Is it worth trying to fix 4e?

[rapa-nui]

(As usual) I'm with RC.

The basic game is OK, it's just the crap they layered on top of the skeleton that sucks.

The first thing to do would simply be to throw out the classes, pretty much completely. The next thing to do would be to convert your favorite 3e classes to the new edition (you could start with the Tome classes... we should start a thread on that). Finally, you'd need to come up with a sane and interesting way to multiclass.

That's a lot of work (not to mention the huge amount of work implied in reworking monsters, etc to work with your re-built classes), but at its heart the basic system would remain untouched.

[Username17]

Well, you'd want to drop all the classes. Not nearly, but completely. None of the classes do anything that I care about. At all. And you'd want to overhaul the ability system so that you got more of them - especially at the lower levels and really especially in the at-will category. And you'd want to make monsters use PC rules more often. Especially when it comes to equipment, but really all over the place.

But really what it needs is a bold statement of just what the fucking hell the world is actually supposed to be. Coupled with a unifying vision of what the different classes are supposed to do. The marking mechanic is fucking retarded, and along with the mechanics for PCs at negative hit points (which ironically cause PCs to die constantly if the monsters are played at all intelligently) are things that just have to go. The world of course is Ivalice, because Final Fantasy is the only world that actually works like a 4e scenario.

So the available races are Human (close to unchanged), Viera (who are a lot like Elves), Moogles (who are a lot like Halflings), Nu Mou (kind of like Dwarves really), and Bangaa (close to unchanged).

The New Classes

Starting at 1st level, characters get to select "jobs." These jobs give you a set of special class features like the 4e class features but hopefully more interesting. The deal is that you can change jobs whenever you level, and you have the job abilities of whatever job you happen to be. But the powers that you gain and trade in as you go up in level always have to give you powers from the job you are in right now when you take them. So if you go up as an Archer you'll have all Archer powers and the Archer class features. If you decide to change jobs to Thief, your Archer job features go away and you have the Thief features, but all the Archer powers you already have stay around - you just get shiny new Thief powers for this new level alone. Obviously this means that you continue to pick up and trade-in at-wills for your entire 30 level career.

• Warrior
• Archer
• Thief
• White Mage
• Red Mage
• Black Mage

The key to understanding the new classes is that there are two power sources: Might and Magic. Whatever you get your powers from, the jobs are split into the roles of offense oriented (Black Mage, Warrior), Defense Oriented (White Mage, Archer), and Mixed (Red Mage, Thief).

The New Paragons

So when you hit 11th and 21st level you get into a new tier of power. This allows you access to Paragon Jobs and then Epic Jobs. These changeovers are mandatory and give you cool new things to do as well as powerful new ability lists to choose off of.

• Paragon Jobs: Might
• Fighter
• Gunner
• Paladin
• Ranger
• Ninja
• Gadgeteer
  
  Paragon Jobs: Magic
• Elementalist
• Illusionist
• Time Mage
• Summoner
• Blue Mage
• Alchemist

-Username17

[RandomCasualty2]

The big problem I see is that classes aren't really that different. I mean sure, if you have a Rogue ability you have to use a light blade or a sling, while if you have a Warlock ability you have to be carrying a big piece of wood that you are for whatever magical reason incapable of hitting people with, but the abilities really are not super different. A Rogue attack does a d6+Dex damage with a short sword and allows you to shift 2 space before you attack. A Warlock attack does a d6+Con damage and doubles if your enemy hits you before next turn, but neither one of those is especially different inherently. If you rolled one or the other into the other class noone would notice.

Yeah, pretty much.

The main class powers actually come from class abilities, not from the powers themselves. Only the wizard I think has a definite theme and difference with his powers. The melee types (pal, fighter, rogue), do pretty much similar crap, it's just that the class abilities give the classes their basic theme and role. Without sneak attack a rogue's damage would be garbage, actually worse than everyone else. The fighter and paladin's challenges and marks tend to help them draw fire pretty well.

In the one 4E game I've played, it did seem like the classes had their own niches. After fighting some goblins and their goblin tactics shift ability, people were saying "we could have really used a fighter there"

While the classes do look very similar on paper, I don't feel like they really play at all similarly. You're still going to use different tactics with a fighter than with a rogue or a ranger. Things really haven't changed much from 3E. The rogue still hides and goes for flanks, the paladin and fighter are front liners. The wizard tries to stay out of melee, the cleric heals and the ranger shoots a bow or fights with two weapons.

[Amra]

Frank... you mean, go all the way and make 4e into Final Fantasy Tactics rather than "a boring clone of Final Fantasy Tactics"? I don't see why not; FFT has a great - and largely unbreakable - job system, and the advanced "classes" are nicely balanced (aside from the Arithmetician, but that was out-and-out designed to be batshit crazy). So, y'know, just take the core 4e mechanics and make the job system more-or-less the same as FFT. You'll get 30 levels to reach a particular "Paragon" job and won't be able to qualify for more than one without getting more than 30 levels somehow.

And in the meantime, you'll be doing stuff that's interesting, necessary and not underpowered compared to anyone else. Nice.

[Maxus]

Well...

Hypothetically, you could also multiclass into Paragon jobs. I'm not sure how 4e does it (too broke to buy the books right now), but you could have two or three paragon paths, which you qualify for by gaining X number of abilities from certain classes.

Since that worked out pretty well in Final Fantasy TA

http://db.gamefaqs.com/portable/gbadvan ... e_jobs.gif

That way, a character can have two or so Paragon Paths he can multiclass between.

Although it might be nice to put in a few augments in each class that you can earn, so you can carry over class features, such as weapon proficiencies. That way, some who multiclasses into archer can still have a sword as a backup.

[Harlune]

Frank... you mean, go all the way and make 4e into Final Fantasy Tactics rather than "a boring clone of Final Fantasy Tactics"? I don't see why not; FFT has a great - and largely unbreakable - job system, and the advanced "classes" are nicely balanced (aside from the Arithmetician, but that was out-and-out designed to be batshit crazy). So, y'know, just take the core 4e mechanics and make the job system more-or-less the same as FFT. You'll get 30 levels to reach a particular "Paragon" job and won't be able to qualify for more than one without getting more than 30 levels somehow.

And in the meantime, you'll be doing stuff that's interesting, necessary and not underpowered compared to anyone else. Nice.

Eh... unlocking paragon paths by taking a bunch of different class levels seems like a bad idea for a tabletop games, from a RP angle anyway.

"So I started out as squire and after that I became a knight for awhile, then I did a 360 and became a monk, then after that I wanted to become a lancer but before that I spent a little while as an archer and a thief for some reason that escapes me now. After finally becoming an lancer, someone offered to make my character a samurai which sounded cool but then I discovered that the job is all about taking expensive rare swords and breaking then over your knee.

Oh and meanwhile our DM just had his new DMPC Agrias join the party and he gave this bitch some cheesy homebrew class called magic knight that lets her wear heavy armor, the best swords in the game and shoot off ranged aoe attacks that make giant magical blades shoot up out of the ground and impale people, she's like, 2x better than anything I could do and she doesn't even have to break swords to do it. And then the DM says that his girlfriend will be joining the group soon and that'll she'll be playing some old swordsman guy named Orlandu... "

[Maxus]

Eh... unlocking paragon paths by taking a bunch of different class levels seems like a bad idea for a tabletop games, from a RP angle anyway.

"So I started out as squire and after that I became a knight for awhile, then I did a 360 and became a monk, then after that I wanted to become a lancer but before that I spent a little while as an archer and a thief for some reason that escapes me now. After finally becoming an lancer, someone offered to make my character a samurai which sounded cool but then I discovered that the job is all about taking expensive rare swords and breaking then over your knee.

Oh and meanwhile our DM just had his new DMPC Agrias join the party and he gave this bitch some cheesy homebrew class called magic knight that lets her wear heavy armor, the best swords in the game and shoot off ranged aoe attacks that make giant magical blades shoot up out of the ground and impale people, she's like, 2x better than anything I could do and she doesn't even have to break swords to do it. And then the DM says that his girlfriend will be joining the group soon and that'll she'll be playing some old swordsman guy named Orlandu... "

You have a point. In FFT, it makes more sense because of the setting. "Hey, Parish, be a dragoon. We need some of that offensive goodness." and "Awesome, we have the bow that gives you Concentrate. Hey, Cheney, change into your Archer clothes."

Edit: And it made more sense in FFTA because of the setting--you control just one of many, many groups of adventurers ('clans') out there, who are mercenary groups banded together for power or profit and get mixed up in stuff and often have weird solo adventures.

Which isn't that bad, actually.

[Username17]

Requiring specific job paths to do other job paths later is a bad idea, people should just do whatever they want to do. Things that do need to go:

• Stat raises. The only purpose these serve in 4e is to make people fall off the RNG if they try to diversify. The game is predicated on people adding to their two main stats every time, so you really may as well skip that entire piece of nonsense and just give every character fixed attributes and make the to-hits and Defenses raise slightly faster inherently.
• Equipment Enhancement Bonuses. These are five kinds of totally fucked up, and they need to go away double quick. A Rod of Ruin can and should be defined merely by a power on the rod, you shouldn't have a +2 and a +3 version, because that's fucking retarded and annoying. Some numbers (to-hit, damage, defenses) will have to upscale slightly in response. But we're seriously talking about an increase of just 6 points in 30 levels, so whatever.
• Super Crits. Damage is of course going to be rescaled because powers are going to be redefined. But the game should reduce the insane dependency on critical hits that people have. Overall damage doesn't need to change much because it's Final Fantasy and high level boss battles are supposed to take forever. But the size of the crit in 4e makes the game really swingy. That bonus 5d12 that a 25th level character's vorpal sword does is seriously more damage than they do with their attacks like ever. Super burst damage is dramatic, but it should come from Daily abilities, not rolling a natural 20. The fetishization of the nat 20 that the 4e designers had is just bizarre. Slightly more damage normally, lots more damage on daily power expenditures, much less effect from criticals with high level weaponry.

-Username17

[baduin]

As I understand it, to qualify for a Paragon Job you need only one thing - 11 level. If you are 11 level, you can take any Paragon Job you wish.

[RandomCasualty2]

• Stat raises. The only purpose these serve in 4e is to make people fall off the RNG if they try to diversify. The game is predicated on people adding to their two main stats every time, so you really may as well skip that entire piece of nonsense and just give every character fixed attributes and make the to-hits and Defenses raise slightly faster inherently.

Yeah that's for sure. I don't even know why they bother with that crap. When I heard stat boosting items were gone from 4E I though they learned their less, then I read that they kept ability increases and made them more plentiful.

Urgh.

[*] Equipment Enhancement Bonuses. These are five kinds of totally fucked up, and they need to go away double quick. A Rod of Ruin can and should be defined merely by a power on the rod, you shouldn't have a +2 and a +3 version, because that's fucking retarded and annoying. Some numbers (to-hit, damage, defenses) will have to upscale slightly in response. But we're seriously talking about an increase of just 6 points in 30 levels, so whatever.

Yeah, getting rid of enhancement bonuses was one thing they just couldn't get the balls to pull the trigger on.

The same can really be said about the entire ability score system. 4E doesn't even need ability scores. What it really should just have is primary and secondary abilities. Your primary abilities get a +2 bonus, your secondary abilities don't. And that can pretty much replace the effect of ability scores.

Ability scores just seem outright pointless now and it's as if they could have just dropped them entirely and we wouldn't care.

[Username17]

Another thing: Magic Equipment should not have daily abilities on it, for that way lies Final Fantasy X2.

-Username17

[Maxus]

So what's the rules on magic equipment?

Since we're ripping off Final Fantasy, we could say that +whatever swords have an increased damage die, to stay competitive with the monster hit points while meaning that monsters that were once tough go down in a couple of hits.

Other things:

-A guide as to what kind of power characters should be throwing down should be useful. Like tiers of damage and what you should be doing in your niche and so on. You know, for those of us who get lost after about fifth or seventh level.

-When characters multiclass, should they start with the new class's beginning abilities, or should a level 4 Archer multiclassing to Warrior for two levels gain level 5 and 6 Warrior abilities?

Or do you dispense with the ordered progression of abilities and let characters select the abilities they want off a list--and the level of the ability compared with your current class (or character) level tells you how many ability levels you can score each, er, level.

[Koumei]

Another thing: Magic Equipment should not have daily abilities on it, for that way lies Final Fantasy: Charlie's Angels.

Fix'd.

I agree that it's a dumb idea. I also think we should try to stay clear of that game. The only things I liked about that were:

*The Death Knight (Paragon job, perhaps?)
*Using Scan 3 on my own team members to look up their skirts/zoom in on Rikku's arse when she's in her plug-suit on her robot
*The lesbicious massage mini-game
*Rikku shouting "It's all in the wrist!" when she uses the "Sticky Fingers" ability.

[Username17]

So what's the rules on magic equipment?

Most likely the goal here would be to make tiers of equipment, where your Heroic weapons are the equivalent of martial weapons, your paragon weapons are exotic/superior (firebrand, goldenaxe), and your epic weapons are retarded (Excalibur, rat morningstar). So I think I foresee people picking up a bonus in the 9th-11th level range and another bonus in the 19th-21st level range. Once characters start running around with Paragon weaponry, they will generally just pick up and use more Paragon weaponry. But that's a pretty small pile of damage really, even though it propagates across your [W] notation.

But the big deal we're looking at here is keeping damage up with what people expect out of a high level character. The expectations go something like this:

• At 1st level your attacks do [W] + Stat Mod, and on a critical they do max damage + a d6. [W] is a d8, your stat mod is +4, and you probably have access to a power that gives you an extra 2 points of damage, more or less. That means that you average about 10 points on a normal hit and 17 points on a critical.
• At 29th level, your attacks do 2[W] + Stat Mod, and on a critical they do max damage + d6 + 6d10. [W] is still a d8 so whatever, but your Stat modifier is now +8, your weapon gives you a flat +6, your bracers give you another +6 and you've probably accumulated a number of other abilities to bring your damage bonus up to +8. So your normal damage is 37, and your average critical damage is 80.

Characters critical 1/10th of the time with 1st level characters and 1/5th of the time with 29th level characters (they still hit half the time, only now they crit on a nat 19 or 20 instead of just a nat 20). This means that DPS for a 1st level character is about 11 points per hit (five and a half per turn), and about 46 per hit at level 29 (or about 23 points per turn). At higher levels you get more Encounter powers, but they don't really change things much - at 3rd level you pick up the ability to once per encounter attack twice for [W] + Stat Mod, and at 27th level you can upgrade that to an attack that attacks twice for 2[W]+ Strength mod, so whatever.

Since among other things I would like to get rid of people's free respawns for being 24th level and such, I wouldn't mind increasing DPS by a substantial amount. But mostly I would like to get rid of the critical system because it involves rolling a fuck tonne of dice at high level and I don't want to do it.

Which brings us to the real question: which is how to model a smooth transition from a DPS of 5.5 damage per turn to a DPS of 23 damage er turn. And I would say that some of it can come from the Epic Explosion, where your attacks all roll an extra die, and some of it can come from equipment upgrades - your sword goes from a d8 to a d10 at Paragon and up to a d12 at Epic. So right off our 29th level character is looking at 8/15 at 1st level and 17/31 at 29th just based on a +4 stat mod and the damage die increase for using a rat morningstar. That means to keep parity with our 4e counterparts the character will need to pick up about 1 damage per level, including super powers and special abilities.

Honestly, I think just letting people add their level to their damage seems like a pretty good start. 2d12 + 4 (strength) + 29 (level) gives us 46 damage per hit at 29th level, and that seems like a decent enough starting point. If that seems like it doesn't give a lot of room for crazy, then the level bonus can be halved and the expectations of bonus damage for character abilities could be increased to compensate.

-Username17

[Amra]

@Harlune... Er, what? I wouldn't suggest for a moment that you keep the job classes the same as FFT, but there's no reason why a more consistent progression couldn't be devised. [1]

Requiring specific job paths to do other job paths later is a bad idea, people should just do whatever they want to do.

Perhaps we're talking at cross purposes here, but I can't see how that works at all. I mean, you can't suddenly decide to have retroactively had a whole shitload of experience at doing a particular thing in order to be good at something else. Sometimes you just *need* to have had experience in one thing in order to move onto the next.

I totally agree that you shouldn't be forced to do a specific job at any particular point in your career, but surely you must have had to do a specific job at *some* point in order to later get the more hardcore versions of that job's abilities?

Starting at 1st level, characters get to select "jobs." These jobs give you a set of special class features like the 4e class features but hopefully more interesting. The deal is that you can change jobs whenever you level, and you have the job abilities of whatever job you happen to be. But the powers that you gain and trade in as you go up in level always have to give you powers from the job you are in right now when you take them.

How are you proposing to choose your Paragon and Epic jobs as you described in that post? Are you saying here that it wouldn't be necessary for you to have ever picked up a level in a magic-using job in order to get levels in - or powers from - a magic-using Paragon job tier? Excuse me if I'm missing the obvious!

***

[1] And as for all that cobblers about Agrias and Orlandeau;

a) I never used either of them much anyway; by the time you've unlocked the higher-level jobs they're pretty much irrelevant and an Arithmetician would pwn their asses every time... my squad had usually finished the encounter before Agrias even got to act more than once, she sucked so badly.

b) If I wanted to witness the uncomfortable spectacle of people dancing in the light of burning straw men, I'd go visit the Wizards boards. I'm just saying, is all.

[JonSetanta]

*Rikku shouting "It's all in the wrist!" when she uses the "Sticky Fingers" ability.

...
The game will never be the same again.

[Harlune]

@Harlune... Er, what? I wouldn't suggest for a moment that you keep the job classes the same as FFT, but there's no reason why a more consistent progression couldn't be devised. [1]

I totally agree that you shouldn't be forced to do a specific job at any particular point in your career, but surely you must have had to do a specific job at *some* point in order to later get the more hardcore versions of that job's abilities?

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm against, I just used FFT as a blatant example of it. It's one thing to have unlockable classes/job that are just your current class only shinier or your current class only focused on a single aspect of it; It should never be an entirely new job. At no point should I have to play a different job from what my character concept was in order to get the job that I wanted in the first place.

Say I want to play a holy knight guy, I should just be able to play a bloody holy knight guy at level one, and not have to play a fighter for a few levels, then a priest, then FINALLY get to play what I wanted to five levels ago. Same with fighter/mages, whitemage/blackmage, thief/mage, or fighter/thief.

I have no desire to see the return of the D&D 1st edition style bard that required that you play half a dozen classes before you got to just be a damn bard or the 3.5 edition 'completly suck for 2 to 4 levels before you can get the prc that might finally make you what you wanted to be in the first place' style of multiclassing.

Also, you were missing out on Agrias. I may have used her for a weak dmpc joke, (because holy knight really should have been accessable job for all the characters) but she's is still one of my favorite female final fantasy characters.

[Username17]

In the 4e model you actually do want jobs to unlock at tiers, because the power lists are all geared towards the levels they appear at.

In the level 21-30 range you can take levels as the Holy Knight job but you can't take levels in the Soldier job because the Holy Knight powers aren't appropriate for lower level characters and the Soldier powers are not appropriate for higher level characters.

No reason to have any restrictions other than tier though. If you want to start getting Black Mage powers at 3rd level you change jobs to Black Mage and take a level and get some Black Mage powers on level-up. If you get to 21st level and you decide that you want to get some powers off the Holy Knight list, you change jobs to Holy Knight and move on with your life.

The only restriction is that you must change jobs at level 21 because there are no more levels left in the Dragoon or Illusionist class.

-Username17

[zeruslord]

I wouldn't give a level bonus to damage, because that eliminates real status effects and situational damage modifiers - sneak attack, the Tome Knight, barbarians, etc. on the damage side and the save or suck mildly wizards, lock fighter builds, healing rider clerics, etc. A tome-style Knight would either go batshit crazy with his damage and be more effective, or the difference would be so small that they wouldn't care. On the other hand, characters could not have meaningful secondary effects ever. That way lies 4e boring abilities and/or MADNESS. Scale the damage in powers or as a class ability for damage classes, scale meaningful rider abilities in powers.

Also, have we looked seriously at percentage chance recharges? These would reduce the number of encounter powers that are needed to have something interesting and level appropriate to do each round. I think that was everyone's first thought on seeing the monsters - they get to be interesting and level appropriate more often than any single player character. On the other hand, increased randomness and lack of planning ability sucks. Maybe decide recharge time when the power is used?

[Manxome]

Frank... you mean, go all the way and make 4e into Final Fantasy Tactics rather than "a boring clone of Final Fantasy Tactics"? I don't see why not; FFT has a great - and largely unbreakable - job system, and the advanced "classes" are nicely balanced.

Look, FFT is an awesome game, but you need to get over that and look at it critically if you're going to start stealing mechanics from it.

Short list of problems with FFT's mechanics:

• You can learn Fire 3 earlier if you never bother to learn Fire 2 (a "Power Now, Pay Later" problem)
• You can pay for, but cannot use, two abilities of the same type (e.g. Concentrate and AttackUP are both support skills, so you can't equip both)
• Some abilities become obsolete as you level up, others don't, and they're purchased out of the same pool
• The game confuses the concept of tactical options and character progression; consequently, some "high level" abilities have substantial drawbacks compared to lower-level abilities they're apparently supposed to replace
• The charge time mechanic, while cool, is badly broken several times over
• The more efficiently you overcome obstacles, the less XP you get
• You can give yourself (and your allies) permanent stat boosts with class abilities that operate orthogonally to your nominal character (or job) level
• Diversity is penalized--it's often better to have lots of identical characters than a diverse party
• Abilities are not even slightly balanced, even ignoring Mathamagics. Jump+3 costs more JP than the strictly superior Fly and is available in the same class. Abandon shoves the game math into an unnamable orifice. Many classes get costless abilities that are strictly (and significantly) better than regular attacks, while others pay for abilities that are balanced against regular attacks. There are ways to become completely invulnerable to large classes of attacks, and there are ways to penalize certain classes of attacks against you so harshly that they're potentially worse than doing nothing. There are infinite action loops. For a min/maxxed party, level-appropriate encounters are frequently over in one round. Heck, on my last play through, I frequently won battles against opponents twice my level in one or two rounds.

Now, I don't think anyone was planning to emulate those features, which is good, but I just wanted to point out that you want to be really careful how much material you borrow from FFT.

[Username17]

I wouldn't give a level bonus to damage, because that eliminates real status effects and situational damage modifiers - sneak attack, the Tome Knight, barbarians, etc. on the damage side and the save or suck mildly wizards, lock fighter builds, healing rider clerics

The thing is that doing an average of 46 damage on a hit at 29th level isn't some kind of magic replacement for inflicting status conditions or otherwise accomplishing things in the game. It's just something to get you in the door - and barely at that. A Boss monster that you are up against has over a thousand hit points. You'll need to be doing all that and a bag of chips just to kill a boss monster in 20 combat rounds.

-Username17

[Tydanosaurus]

Problematic:

• Everyone stays pretty much in exactly the same place vis a vis each other on the RNG. That means that everyone is pretty much interchangeable and nothing you do really matters. While it's important for people to be on the RNG with each other and not wildly diverge, the pendulum has swung too far and people normally don't even care what abilities they use or what tactics they employ.
• Hit Points and Damage Dice actually don't stay constant or even close to it relatively speaking, causing the game to degrade into padded sumo anyways.
• Abilities don't differ one from another enough to actually care. PArtly this has to do with the sameness of defenses, I genuinely don't give a crap if my Wizard is shooting Ice or Thunder at people for example, but a large segment of it is that the abilities themselves are constrained by design principle to be virtually identical.

This is where 4E fails IMO. It's still about the best RPG in town, b/c the bars pretty low, but there's some huge problems this brings up.

50% miss rate. Always. Essentially, that never changes. I don't know how many of you have played 4E, but I have about 12 hours in. It sucks.

Think about the effect on that over 30 levels of playing. Does any choice you make matter? No. No matter how clever your play was, it has a 50% chance of PHAIL! Also, no streakbreaker - I played one game where there was nothing but whiffs (with rare exceptions) for three turns.

No scaling. You never do anything more or less cool than what you did before. You simply do the same thing against the same basic bundle of powers and stats, which is now called Elder Dragon instead of Young Wyrmling. Compare that to, say, City of Heroes (IMO, one of the best MMO's for game design). You go from barely taking out a pair of thugs w/ bats to being a match for dozens of giant robots. You go from using a basic blast to massive attacks that can level an army. And that's using the same basic MMO framework.

Time sinks. Battles are time sinks b/c of HP scaling and the 50% miss rate. Skill use is a time sink. Getting a minor majic items you can use is a massive, complicated time sink. That's great when you're 13, playing WoW on your dad's computer. Not so good at the table.

Those are all solveable problems, within 4E. Give feats and powers that increase hit rates. Errata hp, or monkey with damage. It'll work.

[RandomCasualty2]

Regarding RNG equalization and tactics, I don't think that necessarily having people be close on the RNG removes tactics. There just isn't much tactics towards always picking the best attack type (Fort, Reflex, Will), that's simply a matter of memorization. Really, the only time you probably want that to matter is if certain classes are good with certain attack types.

So you want the psionicist against a weak will creature, and a fighter against a weak AC creature and so on.

This mechanic doesn't add a heck of a lot of tactics, it just lets different classes shine at different types of creatures. Which isn't terrible for an RPG, but tactically it doesn't do a heck of a lot. Mainly because it's just a matter of memorization. It definitely means that knowledge of your enemy is more important, but once you've memorized the monster manual, it's not going to play a continuing factor.

Tactically speaking, I do sort of like the idea of 4E roles. WHen you use them for PCs and for monsters, they do create interesting dynamics. Against a lot of area attack monsters, you want to spread out. Against stuff that attacks in mass numbers, you want to pull in your ranks and get them to group up. If you have a leader type who can buff or help out your area, you may want to gather around him. Of course, gathering also leaves you vulnerable to area attacks.

Those strike me more as tactical trade-offs, as opposed to "the psionicist is really effective against this creature and the rogue sucks."

The only time that stuff might matter is if each character could switch his role pretty much freely. So sometimes the rogue goes defense, and other times he goes offense, depending on the situation. Though that's more problematic than it's worth if you ask me and probably ruins the tactics you get from having roles in the first place.

[Voss]

Thats pretty basic stuff (seriously, entry level tactics) and it doesn't really do it well. Because nothing ever beats 'kill the enemy as fast as possible', failing that (which you automatically do at higher levels), stun-lock them.

[RandomCasualty2]

Thats pretty basic stuff (seriously, entry level tactics) and it doesn't really do it well. Because nothing ever beats 'kill the enemy as fast as possible', failing that (which you automatically do at higher levels), stun-lock them.

In 3.5, nothing does beat it. But in a balanced game, it's not always the best solution to just get the biggest damage dealers and run with them.

Take a game like Starcraft, Sure, you can go all zerglings which undoubtably deal the most damage at the fastest pace of all. But that's not to say that you're not going to get totally shut down by zealots combined with archons. Because you deal damage fast, and you're also fragile.

Similarly, a group of pure marines is a lot weaker than a group of marines and medics, and medics have no offensive capability at all.

Raw damage output wins in games of rocket launcher tag, but in games that are more balanced, there are counters to groups composed purely of DPS units, and usually, a pure DPS mix is not the best unit mix you can use.

In a good RPG, this should be true as well.