Quote:
Originally Posted by Gnome
I don't really see it that way. Party members should play different roles. The classic "tank" is built to take hits, and if your party has one you want the enemies to attack him rather than everyone else. A good melee fighter should have a high Parry even if he's not a tank per se, so again you want enemies attacking him so their attacks are negated.
You might have a ninja type who sneaks up on enemies--he doesn't get as many shots in, but when he does it really counts. Everyone wants the healer to stay out of harm's way. I would say there are plenty of archetypes that help the party and are best kept out of harm's way as much as possible. You could say that's at the tank's or swordmaster's "expense," but that's the division of labor, and it's a good one. I've seen how effective it can be in many DF games. When the enemies get close to the squishies, that's when you're in trouble.
This is all especially true if you have casters that can cast the right buffs: Armor, Shield and healing for whoever's going to be taking the hits, Hawk Vision for the Archer to negate range penalties, Missile Shield for the ranged combatants and casters so they can stay truly safe, Partial Shapeshifting (Spider Arms) for the melee fighters to give them extra attacks, etc., etc.
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...But you wrote a whole post about how not exposing your own PC to danger was what made being an archer desirable even if your contributions were feeble.
Division of labor works if everybody's labor is valuable, like with the actually-contributing back-rankers you mention. If your division of labor is 'you take all the damage and do almost all the damage, I do just a little damage and never get hit', that's...not a division that makes any sense to the second person unless they also put a high premium on the archer PC (rather than their own PC) not getting hurt.