I have long hated niche protection, and I think I've finally figured out how to express why.  To explain, let me start with a game where, in theory, it kind of works.

So take D&D.  Fighter, cleric, mage, thief.  In combat, the fighter fights, the cleric is a secondary fighter who decides when or whether to heal or turn undead, the thief sneaks around and tries to set himself up for a backstab (or just stands back with a shortbow once he sees his actual chances), and the mage, while he may have the least to do on a turn by turn basis, decides when to bring the artillery in with a Fireball or Sleep spell.  There's some strong niche protection, and not everyone's equally involved every turn, but in principle everyone has a role in combat.

And out of combat (and again, in theory) everyone should have something to do as well.  The fighter is a leader of men, the thief wrangles traps and locks and spy missions, the cleric can heal and preach to villagers, the mage can research spells or scribe scrolls.  I'm aware this part starts to break down in later editions, and especially where the words "face man" or, even worse, "diplomancer" can be uttered with a straight face, but that was the original ideal, especially in games that assumed downtime.

So we've had that concept of class protection from the very start.  But that's been combined with people getting used to stable groups of four or five players (which wasn't the case right at first, though it emerged pretty quickly), and we got stuck with the idea of niche protection.  And now I've seen groups and individuals in everything from Traveller to Savage Worlds to L5R start talking spontaneously about niche protection as if it's either a good thing or just a baseline assumption.

But stop and think about that.  Take Traveller, or sci fi generally.  If your niches shake out as, say, "pilot/ship guy", "combat specialist", "party face", and "ship's doctor/medic" you've just accomplished the opposite of what the original class system did.  Because now there's only one player with something certain to do in combat, one player with something to do in social situations, one player to do in chases or flight scenes, and so on.

That in turn imposes a burden on the GM, to "challenge" each character - except really it works out as name-checking everybody's separate skill sets.  So every session or every adventure ought to have a social test to get past (but not one that lasts a full night of play), every adventure needs a combat (which is somehow going to have to challenge the combat monster without pasting the noncombatants, an added burden), every adventure needs some kind of technical challenge which just so happens to require whatever engineering, repair or computer skill one character has, and so on.

But if involving all the characters is such a good thing, how much better would it be to just have a party full of generalists who can all be involved in multiple types of challenges?  If everyone's got a combat skill of some kind, but no one's head and shoulders above the rest, the GM can involve and challenge the whole party without turning the worst combatant into tomato paste if he stumbles across the combat monster's intended foe.  If the game has different social skills, why not split Diplomacy, Bluff and Seduction across three different characters instead of stacking them all on one with a maxed out Charisma, who's magically always present to talk to NPCs for everyone else in the group?

I think this is one reason I like Traveller's random character creation.  Because you can try for certain things, but out of a group, at least one person's likely to get Mechanic whether they like it or not, you may well see some skill overlap around Pilot or Engineer, and in general you get a mix of skills you may not have expected or desired if you were trying to min-max and match your skills to your attributes and your expected party role.  That's a good thing!  Skill overlap is a good thing for involving more players in challenges.  And, tactically it's good to have some backup if someone gets shot (or the player just misses a session).

Similarly, the last time I ran L5R I just flat out told the group, "hey, try to make well rounded characters.  Everyone should have something to do in combat, everyone should have one of the social offense skills, every samurai should have a courtly skill of some kind, whether it's a Lore or Perform or Artisan skill."  I didn't actually veto anyone making a combat monster or a helpless courtier, but I warned them up front that if they did I wouldn't be tailoring any challenges to them.  So they might well make paste out of any one challenge they came across if it matched their skills, but I wouldn't go out of my way to challenge them or involve them on their highest strength every session.  And that campaign ran better than when I've seen min-maxers go for niche protection in L5R.

So I'll make a claim, though it applies more to point-buy and skill based systems than well designed class systems:  at a meta-game level, niche protection is just plain bad for games.  It's bad GMing if the GM is the one encouraging, and it's bad play if it's players seeking it out.  For games that differentiate them, by all means distinguish characters with different weapon skills or fighting styles, different technical skills, and different social skills, but it's far better to spread those out across the group than stack them on one character.

Anyway...  Am I wrong, and there's a counter-argument I'm not seeing?  Or is this not even news to anyone here, and I've just been unlucky in some of my face to face groups?

"Niche Protection" is more a factor of the table than the game. And it morrors different areas of focus. A wizard is a poor fighter because theyve focused their studies elsewhere. They can still fight. But they dont have all the skill a actual fighter or cleric has. Thieves are the least niche protected. Anyone can climb, pick locks, backstab even. The thief just does it better. And so on.

But at individual tables you can see all sorts of treatments up to and including players with the idea everyone is locked in one role and thats that.

BX is where you get the early wake-up call that there arent any niches really since everyone starts out fighting much the same, its just weapons proficiency and abilities that set one apart.

5e takes that even further. Everyone fights the same, non-casters can pick up a few spells, casters can learn to wear armour, and everyone can learn the thieving skills.

And non class systems are not immune to this either. Ive seen players of Gurps complain about how some other character had skills too simmilar to their own. And its 95% of the time the players that are trying to enforce it. Never seen a DM try to. In fact seen many discourage it.

Its not even limited to RPGs. Some players are more territorial of their function in a game than others and try to either peg others into simmilar holes or at least make sure no one is encroaching on their turf.

Ive seen people just flip out at the mere idea everyone playing the same class. I suspect 3 and 4e D&D edged wording to imply you needed a balanced group and that playing the same as someone else was not balanced? Just a impression got from one glance through and only noted it at the start.

Id lay good odds others have seen the diametric opposite. Sessions where everyone was lock-stepped into one role-one-class-each. Sounds brutally boring.

Currently in 5e the group I am DMing for is comprised of two casters, Sorcerer and Wizard, and one Paladin. The group Im playing with is Two casters as well, Druid and Warlock, and one fighter. Though I've been playing the warlock as more fighter than caster. In both groups one player happened to pick up some thieving skills.

Currently discussing doing an all Fighter group once the current campaign winds down.

I think the problem is more the idea of finding contrived reasons or "bending over backwards" for making tests specifically for each character.
If one ditches that notion, and is prepared to throw a fight against a non-combat character or a social obstacle against an anti-social one if need be, then it makes even more character playing, i'd say.
Also, it makes a world of possibilities emerge.

I think it really depends on the players. Some, probably most, only like certain aspects of RPGs - combat or social encounters or solving puzzles/whatnot by creative skill use. Trying to make everyone a generalist forces them to do things they probably don't want to, while taking away from the fun stuff they like (and giving that to other people who might not like it much).

Original Traveller would often give you the type of character you didn't want to play. Go into the Army wanting to be a gun bunny, but end up being a mechanic.

I think a better solution, although still not ideal since it can force people into playing styles they don't like, is "troupe" play, where everyone has 3-4 characters and they simply use the one appropriate to the given scenario or situation.

Quote from: Dave R;907714Anyway...  Am I wrong, and there's a counter-argument I'm not seeing?  Or is this not even news to anyone here, and I've just been unlucky in some of my face to face groups?

Your "guys, for the upcoming adventure my suggestion for PCs is as follows..." is good approach and it should be applied more often. If followed, it solves the problem of scenario <-> classes mismatch, or, in case of stubborn "my way or no way" players, it makes it his choice to take worse seat in the theater (while the better ones are unoccupied and free to take).

And just a side note: nowadays players often demand far too much control over the game - they mistake GM for an employee of McDonald, who is there to serve them. Unlike the McDonald they aren't willing to pay for that service.

The only reasons that I don't find the "niche protection" concept the most moronic and useless ever to come out of D&D are (a) that Gygax came up with alignment, and (b) as Omega correctly points out, you really can't blame this on TSR, because the concept is something the gaming culture created.  I hate it so strongly that it wound up being #2 on my bucket list of Gaming Geek Fallacies and the impetus for starting a gaming blog.  To wit, this rant:

Gaming Geek Fallacy #2: We Have To Have One Of Everything

No, we really don't.  The concept of "niche protection" is one of the more bizarre tropes the wargaming roots of our hobby's stuck us with.  Let's see if I have this straight: we decree that a questing team needs an artificial balance of certain archetypes (archetypes that, I might add, are not necessarily found in all of the fictional stories which are the underpinnings of the hobby). The players are compelled to make the expected selections, often ensuring that one or more run a character he or she does not wish to play. We then design pre-packaged, commercial "modules" so that a party lacking the proper percentage of these archetypes is punished for their failure to make the "right" choices in rollup.

What are my problems with it, I've been asked?

*  It's not only entirely artificial, the roles are arbitrarily chosen. The Tank / Blaster / Healer / Rogue paradigm presupposes -- farcically -- that these are not only the only roles conceivable, but that they're the only ones desirable.

*  It's a self-justifying paradigm; we need to "protect niches" because some game systems are designed so that you can't succeed without them.

*  Decades of RPGs with freeform or skill-based systems have proven we don't need them ... and never really did.  Heck, this isn't universally the case across genres.  I've heard some of the most rabid defenders of niche protection concede that they don't feel it's necessary for SF or supers games.  Why not?  Is there some reason why "niches" for fantasy is essential, but not for other genres?  Is it that SF novels or comic books lack identifiable archetypes?  Or is this more of a case that the first really big RPGs for SF (Traveller) and supers (Champions) were classless systems lacking easily definable and exclusive niches, so people weren't conditioned to think they had to have them for those genres?

*  It's quite easy -- truly it is -- to write scenarios that don't require (say) a thief or a priest to succeed.  Heck, I've had all-warrior and all-magician groups, and I've had campaigns go for years without characters who were any good at disarming traps or could call upon divine healing.

* It retards creative thinking. I remember quite well a niche protection debate where a poster flung the gauntlet at me: what if a locked door is key to the scenario and you didn't make the party bring a locksmith along? Huh? Huh? Well, says I, the party could bash the door down. Or the wizard could witch their way through somehow. Or they could pull the pins on the hinges. Or they could look for another way into the room. Or they could find out who had the keys and filch/bribe/seduce them from the owner somehow. Or the GM could devote a scrap of brainpower to developing scenarios that didn't revolve around a skill the group lacked. (This, of course, would require that (a) the GM didn't play out of "modules," or (b) exercised his privilege to change them if he did.)

* What's wrong with redundancy?  Characters die.  The player with the key skill can't make the session. There are countless circumstances where multiple characters with the same skill make the task go much faster or much more safely ... never mind that combat redundancy is only ever, well, "redundant" if you never fight more than a single opponent at a time.  (I view the "But I have to be The Best in the party at something!" as the province of whiners channeling stereotypical 1950s Hollywood women who go into hissy fits if another woman shows up to the party wearing the same dress.)

* It reflects fictional sources but poorly. Especially before the late 1970s and the advent of gaming fiction, duplication of skills was rampant. Did JRRT worry that Aragorn and Boromir had much the same skill set? Did Fritz Leiber worry that his dynamic duo were both thieves? For every movie with Only One Of Everything, there was a Seven Samurai.

Beyond that, niche protection is one of the more angst-ridden subjects in gaming.  People get pissed off when they feel their "thunder" is being stolen.  People get pissed off because they think it was their turn to run the mage.  People get pissed off because they're being forced to play the cleric, again.  People get pissed off because it seems THAT guy always gets to play what he wants.  People get pissed off because one niche is (or is perceived to be) poorly balanced against another.  People gets pissed off when playing Niche A because someone in Niche B is doing a perceived aspect of Niche A better.  People get pissed off because the only face time they get is when someone wants a lock picked or a wound healed, and the rest of the time they're relegated to being REMFs.

Much of what drives the ongoing controversy about railroading GMs is related; with the widespread practice of running nothing but commercially-produced "modules" straight out of the shrinkwrap, paired with a deep unwillingness to change a jot of them to suit their groups, GMs and groups require that the niches be filled because the modules (allegedly) demand it of them.

My wife, for example, played in a campaign in high school with her cronies. Around a bunch of testosterone-soaked boys, she was stuck with being the party healer. The concept didn't bug her, per se, and sure, she got to roll dice a couple times a session and do her healing spells. The "niche," however, didn't guarantee her a say in tactical planning or decision making, and in fact she didn't have one. What the rest of the group valued was the ability to put hit points of damage on the enemy, and that she lacked.  She was stuck, however, with the character she had and wasn't allowed to trade out for an archetype which would be better respected ... because they "had to have one of everything."

Even the alleged virtues of the system, as articulated by its defenders, are weak:

* It's good to play characters who aren't good at everything?  Terrific, then design one ... who's stopping you?

* It's good for weak characters to be useful?  Shouldn't this be enforced with group dynamics and by the GM instead?  (Or, well ... in a skill-based system, a character doesn't have to be "weak" just because he's a performer or a scholar.  Better not jeer at Tanri the busker, because she works out at Saragam's dojo and she'll whap you upside your head.)

* Characters in class systems have different "flavors?" What makes restricting the number of available roles more varied and interesting than taking what you want?  (Beyond that, my flavor is oreo, thanks.  If you can't hack any ice cream other than vanilla-chocolate-strawberry, whatever; you stick to those.)

* Characters ought to have defined functions?  Why do I need to have one-word labels for all my characters, and what makes this a virtue?

* "Enforcing the genre expectations?" Please. If the GM can't manage to run the anticipated genre and the players aren't interested in running the anticipated genre, no character class written will compel them to do so. You can never legislate the munchkins out of existence. You can say, bizarrely enough, "Nice try, but no."

* It's too hard to design characters outside of pre-defined niches?  Quite aside from that there are countless gamers out there who don't need training wheels, many a game has optional "templates" based around popular roles, without requiring that players choose one or the other.

Alright, so some game companies would have to do a lot more work to write adventures which could be solved in more ways without niche protection.  (Other game companies, the ones who work with classless systems, seem to manage just fine, of course.)  But how many of us don't work with commercial "modules?"  What's our benefit in buying into this fallacy?

Quote from: Catelf;907721I think the problem is more the idea of finding contrived reasons or "bending over backwards" for making tests specifically for each character.
If one ditches that notion, and is prepared to throw a fight against a non-combat character or a social obstacle against an anti-social one if need be, then it makes even more character playing, i'd say.
Also, it makes a world of possibilities emerge.

That is certainly part of it. The other part comes from the idea of what a "challenge" is. In many cases a challenge simply means making a successful roll of X difficulty. Quite often the gaps in ability between a specialist and someone who is supposedly competent are large enough to drive a truck through. The player, not wanting to "suck" puts all available resources into his or her stupid PC trick and the GM wanting to make sure that the character is properly "challenged" sets the hurdles for success so high that only the specialist has any hope of success.

This ridiculous paradigm is played out again and again all in the name of providing adequate spotlight time for each specialist. This results in all the other players being spectators while the spotlighted player hoots and hollers because of having a bonus that makes rolling a 25 or higher a piece of cake.

Why does this keep happening?  For starters the game systems themselves, some more than others ( d20) encourage it. Also there is mentality involved in the approach to play that I have dubbed the Ricky-Bobby syndrome. IF YOU'RE NOT FIRST YOU'RE LAST!  Players with this philosophy won't contemplate attempting to do ANYTHING in a game unless they have the highest bonus. The whole game is simply throwing the highest bonus at any given situation . Mathematically solid but boring as all hell.

This isn't the players fault alone, not by a long shot. Players wouldn't approach play like this if it wasn't for inflexible GMs who run games in which throwing large bonuses at problems is the only solution that will work. Too much of what is used to resolve challenges comes from system math and not enough fun creative input from participants. So long as we keep expecting the game system to do all of our thinking and judging for us this is what we will have, simple expected responses to system demands.

Quote from: Dave R;907714So I'll make a claim, though it applies more to point-buy and skill based systems than well designed class systems:  at a meta-game level, niche protection is just plain bad for games.  It's bad GMing if the GM is the one encouraging, and it's bad play if it's players seeking it out.  For games that differentiate them, by all means distinguish characters with different weapon skills or fighting styles, different technical skills, and different social skills, but it's far better to spread those out across the group than stack them on one character.

Anyway...  Am I wrong, and there's a counter-argument I'm not seeing?  Or is this not even news to anyone here, and I've just been unlucky in some of my face to face groups?

Totally agree with this. I referee Traveller way different than most, and don't allow meta-gaming that you see in so many Traveller sessions. If you've read Agent of the Imperium, that is how I get players to role-play their characters.

Your points are well-worded and I commend you for it. Here's to more threads like this one.

I do see a couple of counterpoints:

1. Players in skill-based games creating "specialists" probably do so because, like in real life, they are rewarded for doing so. A group of four PCs with Diplomacy-1 is more costly and less effective than one PC with Diplomacy-4. Cross-training (having 1 or 2 PCs with at least Diplomacy-1) may be a plus, but once you've given PCs free reign to generate their characters, IME, some degree of specialization is to be expected.

2. Tailoring challenges is okay, but an easier road might be to allow for scenarios with multiple solutions. I am very much a seat-of-the-pants GM and enjoy introducing NPCs that are just as likely to become patrons or foes. I am often surprised with PCs' solutions, combat and non-combat alike.

Quote from: Dave R;907714But stop and think about that.  Take Traveller, or sci fi generally.  If your niches shake out as, say, "pilot/ship guy", "combat specialist", "party face", and "ship's doctor/medic" you've just accomplished the opposite of what the original class system did.  Because now there's only one player with something certain to do in combat, one player with something to do in social situations, one player to do in chases or flight scenes, and so on.

That in turn imposes a burden on the GM, to "challenge" each character - except really it works out as name-checking everybody's separate skill sets.  So every session or every adventure ought to have a social test to get past (but not one that lasts a full night of play), every adventure needs a combat (which is somehow going to have to challenge the combat monster without pasting the noncombatants, an added burden), every adventure needs some kind of technical challenge which just so happens to require whatever engineering, repair or computer skill one character has, and so on.

Or even worse, you get to the point where everyone has a niche in combat, because that's usually always done through mechanics (where social interactions aren't, depending on table), so now everyone can fight, just in a different way, but the Rogue is also a skill monkey, the Cleric is a mini-fighter with spells, and the Wizard can cover any other role, provided he has the time and spells (and in 3e, for example, where every possible casting restriction every devised was removed, he was) and the Fighter...fights, no longer all that much better than the others.  Moving from classes to niche protection and focusing all mechanics on combat was a mistake of WotC-era D&D.

In other games, look at Firefly, or even Star Wars.  A lot of the characters have some crossover, but there might be specialists among them.  Look at the Episode IV crew, they all can fly ships, they all can fire a blaster, but each has different other talents.  Same thing with Firefly, only Jane and the Doctor are pure specialists.

The problem is, some players have to be "the best" at something, and need to make sure that at some point, the spotlight is fully upon them as they become the center of attention and the focus of the story.

Niche Protection is useless horseshit...although in certain types of games it does make sense to have specialists, or at least a team where each needed competency is handled by *someone*.  An example would be the Heat/Leverage/Shadowrun type of game.  But even then, they work just fine without a team of Hyper-Specialists.  If you don't have a God-Level Samurai, then you need to do things differently, because Rock n' Roll against a platoon of guards isn't an option.

Step 1: Don't play a class based system

Step 2: ?

Step 3: Problem solved

Quote from: CRKrueger;907735Or even worse, you get to the point where everyone has a niche in combat, because that's usually always done through mechanics (where social interactions aren't, depending on table), so now everyone can fight, just in a different way, but the Rogue is also a skill monkey, the Cleric is a mini-fighter with spells, and the Wizard can cover any other role, provided he has the time and spells (and in 3e, for example, where every possible casting restriction every devised was removed, he was) and the Fighter...fights, no longer all that much better than the others.  Moving from classes to niche protection and focusing all mechanics on combat was a mistake of WotC-era D&D.

In other games, look at Firefly, or even Star Wars.  A lot of the characters have some crossover, but there might be specialists among them.  Look at the Episode IV crew, they all can fly ships, they all can fire a blaster, but each has different other talents.  Same thing with Firefly, only Jane and the Doctor are pure specialists.

The problem is, some players have to be "the best" at something, and need to make sure that at some point, the spotlight is fully upon them as they become the center of attention and the focus of the story.

Niche Protection is useless horseshit...although in certain types of games it does make sense to have specialists, or at least a team where each needed competency is handled by *someone*.  An example would be the Heat/Leverage/Shadowrun type of game.  But even then, they work just fine without a team of Hyper-Specialists.

Even in Shadowrun it'd be expected that anyone at least has a few points in Pistols to be able to shoot their way out of the broom closet, if things go down South farther than Sherman.

I strongly support classes, but I don't have much use for niche protection.

I view classes not as "this is how I participate in the game" and more as "this is how I solve problems". So, fighters are the best at breaking things with standard physics. Clerics are the best at resisting or defeating malign magic. Magicians are the best at taking short cuts by changing physics.

Starting from a baseline ur-class, I've designed my classes so that there is a basic level of competency which is then built upon by the specializations that the class offers. Each class has a means to overcome or evade an obsticale, although some classes are more efficient at overcoming certain obsticles than others.

I think it was Kevin Crawford who mentioned "strong" and "weak" niche protection.
I like weak niche protection. I dislike strong niche protection.
CP 2020 springs to mind, where it's skill based, but each "class" gets their one role special ability.

Quote from: Baron Opal;907745I view classes not as "this is how I participate in the game" and more as "this is how I solve problems".

Ditto. Although the line between participation and problem solving is probably a vague one.

Interesting conversation.  'till now, I haven't given it much thought mostly because as a GM it feels like there is little I can do to prevent it without being arbitrary at chargen.  I also know I know that niche protection is annoying as hell from a GM perspective, and that it is a sacred cow to most players who insist on developing "well-balanced" parties with specialists to handle any situation.  It doesn't matter if it's a class or skill based game either, players design their parties as a mufti-fasceted bonus maximizing machine as a matter of course.

I don't tend to worry about niche protection.  Especially not "strong" niche protection/making sure to highlight peoples' abilities.

What I do do is two things, at least for the relevant types of games:

1) I make sure that the characters are relevant to the adventure and vice versa.  If someone makes a pilot character in a space opera game, then, yeah, flying spaceships around is going to be A Thing at least some of the time.

2) I present problems to the players, and let them figure out their own solutions.  Presumably they're smart enough to figure out how to use their own stuff to fix problems.