AbdulAlhazred
Legend
I generally agree that 4E gave you a sense of of the purpose of your character right there in the abilities. That certainly aids role-playing in some regards, but it also limits it. In other editions, the things you do were less right there in the abilities and more in how you put them to use. These approaches have appeal and work for different people. I like 4E in that the combat play reinforces the decisions you make during character creation. It can help keep you "on the path" of a certain type of play and a certain sort of roleplay.
On the other hand, other editions give you "pieces" and a note saying "some assembly required" and nothing more. This approach requires the player to keep themselves on track and focused on the style of play and sort of character they want to roleplay. Some people are better at this approach, some people aren't. This approach certainly requires more work and some people find that more enjoyable but some people see it more as work and some character concepts are harder to make work than others.
4E supported an awful lot of character concepts, and with their hybrid system, there were a nearly infinite number of combinations. As well every class had a variety of powers that could allow one to express a number of character concepts. But this design also limited players who wanted a more "bake from scratch" sort of approach. And it can be just as frustrating to not be able to express your character concept in this edition because the pieces don't exist, as it is to attempt to express your concept from the raw elements.
Given the extremely incremental nature of character building over levels in 4e I'm going to say I'm not really seeing this argument. I mean, 4e characters are in no way shape or form rigid constructs that only do their designed 'thing'. There are 1000 different fighter builds, literally. Each of those will play a little differently based on what the rest of the party is, what you go up against, and how you play your character. The player is constantly making choices about which powers to take, which feats to acquire, which items to keep, discard, or acquire. Even if you subscribe to the idea that your character IS totally described by the sum of the things on his sheet, that is a LOT of stuff, and it includes some pretty open-ended stuff, like background, race, class, PP, ED, etc. Those all have a lot of color and you can do a lot of coloring between the lines.
I found the AD&D fighter, by contrast, to be the rigid one. It has few abilities, and most new ones are going to be a consequence of some 'stuff' you found, which you have zero real control over. At best you have the same "I just do X" that you can accomplish in 4e as well (it is still an RPG and your character can try to pull off anything basically). It is true that this means your character is not really DEFINED, but then my experience was that a lot of classic D&D PCs just never really BECAME defined. They stayed mostly a few numbers and not too much else. I'm sure plenty of 4e PCs share that fate, you can't make people RP, but when my character is a Tactical Warlord, Iron Commander, Demigod 25th level fighting against the hordes of the Abyss, its HARD not to draw SOMETHING out of that!