When Roles go Bad pt 1.

I mentioned before that in 4th edition one of the better ideas that they had was putting forward a solid role system, IE the classes would be set to certain types and their functions would be set around that. Defending the group, healing party members, raw damage, or AoE/Debuffing. The role system is used in other games and there are a lot of advantages to it. For one thing designing classes is a bit easier when there is a clear idea of what the class is supposed to do as well as helping figure out if something is marked too high or low in terms of damage, hit rating, etc. The problem is that roles can also lead to stagnation and can, if used incorrectly, lead to a game that is frustrating, samey, or just plain bad. I am going to try to do this in shorter bursts, I realize a lot of my posts are kind of text walls and it might be easier for someone to follow the posts with shorter posts and maybe my stuff will improve if I'm more focused.

One common problem in role based games comes from a problem in division of labor, especially in the area of the damage dealer. In most of these games everyone is able to deal a certain amount of damage, it isn't impossible for the people healing, debuffing or tanking to also lay a pretty good smackdown. However this leads to a problem, if their damage is comparable to that of the 'dedicated' damage dealer then three questions arise.

1) Why bother playing a dedicated damage dealer if a class in another role can crank out about the same amount of damage and have other options and features besides?

2) What was the point of the pure damage class in question, or even the pure damage role if the other classes in these roles can get near the damage output or perhaps even outpace it?

3) If the pure damage role is able to put out an incredibly high amount of damage, high enough that the other roles can't match it at all, then how do you avoid the idea of everyone simply going for raw damage and trying to overwhelm the targets with speed and a few hard blows.

In fourth edition D&D there were quite a few, for lack of a better term, errata storms that would hit because the Fighter was apparently outdamaging strikers, and then they would dial back the strikers to keep them from doing too much. It got frustrating but it also showed a basic problem, damage isn't exactly a complicated thing compared to what a lot of other classes do but it can still be easy to screw up, and when it goes wrong here it can get worse in other areas. I'll get into the problem of things feeling identical and some of the other issues from the role system in later posts.