Everyone Useful?

One shift in D&D from 3.5 to 4.0 is the idea of having everyone be useful. In 3.5 some characters aren't very useful in many situations. The classic example is a rogue. Many creatures such as elementals, constructs, undead, oozes, and so on are immune to the rogue's major offensive power, sneak attack. So when battling these things rogues aren't very useful, but in other situations where a rogue can bring his sneak attack into play they can do devastating damage. There are numerous examples of this and in general many characters will have situations they excel in and situations they do poorly in based on their character abilities.

In 4th edition they worked to make everyone useful all the time. There will still be times when some characters do better, but things are much more uniform and even. They might have been modelling this off of MMORPGs. In a MMORPG groups tend to be ever changing. Who you do a dungeon with depends on who is available at that time. If you know that a certain class would not be useful in a dungeon you would make the decision to not include people of that class. Imagine if you had a D&D dungeon that was full of undead but you picked characters like an MMORPG. You would never include a rogue in the party because they would be useless. Therefore, in a MMORPG you have to have every character be useful in every situation.

With pen & paper D&D games things are different. You have the same people every time. If there is a rogue in the party who isn't useful in one circumstance, it is okay because you know that in other circumstances they will be really useful.

So does having someone be useless in a fight add anything to the game? The 4th edition designers seemed to think it didn't. Lets look at what they did to sneak attack, the rogue ability that is so often useless in 3.5. They decreased the damage substantially, but they had it work on everything. So the rogue now never has his primary damage power completely disable, but he also loses those battles where he shines. Gone are the battles when the rogue is dishing out crazy amounts of damage. Making someone useless in some situations helps to balance out situations where they shine. And having battles where a specific character can shine is a good thing, but everyone should have their chance to shine. If you make it so everyone is useful all the time you also have to make it so that no one person can really ever stand out.

Ironically, by shifting the game to where everyone is useful in every encounter they made balance much more of an issue. If you aren't going to have battles where you shine or where you lag behind then instead of being balanced across multiple encounters you have to be balanced within every encounter. So balance becomes much more important and harder to do well.