assume that every campaign works the same and has the same needs. But they don't. That Thief might be great for a game full of intrigue or dungeon-based treasure hunting, but he just doesn't work as well in a combat-based battlefield campaign against the Necromancer's legions.
Character classes written to fill a niche in one campaign get published. Several of those classes gain in popularity with players, becoming sacred cows. Fashion and the Powers that Be then start to alter the focus of the game. They publishers can't exclude long-established and beloved character types, or the fans will riot. They try to shoehorn those characters into a new paradigm, even if they no longer fit the change in focus. They trim the "useless" abilities to focus on the "important" stuff. But those abilities weren't useless: its just that the niche for the class simply no longer exists.
It's the balance of the overall game that matters. In 4e, the scope of play is a tactical combat. Given that one fight often eats up more than half of a given game session, it would be silly to claim a wider scope than that. But in the pre-3e editions, balancing combat is a red herring: Fighting is only part of the overall scope of the game.
"But those abilities weren't useless: its just that the niche for the class simply no longer exists."
Bingo. However, what you describe sounds a lot like what RPGnetters call the "Decker" problem. The Decker in Shadowrun has an entirely separate subsystem for netrunning, so most sessions have a 30-minute session when the Decker hacks stuff and the other players sit on their thumbs. Could be called the Thief problem if what you describe happens.
Not a problem in a solo campaign, of course, but in a traditional 4-player game, you get back to the "splitting of spotlight" problem.
Yeah. I've always found spotlight splitting to be the problem in just about any ad-hoc party in nearly any game. It actually happened to me two weeks ago in my 4e game, when a rogue stealthed out to scout this weird object that fell from the sky. He had to take a boat and cross three or four miles of thick swamps to get there, and he neglected to bring along any means of finding his way back.
Ironically, the grognard-style mega-dungeon sandbox game that I run on the side has so far (accidentally) averted the problem - the spotlight only ever seems to split in town when people are handling personal business. Partly, I think it helps that Castles and Crusades has one very vague mechanics for most actions and no "Remove Traps" ability for rogues. So everyone (or at least, everyone but the hack-and-slashers) tends to pitch ideas on how to safely deal with traps and dungeon weirdness without exploding.
Mostly, though, I think it's because when the time comes for a wandering monster check in the actual dungeon, I roll once for each separate part of the group. Fear will keep the local systems in line. *evilgrin*
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