4e complaining, 2010 style - split from Lago's Kickass etc.

[Lago PARANOIA]

It all just circularly comes back to "That's how it works in WoW."

I can't tell you how delicious it was to hear one of the top architects for 4E D&D to have every design goal rejected except 'have it play more like WoW'.

Seriously, that makes me purr with inhuman, sadistic delight. Today is going to be a good day at the forums.

More seriously, however:

In short, if you don't play the game the way the playtesters did...it's not ever going to balance!

Well, no fooling, that's why clerics and wizards were so berserkly powerful while healer clerics and blaster wizards were a total joke.

But the way they decided to fix this dissonance, by shaving away all of the options that made clerics better anything than healers and wizards anything but blasters was extremely unsatisfying. I'm now convinced that the ultimate failure of 4E that paradoxically hooked people who don't know anything better is how they did role protection.

What they SHOULD have done is come up with a huge list of monsters with wacky powers and schticks. The weirder the better. Then they should have come up with a range of possible tactics to defeat the monsters and then ranked them by universality. Tactics that were too universal would be neemed or split up, tactics that were too weak would be boosted up or kicked down a tier (so you could collect several of them and cobble together a decent character).

Where they fucked up was coming up with a list of roles, without really deciding how they would fit together or how they would help beat challenges, then hammering the classes to fit the roles. And then to prove that their system worked they neutered the tactics and schticks of monsters until 'I Divine Challenge it!' + 'I Twin Strike it!' + 'I Healing Word the people who got hurt!' became the universal answer for all challenges. So you have a bland and cookie-cutter game.

I can only imagine how much better 4E would've been if they really examined WHY people were playing outside the way the devs wanted to rather than just deciding that the way people were playing was bad and were going to be punished by having their toys taken away.

[Lago PARANOIA]

but to that I seriously reply "So what?"

If you don't ever think that it's important or necessary that the fighter would have to make a Religion check or that the rogue makes a Nature check (and that means that the cleric will always be able to make a religion check on his own and the ranger can always make a Nature check on her own) then I don't have an answer that can satisfy you.

I can say that the setup is satisfying for games like Shadowrun where you have party roles but many challenges are expected to be met by the entire group rather than steamrolled by one person while everyone piggybacks atop of them.

[RandomCasualty2]

If you don't ever think that it's important or necessary that the fighter would have to make a Religion check or that the rogue makes a Nature check (and that means that the cleric will always be able to make a religion check on his own and the ranger can always make a Nature check on her own) then I don't have an answer that can satisfy you.

No, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that it's not a big deal if one fighter makes checks at a +3 while the other makes checks at a +2. It's not even going to be noticeable pretty much and I don't think think it matters if both are just set to a +2. Remember these are skills you didn't take anyway, so it's not something you expect your character to be good at.

So asking that you're slightly better than someone else for some reason, probably isn't high on your list. If one druid trained the skill and the other did not, then obviously you've got a difference. A rogue using acrobatics, even an untrained one, ends up being better than a dwarven defender because he has the "agile" trait from his dexterous attack powers, which gives him a bonus to dexterity related checks.

I can say that the setup is satisfying for games like Shadowrun where you have party roles but many challenges are expected to be met by the entire group rather than steamrolled by one person while everyone piggybacks atop of them.

Yeah, I can see the need to ability scores in level-less games like shadowrun. But in a level based system, you seriously don't need them.

[shadzar]

And finally, shadzar's post which attempts to contrast Noonan to the MMO crowd seems to me off.

It wasn't that Noonan was the counter to MMO style design, but rather Mearls only knew MMOs and didn't like D&D prior to getting a job working on D&D...seems kind of like hiring someone with Parkinson's Disease to carry nitro. You just know it is going to end up bad.

So not that Noonan didn't like MMOs, but that he at least liked D&D, and wa looking for a way to design it.

I always thought the idea of roles as in 4th are just stupid, no matter what they came to be, the way the game defines your participation in it breaks from all sense of an open and free thinking game.

So it was all to the point that Mearls and Bill Suckadick should have nothing to do with a D&D that will be a decent D&D game..ergo why you have a 4th edition which is more MMO minis game, than an RPG like D&D.

I have seen Noonan play, and while I wouldn't want him DMing any of my games, we at least have an idea he knows what he is doing. When it comes to Mearls...we don't know shit. He is trying to be the new Frank Mentzer, but hiding in an office.

Bill Suckadick knows so little about D&D< that he went on the MMO Report on G4 and tried to relate to it by comparing 4th edition combat like a basketball game with two teams. He knows nothing of his audiences and what interest they have, as can clearly be shown their and with the confused look on his face of Scott Rouse sitting beside Bill the entire time. You don't want someone trying to say you game is "taking back" from MMOs, and that your game is going to run like a sport when you are the head of R&D for D&D. You need to speak to your audience, at least for the fucking one that he was being interviewed to address.

Your head of research, needs to do a bit of, i don't know what is the word...oh right....RESEARCH!, and your designers need to like what they are designing for. If you don't like spoons and would rather everyone uses forks, then you shouldn't be hired to design spoons.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So asking that you're slightly better than someone else for some reason, probably isn't high on your list.

Again, this is only true if you worship 4E's current setup where everyone shuts the hell up when it comes time to diplomatize or to translate the diary of some fallen hero.

If you set up challenges so that it's impossible for 4 illiterates to piggyback atop of the wizard on the 'translate the runes in one week or the city explodes!' then people suddenly do care about skills lower down the list.

Shadowrun pulls this off not because it uses a level-less system (seriously, it's irrelevant) but because occasionally the street samurai is expected to fast-talk a Lone Star agent or a mage is supposed to sneak down a ward-protected hallway. D&D's current setup where you can always get a specialist for any task and filter out the chaff doesn't exist for that game.

[RandomCasualty2]

Again, this is only true if you worship 4E's current setup where everyone shuts the hell up when it comes time to diplomatize or to translate the diary of some fallen hero.

Nah not really. I mean it just means that you accept that all untrained druids are basically equal at diplomatizing or whatever it is they didn't focus on. And I think overall that's fine. Nobody will hardly notice a +1 bonus anyway. Like I said, all you really lose is a little bit of granularity.

If you get to the point where you want minor specialists. Then maybe you add in another skill category or let people choose one minor trait in addition to the other stuff they've got. So you could take "social" to get a +2 to social abilities, or "knowledgeable" to get a +2 to knowledge stuff.

Other than that, honestly Lago, I just don't see people making a big deal about the fact that their chances are equal. If the rigger and the street samurai both try to discern magical script untrained, I honestly don't think that anyone is going to care if both are equal or if one has an almost unnoticeable edge.

Shadowrun pulls this off not because it uses a level-less system (seriously, it's irrelevant) but because occasionally the street samurai is expected to fast-talk a Lone Star agent or a mage is supposed to sneak down a ward-protected hallway. D&D's current setup where you can always get a specialist for any task and filter out the chaff doesn't exist for that game.

True, Shadowrun definitely forces you to use off character skills more, but I don't feel like a system like the one I'm describing would even be bad for Shadowrun necessarily. Basically it would just be replacing SR attributes with level. And really you'd only lose a slight bit of fine tuning there, because most characters with relevant skills already have the attributes to use them well.

You're not going to have 1 agility and focus in firearms. That's just not going to happen.

And because the dudes that take a lot of agility skills would get the "agile" tag or whatever, and the logic skills would get "logical", you'd end up doing pretty well at determining who should be good at untrained acrobatics or who can gets the bonus to try to repair something even though he's untrained.

Of course, what you really tend to lack is the differentiation between attributes of 1 and 2. There aren't really too many variable levels of suck.

[ggroy]

[mean_liar]

The presence of variations between characters' periphery skills doesn't detract from the game experience, but it doesn't add a lot either. Minor bonuses tied to Background traits or Strengths and Weaknesses are fun and diversify a character, but its not essential to have them as assignable points that allow access to a mid-range of competency to have a meaningful character.

I honestly like how 4e did skills and Background options in that regard.

Again, this is only true if you worship 4E's current setup where everyone shuts the hell up when it comes time to diplomatize or to translate the diary of some fallen hero.

Niche protection unto itself isn't a bad concept, its the problem of how niche relevance is supported and general access to skills, which is where 4e DnD shits the bed: certain characters get tons of skills and other don't, and I don't see a compelling reason why if their combat significance is supposed to be the same. So yes, it's okay if some characters don't get to shine sometimes as long as they get to shine in other occasions.

[Psychic Robot]

Part 1: The roles in D&D (defender, leader, striker, controller) and WoW (tank, healer, DPS, and a side order of crowd control) aren't inherent in player psychology.

Duh.

Part 2: You can't find proto-roles in the fantasy literature that inspired D&D (and thus WoW) or in other relevant cultural touchstones like comic books or Star Wars.

No literary background? Well, they must have come from somewhere.

Part 3: Tanks emerged in D&D because magic users could not survive low level gameplay, and in a cooperative game like D&D, everyone contributes to keeping that guy at your table happy.

Protecting the weaker teammates? How could I have overlooked this?!

Part 4: Healers emerged because magical healing was so important to keeping a D&D party active and engaged in the ongoing narrative, but that magical healing was available from only a handful of the original character classes (the cleric, mostly).

Healing keeps the party from having extended periods of rest? Madness.

In conclusion:

4e class roles are arbitrary psychological restraints shackled to players in order to keep them playing how the designers have decided they ought to play. While there is absolutely no literary basis for class roles, the "standard" class roles that we know today came from players automatically adapting their playstyle to cope with challenges. MMOs took these playstyles and made them an integral part of the game. Rather than allowing players to play the game in a manner that best suited their group, the 4e developers chose to thrust class roles onto the players in order to enforce a certain playstyle. In fact, 4e is the first edition of D&D where class capabilities are based on the peremptory mechanical expectations of the developers rather than the ideas of what a class should be able to do (that is, the fluff behind the class). Thus, the entire idea of class roles codified into 4e is based on the restrictive nature of MMOs that works to preserve gameplay based on the developers' preconceptions.

In short, the 4e developers wanted to keep players on a short leash.

[Lago PARANOIA]

In short, the 4e developers wanted to keep players on a short leash.

TBH, this thing has been going on for a good long while. If you want to do high-level adventuring in Shadowrun, you need a rigger and a mage and possibly a street samurai. The iconic D&D party is thief/mage/fighter/cleric, all with different capabilities.

I don't have a problem with role protection, not anymore, and I do admit that there's a distinct advantage in getting new people to come together and have a frame to do some teamwork. It's just that 4E really messed up role protection badly in several ways, in addition to other unrelated problems which exacerbated the fail. For example, even if the roles were well-defined and actually worked as advertised (for example, tanks actually tanked well without DM pity and controllers had a more identifiable schtick), the blandness of the power structure would still make nerds rage.

[A Man In Black]

You can go through his entire descent into madness. And it's all a giant WTF. He admits that the roles aren't inherent to player psychology. He admits that they aren't based on or supported by any literature. His description of the Tank role (and every other role) is completely unlike the utility that old school Fighting Men had (or any other class, for that matter). It all just circularly comes back to "That's how it works in WoW."

Seriously, how did he get so uncreative?

It's even worse than that. He's talking about the design process for both 4e and WOW. It's as bad as you say for 4e, but the only reason he can come up with for why WOW has tanks, healers, and DPS is because...MMOs have tanks, healers, and DPS!

[A Man In Black]

Some more random complaining, this time about the left hand not knowing what the right is doing.

A sidebar on page 65 of Divine Power states that "As an invoker, you can't dedicate yourself to an evil deity without matching the god's alignment, but that doesn't mean the dark gods can't ask for some return on the immortals' divine investment" and offers some plot hooks based uncomfortable situations where followers of evil gods make common cause with good invokers.

A sidebar on page 66 suggests: "For a darker twist, maybe an evil deity gave you your powers, but you seek to use them in a righteous way".

[shadzar]

I bet you check DDI Rules Compendium and you will find yet another ruling, or the Rules Compendium coming to print will have yet another.

The same as asking the question by two different people to CS at WotC will yield many different results, because, even though they claim to ask a dev, they just make the shit up on the spot rather than contact anyone that might know what they were talking about in the book.

[RandomCasualty2]

I don't have a problem with role protection, not anymore, and I do admit that there's a distinct advantage in getting new people to come together and have a frame to do some teamwork. It's just that 4E really messed up role protection badly in several ways, in addition to other unrelated problems which exacerbated the fail. For example, even if the roles were well-defined and actually worked as advertised (for example, tanks actually tanked well without DM pity and controllers had a more identifiable schtick), the blandness of the power structure would still make nerds rage.

After 4E, I think role protection is pretty much everything that's wrong with the game, and I'd like to see it abolished entirely. I think more or less everyone should be playing some kind of role and that role should change based off of what you're fighting. In some battles, the mage should be playing defense, countering enemy spells, shielding his allies from fire, etc. In others, he should be the guy blasting while the fighters try to keep the enemy off him. In fact, I'd be as far as to say that every class should get powers from each of the roles, but they should be conditional enough that you have to pick the right one.

The mage may be able to act as a defender against spells, but against physical attacks he tends to want a meat shield protecting him. Against an incorporeal creature, the mage may have to be the controller and debuff the thing to let his party members hit it.

An archer may be a striker against melee stuff, lay down cover fire against enemy archers, and act as a controller by disrupting mage spells, and causing flying creatures to come down to earth.

Also, on a side note, the leader position shouldn't really exist. Buffing the party should basically be a last resort of people who literally have no great actions. So if you've got shit to do, you use aid another or toss out a heal. This is mainly because the leader role is opposition independent. Quite simply you can always just buff and heal whether it's fire elementals, human warriors or mind flayers. And that's bad for the game.

The worst feature of 4E is that bullshit that your primary schtick is always valid and all you do is spam it. That needs to die a horrible death.

[Murtak]

If you want to do high-level adventuring in Shadowrun, you need a rigger and a mage and possibly a street samurai.

Do you? Balanced teams are often nice, but you can solve most problems entirely without violence. So what do you need a street sam for? Riggers can do scouting, transportation and artillery. Thats great. But everyone can do some form of scouting and three quarters of the archetypes can grab a rocket launcher. Samurai can handle transportation and often mages can too. Mages can do astral reconnaissance, magical stealth and one-shot people damn well, but a well-placed decker often makes invisibility spells needless, street sams and drones are quite good and dishing out the hurt (and do it all day long) and astral scouting is a lot harder against important targets. Deckers can scout and disable security and decrypt data - but you can do all of that with social engineering and anyone at all can do that with a decent charisma and influence.

Seriously, what archetype can do something that can not be achieved in another way? Shadowrun roles overlap so much it is hard to call them roles at all. They are more akin to methods - different ways to achieve something many others can do as well.

Contrast this with DnD (3E - no need to talk about 4E). Classes with trapfinding are few and far between. Cheap healing belongs exclusively to divine casters. Precise "I win a specific encounter" spells belong almost exclusively to arcane casters. Overlap is next to zero.

[RandomCasualty2]

The only real class needed in SR is the hacker. There are just so many secrity systems you need to bypass that honestly without hacking you're going to get your ass kicked on any but the simplest missions. Once the alarm goes off and your enemies get barricaded down and wait for you in ambush until backup arrives, you're in deep deep trouble. Potentially your defenses may be good enough to just go in there and soak the damage, but in Shadowrun that's not really too likely.

[Username17]

After 4E, I think role protection is pretty much everything that's wrong with the game, and I'd like to see it abolished entirely. I think more or less everyone should be playing some kind of role and that role should change based off of what you're fighting. In some battles, the mage should be playing defense, countering enemy spells, shielding his allies from fire, etc. In others, he should be the guy blasting while the fighters try to keep the enemy off him. In fact, I'd be as far as to say that every class should get powers from each of the roles, but they should be conditional enough that you have to pick the right one.

You're buying into David Noonan's concept of roles, which is bad. Don't do it. Roles are about having something to do whose toes are not specifically stepped on by another player. The game mechanical enforcement of the narrative imperative to not put two speedsters onto your super hero team.

Noonan's concept of roles as being "guy who does this one action over and over and over again" is completely unsupported by any fiction or inspirational source because it is fucking dull. Nobody likes that. They want to be the only ice projector, not the guy who provides a small area burst of minor damage with an attached slow effect every round. Each player is supposed to feel special, not confined.

But the idea of protecting roles is not bad, it's basically necessary. It's just that the things Noonan is suggesting that we protect are jaw droppingly inane. A role is protected if the things you do to the party and the enemy are at reduced effectiveness if more than one person is doing exactly the same thing. That's it. If you can stand up and make an honest logical argument that you are already playing a character who does X, so a new player needs to get his own schtick, then your X is a protected roll. Yes, it's really that simple.

For example: if haste and slow are binary status effects, Time Mage is probably a protected role. If they are bonuses and penalties that stack with multi-castings, then Time Mage is unprotected. In the first case you can say "I'm already a Time Mage, so I'll be slowing the enemies. There's not much for a second Time Mage to do." and in the second case you can't. At least, not rationally.

Role protection is to protect players from feeling like they aren't special snow flakes contributing to the team. Role protection is not what David Noonan thinks it is for - which is apparently to protect players from being able to vary their tactics.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Seriously, what archetype can do something that can not be achieved in another way?

Undetectable assassination (which means magic is out of the question), people convincing, magic, and computer skills.

A lot of Shadowrun adventures are structured around the idea of 'retrieve this file' or 'convince this scientist to jump ship' or 'kill this heavily-guarded CEO and make it look like an accident'.

[ggroy]

[RandomCasualty2]

Noonan's concept of roles as being "guy who does this one action over and over and over again" is completely unsupported by any fiction or inspirational source because it is fucking dull. Nobody likes that. They want to be the only ice projector, not the guy who provides a small area burst of minor damage with an attached slow effect every round. Each player is supposed to feel special, not confined.

I don't really think of Time mage as a role, so much as a concept. Roles in my opinion are something strategic, while the character concept is thematic. Units in an army (or strategy game) are big on roles. There are ranged attackers, melee attacks, support units, artillery, skirmishers, spies, etc.

On the topic of concepts, I'm not exactly sure if we need to protect them exactly. I think the more important thing is to determine how locked into a theme we want characters to be. For instance, if your schtick is "Time Mage", how many of your powers actually have to be time related, and how many can be crossclassed from other people?

If you set up your prerequisites right and balance your system correctly, you'll be able to establish characters with different concepts that don't step on each others toes. The only real reason you generally get people stepping on each others toes is if you have abilities that are overpowered that everyone wants. If someone sets out to make a swordsman, they'll take sword powers. The only reason they're going to be dipping into time magic is if haste is broken, their sword powers suck or their concept actually wants them to be a gish.

The concept that you want to prevent people from dipping time magic is probably not even a good idea, because it limits character concepts. Some people really just want to be a warrior with a splash of time mage.

No matter how much character concept protection you have, nothing is going to stop one PC from making the same character as another. The best way you have to encourage different concepts is to have different concepts be equally useful and possibly to set it such that powers of various concepts don't stack well with the same powers. For instance, you can only get hasted once, so having two people take the spell isn't necessarily a good idea.

But I don't feel like having an iron fisted policy of "you can't take this ability" is good for an RPG, because a great many concepts are in fact blends of other concepts, and you drive yourself insane trying to accommodate gishes that way.

[Murtak]

The only real class needed in SR is the hacker. There are just so many secrity systems you need to bypass that honestly without hacking you're going to get your ass kicked on any but the simplest missions.

Sure, you can sneak into facility x at night, after the decker has taken over the security system. You can also sneak in invisibly, impersonate legitimate personnel via cyberware or adept powers, try to get hired to work there or )admittedly in few cases) just blow through whatever security is on site and be done while the SWAT team is still assembling their gear.

Once the alarm goes off and your enemies get barricaded down and wait for you in ambush until backup arrives, you're in deep deep trouble. Potentially your defenses may be good enough to just go in there and soak the damage, but in Shadowrun that's not really too likely.

How does having a decker on the team relate to shooting it out with security reinforcements? Why would you care about random security goons barricading somewhere? In what scenario can't you just go another way and be happy not to deal with them?

Undetectable assassination (which means magic is out of the question), people convincing, magic, and computer skills.

Undetectable assassination? Why does it have to be undetectable? Anyways: Mages can probably rig something if the investigation will take a couple of hours. Otherwise a street sam can play sniper, a bioware stealth sam can probably do the deed close up, sabotage is always a good staple and best of all you might get one of the target's enemies to do your job for you. Depending on where the target hangs out heavy machinery attached to the matrix can do it.

People convincing - anyone with a decent charisma score and influence will do to smooth-talk your average guard. If you are talking about outdoing professionals or getting that guard to risk his job you might have to resort to a dedicated face, an adept or someone willing to blow a little cyber or an attribute boost. Or you may have to resort to blackmail or bribery.

Magic - well you got me there. To do magic you need to be able to do magic. But what do you use it for that is unreplaceable?

Computer skills: see magic.

[RandomCasualty2]

Sure, you can sneak into facility x at night, after the decker has taken over the security system. You can also sneak in invisibly, impersonate legitimate personnel via cyberware or adept powers, try to get hired to work there or )admittedly in few cases) just blow through whatever security is on site and be done while the SWAT team is still assembling their gear.

SR invisibility isn't D&D invisibility. Pretty much it's near useless against cameras, except with a ridiculous amount of hits and people still get to resist it to see through it, and if you pass through a ward, it drops your spell, so it's easy to create a security checkpoint.

Accomplishing infiltration is also very difficult without a hacker, because you quite simply probably need a hacker to get you through the security systems. Just because you look like someone who works there doesn't mean you know the code to open up a maglock. Also hackers are integral to recon and planning in the preliminary phases so you even know where you're going. Inevitably, the guy who gets the building floorplan and tells you where to go is going to be the hacker. Otherwise you're stuck either paying an NPC hacker, or going in D&D style where you do a room to room search. That rarely ever goes well in SR.

Also, drones and sentry guns. These little bastards are a bitch for your mage to take out and can even do a number on your street samurai. The hacker is your best bet to take them out.

What happens when the facility goes on lock down and blast doors start slamming down? Either you brought some heavy explosives, or once again you're counting on the hacker to get you out.

Of course, there's also counterhacking as well. If your team is running your commlinks for shit like communication, you can bet that any spiders on site are out there trying to scan your asses down once the fighting breaks out. If they get into your link and start feeding you false signals from your hacked cyber eyes or gets control of your cyber arm, that's bad. Real bad.

Now I'm not saying it's impossible without a hacker, but it is way more difficult in most cases. The SR world is tightly linked with the matrix and it really can help you everywhere.

How does having a decker on the team relate to shooting it out with security reinforcements? Why would you care about random security goons barricading somewhere? In what scenario can't you just go another way and be happy not to deal with them?

Because likely they'll be barricading themselves to protect the secure locations, which typically is what your shadowrunning team is after.

And since you're running without a hacker, when the alarms go off, you can be sure the security teams are closely monitoring the cameras... cameras you couldn't hack because you didn't have a hacker. So they know exactly where you are and where to set a trap.

[Username17]

I don't really think of Time mage as a role, so much as a concept. Roles in my opinion are something strategic, while the character concept is thematic.

Time Mage can be a role and a concept.

"Roles" are mechanically protected things.
"Concepts" are things that are broadly describable by inference with a few words.

So "Time Mage" is a concept because I can use those two words and imply that the character has the power to speed things up, slow things down, possibly stop things or instantly hop from one place to another. That's intellectually complicated, but it's distillable into just two words.

Time Mage may or may not be a role. If it isn't available in the game at all, it obviously isn't. If everyone in the setting gets a certain amount of Time Magic, then it still isn't. Time Mage is a role if it exists and is mechanically protected - either by being only available to characters with specific tags or having limited stacking, or both (usually both).

The thing is that David Noonan got what roles are for exactly backwards. So if you accept his idea of how to use them, the only conclusion you can reach is that they are bad for the game and need to be scrapped entirely. But that's not really true, because it is nevertheless true that if you're going to make a super team with Impulse on it, you aren't going to put Quicksilver or Flash on it. And when you're playing a game it is important to have logical numeric arguments to back that up rather than simply the emotional plea of "stop horning in on my schtick you fucking asshole."

When designing roles to be protected for your game, there are really oly a couple of rules to do it right:

• There need it be substantially more roles than the expected number of players.
• No specific role should be mandatory.

The statement "I am already playing X, you need to play something other than X" is a fair statement. In fact, people need to be able to make that argument honestly and coherently so that their character can feel special. The statement "We don't have an X yet, so you need to play an X" is ten flavors of bullshit, and should not be made under any circumstances.

So there are lots of protectable roles. Guy-who-uses-fear, guy-who-uses-time-magic, guy-who-uses-entangle, and so on. David Noonan's roles are not protectable for several reasons. The most obvious is that he has less of them than he has PCs. So obviously it is definitionally required that every role play nicely with another copy of itself. So if you are playing a "Defender" then you can't tell someone else to stop horning in on your schtick by playing another defender, because the fifth player has to horn in on somebody's schtick by definition. Secondly, the things the roles do aren't unique. every character attacks. Every character gets attacked. Every character heals. Every character drops minions.

A proper role is really any arbitrary division of the play space that the team only wants one player character to do, for whatever reason. Noonan's roles are terribly defined.

-Username17

[Parthenon]

How reasonable is it to have several roles do the same ... well, role?

For example, healing can be an obvious role in a party. But since if it is in the game it is almost strictly necessary, if only the cleric is able to heal then it does become a case of "We don't have a Cleric, so you need to play a Cleric".

Does that mean that healing can't be a role? Or do several roles do the same role, if that makes any sense?

Or trapfinding. If only one class can search for traps as their mechanically protected out of combat role, then they become necessary.

[Username17]

How reasonable is it to have several roles do the same ... well, role?

Very. You could have lots of people who "debuff enemies" as long as each different way to debuff is separately protected. It just needs an in-character justification for being special and a game mechanical manner to be the star sometimes.

For example, healing can be an obvious role in a party. But since if it is in the game it is almost strictly necessary, if only the cleric is able to heal then it does become a case of "We don't have a Cleric, so you need to play a Cleric".

Healing is a shitty thing to put into the game, at least as portrayed in 4e. It works fine in Chrono Trigger though. And the reason it works in Chrono Trigger is that it isn't necessary. The players can get by without a healer. Because the players can heal up fully out of combat anyway. Healers work in Pokemon too, and for the same reason. So long as combat healing is just another way to defensively buff the team, it's an acceptable and protectable role.

You could even have two different characters who provided protectable combat healing. So you could have a Green Mage who provided a regeneration aura and a white mage who could trigger peoples' recoveries without them needing to take recovery actions. If you made the regeneration aura non-stacking and you put the white mage heal o a per-target refresh countdown, both characters would be "protected" from other players coming and poaching their gimmick.

But as long as you don't need someone to use healing magic to be allowed to fight the next battle, neither of those characters are needed.

Or trapfinding. If only one class can search for traps as their mechanically protected out of combat role, then they become necessary.

Trapfinding is a bad role. It's bad because while it is obviously protectable (in that if one player finds the trap it doesn't matter if any other player finds the same trap), its existence forces the world to include enough traps to make it necessary. And no role should be necessary. Your super team doesn't want 2 speedsters or 2 psychics, but it doesn't need one of either.

-Username17