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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dd.stevenson" data-source="post: 6508068" data-attributes="member: 6683099">To my mind, these differences (darkly) mirror the differences between early and late World of Warcraft roles. At every point in the game's life cycle, roles have been a critical part of the way WoW is played. But big changes in presentation and focus very much changed how the game was played and how it felt to play.At the beginning, players were given three talent trees and asked to construct their own character a la carte. Some classes and some talent trees corresponded to some roles--but not all did, and even the most focused trees had its sore thumb talents.Gradually the game began moving towards a roles-first design philosophy. From my perspective, the key moment in this transformation was at the beginning of the cataclysm expansion, <a href="http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/04/06/cataclysm-blood-will-be-the-only-death-knight-tanking-tree/" target="_blank">when the design team rejected multi-role trees</a>. I remember that point in the transformation clearly, because it marked the point when I lost interest in World of Warcraft. Why? I'm not 100% sure. I suspect that for me self-discovery had been an important part of the character/player arc. Previously I had been allowed the journey of negotiating my character's role; and then the designers took that journey away. The (arguable) fact that the journey's endpoint remained the same was no comfort at all.Coming back to D&D, it was the "roles" section of the 4E PHB where I stopped reading and gave up on wotc, because they were clearly aping the then-current language of WoW devs, and they appeared to be going further down the "roles first" path then even WoW had at the time. (In marked contrast to earlier D&D, which was IME primarily about player characters negotiating their own roles.)But since I never so much as touched a 4E product again, I'm willing to concede that this overwhelmingly strong impression might not have been borne out in play.TL;DR: Yes, roles were always there--but that doesn't mean one wants them in the character premise, or even guaranteed during character development.</blockquote>

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