Games for the Mind

I’ve had the chance to chat with a few people about our first reactions to what we have seen.  One thing that amuses me is one of the places that I seem to differ from them in one key area.

One of the things mentioned in the Youtube video is the increased emphasis on filling a role in the party, on clearly defining 4 key roles for characters to fill.  I am unsure exactly of how this will fall out, but the idea excites me while it seems to disappoint others.

It excites me because that is what D&D really seemed to need to me.  It needed to tell the players, before they even started play, that this is a game about a group facing great challenges.  It needed to tell them, from page one, that they needed to work together and cooperate, coming together to be greater than the sum of their parts.

It seems to worry those I have spoken with for the corollary of that: they worry that their freedom in creating a character will be inhibited by having to fit a role.

While I hope that the system ends up being flexible enough to allow a lot of variation in the sorts of characters who can fill those roles, at base that constraint is a good thing.

My best short-term games began with discussions that helped role formation occur and my best long-term games picked up speed as players found their roles in relationship to each other. 

Many poor short-run games failed because there was no group posited, only a passle of ‘cool’ seeming character ideas.  I had a few slumps in my long-term campaign, too, when roles seemed to blur a little. 

Building that role structure into the rules seems like buckets of potential awesome.  If they can manage to provide mechanical incentive (e.g. some magic items clearly aimed at those who excel in roles rather than classes; xp for fulfilling role-related goals) for maintaining those roles over the course of a long-term campaign, all the better.

That said, I dearly hope that those four roles are not the tired breakdown of fighter, divine, arcane, and rogue.  I really want to see the spellcasting division of labor softened and the role of rogue made more available to a number of class mixes.