I always figured the Rogue should have been a support role. Following from OgreBattle's there.
Rogue- By aiding their allies in battle, they hit hard.
Sort of an anti-leader. Setting up flanking or crossfire support their own attack powers come on line. Then they just need movement stuff to get there and slide-other tricks to make the monsters comply.
Fighters push, Clerics pull, Rogues slide, Wizards add movement conditions (trip, slow, immobile) and Clerics remove them. This is of course all very easy after the fact. I think my first observation in 2008 was they had a Striker role and the Fighter wasn't in it, which was obviously going to suck for Fighters. Oh, and Monks would obviously be martial Controllers (though Psionic isn't bad).
Now that it's over, deconstructing 4E
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Except, of course, that there were zero psionic things about them and they didn't use the mechanics that the other psionic characters did. So in pretty much every way, psionics were a bad choice for the monk, because it didn't fit any general concept of psionics or the specific construction they were actually using for the game (as shitty as it was).
Fighters on the other hand, pretty much by virtue of being in the first book, got more support, and did have enough damage dealing crap if they scrounged around for it.
Fighters on the other hand, pretty much by virtue of being in the first book, got more support, and did have enough damage dealing crap if they scrounged around for it.
Okay so I'm going through this article and Noonan wants:FrankTrollman wrote:When David Noonan went off on a rant about how MMO roles were ported to 4e D&D even though he couldn't find examples of such things in any other source material, you know you've got a major stumbling process of the design team.
And weirdly enough... this actually exists. Slayers has Gourry (tank), Lina (black mage), and Amelia (white mage).* A really durable guy who occupies the attention of most of the opposition, yet provides only moderate "output" back at them.
* Conversely, someone who's more fragile but delivers most of the force applied against the opposition.
* Someone who heals other people. If that's insufficiently abstract, you can say "someone who rejuvenates others mid-battle," but really, if it's not actual healing, you're stretching.
However, Slayers is basically a DnD campaign as an anime, so, I'm not really sure it counts towards supporting the idea of anything within DnD, because that's just circular.
@Voss. #PsiMonks.
I basically agree with what you said about how it ended up in 4e, but the classic flavour powers of Monks with their shadow steps and ethereal walks and catfalls and death touch and feign death and stuff, it fits the Psionic power set quite well. It was largely taken from the OD&D Psionic power set in ye olden days.
But if we complain about 4e's implementation of ideas, I think we can miss that the underlying concepts are quite good here and there. For example:
[*]The Astral Sea with the outer-planar islands is a beautiful concept.
[*]Folding together Planescape and Spelljammer within that is a good idea.
[*]Making more of their background material adventurable, in general.
[*]Making more use of the Shadow plane to hide monsters on. Ditto for the Faerie, so you can walk in the forest without dying, but it's also full of monsters as needed. That's a useful idea, even if their implementation is not all it could be.
But then, I don't see any advantage in messing around with the huge corpus of monster mythology and ecology they had from the first 30 years work, having two seductive femme fatale fiends and also Dryads and Sirines is not a real problem.
It's not even that changing Dryads into mini-Treants is a very stupid way to "solve" the issue of things being conceptually similar, it's that D&D is always going to have multiple monsters filling the same role, abandoning the old fluff can't actually solve that.
[*]Back to good ideas, cutting the outer planes to 8 or 9 with about 8 layer each, that's useful for memory purposes. Not quite what they did, and again you don't want to abandon your corpus, but things like Limbo and the Abyssal planes can totally hide away inside great caves in Pandemonium, that doesn't cost you anything.
[*]Concepts like having a role for classes in combat makes sense from a design perspective, having themed "power sources" with associated effects. Awesome Centre, Shadowy Wing, Elemental Tactician, Holy Waterboy.
Of course, that's mostly a list of things I stole from 4e because it actually helped, and it's fairly short, and for the most part you want to avoid their specific implementations.
I basically agree with what you said about how it ended up in 4e, but the classic flavour powers of Monks with their shadow steps and ethereal walks and catfalls and death touch and feign death and stuff, it fits the Psionic power set quite well. It was largely taken from the OD&D Psionic power set in ye olden days.
But if we complain about 4e's implementation of ideas, I think we can miss that the underlying concepts are quite good here and there. For example:
[*]The Astral Sea with the outer-planar islands is a beautiful concept.
[*]Folding together Planescape and Spelljammer within that is a good idea.
[*]Making more of their background material adventurable, in general.
[*]Making more use of the Shadow plane to hide monsters on. Ditto for the Faerie, so you can walk in the forest without dying, but it's also full of monsters as needed. That's a useful idea, even if their implementation is not all it could be.
But then, I don't see any advantage in messing around with the huge corpus of monster mythology and ecology they had from the first 30 years work, having two seductive femme fatale fiends and also Dryads and Sirines is not a real problem.
It's not even that changing Dryads into mini-Treants is a very stupid way to "solve" the issue of things being conceptually similar, it's that D&D is always going to have multiple monsters filling the same role, abandoning the old fluff can't actually solve that.
[*]Back to good ideas, cutting the outer planes to 8 or 9 with about 8 layer each, that's useful for memory purposes. Not quite what they did, and again you don't want to abandon your corpus, but things like Limbo and the Abyssal planes can totally hide away inside great caves in Pandemonium, that doesn't cost you anything.
[*]Concepts like having a role for classes in combat makes sense from a design perspective, having themed "power sources" with associated effects. Awesome Centre, Shadowy Wing, Elemental Tactician, Holy Waterboy.
Of course, that's mostly a list of things I stole from 4e because it actually helped, and it's fairly short, and for the most part you want to avoid their specific implementations.
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Username17
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Eh. Making the outer planes non-infinite is good, but making them all the size of Rhode Island or smaller is not. I think everyone agrees that Celestia doesn't make sense as seven infinitely large regions, but making it three counties, the largest of which is the size of Weston, Wyoming doesn't help anything either.
The Feywild is cool, but the Shadowfell (and the darkbad) is not. As a whole, 4e's planar crap made as many dumb decisions as good ones, and then they didn't bother to put any interesting content in it so it's all moot.
There is nothing really to learn from 4e's planar cosmology. Everything you need to do to D&D's multiverse can and should be done with 3rd edition or even 2nd edition as a starting point.
-Username17
The Feywild is cool, but the Shadowfell (and the darkbad) is not. As a whole, 4e's planar crap made as many dumb decisions as good ones, and then they didn't bother to put any interesting content in it so it's all moot.
There is nothing really to learn from 4e's planar cosmology. Everything you need to do to D&D's multiverse can and should be done with 3rd edition or even 2nd edition as a starting point.
-Username17