EDIT: TiaC captured my thoughts on this topic pretty perfectly in the response in the above post (that was written while I was typing the spoilered bit).
[snip]
I don't think it implies that. It's just saying what it's saying, which is that more versatile characters have less of this niche protection keeping them from other roles, and more powerful characters have more niche protection keeping others out of their role. As you move up the tiers, the cross section of power and versatility shoots up, such that you wind up with characters that can supplant any other member of their party at any moment, but which cannot themselves be supplanted. The point is simply that versatility matters, and is variable between the classes, not necessarily that all classes should be infinitely versatile.
"Play in less of the game" is not a value-neutral phrase. And, just look at your exchange with Samwise. It's an argument that the Orc is a bad character in some sense b/c he can't do a variety of things.
EDIT: back to Tiers and versatility and my issues with the Tiers systemMy original point, stated clearly I think, was that the Tiers ranking overstated the importance of versatility. If your point is just that it "matters," well, sure. But, that's not a response to what I said at all. I said that the Tiers generally weighted versatility
too heavily, not that the weight should be set to 0.
Like TiaC said earlier, if you're concerned with intraparty parity, which is what the Tiers system is emphatically focused on, then the ability to utterly trivialize combat, even without anything else, will really skew that. Hence the criticism.
There's more I could say, but I think this is more straightforward. What does the Tiers system really tell you that you didn't know before? I find a handful of maxims would probably be much more useful, and would eliminate the false implication of precision that the Tiers seem to carry with them. Maxims like the following generally hold true:
- The most versatile and powerful ability in the game is spellcasting. Things that are very similar to spellcasting, such as usage of a variety of magic items which often simply duplicate spells, follow similar logic.
- Action economy is extremely important.
And ... actually that's kind of about it. You could add in one more about how easily a character/build can just end encounters. Going back above, I don't necessarily think 19 ways to end encounters is a much bigger deal than having 2, provided those are all reasonably generally applicable.
What I think the Tiers system sets out to do is translate some charopp accumulated wisdom to people who are knew to the game/system. That's the thought exercise that I subject it to, and I don't think it really succeeds at that, which is what the ubercharger type of counterexample is meant to illustrate.
All the rest asks questions about niches and niche protection, which are a fundamentally separate issue from "power," which is what the Tiers system purports to speak to.