OSSR: 4th edition D&D.

[jt]

One way to make controller/defender/striker work would be:
1. Controllers and defenders are more effective than strikers. That is, they each increase survivable rounds of combat by more than a striker can decrease rounds of combat.
2. Controllers cannot cooperate effectively with each other. For example, they all work by creating zones, which do not stack, and any one of them can cover enough squares in bad stuff.
3. Defenders cannot cooperate effectively with each other. Honestly they could just be drawing aggro like in an MMO.
4. Strikers stack linearly. More damage always helps.
5. The optimal party is one controller, one defender, and as many strikers as you have extra players. Also the game is probably terrible if you have less than 3-4 players.

Because a lot of the authors thought "control" meant "Crowd Control" rather than "Battlefield Control." That structural incoherence meant nothing would ever or could ever make sense, let alone be good.

Well fuck, it's 2019 and we're 8 pages into this topic and I think you just found a way that 4E fails that I haven't seen discussed before. Whoever designed the skeleton of the class roles was thinking in terms of how a tactical miniatures game could work, and whoever filled in the content was thinking in terms of how MMO raid mechanics work, so controllers can't control because whoever wrote the attacks thought that merely having an AOE attack is "control," and defenders can't defend because all their attacks were written as things to do in the meantime while you hold aggro.

[Username17]

Even within the narrow concept of battle as there being a pile of hit points on each side reduced by a pile of damage from the other side, there's plenty of room for distinct roles.

[*] Reduce incoming damage from the other side through increased defenses.
[*] Increase outgoing damage through damage bonuses.
[*] Heal damage that has been delivered.
[*] Increase the amount of hit points on your side.
[*] Reduce incoming damage through penalties to the other side.
[*] Increase outgoing damage through penalties to the other side.

Now you might object that it is in fact mathematically equivalent to give the other PCs a bonus to AC as it is to give team monster a penalty to attack rolls. And while I grant that is true, it is also true that in Diablo II the Paladin's Auras and the Necromancer's Curses feel different even when they are mathematically equivalent. And the fact that they are added to different quantities means they multiply in a way that encourages teamwork.

I simply don't agree that creating solid, explicable, and balanced roles is impossible or even particularly difficult. It's an algebra problem and not a particularly difficult one. But then, Mearls directly said that the math of attack and damage versus hit point and defense progressions was completely beyond him, so that's pretty much where we are.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Even within the narrow concept of battle as there being a pile of hit points on each side reduced by a pile of damage from the other side,

Let's step back for a bit: should that be the dominant paradigm of D&D?

Shadowrun has a bunch of alternate win conditions and scenarios baked into battles. It's not just enough to defeat all of the enemies while taking no wounds of your own. For example:

[*] You need to prevent the activation of certain environmental effects like sleeping gas ducts or electronic door lockdown.
[*] You need to prevent the enemies from escaping and/or raising an alarm.
[*] You need to protect escorted personnel and certain goods.
[*] You need to clean up evidence of your team specifically engaging in battle.

A lot of games also have bonuses for achieving objectives. For example, not killing any of the bandits and turning them in for a bounty or making sure the assisting town guard doesn't get injured or destroying fragile artifacts the monsters are using.

If D&D's adventure design was changed from the ground-up to make a 'bust into the room and defeat all of the enemies with violence, don't worry about anything else' as shallow (and if you do it too often, out-of-genre) as it would be in Shadowrun I could definitely see a role for controllers. The controllers have powers and effects that help the completion of alternate mission objectives. For example, protecting a specific area or person at the cost of making the rest of the party more vulnerable. Or reducing the movement/activity speed of people in a certain area unless those people are fighting the party. Or just being able to do skill checks faster and more reliably.