Quote:
Originally Posted by Menchi
I disagree. While roles may have been implied in older editions - they weren't the centre of the design of the various classes - hence not all classes were made equal. Some classes just simply muddied the waters as to what you could do.
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Hum, my reading of classic D&D (red box for me) tells me that roles were at the centre of the original game. Of course, they were not called 'roles' because when the game came out it was not qualified as a roleplaying game, this came after the game, not before it. Yet, original D&D and the hobby that span from it came to be called 'role playing' precisely because original D&D had very clear and precise roles to be played: Fighter, Cleric, Magic user, thief. And then Elf and Dwarf as specialized, cross-functional, culture-dependent roles.
ADD "corrected" things by separating people from role, and then role meant class and class meant role. On the other hand, it muddled things by creating a lot of variant roles and cross-role classes. This turned the clarity of original DD into a mess.
What happens with DD4 is that the designers perfectly understand why DD has always been a game about roles. They also understand that if classes meant roles in the beggining, they came to be roles and mixed roles. And they understand that it is very hard to go back to the origin. So, they kept the classes and they made explict the importance of roles. For that purpose they created a limited set of roles, and a wider ser of classes, each one leaning towards a particular role.