Classes should primarily be force multipliers for others.

[Username17]

The point is that if you have lots of different synergistic things, and it's all synergy that points to other classes (to prevent Knights of the Round horseshit), then it doesn't really matter if there's some ideal party layout. The practical effect is still that you're going to be glad every other character is there.

I'm not sure what the Knights of the Round part references. Is it stacking synergy or something?

It's a 4e thing. The 4e Paladin is... really bad. He has high defenses, a large amount of healing surges, and the ability to shunt his healing surges to other characters - but he has very little offensive power and can only produce short term incentives for enemies to avoid attacking his friends... one at a time. He does his job as a "defender" very very badly. The vast majority of enemies can simply walk around him, and while he can contribute his healing surges to his allies, healing surges provide less hit points to non-Paladin characters and they also take more damage per turn, making that a poor trade in most cases.

But imagine for the moment that every character in the party was a Paladin. The fact that the enemies can make their attacks on almost any character matters little because all characters have the same high defenses. The fact that they could choose to gang up on any particular character matters not at all, because everyone has a huge communal store of fungible healing surges. And the fact that each character has low damage output doesn't matter because every character is geared up for the long grind. If you have only Paladins in your party, the Paladin is actually pretty kick ass, in that there is absolutely no encounter that poses a serious threat to the team at any level. But of course, every non-Paladin you put in that party makes the party weaker. But when you get it down to one Paladin, it is the Paladin character who is least valuable player every battle.

That's the kind of design you want to avoid like the plague. It should never be advantageous to go all-in on a single character archetype. And every character archetype should play nice with others.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Thus, to solve the Knights of the Round problem you need to keep this one thing in mind:

[*] A class's contribution should be generically useful no matter what the party configuration is.

That seems obvious yet you'd be surprised at how often that doesn't get followed. Probably the biggest violator of that paradigm was the 4E D&D role system in of itself. Pacifist clerics are great to have on-average, but their usefulness drops a lot if you're doing an all-ranged party (because their powers are shorter range than bows) or a glass cannon party (because the pacifist cleric specializes in grindy healing). Non-Battle Captain Warlords are awful in parties that don't have good basic attacks. So on.

First of all, I recommend completely dissolving the role system, or at least how it's been envisioned by the vast majority of TTRPGs and video game RPGs. Tank/DPS/Healer/Mezzer needs to go. The reason why they need to go is because pre-pigeonholing parties is probably the biggest reason why the Knights of the Round problem exists. Instead, I recommend doing a system more like this:

What to do instead: To make the concept fly at all you need each role to provide distinct and instantly recognizable synergy with other roles. You need to have enough roles on the table that each character can be a different role and still have other roles still yet unexplored so that there is room for the "average" team to add new members without toe stepping.

Example Setup:

• Harrier: The Harrier role specializes in ranged attacks that disorient and distract their targets, leaving them at significant defensive penalties in melee.
  Exemplars: Ranger, Psion
• Belligerent: The Belligerent role specializes in interdicting movement through melee presence, making it difficult for enemies to go or attack where they want.
  Exemplars: Fighter, Druid
• Protector: The Protector role specializes in negating enemy attacks, especially against his compatriots.
  Exemplars: Paladin, Illusonist
• Dazzler: The Dazzler role specializes in dropping status effects on enemies that weaken their offensive potential.
  Exemplars: Enchanter, Rogue
• Striker: The Striker role specializes in crushing enemies who are already engaged or disadvantaged.
  Examplars: Assassin, Battlemage
• Leader: The Leader puts chaff on the battlefield, which whether it is rats or skeletons is quick to die but eager to soak hits or distract enemies.
  Exemplars: Necromancer, Bard
• Buffer: The Buffer grants bonuses to other characters, especially offensive ones.
  Exemplars: Cleric, Warlord
• Controller: The Controller role gets to adjust the battlefield itself to limit the mobility and options of enemies.
  Exemplars: Conjurer, Swashbuckler

In that quick-and-dirty example I gave, I balanced the paladin and the thane ranger around the idea that a party might have all or no 'defenders'. If everyone plays one of the two classes then you have a grindy team where fresh defenders cycle in to cover for their buddy like in the Knights of the Round example. However, if they're the only one of their class in the group then they act like glass cannons where they draw fire to augment their more offensive-minded buddies in the case of the paladin or keep the group running a bit longer before flip-flopping into an all-out attacker.y

[sabs]

Buffer has to go as a character concept. It's fucking boring. Any character concept that could be replaced by a couple of rings and belt.. is fucking terrible.

Leader? Stop playing 4E. What makes a Bard a Leader and not the Warlord? or the Cleric? Why can't an assassin be a leader. It's a terrible description of a class feature.. and it's not even a good class feature.

Why could a rogue not be a striker? You started off so well, but then it all fell apart on you.
Dazzler and Controller are not different enough space to really be different catagories.
You start with
Skirmisher (Close Quarters lightly protected, Rogue, Ranger, melee/short range controllers )
Heavy Melee (Close Quarters heavy protectionL Paladin, Druid, Berserker, Transmutation Wizard, War Clerics)
Harrier (Ranged light damage: Horse Archers, Psion, Pistoleer, Ranged controllers)
Heavy Ranged (Ranged heavy damage: Longbowman, Rifle, Evocation Wizard)
Puppet Master (Summoner, Necromancer, Elementalist, Warlord, Mind Controller, Summoning Clerics)

THe artificer, for example.. can be in any of those catagories, depending on what he artifices. Iron Man for example is Heavy Melee, and Heavy Ranged, and a Puppet Master)
A Death Knight could be a heavy melee and a puppet master.

Buffing, Debuffing, Controlling the battlefield. This is all things that each class should have in their toolbox as options. THey should not be 'catagories' that fit multiple classes into them.

There is no reason a rogue can't do debuffing, controlling, and heavy damage, depending on what the situation and his build.

[virgil]

Buffer has to go as a character concept. It's fucking boring. Any character concept that could be replaced by a couple of rings and belt.. is fucking terrible.

I don't think that's feasible. I know too many players who have, before even seeing the system, declare their intention to be focused on healing or support. It's a 'role' in every edition of D&D, be it bard or cleric or whatever. It's in a huge amount of the multiplayer video game culture, the Team Fortress Medic or the Warcraft healer. I'm not saying to make a boring character, but as Pathfinder proved with their 'fixes', you can go far by just lying.

[sabs]

Buffer has to go as a character concept. It's fucking boring. Any character concept that could be replaced by a couple of rings and belt.. is fucking terrible.

I don't think that's feasible. I know too many players who have, before even seeing the system, declare their intention to be focused on healing or support. It's a 'role' in every edition of D&D, be it bard or cleric or whatever. It's in a huge amount of the multiplayer video game culture, the Team Fortress Medic or the Warcraft healer. I'm not saying to make a boring character, but as Pathfinder proved with their 'fixes', you can go far by just lying.

A bard is way more than just a buffer. Same with Healers.
A Bard does battle field control, buffing, knowledge interaction, skirmishing.
A Healer certainly can do way more than just HoT and DH.

What is really fun in VIDEO Games, does not come across the same way in table top. WoW or Team Fortess healing only works because the monstrs do so much damage, that active healing is actually interesting. And healers are fuckig boring in MMO's when you're fighting under anything but super-hard mode.

If you're trying to 3 man a dungeon, or do cutting edge boss fights.. then yes, the healer classes are cool (in a video game). If you're not, they spend a lot of time wondering why the fuck they are there.

Both of these options are terrible for a roleplaying game. Your healer character in a roleplaying game can have battlefield control, or some flavor of damage dealing. Straight up Buffer characters are as bad for the game as VAH and Fighter.

[Username17]

Leader? Stop playing 4E. What makes a Bard a Leader and not the Warlord? or the Cleric? Why can't an assassin be a leader. It's a terrible description of a class feature.. and it's not even a good class feature.

The "Leader" as described had the purpose of putting extra chaff troops on the field. It's not like a 4e "Leader" where you heal people through friendship speeches, it's a fucking Summoner. Except with a generic title so it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with magic. You could have your own peasant uprising or a pack of dogs if you wanted to pull the role off mundanely. I really think you didn't even read the text you're complaining about, because there's no way that any sane person would declare a priori that Angel Summoner couldn't be written up to have a good class feature. That's just really stupid. There are people who continue to argue that BMX Bandit is a salvageable character concept in high level play, but noone argues in good faith that Angel Summoner isn't.

Buffer has to go as a character concept. It's fucking boring. Any character concept that could be replaced by a couple of rings and belt.. is fucking terrible.

Buffer has to go as a mandatory concept. But the fact remains that there are lots of people who want to contribute but don't actually want to spatter Orc brains across walls. Sometimes it's weak pacifism (as opposed to strong pacifism, where the person refuses to aid other people who are going to use that aid for violence), sometimes it's a disengagement with the combat, sometimes it's trepidation about making a "wrong" choice and wanting to defer to other people, and so on and so on. But these people exist. You do no one any favors by removing the potential to play a character who contributes exclusively by giving bonuses to other players. There are a lot of people who want to play that.

-Username17

[Bihlbo]

I don't want to derail your tread with boring semantics, but I have to ask about the term "cynical buff". A search tells me you probably made that up (or "coined it", I guess). I saw you describe a cynical buff as:

You know, fire-and-forget crap like 'everyone has a +3 to defenses for one round' or 'on your next attack roll, threaten a critical hit'. Basically A.) passive bonuses that B.) require some or even no thought in how to use them.

How is this different from a non-cynical buff? Why wouldn't you just call this a "buff"? Am I wrong in assuming you came up with this yourself, and if so where can I read more about the term?

************

Anyway, I'm with you. I've only played about half a dozen of the 4e classes, and none of them were anywhere near as fun as the warlord. I could either do 5-12 damage by attacking, or 22-35 by forcing the fighter to attack. We both preferred the latter option.

I love the role of a buffer or a support character in games. One of the coolest characters I ever made was a fighter that did a max of 8 damage at level 13, but had a 39-42 AC, threatened squares like a large creature, and acted like the anvil against which the entire enemy line were crushed by my allies. All I ever did in combat was stand still and toss around buffs and aids, helping everyone else be about 33.3333% more awesome. For people like me, roleplaying a character and looking like a really cool hero in a fight aren't equally rewarding pursuits, and it's more fun helping other people feel great about how good they are doing with their character than it is to personally feel good about my character doing similar things. Even in an MMORPG I'd rather be a buffbot who tactically guides the party than to be the backstabber who just gets the big numbers. I don't care about numbers, I care about success.

Anyway, one of the things I really liked about 3e is that you could build a character x levels higher than your PC's average, and it would be a great "boss" enemy to fight. However, if the strength of a class is based on buffing others and getting buffed, no matter how cynical, then your BBEG is either waaay over the PCs' level or he sucks without a team behind him. 4e's way around that was to make every enemy a unique snowflake with arbitrary stats and abilities that just did whatever you wanted them to do, meaning they had no interaction with or relation to the class structure in any way. Using that design style your bad guys could just synergize with themselves like hermaphroditic chimera shivas. Seems like a poor way to go.

As far as the rest of the concept goes, you've given a detailed list of how you think things should be broken down 3 times in 3 ways on 2 pages. Are you looking just to spark discussion, or to get something accomplished?

[nockermensch]

I really have no idea why people think "Thane" is a good class name. It means Servant for fuck's sake.

You know what else means servant?

Samurai.

[Username17]

I really have no idea why people think "Thane" is a good class name. It means Servant for fuck's sake.

You know what else means servant?

Samurai.

Wikipedia says you're wrong. Etymologically it does come from a word meaning servant, but that is the earlier terms "saburai" or "saburu". The word "samurai" has meant a noble who was a bushi for like nine hundred years. And it's still currently in use under that meaning.

No one is suggesting making a class named Saburu. That would be as retarded as making a class named Factotum.

-Username17

[Koumei]

No one is suggesting making a class named Saburu. That would be as retarded as making a class named Factotum.

Oh snap!

Regarding the support for Buffy the Vampire Buffer as an acceptable (but not mandatory) concept, did you yourself not say some time ago that the idea of buffs in general has to go (regarding action economies and resource management)? That you either end up balancing it for spending the first X rounds casting the buffs and then it gets broken when someone pre-buffs and Clerics on in, or balancing it for pre-buff action, then it's lame when someone sits there casting their buffs in combat time?

Have you veered from that thought, or is the trick just "make it something you cast on your friends, not yourself, with a short duration"? That will of course get on the nerves of everyone who likes to do The Cleric Routine, but in a new game, they can of course just learn to live with that.

[Lago PARANOIA]

That you either end up balancing it for spending the first X rounds casting the buffs and then it gets broken when someone pre-buffs and Clerics on in, or balancing it for pre-buff action, then it's lame when someone sits there casting their buffs in combat time?

There's nothing inherently wrong or broken about either buffing paradigm. If you're running a game that's primarily about ambushes and asymmetric force (like Shadowrun), pre-round buffs are better for the game than all-day buffs. Similarly, if you're running a game that's primarily about 24/7 steady-state response (like a superhero game) then all-day buffs are good.

Where buffs get problematic is when they become a thing but the game doesn't anticipate their impact. 3E D&D didn't price in buffs for its difficulty assumptions so they tear the game apart. 4E D&D similarly expected (and to large extent required) buffs, but they also expected a certain distribution of people capable of the ability; If you say that you're going to play that game where four out of five people are Leaders, then the difficulty of this already-easy game collapses even further. All-day and/or short-term buffs don't tear that game apart, but buff circle-jerking does. Which is why No Self Buffs tears that game apart.

Which is also why I insist that if a game implements my broad suggestion, either everyone has to have access to buffs that they can't really use on themselves or no one does.

[Username17]

Buffy is very easy to balance in games like Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea. An offensive buff is worth as much as an attack that is the difference in offensive capability between the unbuffed and buffed character, equivalent to a DOT attack for an offensive buff that lasts more than one round. A defensive buff is equivalent in value to healing that removes an equivalent amount of damage/conditions.

The problem here is that in a role playing game it is very difficult to get players to use combat actions on buffing at all. I don't wait until enemies are swinging axes at my head to put my armor on, why would I wait until arrows started flying to get blessed? And most of the attempted solutions have actually quite bad results: making buffs be very short in duration just makes for a five minute workday.

There are certainly available scenarios that have a logical reason to work exactly like a JRPG and disallow buff routines before the combat music starts. For example: Computer Hacking or Psychic Combat could logically involve the character's combat avatar not existing to be buffed until the combat had already begun. But for the most part, it's really difficult to construct a scenario where Buffy doesn't take all her actions before the door is kicked in and then have the player go on a beer run during the actual combat because she has already taken a full combat's worth of actions.

There are solutions. One solution is for the character to simply provide their buffs out of combat and then plink away with minor personal actions during actual confrontations. Another plan is to tie buff magic to actually meeting the enemy, possibly by inverting the buffs into debuffs. Still another plan is to have the buffs get expended continuously, forcing the player to reapply the buff during combats. And so on and so on.

But despite all its problems, I think the Buffy archetype is probably one you want to work on. Because Buffy the Vampire Buffer is a popular character concept. And it is most popular with the kinds of people who are actually least able to fuck with the rules themselves. So if you don't provide core support for it, the fans are unlikely to be able to cobble something together on their own.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

The problem here is that in a role playing game it is very difficult to get players to use combat actions on buffing at all.

Pish posh, FrankTrollman. 4E D&D worked very, very hard to beat that silly 'Lance of Faith on the rock' nonsense out of the munchkin's skulls. Mostly by argumentum ad nauseam and doublethink, as seen in that Robot Chicken sketch.

[wotmaniac]

to chime in on the whole "validity of a primary/dedicated buffer" ....
as of late, I find myself actually drawn to bards and such (despite my typical natural inclination to the contrary) for 1 simple reason -- it's the only way I can feel useful without making the rest of the group feel like a bunch of monkeys trying to fuck a football.
I can't just half-ass a character; and I have, by far, the highest level of system/rules mastery of anyone in my group ..... me playing a "main" class tends to really upset things.

Point being, such classes can also server to "balance out" a group of players with disparate efficacy levels.


As for classes as a whole ... not sure I can add much that hasn't already been said.

[Xaos]

I really have no idea why people think "Thane" is a good class name. It means Servant for fuck's sake. Thane is a middling rank, granted to retainers of people of actual importance. You might as well call your class Družyna or Hird. Actually, those would be better because there is room to move up as a Hirdman.

If you thought Clerics were a dumb class because they channel power from gods who will eventually be the monster of the week, how much worse is Thane, where you literally draw power from a frickin Earl.

-Username17

Actually, on the subject of Clerics, I can't find a clear origin for the class.

Lots of old school blogs comment on things like the Knights Hospitaler or Hammer Horror films from the 50s, but those aren't very clear. Mostly because they were obviously Christain in OD&D, dripping with Catholic symbolism (also "Crosses" were the only holy symbols available), and then, they decided to keep using this class for polytheistic deities whose priesthood were nothing like this class (hell, Catholics don't have much in common with the class).

It started as something ultra-focused on support, but then it got more and more offensive abilities until we got CoDzilla. And yet, it is STILL perceived as the "boring" class, stemming in no small part from all of the obvious cognitive dissonance written into it.

Its a VERY dumb class.

[Username17]

The Cleric is basically some guy's Elothar Warrior of Bladereach grown out of control. He's mostly based on Odo, Bishop of Bayeux. That's a historical dude who was William the Conqueror's right hand man during the Norman conquest of England. His clerical order forbade him the use of swords, so he went to battle with a big club and/or encouraged his fighting man rather than "draw blood". Someone apparently thought that was awesome and made a class around it.

It then got padded out with various extremely eclectic holy man tropes drawn from different sources. You get to turn undead in the way that priests get to present crosses at vampires in cheesy Hammer horror movies. You get access to a spell list that was originally just a greatest hits list of miracles out of the Bible. And then because healing injuries is actually fucking important, this particular extremely specific character got generalized into being a standard not only in D&D specifically, but in RPGs in general.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

So one of the lynchpins of the modern and historical c/j/TTRPG is and was basically some neckbeard's pity party pacifier? That's interesting.

[Almaz]

The cleric specifically was supposed to show up and Van Helsing this one vampire character. So they basically made Helsing the vampire-fucker, capable of curing diseases, healing wounds, and exploding undead into flames, and with a weird thing about bludgeoning weapons, and then it got bigger and bigger...

So it actually was more like having "The blacksmith turns into a dragon and eats you" be an important design point for the rest of the game history.

[OgreBattle]

Does the Cleric predate the Paladin who can 'lay on hands' then?

[Xaos]

Yes! The first three books of "Dungeons and Dragons" were "Men and Magic", "Monsters and Magic" and "Wilderness and Underworld adventures". In "Men and Magic" there were three classes:

Fighting Man,
Magic user,
also technically Elves (Fighting man/ Magic User multiclassers),
and Cleric

Neither the Thief nor the Paladin would exist until "Supplement 1: Greyhawk" came out, and even then the Paladin was a subtype of Fighting Man who rolled very high stats and was Lawful in alignment (good and evil weren't on the radar yet, even though there was Protection from Evil and Dispel Evil spells....yeah.) I don't remember if they had a lay on hands ability, but Greyhawk was AFTER Clerics were introduced.