The Myth of Party Roles in D&D 5E
Author: Audere
There’s a lot of misinformation regarding party roles in 5E. For example, many people will tell you that a party needs a “tank” or “front-liner.” This is simply false. Actually, it is better for a party to simply play builds that they find fun, or if they really want to optimize, builds which each contribute many things at once. Earlier in the week, we posted The Two Problems with Tanks, and this article expands on that discussion.
Fake Party Roles
“Tank” / “Front-liner” / “Melee”
This is the biggest and most egregious misconception. In many parties with “squishy casters,” people will say, “we need a front-liner! Maybe a Fighter or Barbarian?” The truth is that in 5E, tanking is not a big thing. Even with Sentinel, it’s easy for multiple enemies to move around a “front-liner,” who only has a single reaction with which to make an opportunity attack.
There are a couple true “tanking” mechanics in the game, such as the Ancestral Guardian Barbarian’s subclass abilities, but even these are generally not as strong from an optimization perspective as good old-fashioned battlefield control. It’s not that tanking is impossible in 5E; don’t worry, tank-lovers, there are build options that can fulfill your fantasy. It’s more so that tanks aren’t at all necessary, and the vast majority of the time when someone plays a “tank” it does not serve well as such in practice.
In fact, in 5E, there is a great benefit to having a party which is entirely ranged. Such a party can engage with melee-only enemies (which make up a huge proportion of the monsters in the game) without anybody in the party needing to walk up to where they can get hit.
The Myth of “Squishy Casters”
Casters in 5E need not be squishy. In fact, optimized casters tend to be significantly more durable than optimized martials.
The reasons for this are:
- Armor dips. Any caster can get access to medium armor and shields with no more than a single level dip, or sometimes a feat (Moderately Armored.)
- Wielding a shield. Most optimized martials don’t end up wielding a shield, because they use a glaive or halberd with Great Weapon Master or they use a hand crossbow with Crossbow Expert. Armor-dipped casters can rock a shield and a component pouch, or a shield and an arcane focus using the War Caster feat.
- The shield spell. +5 to AC for a round as a reaction is no joke. Optimized casters tend to sit on 19 base AC, 24 after shield. Sure, it’s possible to run out of shield slots, but is a caster who can get to 24 AC when it’s important really less durable than the Great Weapon Master Fighter who can’t?
- The Dodge action. Many casters contribute to combat primarily through their big concentration spell, and then can focus on keeping up that concentration, unlike a martial who has to Attack each round to contribute. For example, a Dodging Cleric concentrating on spirit guardians deals plenty of damage and has better defenses than just about any pure martial.
If we’re not talking about a high level of optimization, even the non armor-dipped Wizard is not much more squishy than the 18 AC Great Weapon Fighting Fighter! The Wizard’s d6 hit die only puts them back about 25% in maximum Hit Points, and the Wizard has 16-21 AC instead of 18.
“Healer”
Healing in 5E sucks.
Okay, sorry, that’s incorrect. Healing in 5E can be great. But it’s not at all like healing in an MMO. In 5E, efficient healing primarily takes two forms:
- Healing from 0 hit points to bring up an unconscious ally.
- Out of combat healing.
Neither of these are enough to constitute the full contribution of a player character. For the first, you just want healing word. For the second, there are some great combos like goodberry plus Life Domain’s Disciple of Life, but they don’t determine a build’s actions in combat.
Don’t expect to define your character around being a “healer.” It won’t be enough, and you can do much better. Instead, build a good character who also has access to useful healing abilities!
The prime example of this is the Cleric. Good Clerics in 5E are not really “healers“. Instead, they are durable front-line area of effect damage dealers and controllers, who primarily contribute in combat through spirit guardians, and deign to pick allies back up with healing word when appropriate.
“Face”
Having a party “face” is nice. However, like “healer,” this is hardly something to build an entire character around. It shouldn’t be any trouble at all to get someone with good Charisma. After all, many of the most powerful builds in the game are Charisma-based!
Bards, Paladins, Sorcerers, and Warlocks can all pick up Persuasion and be good at it, while being built primarily around other things.
“Scout”
“We need a Rogue to scout ahead and disarm traps!” the one says. Well, scouting ahead and disarming traps is nice, but you hardly need a Rogue for this. A Wizard, someone with the Ritual Caster feat, or a Warlock with the Book of Ancient Secrets can do just fine.
Find familiar is a better scout than any Rogue, and triggering traps from afar with unseen servant is generally safer than having a Rogue try to disarm it.
If you need to get past a locked door, well… anyone can have proficiency in thieves’ tools, or you could simply break down the door with fire bolt, or you could dismiss and resummon your familiar on the other side of the door to unlock it, or you could reduce the door, or any number of things.
“Utility Caster”
You may be noticing a theme here. Having utility is great, but there’s no reason to build a character around it as a role. A caster should be prepared to solve problems in and out of combat. Any Wizard can take great rituals like unseen servant, detect magic, find familiar, Leomund’s tiny hut, contact other plane, and Rary’s telepathic bond while preparing great combat spells like web, spells that are good in and out of combat like dimension door, and a couple useful utility spells like locate object.
Ultimately though, any caster can contribute great utility simply by being a caster with spells.
Real Things a Party Wants
There are real things that are great to have in a party. They just don’t have to slot into discrete roles.
Control
This is one of the few party roles that is actually somewhat justified. When someone says, “we need a controller,” and then someone rolls up a controller, that is a positive for the table! Unlike when someone says “we need a front-liner.”
Control is a big force multiplier in 5E. If you don’t have at least one controller, it should be at the top of the list in terms of what would benefit the party most.
However, if you do play a controller, don’t let the role limit your thinking. If fireball would be good, take fireball. There’s no need to only do one thing in 5E.
Damage
Damage output is an important element of any party. It (usually) determines how quickly monsters go down. However, while damage-focused characters are plenty strong, there’s no need to concentrate damage as a job onto one or two strikers. Having two casters with Warlock dips for eldritch blast is more powerful than having one straight-classed caster and one pure martial.
Single Target Damage
This is the main form of damage in the game, great to have, and just about always useful.
AOE Damage
If a party has no sources of area of effect damage, someone should really consider taking fireball. Groups of enemies are at least as common in 5E as singular targets. Clerics fulfill this role excellently with spirit guardians.
Various Force Multipliers
Besides damage and control, there are lots of force multipliers in 5E that are great to have in an optimized party. However, there’s no need to concentrate them all onto a single “support” character; in fact, it’s usually best for multiple characters to have support aspects.
Initiative Bonuses
The two main sources of this are the Watchers Paladin’s Aura of the Sentinel and gift of alacrity. If accessing these is possible, they are definitely worth snatching up. Ask your DM about using Fey Touched to gain access to gift of alacrity. Initiative makes or breaks encounters, and bad initiative is a big party killer.
Saving Throw Bonuses
The big source of this is the Paladin’s Aura of Protection. Other sources include bless and the Peace Cleric’s Emboldening Bond. Aura of Protection in particular becomes more and more “mandatory” as the level of optimization/game difficulty increases.
Pass Without Trace
Surprise in 5E is insanely powerful and commonly overlooked. If your DM runs surprise in line with the rules as written, you should seriously consider adding pass without trace to the party, whether that be from a Ranger, a Druid, a Trickery Cleric, a Lore Bard, or a Dragonmarked race.
Temporary Hit Points
Temporary hit points are great for increasing a party’s survivability. By far the best source of these is the Twilight Cleric’s Twilight Sanctuary. If a party doesn’t have another source of temporary hit points, someone should consider taking the Inspiring Leader feat, which is excellent. Other good sources include the Artillerist Artificer’s Protector Cannon, Shepherd Druid’s Spirit Totem, and the Glamour Bard’s Mantle of Inspiration.
Rest Casting
Certain rest cast spells such as aid and death ward can be great to have access to in a party, since they can buff everyone. Ask your DM about rest casting.
Two Example Party Compositions
To show how slotting yourself into a role is unnecessary, let’s look at a couple example parties.
Tank, Controller, Healer, Striker
This party thinks they need a tank, a controller, a healer, and a striker, so they’ve dutifully filled out these roles. The party contains:
- Nala, a Path of the Totem Warrior Barbarian with Polearm Master and Sentinel, who has 17 AC.
- Redyns, a School of Divination Wizard who primarily casts web and sleet storm, and has 16-21 AC.
- Bor, a Life Domain Cleric who primarily casts healing word and cure wounds, and has 20 AC.
- Rotciv, a Battle Master Fighter with Crossbow Expert and Sharpshooter, who has 17 AC.
Now, this is not a bad party! Not a bad party at all! Redyns the Divination Wizard and Rotciv the Battle Master Fighter are doing particularly well. As we’ve discussed, the most valid party roles are controller and DPR.
However, Nala and Bor are doing less well. If Alan, Nala’s player, is playing a Barbarian because he likes to hit things with a big weapon, he’ll hit things and have a great time. However, if he’s playing one because he figured the party needed a front-liner… he may end up disappointed when a horde of enemies rushes around him, making for the Wizard. Or when a horde of enemies focuses fire on him instead, and he finds himself less durable than he thought.
There is also a good chance that Rob, Bor’s player, is playing a Life Cleric because he wants to support the party. He will find that casting cure wounds in combat does a poor job of this. Damage in 5E far outpaces basic healing spells, so using actions to cast cure wounds on conscious allies is like trying to bail out the Titanic with a handbag.
Paladin, Tank/Primary Controller/Support, Tank/Controller/DPR/Support, Tank/Controller/DPR/Support
This party is a bit more savvy, and has built characters that fulfill the party’s needs while also being very strong individually and contributing in a myriad of ways. The party contains:
- Einnoc, an Oath of the Watchers Paladin who primarily concentrates on bless and has 20 AC.
- Kaz, a Chronurgy Wizard with 1 level of Peace Cleric who primarily casts web and sleet storm, but also supports the party with gift of alacrity and Emboldening Bond and has 19-24 AC.
- Elleon, a Twilight Cleric with 1 level of Divine Soul Sorcerer who uses Twilight Sanctuary to contribute refreshing temporary hit points to the party in combat, primarily casts spirit guardians, and has 20-25 AC.
- Eve, a Shepherd Druid with 1 level of Life Cleric and 1 level of Divine Soul Sorcerer who primarily casts pass without trace and conjure animals, contributes out of combat healing with goodberry and Disciple of Life, and uses spiked armor, a shield, and the shield spell to achieve 18-23 AC.
This party is much more powerful than the other party. They have at least as much damage output, significantly more control, and way more durability, both in terms of AC and saving throws. However, they don’t slot nicely into discrete party roles! Each party member contributes in many ways and acts as a force multiplier.
“Wacky” Party Compositions That Do Just Fine
Einnoc, Kaz, Elleon, and Eve are a force to be reckoned with, but there’s also plenty of room in 5E for “unbalanced” party compositions which don’t fill certain roles at all. Here are some examples.
Striker, Striker, Striker, Striker
A party of actually optimized strikers–martials with Crossbow Expert and Sharpshooter–will probably wreck any officially published adventure, at speed.
Controller, Controller, Controller, Controller
A party with an abundance of control, and not all that much DPR, will do just fine. Combat might be a little slow, but it’ll be under control, and the casters will prevail in the end.
Paladin, Primary Controller, Whatever, Whatever
A party with a Paladin and a primary controller such as a Wizard will do fine so long as the rest of the party plays halfway decent characters.
Play What You Want to Play
The lesson we want you to take from this is not “holy shit, we’d better perfectly coordinate our party to tick off gift of alacrity, Emboldening Bond, pass without trace, Aura of Protection, and Twilight Sanctuary!” Although we will be very happy if you go out and make such a party.
The lesson you should take from this is, don’t listen when someone says, “we need a tank” or “we need a healer.”
Play what you want to play.
If what you want to play is strong, great. If what you want to play isn’t that strong… it probably wouldn’t be much better to play a “tank” or “healer.”
I like this one the best. Good article, good points. I think 5e did a fantastic job when it comes to party diversity. Note that even control and DPR are not really “dedicated” positions– everyone contributes to DPR, and anyone with forced movement/movement debuff contributes to control, which consists of many unique options (not just hypnotic pattern etc: command, open hand, repelling blast, even ball bearings, and all of these interact with other control techniques and with party mobility.) The more significant limit to “play what you want to play” is about character vision, where for example a player that wants to play Gandalf probably doesn’t want to do so while wearing a breastplate.
“In fact, in 5E, there is a great benefit to having a party which is entirely ranged. Such a party can engage with melee-only enemies (which make up a huge proportion of the monsters in the game) without anybody in the party needing to walk up to where they can get hit.”
“A party of actually optimized strikers–martials with Crossbow Expert and Sharpshooter–will probably wreck any officially published adventure, at speed.”
As much as theoretically all these are true, and I genuinely agree with it in theory.
In practice, it’s pretty much if always never true.
I’ve played a ranged only party campaign, and we are so very much often got trounced.
Between the field being not open field but more often things with cover, or labyrinthine dungeons where corners and rooms makes long ranged shooting impossible, melee characters have the wherewithal to focuses on high AC and high HP as opposed to their ranged counterpart, some monsters having high speed and a dozens other factors.
More often than not, the party got smacked around.
Then after a ranged character die and the player finally brings in a melee my god I never felt more safe and protected.
It was only after a while that I realized after similar discussion as this very article: while at the baseline, ranged combat indeed give you far more benefit than melee with far less demerit… more often than not, situations, terrain, and field where you fight in a campaign in certain situations almost always puts you in places where ranged combat’s superiority is immediately negated.
I know I’m just talking from personal experience, and so hardly the uberexample for this, but…. from experience, more often than not the advantages was never that clear, sometimes downright nonexistent.
Ok so, general high level gameplay breakdown. Wish and True Poly make tier 4 unplayable so let’s look at around levels 13-15. (I’m totally down to talk about your game’s specifics, if you want, but ‘d need information on that first.)
You can basically break it down into casters, ranged attack lads, and melee attack lads. Also into whether or not the game has feats and multiclassing.
Monsters at this level tend towards higher speed and ranged attacks. This makes kiting from ally ranged attackers and casters more difficult, but it also means that ally melee can instead be kited by the enemy! There is absolutely nothing stopping a demon or dragon from being twice as fast as your melee boi while flying up and mashing AoE. Frightful presence is decently common, and makes this worse.
Assuming your DM isn’t lowballing enemy tactics just to help you out, ranged is more consistent that way.
Hit die/HP differences didn’t matter at level 1 and they matter even less now. The % difference in health is the same, but now attacks that do more than just damage are incredibly common. Things with built in poison, mind screws, or the hated grapple restrain are everywhere. You’d much rather not get hit to begin with.
So, how do you not get hit? Well, if feats are in play, as a character with no magic you only have one universal option: hitting first with big damage. HP and AC have bloated to the point where this plan isn’t great, but it’s workable. Note, however, that ranged is much much better at this. On top of the already discussed issue of enemy movement, Sharpshooter gives them the better advantage against crowds and weird terrain and Crossbow Expert eliminates melee’s close range niche, and by now you have both so you’re just better by default as a ranged lad, fully eclipsing every case for melee and then some. This also includes doing more damage, because Archery is good enough with -5/+10 to matter more than weapon damage dice.
If you dont have feats then you, uh, honestly you just perish, ranged or melee. Play a caster instead (see below). That said, if you don’t have feats, melee vs ranged doesn’t matter because you can just be a switch hitter. Go DEX over STR because its a better stat with better weapons, don’t play Barb, and just use ranged all the time for all the reasons listed above unless for some reason you’re forced not to.
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(Casters can often spam Shield for +5 on top of their base, and since their impact on the field isn’t action reliant, they can also Dodge, meaning they have a chance at forcing misses while you don’t. (For example, even +14 or 15 hit has less than a 50/50 chance at hitting a Mage Armor + Shield spell + Dodge wizard, dropping to under 1/3rd if they can multiclass and pick up medium armor.) Similarly, spells like Absorb Elements and Phantom Steed give extra defensive coverage that any given mundane class has no answer to, and even with magic resistance in mind they have much better offense than you do, examples include Antipathy, Synaptic Static, Spirit Guardians, Animate Dead, and Eldritch Blast.)
Since there’s a few articles on misconceptions about D&D optimization, can you make one debunking the all-day martial? That somehow not having spells gives you more resources for a long encounter day?
I don’t want to spoil any upcoming articles but yes this is being considered and we can explain this. 😉
Pack tactics does have a video on it, it’s called “Resourceless martial arguments make no sense” or something along the lines of that.
Can I make a suggestion on these types of articles? Don’t state absolutes, as it’s a big turn off to this website.
A party for example could go all ranged, and that may work out fine, but it’s not on average probably going to work out how this white room theory thinks it is. Like, at some point a monster is going to grapple a “squishy caster”, poison a SS+CBE ranger, break the concentration of the Cleric spamming spirit guardians, etc.
A DM is almost always going to try and challenge party options at some point. So saying “this type of team, this type of player, this type of play style” will always be better, or almost always, is really misleading. Yes, there are higher damage options and better spells and the like, but that doesn’t mean the best options copied over and over again will solve all problems and have no risk, or even have less risk than another party that didn’t optimize at those levels.
I know you kind of say this at the end, “play what sounds fun”, but it doesn’t sound very fun when the rest of your article tells people their entire play style or choice of character design is a “myth”.
I don’t write for TTB, and I can’t speak to their intent. By my reading, though, the message isn’t “parties can’t have tanks” but rather “parties don’t need to have tanks.” The target isn’t the playstyle or character, it’s the forcing of such playstyles and characters onto players who don’t know better.
As for absolutes, I don’t remember reading any meaningful ones in the article. All of these are averages and generalities. Trivially, an all-martial party is going to fare better than an all-caster party in a campaign set on a giant anti-magic field. But, on average, an encounter that challenges the optimized party is one that wrecks an unoptimized one. A monster that deals enough damage to break the concentration of a dodging shield-dipped cleric is a monster that deals enough damage to outright kill a barbarian. (I’m serious. By the time the cleric takes a single hit, the barbarian has taken 20 hits. By the time the res con + war caster cleric loses concentration from DC 10 saves, the barbarian has taken 886 hits. Obviously you aren’t going to see these exact numbers in real life, but I assume that’s common knowledge. I don’t need or want to read an article with qualifiers every other word.)
They’re correct though- that’s the sad truth of how unbalanced 5e is. And casters aren’t squishy, you should know this by now.
Ok so I guess I have some thoughts…
1) “A badass warrior who protects others in combat,” is not just an MMO role (and a major point of the old-school fighter, which is where the MMOs got it), but also a perfectly valid character concept for a player to want in an heroic fantasy game.
2) In D&D, regardless of edition, focus fire is a solid, basic tactic, that PCs and monsters should use. Since hit points are a resource, isn’t the point of a tank getting enemies to attack them to break up focus fire. Presumably the tank should have more hp than other characters, be harder to inflict damage on, and be more efficient to heal. But, if allies never take damage, isn’t that also sub-optimal use of party hp resources (and, in 5e HD).
3. Could any of 5e’s tanky resources be viewed as more nearly adequate from that PoV, breaking up focus fire and spreading out Damage?
Good article, but of course everything depends on having a good DM. Personally, I feel that any DM worth their dice should be able to modify encounters and story to get the amount of challenge right for the players with the rules they want to play.
I teach DMing at a high school, and a lot of them early on operate under the misconception that creative combat design means taking away what the party does best. Not adjusting to the chosen party classes and such is a larger scale version of this. For most players, this is frustrating (unless they chose to wade into a limiting situation knowing they would not have their best traits highlighted in order to get some special prize). Throwing a creature immune to non magical damage at a party where half the players can’t deal magical damage yet is just poor dming, but many beginning (and sometimes experienced ) DMs think it is clever. Not adjusting your story and encounters to fit what the players want to play is one of the first steps in going from being a beginning DM to a competent one.
What about the barbarians Feral Instinct as a way to bump initiative?