Party Roles and You!

The adventuring party comes across a group of goblins in the woods, and immediately they jump into action. The warrior drawing sword and shield yells a taunt and places himself between the monsters and his friends. The mage prepares his first spell to put several of the beasts to sleep. The rogue moves to flank any that engage the warrior. Meanwhile the ranger begins to pick off his targets towards the rear, and blessings are being chanted  by the cleric in the background.

This is a pretty typical idea of how an adventuring party should handle threats in your basic fantasy RPGs. We all have the ideas of party roles, and how they work out to make things run smoothly. In a large part the class roles became codified from MMO’s and the concept has trickled in and become a major part in many games. Whether we are looking at FPS, or tabletop RPG. Any game where you are working with a group, it helps to know what each person is in charge of, and so we have adopted universal terms to know where everyone stands. These roles are broken down into 4 basic concepts: Tank, DPS(Damage Dealer), Healer, and Utility. Most characters have a primary role, but they can help out with others.

Here is a breakdown of the roles, and their sub-roles:

Tank: This is the bulwark behind which the party can feel safe performing whatever role each member has to do. Without a tank things can get very ugly as the party can’t survive long enough to defeat encounters. The main characteristics of a tank are high defense, and health as well as an ability to make sure that monsters continue to attack him rather than go after his squishier friends.

For 5e the classes and roles that are best suited to tanking(in my opinion are):

• Fighter: Either Champion or Battlemaster can make a good tank, but I feel that the battlemaster’s maneuvers give them an advantage as far as battlefield control and stickiness(the ability to keep a monster from ignoring you)
• Barbarian: A bear totem barbarian has just about the best survivability of any class in the game at the moment. This makes them a good tank, but he has a hard time getting mobs to stay on them.
• Paladin: I feel that oath of devotion and oath of the ancients can make for some very good tank builds. They have abilities that allow the paladin to survive a beating, and exert some minor control over the battlefield

The other class can  make builds that are hard to kill or can control the battlefield, but have a much harder time doing both at the same time. A monk tank built as a defensive duelist has some potential, but is going against the grain. While this isn’t a bad thing, its just important to note its not the easiest way to go about it.

Tank has one sub-role, the off-tank. This is a person who when there are far too many monsters for the tank to cover easily or when the tank goes down, can step in and protect the party. Typically this is one of the classes mentioned above, but built more towards a DPS role. This way when tanking isn’t needed they are pumping out damage and still helping out the party.

DPS: Even the hardiest tank with the best healer can only withstand an onslaught for so long. It is the job of the DPS to make sure that an encounter is finished as quickly as possible to conserve party resources. There are people that say that this is the easiest role, because its purpose is so straightforward. Find a target kill it and dont die, repeat until the encounter is over. This fails to take into account that a DPS person needs to make sure that their damage is optimized and that they need to be able to pick their targets to keep things going.

DPS is split into two types: melee DPS and ranged DPS. That is to say those who are up close and in the battle and those who rain death from afar. Nearly every class can be built to do damage, so I am only going to list the ones that are in my opinion the best at each of the sub-roles.

Ranged DPS(RDPS)

• Warlock: The warlock is currently the king of RDPS in 5e. The fact that their spells scale with them, and that their base cantrip has so many options to improve it make it difficult for other RDPS to keep up with them. They lack versatility, and unless they build themselves towards it battlefield control.
• Ranger: The ranger has the advantage that they can be built depending on what you expect to be dealing with either colossus slayer or horde breaker. With either of these as long as you are in your comfort zone you can do a ton of damage. The ranger also has a fair bit of utility.

Melee DPS(MDPS)

• Barbarian: Frenzied Berserker path has the ability to pump out huge amounts of damage per turn, because of their extra attacks. This coupled with their high health makes them ideal for getting in close and beating down targets.
• Fighter: The Champion path with a great weapon has a high critical chance, and the ability to reroll low damage. This lets them be very consistent in the damage they deal.
• Rogue: Assassin is different from the other two MDPS because they are very front loaded, or crit dependant. An assassin has the chance to kill a target in the first turn with their automatic critical sneak attack, but the longer a combat drags on the other MDPS can catch up, and even surpass them.

Healer: This is the least complicated role to describe, and also the most essential to a party’s survival. The healer prevents his companions from falling unconscious either through preventing damage or healing damage as it is done.

• Cleric: This is the standard healer for Dungeons and Dragons, and has been for decades. They have a wide variety of spells and builds that allows them to adjust their playstyle. They can also wear armour which means that they can survive being in the thick of things to apply healing where needed.
• Druid: Another divine caster, the druid plays very differently than the cleric. Their heals tend to be somewhat smaller, but they have a variety of buffs to make combat go more smoothly.
• Bard: I have only started to experience the bard as a healer recently, but I must say I am impressed. They can cast cure spells, and they can prevent damage using bardic inspiration. Spells like Vicious Mockery allow them to give extra defense to the party, which prevents a large amount of damage. The icing on the bardic healing cake is Song of Rest which increases a party’s healing during a short rest.

Utility: This is a catch all term for party members whose abilities are either devoted to controlling the battlefield, or are best suited for being out of combat. Most often you will not see a character who is primarily a utility role, this tends to be in addition to what they do in combat. These hybrid characters are often less powerful in the combat roles, but they are still needed for getting through all those times when a sword isn’t the right answer.

I tend to split utility into three distinct roles: the academic, the dungeoneer, and the controller.

Controller: These are characters that either disable or disrupt the enemies during combat. They will also have a variety of abilities out of combat to keep things moving if the party encounters resistance.

• Wizard: This is the controller that most people think of when they think of the role. They have access to spells of all sorts that let them either put monsters to sleep, control where they can walk(grease and entangle), or otherwise keep monsters from moving and attacking freely. The wizard also has the ability to fulfill the academic role, and some serious damage potential depending on the build.
• Sorcerer: Similar to the wizard with less variety, but more spells per day. They have a harder time filling the academic role, but they can do more damage
• Druid: Druids fulfill the controller role primarily by affecting the environment or monster movement.

Dungeoneer: This is the role that used to be filled almost exclusively by the rogue. Finding Traps, secret doors, and scouting the terrain to provide the party with an advantage. 5e has allowed the role to be filled by any character with stealth, perception, and investigation as class skills.

Academic: Like the dungeoneer gives information about the area that the party is dealing with the academic gives the party knowledge about where things can be found, what a Monsters strengths and weakness are, and what magic items do. This is typically filled by high intelligence characters with access to skills like history, arcana, and religion. I feel that this role is best filled by wizards and bards.

 

That is the breakdown of how I see the roles in 5e. You can see how the roles work out when you look at parties throughout the genre from the Heroes of the Lance to the Companions of the Hall. It is even easy to see in Rurik’s party, Rurik is the Tank, Kova is the Healer, Willis is the MDPS and Azhag is the RDPS. These roles being clearly defined I think is why the second party has been more successful than Aurelion and his friends.

Let me know what you guys think of the break down. Do you have a really cool build for one of the classes you want to share? Let me know in the comments section