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D&D 4E: The fifth role.
I just read through parts a couple of long forum threads that were linked to in my last post, that were analyses of how the "roles" system in 4E are supposedly broken.
Suffice it to say as a beginning that I disagree. I'd like to preface this by saying that while I've been a pretty stalwart booster of 4E, I'm not a Wizards of the Coast partisan... my first impression of 4E was very negative and I approach each book that comes out from a skeptical, even suspicious, standpoint... but so far I've been won over. I'm impressed with what they're doing, when I stop and think about it and when I look at it in context.
But as I've said before, our first session didn't go so great until halfway through, because we didn't really understand the role of roles... once we got that, the game went great and we loved it. Now I come across people who've given the game more thought and more attention and they have a much lower opinion of the role of roles.
But the thing is, I keep reading people discussing how the roles are broken... and the criticism always seems to boil down to the idea that the DM can (and perhaps should) ignore the roles and just dogpile on the squishy but damage-dealing (or ally-damage-undoing) player characters to take them out first, which makes Defenders (the front-line fighters who would ideally be tying up the more dangerous opponents in combat) "worthless". According to this line of reasoning, the Defenders' abilities to "mark" opponents and penalize them for not focusing on the Defender aren't big enough "incentives" for a DM to actually focus attacks on them when they could be taking out the artillery.
Reading stuff like this, I guess some people missed the fact that the roles are there as guides for the DM as much (if not more so) than the players. They're there so the DM can provide balanced challenges on the assumption that the PCs are using a "standard" party with each role covered at least once... and if the PCs aren't, than the DM can figure out how to adjust things more easily.
That's the point of player roles. They only work if the DMs are performing their own roles.
Now, the DM's role outside of combat can be stated in varying ways. I formulate it thusly:
1. Make sure everybody has a good time.
2. Facilitate the unfolding of a story.
3. Roleplay the actions of the NPCs.
4. Adjudicate disputes, resolve non-automatic actions, and answer "Can I do this?"
I've listed them in what I consider the order of importance to be, though with a well-crafted story 1, 2, and 3 will frequently overlap with each other. The story and the roleplaying are what make it a roleplaying game, but if people aren't having a good time with your story and your characters, there's no point to sitting around a table for hours doing it, right? That's why I put "good time" as number 1.
Other people might have other priorities or state them differently, but there's not really anything too controversial there.
So what's the DM's role inside combat?
The same damn thing.
Why should it change? You're still playing the same game when a fight breaks out.
But it seems like some people approach D&D as two separate games: one an actual honest-to-goodness roleplaying game with actual roleplaying, and a tactical war game interrupts it. When this happens, the person who moments before was serving as narrator, supporting actor, and referee is now the enemy player who's out to use his or her knowledge of game statistics and probability to win a game against the rest of the players.
DMs who play that way would probably bristle at that description. They'd probably insist that they're just refusing to go easy on the player. They'd probably say that if the game were balanced it shouldn't matter.
And they're missing the point.
No system is "balanced" without a DM who is likewise balanced... I mean, whatever the mechanics, you can still go "ROCKS FALL, EVERYONE DIES". You can still have the only door leading out of a room trapped with an unavoidable instant deathtrap. And you can declare that all the monsters play a numbers game to figure out how to take a party down the quickest with no sense of drama, story, or style. You can play combat like the monsters are all appendages of a power gamer with a DM's knowledge of game mechanics, a bird's eye view of the battlefield, and no individuality or inner life.
Or you can perform the role of a DM.
The reason D&D is greater than an MMO is that in an MMO, scripted sequences are comparatively rare and the "intelligence" governing mobs in combat can't handle anything much more complicated than prioritizing attacks and keeping at optimal range in relationship to the target (i.e., up close or far away). In D&D, every encounter can be "scripted" on the fly and every monster is controlled by an actual intelligence. 4E is built to take advantage of this, with individual monsters roles and with the "tactics" section of each MM entry giving DMs cues
"Fuck that," the critics say. "It doesn't make any sense for them not to just dogpile on the squishy damage dealer. If the system were balanced, monsters wouldn't need to have separate tactics."
Hate to tell you, but you're part of the system. How the monsters act is part of the system, and that's under your control. There's no way to do that 100% mechanically, which is why there's a DM in the first place.
D&D is a "simulation" of heroic fantasy fiction. It arose out of tabletop war games, which is where a lot of the imbalances in the original formulation came from: in the games it evolved from, a side consisted of a number of unequal units and individual units could be wiped out in a hit or two and no one unit was very interesting or unique, so you had cheap frequent death at low level and no real attempt to balance character classes.
The game has moved away from that towards a model that more closely matches the "reality" of heroic fantasy, but a lot of people still approach combat as if it were a war game. Roleplaying gets turned off, the DM turns from impartial facilitator of both challenges and awesomeness to adversary, and it all comes down to die rolls.
There will always be power gamers who approach the whole game as combat and combat as A Thing to Be Won Mechanically, but if the DM is viewing it that way than players don't have a lot of choice. A player can't be more than his or her character sheet in combat if the DM isn't playing the same game.
I'm not saying that DMs need to line up enemies in the most convenient pattern for the heroes to mow them down. I'm saying they need to play mooks like they're freaking mooks, henchmen like they're henchmen, The Dragon like he's a dragon and the Big Bad like a Big Bad, not run the combat like it's a game where every piece on the board is... a piece on the board, all under the control of a single person who can calculate the probability of everything in convenient 5% intervals.
Played properly, combat doesn't just give every player something to do... it gives every player a challenge, gives every player some entertainment, and gives every player a chance to pull off something awesome. Played properly, combat is not just an interruption to the roleplaying that maybe determines how the next part of the story branches, it is part of the roleplaying and the story.
Of course, there is no "wrong" way to play a roleplaying game, but if somebody's DMing style consists of "do everything I can to wear the player characters down faster than they can wear 'my guys' down", they probably shouldn't bother playing a game that uses a tactical map, distinct roles for both sides, and distinct attack powers with individual flavors and feels. They should be playing freaking Tunnels and Trolls, or another game where combat boils down to a single hit or miss every round.
To put it another way... by way of parallel to MMORPGs... combat in D&D is not "PvP"... player vs. player, one human player trying to make their character kill another human player's character for in-game profit and bragging rights), but "PvE"... player vs. environment, one or more human players trying to overcome monsters who are an organic part of the game world, who should present a genuine challenge but ultimately are there for the players to overcome, and paying attention to the players' roles gives DMs ideas on how to play their role to make sure that this happens.
Suffice it to say as a beginning that I disagree. I'd like to preface this by saying that while I've been a pretty stalwart booster of 4E, I'm not a Wizards of the Coast partisan... my first impression of 4E was very negative and I approach each book that comes out from a skeptical, even suspicious, standpoint... but so far I've been won over. I'm impressed with what they're doing, when I stop and think about it and when I look at it in context.
But as I've said before, our first session didn't go so great until halfway through, because we didn't really understand the role of roles... once we got that, the game went great and we loved it. Now I come across people who've given the game more thought and more attention and they have a much lower opinion of the role of roles.
But the thing is, I keep reading people discussing how the roles are broken... and the criticism always seems to boil down to the idea that the DM can (and perhaps should) ignore the roles and just dogpile on the squishy but damage-dealing (or ally-damage-undoing) player characters to take them out first, which makes Defenders (the front-line fighters who would ideally be tying up the more dangerous opponents in combat) "worthless". According to this line of reasoning, the Defenders' abilities to "mark" opponents and penalize them for not focusing on the Defender aren't big enough "incentives" for a DM to actually focus attacks on them when they could be taking out the artillery.
Reading stuff like this, I guess some people missed the fact that the roles are there as guides for the DM as much (if not more so) than the players. They're there so the DM can provide balanced challenges on the assumption that the PCs are using a "standard" party with each role covered at least once... and if the PCs aren't, than the DM can figure out how to adjust things more easily.
That's the point of player roles. They only work if the DMs are performing their own roles.
Now, the DM's role outside of combat can be stated in varying ways. I formulate it thusly:
1. Make sure everybody has a good time.
2. Facilitate the unfolding of a story.
3. Roleplay the actions of the NPCs.
4. Adjudicate disputes, resolve non-automatic actions, and answer "Can I do this?"
I've listed them in what I consider the order of importance to be, though with a well-crafted story 1, 2, and 3 will frequently overlap with each other. The story and the roleplaying are what make it a roleplaying game, but if people aren't having a good time with your story and your characters, there's no point to sitting around a table for hours doing it, right? That's why I put "good time" as number 1.
Other people might have other priorities or state them differently, but there's not really anything too controversial there.
So what's the DM's role inside combat?
The same damn thing.
Why should it change? You're still playing the same game when a fight breaks out.
But it seems like some people approach D&D as two separate games: one an actual honest-to-goodness roleplaying game with actual roleplaying, and a tactical war game interrupts it. When this happens, the person who moments before was serving as narrator, supporting actor, and referee is now the enemy player who's out to use his or her knowledge of game statistics and probability to win a game against the rest of the players.
DMs who play that way would probably bristle at that description. They'd probably insist that they're just refusing to go easy on the player. They'd probably say that if the game were balanced it shouldn't matter.
And they're missing the point.
No system is "balanced" without a DM who is likewise balanced... I mean, whatever the mechanics, you can still go "ROCKS FALL, EVERYONE DIES". You can still have the only door leading out of a room trapped with an unavoidable instant deathtrap. And you can declare that all the monsters play a numbers game to figure out how to take a party down the quickest with no sense of drama, story, or style. You can play combat like the monsters are all appendages of a power gamer with a DM's knowledge of game mechanics, a bird's eye view of the battlefield, and no individuality or inner life.
Or you can perform the role of a DM.
The reason D&D is greater than an MMO is that in an MMO, scripted sequences are comparatively rare and the "intelligence" governing mobs in combat can't handle anything much more complicated than prioritizing attacks and keeping at optimal range in relationship to the target (i.e., up close or far away). In D&D, every encounter can be "scripted" on the fly and every monster is controlled by an actual intelligence. 4E is built to take advantage of this, with individual monsters roles and with the "tactics" section of each MM entry giving DMs cues
"Fuck that," the critics say. "It doesn't make any sense for them not to just dogpile on the squishy damage dealer. If the system were balanced, monsters wouldn't need to have separate tactics."
Hate to tell you, but you're part of the system. How the monsters act is part of the system, and that's under your control. There's no way to do that 100% mechanically, which is why there's a DM in the first place.
D&D is a "simulation" of heroic fantasy fiction. It arose out of tabletop war games, which is where a lot of the imbalances in the original formulation came from: in the games it evolved from, a side consisted of a number of unequal units and individual units could be wiped out in a hit or two and no one unit was very interesting or unique, so you had cheap frequent death at low level and no real attempt to balance character classes.
The game has moved away from that towards a model that more closely matches the "reality" of heroic fantasy, but a lot of people still approach combat as if it were a war game. Roleplaying gets turned off, the DM turns from impartial facilitator of both challenges and awesomeness to adversary, and it all comes down to die rolls.
There will always be power gamers who approach the whole game as combat and combat as A Thing to Be Won Mechanically, but if the DM is viewing it that way than players don't have a lot of choice. A player can't be more than his or her character sheet in combat if the DM isn't playing the same game.
I'm not saying that DMs need to line up enemies in the most convenient pattern for the heroes to mow them down. I'm saying they need to play mooks like they're freaking mooks, henchmen like they're henchmen, The Dragon like he's a dragon and the Big Bad like a Big Bad, not run the combat like it's a game where every piece on the board is... a piece on the board, all under the control of a single person who can calculate the probability of everything in convenient 5% intervals.
Played properly, combat doesn't just give every player something to do... it gives every player a challenge, gives every player some entertainment, and gives every player a chance to pull off something awesome. Played properly, combat is not just an interruption to the roleplaying that maybe determines how the next part of the story branches, it is part of the roleplaying and the story.
Of course, there is no "wrong" way to play a roleplaying game, but if somebody's DMing style consists of "do everything I can to wear the player characters down faster than they can wear 'my guys' down", they probably shouldn't bother playing a game that uses a tactical map, distinct roles for both sides, and distinct attack powers with individual flavors and feels. They should be playing freaking Tunnels and Trolls, or another game where combat boils down to a single hit or miss every round.
To put it another way... by way of parallel to MMORPGs... combat in D&D is not "PvP"... player vs. player, one human player trying to make their character kill another human player's character for in-game profit and bragging rights), but "PvE"... player vs. environment, one or more human players trying to overcome monsters who are an organic part of the game world, who should present a genuine challenge but ultimately are there for the players to overcome, and paying attention to the players' roles gives DMs ideas on how to play their role to make sure that this happens.