I'll reiterate a point I may have never made, but that Lago once said he couldn't find the thread I made it in, but he really liked my point:phlapjackage wrote:And, for the record, I'm on the side of "role protection is stupid in a TTRPG".Jason wrote:You also haven't grasped the concept of role protection through social contract at all. You still ramble on about role protection through design like a broken record.
Role Protection in terms of "DPS" and "Healing" and "I'm the guy who does overland travel" on a design level is not only not good, it's actively bad. Everyone in the party needs to be able to do most things, and if you try to impose that level of role protection on the design level, you end up ruling huge swaths of parties "unacceptable" which hurts the game when actual humans sit down and want to play specific characters. It's 2e "someone has to be the Cleric" writ large for all the positions in the party.
But thematic and particular role protection is important on a design level. No one else should have the same limitations and benefits of overland travel as whatever class you are writing (or very few classes), or no one or very few classes should have the same method of stealth, or the same method of shooting people to death, or the same method of healing.
The actual particulars are the important role definers. If all DPS classes use the same system, then one of them is going to be the best, and everyone else can just go die (or more commonly, if DPS is the only way to win fights, then someone will do the most DPS, and that person will be the best Fight Winner) and it doesn't matter who that person is, it's bad that they exist at all. Likewise, if everyone uses the same kind of overland travel, then the one with the longest range teleport automatically is the best overland traveler, ect.
In a super ideal D&D like game, all classes would have a method of healing, DPS, status condition infliction, overland travel, stealth, social interaction, extra sensory perception, and tactical obstacle bypassing, but all of them would be different from all the others, with different costs, trade offs, and limitations, so that each encounter would be about the players trying to work within their limits or manipulate the situation to take advantage of the specific strengths of their own specific abilities.