My definition of role-playing and WotC’s new 4E definition are clearly different. To me, role-playing is just that; playing a role, as in a character. You develop a character, you put yourself into the mind set of that character and you play that character as if it were a real person. In my opinion, when you are deciding what character you want to play in a campaign, it should be about what race, gender, class and personality you feel inspired to build upon and develop. Not what tactical benefits are you going to bring to a combat situation.
4E has taken the idea of playing a Role and categorized it into just another template to apply to a character. It could be said that the nature of a violent conflict naturally facilitates the need for the archetypes of a controller, defender, leader and striker. I guess I can agree with that assessment. But from what I’ve been reading online, most everyone seems so stuck on this idea of each character in the group filling a specific role in order to maximize the group’s combat potential/effectiveness. But is this really necessary? If you’re just playing a short one-shot combat intensive scenario, then sure, building a balanced battle group is the way to go. However, long running campaigns are drawn out stories and stories need unique, interesting characters to make them work.
This whole concept of Roles is based on the need for the group to fight and win combat situations. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the groups overall longevity. I just don’t think it should be your main concern when creating your character. This is reminiscent of the old discussion of who should be what class in order to have a “balanced” party. (Who’s going to be the cleric? Who’s going to be the spellcaster?) It seems to hearken back to the mind set of players focusing only about “winning the game” and smells strongly of the min/maxer’s and munchkin’s mentality.
It’s apples and oranges really. It’s the difference between developing a group of interesting individual characters with backgrounds, goals and dreams OR developing a squad of mercenaries built to do one thing; winning combat encounters. While defeating monsters is great, I’m more interested in what the characters can and will do in the spaces between battles. The implementation of Roles is just one of many tools for developing a character, as part of an adventuring group, but in my opinion it shouldn’t be the main focus of your character development.
I’ll stick with my apples, thank you very much.
