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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mattcolville" data-source="post: 4031868" data-attributes="member: 1300">Those aren't roles, they're character classes.If you've played WoW, you know that WoW has classes and roles. Up until now, D&D only had the former.The concept of "role" exists to help the player. Roles help the player, especially the first-time player, understand what their job is which, for many designers, myself included, is to the good.Now, in WoW, players must discover these roles. They're not referred to anywhere in the game.I'm going to say that again, because I think it's important: the terms 'tank,' 'healer,' and 'dps,' occur nowhere in WoW.They're terms the player invented to describe the various jobs in a party. They're also almost certainly the terms the designers use. This means that while WoW has roles, and D&D until now has not, they're not well presented to the player. The designers intentionally hide these roles from the player for reasons passing understanding.I don't believe D&D4's role will be precisely analogous to WoW's roles, but I think they'll fall into the general ballpark. And I think the fact that the roles are spelled out and clearly presented to the player will make D&D4 superior to WoW in this respect, even as it steals from it.Up until now, in D&D, if you were a Thief or a Rogue and wanted to know what was expected of you, the answer was "pick pockets" or "disarm traps." Well, many encounters, indeed entire adventures, have no traps or reasons to pick pockets. That's not a role, that's just an action available to a thief. Whereas it's very nice to be able to tell a player "You do more damage than anyone else, but you're squishy." Now the player understands his role.I was hoping, and I'm apparently wrong, that the roles would be like cards the players could switch around between sessions. So that tonight I might be the Defender, and next week you could be. But this does not seem to be the case.One thing I recently noticed is that, if Bloodied works the way I think it does, this is a direct ripoff from WoW where every creature you fight...at least every one I remember fighting since going to the Outland, gets "enraged" after suffering a certain amount of damage.It doesn't bother me in the slightest that D&D is ripping off WoW. Every game designer should steal the stuff he's seen in other games that worked well. No point in reinventing the wheel.</blockquote>

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