When
I saw that D&D4 had made defender powers, I thought it was a neat idea
because I remembered that in the games my gaming group used to play – like Champions, Star
Wars, and Torg - we used to have powerful bricks who wanted to attract more
than their fair share of enemy firepower, and I thought it was cool that there
was a rule to force this rather than just relying on GM discretion.
However,
I have some problems with the implementation of defenders in play. I tend to
feel the defender powers are much more effective at hosing specific enemies
than at generally drawing attacks towards your defender and away from
vulnerable members of the party. A fighter can really frustrate an enemy by
“locking him down” and preventing him from using ranged attacks or powers
requiring movement, but that enemy tends to be the one that would have attacked
the fighter anyway, so it doesn’t protect the group much unless that enemy is
some sort of unusually powerful “boss” enemy.
A
second problem, commented on by a friend of mine, is that a balanced character
would need to be rather warped in order to be tough enough to take on their own
foe and somebody else’s, so (unless the fight is easy) either you aren’t
balanced, or you aren’t tough enough and you act as a heroic sacrifice while
you friends tear down the villains, or you are tough enough but have toothless
offense, or you are supported by an awesome healer who is either unbalanced or
has a toothless offense to compensate for all that healing power. I wondered
how defender-like characters used to work in the older RPG’s I used to play.
Even
if you successully implement a tank, MMORG-style, the problems that came to
mind for defense-oriented tank characters in a tabletop RPG setting can be
summarized as: having low offense is boring, getting thrashed so that an
offense-oriented character can deal damage feels like you are a meat shield for
someone else who gets all the glory.
The
model D&D claims to be going for, which seems based on MMORG concepts,
involves defense-oriented tanks, backed up by healers, distracting foes and
sucking up damage so that offense-oriented strikers can destroy them. I thought
I’d compare this to how offense-oriented and defense-oriented characters used
to work in my pre-D&D gaming groups. I’ve included the actual character
names from my gaming group; the wider audience can ignore these.
Most
of the characters were just intended to be balanced. These characters just
expect to take on their fair share of the opposition and go at it one-on-one.
The strong characters would tend to take on the strong foes and the weak
characters the weak foes; but if the weak characters were still sometimes
outmatched, that’s OK, it’s part of their character conception. Examples:
Hotshot, Starlight, Gravlock, Lance Benthar, Farukka, most of the Torg
characters.
Many
of the characters I would think of as defenders – our classic Champions bricks,
for instance – were, in fact, characters who were very powerful overall. They
had strong offense and very strong defense. They were tough enough to take on
more than their fair share of opponents and be happy to do so, and had plenty
of offense making them fun to play. Even if they were forced to deal with more
foes than they could handle, it was hard to complain when you knew you were so
awesome that they couldn’t defeat you without teaming up. Examples: Atom-Smasher,
Hellspawn, Monstrosity, Cutlass, Surge, Dr. Sandar, Solan Ionescree.
There
were characters who had strong defense but mediocre offense, theoretically the
equivalent of a "tank". But these characters did not feel or work at
all like the D&D fighter or MMORG tank. Rather, these were scrappy
characters who liked that even if they couldn't win the combat, they wouldn't
be taken out of it; they would always get to be present, doing their thing.
They might try to take on tough opponents to give the rest of the party
breathing room, but more as a special stunt than a routine combat tactic.
Mostly, they just liked knowing they would be the last one standing in the
group. Examples: Blitzkrieg, Charm, Psi-Knife, Olan (the Star Wars Gambler).
On
the opposite side of the spectrum, those characters we made to have relatively
poor defenses were usually characters who were not very powerful overall. Since
these characters were weak, they merited less than their fair share of
opponents, and it wasn't a big stress on the rest of the party if they hid in
the "back ranks" and weren't engaged at all. Everyone was happy
because the weak characters survived, the party was glad their solid offense
was being made good use of, and the front line didn’t feel like mere meat
shields because they knew they were more powerful and important than the back
ranks. Examples: Backlash, Troubleshooter, Colonel Quar.
There
were characters who were arguably high on the offense with relatively average
defense. It seems to me that these characters didn’t want to take on more than
their fair share of opponents, but would be quite happy to take on one
opponent. If that opponent was pretty strong, the fight might be over more
quickly than usual but would certainly be fair and entertaining; if the
opponent were normal, the powerful hero might be expected to win, then help his
scrappy allies who have been holding off the remaining foes. This involved a
little GM cooperation (it isn’t much fun if the villains all join up to stomp
you into the ground), but everyone ends up more or less happy; since the
high-offense character is still taking on a fair share of the enemies, the
other characters don’t feel so much like they are being used as defense for a
wizard that gets all the glory. Examples: Predator, Shock, ATHENA.
Some
characters had average-to-mediocre defense and weak offense. These were
typically skill-based characters. They had various ways of dealing with combat.
They might find a weaker opponent to go one-on-one with. If forced to take on a
fair share on the enemies, they would take on a mindset of being outmatched and
take pride in tying up their opponent as long as possible until the cavalry
could arrive. The lack of glory in this was not a problem since the skill-based
characters got all the glory they needed outside of combat. Sometimes they
would decline to take part in combat at all and concentrate on mission
objectives, relying on their relatively good defenses to survive crossing a
dangerous battlefield. Examples: Psyk-Out, Troubleshooter.
One
other type of defense-oriented character is one who has good defense and low
offense because they are powerful but incompetent (either due to inexperience
or general comedy). These characters don’t mind being somewhat ineffective on
offense because that is part of the character conception. And they usually feel
pretty dangerous when they get lucky and really do something effective.
Examples – Acme, Valkyrie (w/o Einherjar)
Interestingly,
I really did not find any characters built on the “tank” model – weak offense,
mighty defense, and a “hit me please” mentality – or the “wizard” model –
mighty offense, weak defense, uses friends as meat shields. Probably because
our early experience with RPG’s had been that such characters do not work, so we
made sure not to make any.
I’m
not sure what my conclusion here is, except for the observation that the kind
of polarized characters designed for the MMORG team dynamic, are exactly the
sort of characters that did not work at all in a regular RPG. That might
explain why I’m finding that combining the two approaches does not work quite
right.