Editing World of Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game (section)

==Ruleset==
Of course it was simply a means to cash in on the rising popularity of [[World of Warcraft]], but the roleplaying game itself managed to get a few things right which managed to distance itself from the core D&D ruleset.

They binned level adjustments, all races are the same power level so no player gets left behind because they have to earn more experience to get to the same level as everyone else, because they took an ''extra'' imaginary level at character creation. Instead what we get is optional racial classes which give your character statistic improvements, as well as extraordinary abilities not always found anywhere else. The usefulness of multi-classing into your racial class is subjective depending on what your primary class is or should be. For example the Undead "Forsaken" racial class adds nothing in particular if you are a spellcaster, but works better if you are a fighter. 

Perhaps more significantly, it introduced the concept of "Archetypes" before [[Pathfinder]] arrived on the scene and showed us how the same classes could be built in different ways. Though these "archetypes" only really applied to spellcasting classes, so the Arcanist could take the Mage, Necromancer or Warlock paths and give him different class abilities. The system was also elegant enough that multiclassing ''across'' archetypes is possible, and counts as a sort of half-and-half arrangement. You get the class features appropriate to the levels of both your archetypes, but you combine spellcasting levels to a single total, so you don't compromise your ability to get to 9th level spells by taking ten levels of mage and necromancer for example.

They also introduced the "Affiliation" system of '''Alliance''' vs '''Horde''', which does a couple of things to the ruleset. From a [[GM]]'s perspective it maintains a standard level of [[Fluff]] that the players will be familiar with if they have ever played one of the video games. From a player's perspective, it restricts their access to options available to the opposite faction since nearly all of the races belong to one faction exclusively and many prestige classes actually require membership in a particular faction, so it means that the group should make the decision to play Alliance or Horde (or unaligned) from the outset and not whine about not being able to play their Human Paladin in a party containing Forsaken Necromancers and Orc Barbarians.

As a minor thing, which did help give it a "closer to the game" flavor, WoW D20 renamed some of the six stats to resemble the terminology of the games; Dexterity became Agility, Constitution became Stamina, Intelligence became Intellect, and Wisdom became Spirit.