The Gaming Den

Races and Classes wrote:Design Work, Orcus I:June through September 2005
Team: James Wyatt, Andy Collins, and Rob Heinsoo.
Mission: Our instructions were to push the mechanicsdown interesting avenues, not to stick too close to the safehome base of D&D v.3.5. As an R&D department, we under-stood 3.5; our mission was to experiment with something new.
Outcome: We delivered a document that included eightclasses we thought might appear in the first Player’s Handbook or other early supplements, powers for all the classes, monsters,and rules.

First Development Team:October 2005 through February 2006
Team: Robert Gutschera (lead), Mike Donais, Rich Baker,Mike Mearls, and Rob Heinsoo.
Mission: Determine whether the Orcus I design (as wenamed it) was headed in the right direction. Make recommen-dations for the next step.
Outcome:The first development team tore everythingdown and then rebuilt it. In the end, it recommended that wecontinue in the new direction Orcus I had established.This recommendation accompanied a rather difficult stuntaccomplished in the middle of the development process: Baker,Donais, and Mearls translated current versions of the Orcus Imechanics into a last-minute revision of Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords. It was a natural fit, since Rich Baker had already been treating the Book of Nine Swords as a “powers for fighters”project. The effort required to splice the mechanics into 3rdEdition were a bit extreme, but the experiment was worth it.

Second Orcus (Orcus II) Design Phase:February to March 2006
Team:Rob Heinsoo (lead), Bruce Cordell, James Wyatt.
Mission: Finish monsters and other areas that were weakin the first draft. Follow some new design directions suggestedby the development team.
Outcome: After the design phase ended, several weeks of playtesting left most of us unconvinced with where we weregoing. The system wasn’t working the way we wanted it to work.

One Development Week: Mid-April 2006
Team: Robert Gutschera, Mike Donais, Rich Baker, MikeMearls, and Rob Heinsoo.
Mission:Recommend a way forward.
Outcome: In what I’d judge as the most productive weekof the process to date, not that anyone would have guessed that beforehand, Mearls and Baker figured out what was going wrong with the design. We’d concentrated too much on the new approach without properly accounting for what 3.5handled well. We’d provided player characters with constantlyrenewing powers, but hadn’t successfully parsed the necessarydistinctions between powers that were always available andpowers that had limited uses.

Flywheel Team: May 2006 to September 2006
Team: Rob Heinsoo (lead), Andy Collins, Mike Mearls,David Noonan, and Jesse Decker.
Mission: Move closer to 3.5 by dealing properly withpowers and resources that could be used at-will, once perencounter, or once per day.
Outcome: A playable draft that went over to the teams that would actually write the Player’s Handbook and the Monster Manual.

Scramjet Team; Same Timing as Flywheel
Team: Rich Baker (lead), James Wyatt, Matt Sernett, EdStark, Michele Carter, Stacy Longstreet, and Chris Perkins.
Mission: Draft a new vision for the world and the storybehind the D&D game.
Outcome: A first draft of the story bible, notable for its new understanding of civilized portions of the D&D world as points of light threatened by enveloping darkness filled with monstersand other threats.

Player’s Handbook Creation:October 2006 to April 2007
Designers:Rich Baker (lead), Logan Bonner, and DavidNoonan.
Developers: Andy Collins (lead), Mike Mearls, SteveSchubert, and Jesse Decker.
Mission: Achieve design and development consensus onthe direction each role and class should take; make good onthe goals with playable mechanics.
Outcome: Oodles of powers. Semisolid rules set

Writing Phase: April 2 to May 11, 2007
Story Team: James Wyatt (lead), Rich Baker, BruceCordell, and Chris Sims (with advice and general nosinessfrom Bill Slavicsek).
Mission: Write prose manuscripts in the style we want touse for the finished products.
Outcome: The team turned over a 600-plus-page workingrules set on deadline and to specifications.

Magic Item Revision: May 2007
Mechanics Design: Rob Heinsoo, Mike Mearls, DavidNoonan, and Matt Sernett.
Mission: Re-create the vision for what magic items accom-plish in the new design, carve separate space for each type of item, and design them all.
Outcome: More magic items than our initial publicationscan use!
Full-On Playtesting: June 2007
Mission: With Dave Noonan handling the reins, all designers and developers and many other WotC employees donothing but playtest D&D 4E for three solid weeks. This led to ongoing playtesting using in-house groups and the personal game groups of most of the R&D staff that continues to the endof the year.

Baker, Donais, and Mearls translated current versions of the Orcus I mechanics into a last-minute revision of Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords.

RobbyPants wrote:How much do we know about what Orcus I was, other than something pretty close to ToB? Did they have an idea back then about the rest of the system?

Mearls and Baker figured out what was going wrong with the design. We’d concentrated too much on the new approach without properly accounting for what 3.5handled well. We’d provided player characters with constantly renewing powers, but hadn’t successfully parsed the necessary distinctions between powers that were always available and powers that had limited uses.

Sashi wrote:Also it seems like there was a shift from "do the work, make sure it functions" to "talk a big game, it functions because of 'high minded theory'".

Because, seriously, 4E seems to believe that simply saying your game is based on "insert design theory here" is enough to ensure the game is well designed.

As an R&D department, we under-stood 3.5; our mission was to experiment with something new.

Although interactivity is, of course, a generally good thing in gaming, it turns out that paradoxically one must limit it to some extent for successful multiplayer gaming. If games are all about player choices, then interactivity is good because it can give players interesting choices, but it can become bad if those choices mean the player is forced into playing a disguised variant of the chip-taking game: a game in which the number of meaningful (outcome-affecting) choices is very low and always of the same kind. This issue parallels the fundamental issues around game balance, where limiting players' choices among gameplay objects is necessary to preserve the number of meaningful choices: if you add a unit to Starcraft that costs half as much and is twice as powerful as any other unit, you've increased the absolute number of choices, but reduced the number of meaningful choices down to one (i.e. no choice at all).

Voss wrote:Quite a bit of the 5e statements have suggested that they really didn't consider 4e to be well designed, just something that they had to shove out the door (and something that had to be different for the sake of being different).

As an R&D department, we under-stood 3.5; our mission was to experiment with something new.

Mearls and Baker figured out what was going wrong with the design. We’d concentrated too much on the new approach without properly accounting for what 3.5handled well. We’d provided player characters with constantly renewing powers, but hadn’t successfully parsed the necessary distinctions between powers that were always available and powers that had limited uses.

The problem with 5e is they've pretty much put the consumers in a corner. They'll talk a lot of shit about community involvement, but what it comes down to is they have essentially ceded any pretense at a design vision in favor of 'being everything, ever' and following consumer feedback so they can immediately turn around and say 'this is what you told us you wanted, and any parts you don't like are not for you.'

nockermensch wrote:The best (worst) part:

In what I’d judge as the most productive week of the process to date, not that anyone would have guessed that beforehand

This was when the good design was destroyed. Who's the "I" in the quote above?

Rob Heinsoo wrote:I got to level up as the Lead Designer on the 4th Edition of the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game. Here’s the timeline of events as I experienced it.

Rob Heinsoo wrote:The one-week ORCUS development team realized that Orcus II, as well as earlier drafts, had failed to properly account for attrition powers. Earlier designs had been working too hard on our newfangled renewable powers and hadn’t properly addressed D&D’s legacy of attrition-style powers, powers that went away after you used them once or twice. So the Flywheel team’s main job was to nudge the eight player character classes away from the flamboyant precipicesthey’d occupied in Orcus II toward expressions that would look more familiar to players of 3rd Edition D&D.

I say “eight classes,” but they weren’t always the same eight classes. Discussions during Flywheel design eventually ledus to put the swashbuckler aside, gifting his cool moves to theranger and the rogue. We drafted the warlock in his place, adecision we all soon realized was very much for the best, espe-cially when the Player’s Handbook team later sunk their teethinto making the warlock cool.

Flywheel’s end product was a skeletal version of the rules, classes, and monsters that we handed over to the teamsthat were actually designing the Player’s Handbook and the Monster Manual.

Rob Heinsoo wrote:Flywheel was a five-person team: Andy Collins, Jesse Decker, Rob Heinsoo, Mike Mearls, and Dave Noonan.

Dave Noonan tackled many of the strategic vision questions, such as the debate concerning the number of com-peting powers a player character could choose from at thetable. Months later, after we had veered away from the guide-lines Dave had helped establish, playtesting indicated weshould have stuck with the Flywheel consensus, which Dave rather gleefully produced from his notebook as we made the fateful call. I tell this story as shorthand for a numberof other such instances—the fact is that the Flywheel designaimed at a simplicity that we lost sight of for awhile later on. But when I say “aimed at,” I also confess that Flywheel didn’t always phrase its attempt at simplicity in ways that were easy to follow.

But Mike Mearls sure tried to get us there. Mike was fresh from adapting Orcus II ideas for Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords. He contributed many innovative class concepts and designs during this stage. Mike probably shookthings up the most when he designed a few classes that will be appearing in the 4th Edition Player’s Handbook II. I looked at Mike’s designs of the barbarian and the druid andthought, “Oh, geez, this is the cool we need to be getting from all our classes.”

At moments like that, Jesse Decker usually said some-thing like, “You’re right. Think smarter.” He could afford tosay things like that because his day job was leading the D&D development team while he was slumming in our designer world. That unfortunately explained why Jesse ended up too busy helping run the department to contribute a lot of design work outside meetings. Inside meetings, he had a knack for keeping us loose while criticizing ideas we thought were okay. Then we realized we could do better.

Jesse’s other big contribution was mentoring Andy Collins, who functioned in a lead-developer-style role during much of the Flywheel phase. When I did new design work systems like death and dying and healing, Andy worked with me to get it right. Andy worked tirelessly to either get everything right or understand all the angles on each problem. Andy was consciously setting himself up to run development during the game’s final phases.

Here’s an odd thing about the team. I ran Flywheel. But as I write this, a bit more than a year later, both Mike and Andy have emerged as leaders. It’s strange to remember that during the Flywheel phase, I was organizing the work process. At the moment, mid-2007, Mike and Andy both arguably organize workflows smoother than I do. Thinking back to Flywheel days is a bit like remembering the early days of a long-running campaign, back when Mike couldn’t cast fireball and Andy’s healing spells only worked at short range.

Thinking back to Flywheel days is a bit like remembering the early days of a long-running campaign, back when Mike couldn’t cast fireball and Andy’s healing spells only worked at short range.

John Magnum wrote:Heinsoo is fortunate that guys like Noonan and Mearls can be attributed so much of the shittiness for 4e; it lets me preserve the mental narrative that if only he'd really been allowed to implement everything as he'd initially imagined, we'd have had something much cooler with actually bomb-ass powers and a decent resource management framework. And he stopped getting to contribute anything to 4e, so I can't be disillusioned by looking at PHB3 or whatever and realizing that even if Heinsoo had his druthers stuff would've blown.

deadscribe wrote:Another ability was Paladin's Challenge; twice per battle, when you attack an enemy, both you and the enemy suffer -4 to attack rolls against anyone other than each other until the end of the next turn

FrankTrollman wrote:Well, Heinsoo and Tweet ran off together and made a 4e-based fantasy heartbreaker called 13th Age. It's in playtest revisions right now, so too early to see whether it will be good or not. I'm guessing not, because it's mostly built on the 4e engine. Although it does seem a lot cooler than 4e, because every character is required to have a melodramatic hook like they were a Feng Shui character.

-Username17

CapnTthePirateG wrote:This feels relevant to the discussion.

http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx ... t/20090313

Heinsoo on stuff. Apparently there were condition tracks, roll your backstory, and weapon vs armor stuff. Hmm.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:If they're doing random rolled items I hope they do 2E D&D random rolled items.

FrankTrollman wrote:Well, the sample characters for the playtest are up: