Why did they scrap Orcus?

[Username17]

A bit of backstory, this is how the designers of 4th edition described the process:

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.

Now, a bit more backstory, Robert Gutschera is this guy. Unlike the inmates currently running the asylum, he can do math.

Now there's a bit I would like to pull out of the story and have it stand on its own:

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.

Got that? Book of Nine Swords wasn't used as a template for 4e, the 4e that Robert Gutschera made that they scrapped was used as template for the Bo9S.

So here's the question that I think is on everyone's mind, or at least should be: how the fuck did the Flywheel team manage to oust the only guy who could do fucking math from project leadership in order to make the turkey that 4th edition actually ended up being? Because you know what? Orcus sounds like a pretty cool game.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

I'd play Orcus.

As to "why" it looks to either be a case of "lookatthosefuckingnames" complicated by "deadlineitus."

[RobbyPants]

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?

[Sashi]

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.

[Username17]

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?

All we know is the little bits we can glean from their stupid preview materials. Basically they claim that 4e was an advance over Orcus because it made the Limited Use/Unlimited Use power split. In short: they claim that they were dissatisfied with Orcus because it didn't have 4e's incredibly shitty Daily/Encounter/At-Will paradigm.

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.

So they probably had a system where some stuff worked on WoF (like the Crusader) and some stuff worked on a short-rest refresh (like the Sword Sage), and then Mearls and Baker shat all over everything by announcing that "what was wrong" was that things weren't the clunky daily/encounter/at-will divisions that they ended up writing. And in the process of this "discovery", Gutschera gets shoved off the design team and they restart the process from scratch built around their shitty 4e ideas.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

And Gutschera was involved in Netrunner. That alone means I give him the benefit of the doubt.

[Josh_Kablack]

**will pledge $20 towards a kickstarter for Gutschera to web-publish a fantasy heartbreaker**

**will not buy D&D Next if Mearls has his name on it**

[Voss]

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.

Well, no. Not really. They went with the theory that if you claimed 'exception based design' enough, that people would buy it. 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.

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.'

[ModelCitizen]

That makes a lot of sense. In ToB the manuever-use minigames and the class progression charts don't even look like they were written by the same people. The stuff that works the best is the most system-agnostic (you could slot warblade refresh into anything with a rough action economy) and the worst parts are the most 3.5 specific (everything that has to be written straight onto a class progression chart is riddled with basic logic failures and more than a bit of Sashi's "high minded design theory"). It's exactly like if someone wrote a good set of rules for a different game and then Mearls adapted them to 3.5 in a big-ass hurry.

[nockermensch]

The best (worst) part:

In what I’d judge as the most productive weekof 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?

[Avoraciopoctules]

I googled Gutschera earlier today. In 2009, he did a presentation on the social characteristics of multiplayer games. You can find the Powerpoint and base document used for it online, and there's some interesting stuff that's made me more inclined to take a look if I see his name in a game's design credits in the future.

http://www.amazingsociety.com/2010/04/a ... onference/

Here's an excerpt from the document:

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).

[Sashi]

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.

This is just standard marketing speak "New edition rules, old edition drools".

Remember this quote from this page?

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.

So when they put every class on a universal at-will/encounter/daily power schedule they honestly thought that they had fixed everything. They were not grumbling and complaining while they were forced to write boring daily fighter powers, they were celebrating and declaring "blowjobs all around".

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.'

The problem with 5E is that it is being designed by people who have survived the Buzzword Deathmarch. A quick google for 3rd edition ads left me hanging, but I remember them basically being "Hey, there's this thing called D&D, it's fun, here's an updated D&D you can buy!" whereas 4E was "Man, remember when we liked playing 3E? We sure were dumb! Luckily you can buy 4E which fixes everything".

Now part of that was that between 3E and 4E we got the internet and complaining about the rules became the national pastime of TTRPG enthusiasts everywhere. Part of it was also probably that 4E was the first D&D developed by WotC in-house (and so bashing 3E was bashing TSR D&D). But it also was because the guys making D&D believed on some level that they were fixing everything. The only question is how much of this stems from the D&D design offices being a poisonous environment in which survival goes to those who can protect themselves with the biggest piles of bullshit, or if it became a poisonous environment in which brand-tarnishing shovelware is pushed out the door at the secret protest of the design staff.

[Username17]

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?

The book in question was compiled and edited by Michele Carter, but it is compiled from a series of essays shoveled out by various writers. The 4th edition design timeline was written by Rob Heinsoo. And it is prefaced by:

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.

Heinsoo certainly had a decent legacy, having been a big guy in Feng Shui (a fun and playable game that has an absolutely atrocious advancement system). He also has a few other essays in Races and Classes that shed some light on his thinking:

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.

A couple of interesting tidbits there. The absolutely retarded idea that they could release 4e with only 8 classes to win over a 3e-playing community used to a PHB that promised them 11 wasn't just deadlineitis. James Wyatt, Andy Collins, and Rob Heinsoo put the "8 Classes" idea up in 2005, and when they came up with a new class they wanted to use, they cut one of the remaining classes. Also, the reason that the Warlock seems so poorly thought out and half-assed is that apparently it was the last one in the pile. Although I'm not sure that excuse flies, because all the classes were supposedly handed to the PHB team at the same time. And it was presumably the PHB Team's job to make sure that the Starlock and the Strengthadin had powers for every level (a task at which they failed).

But also there's the confident assessment that having scrapped Orcus for lack of Daily Power Limits, everything was on the right track. That was written in 2007, well before 4e had gelled into a vaguely playable game.

Here's how he explains what people were doing on Flywheel:

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.

Take home from that: Dave Noonan basically destroyed 4th edition. It was he who personally demanded the MMO roles and other tie-ins, organized the "playtests", and threw a fit every time someone suggested that anyone have any interesting abilities.

But beyond that: reading the piece it's pretty hard not to come away without the impression that Andy Collins and Mike Mearls were basically fucking around while doing political maneuvering to get the big chair to themselves. Which is interesting, because looking at the company from five years later it seems that is exactly what they were doing.

It's hard to tell from that piece whether Jesse Decker was a voice in the wilderness, begging them to stop the fail train, or just someone who didn't give-a-fuck. But in any case, Rob Heinsoo's team appears to have been made out of two guys who couldn't be fucked to learn the system they were writing for and spent most of their time trying to claw their way up the corporate ladder, one guy who could barely be fucked to show up for meetings and didn't like what he heard there, and one guy who had an actual vision - which happened to be that he wanted to turn the game into a shitty table top MMO clone. No wonder it was so bad.

-Username17

[CapnTthePirateG]

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.

[Korwin]

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.

He is the figther?

[OgreBattle]

so.... is Bo9S basically Orcus I then?

Man, now I want to see what Orcus I was. Or recreate it. Or use this experience for my Fantasy Heartbreaker

[John Magnum]

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.

[Username17]

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.

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

[John Magnum]

Oh, hey, Wizards get neat world-affecting spells like Disguise Self, Scrying, and Charm Person. Assuming they're for-real and not "Attach status X to token Y for a round and a half".

On the other hand...

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

No, stop it. Effects that last microscopic variations of ONE ROUND are obnoxious as fuck. 4e seriously had at least four separate and game-mechanically distinct durations that were all one round.

I'll drop it now, this is pretty off-topic.

[Lago PARANOIA]

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

I honestly don't mind the 4E D&D engine too much if I'm in the right mood for it. Like I said in a very recent thread, when it's running smoothly it makes me feel like I'm playing a 16/32-bit jRPG or a Final Fight clone.

If they were going to make a 4E revision, if they do have the things on this list I'll give them a chance. If they do most of the things on my list they might even have a committed fan.
[*] Gave low-level characters more shit to do. When I DM, I flat-out refuse to run for a group lower than 7th level.
[*] Got rid of padded sumo. I'd seriously rather have rocket launcher tag than padded sumo, especially for a game with a resource management system like 4E D&D.
[*] Changed up the magic item system. Wishlists are the worst thing ever. I can get behind random rolled items and I can get behind magic items as cynical class features. I can't get behind wealth-by-level or wishlists. If they're doing magical items as cynical class features I hope they bring back the 3E D&D system with some tweaks. If they're doing random rolled items I hope they do 2E D&D random rolled items.
[*] While we're actually doing a magic item revision, do something about that 'daily' crap. I'll accept daily stuff if it's REALLY FUCKING AWESOME, not 'you do 1d10 thunder damage in a 3 x 3 square area'.
[*] If they are actually going to be doing epic levels then they better fucking do epic levels. That is really hard to do on the 4E engine I understand, so I'll also accept them firmly keeping the game in heroic/low-paragon tier.
[*] Either compressed the levels or game people more shit to do between levels. Getting to, say, level 13 or 15 and faced with the real possibility of changing or gaining nothing fucking sucks. Regardless of how stuft the levels are, 30 levels is fucking ridiculous. There should be like half that. Really truly. Unless you're doing D&D, it should be like 12-16 levels.
[*] Do something about the mongol archer problem. Ranged weapons in 4E D&D were simultaneously a disgrace and overpowered.
[*] Ditch the marking mechanic or at the very least make it a class-specific feature rather than a universal rule for defenders.
[*] Make healing surges less like cartoon character healing. Either only hand them out at time-invariant intervals (you only get 1 healing surge an hour) or penalize people for burning too high of a proportion.
[*] Shake up the At-Will/Encounter/Daily paradigm. The barest minimum I'll accept is the game having diversity equivalents of: Cleric / Mage / Sentinel Druid / Warden / Barbarian / Psion / Battlemind / Monk / Runepriest.
[*] Make multiclassing or hybrid-classing more transparent. Seriously, there should be no need to tie primary stats to powers.
[*] Change up the skill system. 4E D&D, especially if they're going to keep skill challenges, needs a lot more skills than they actually ended up implementing. They need at LEAST a Bureaucracy, Craft, Academics, Business, and Performance skills. Skills should only auto-scale by your BLB if you have the training, otherwise it should scale even more slowly or not at all.
[*] Fix up the ritual system. Not only do they need more rituals, but they also need to do something about how crappy they are. Simple fix: you can pay the money to cast the ritual as a standard action or you can invest the required time. There. I just instantly made rituals a lot more useful.
[*] Make a good default campaign setting. I mean it. This one is the deal-breaker for me.

[Username17]

Well, the sample characters for the playtest are up:

Human Fighter
Gnome Bard
Elven Ranger
Dwarfforged Sorcerer
Half Orc Cleric

I have no words.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Looking at the Fighter and the Cleric, if they're using the basic 4E D&D numbers for monster then combat is already going to be quite a bit shorter.

One thing that I REALLY do not like, however, is that they have firmly embraced the No Self Buffs paradigm and all of the fail that that entails. Ugh.

[MisterDee]

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.

I'm surprised with the bit where he claims that there was a group of designers who wanted the wizard to be more powerful than the other classes. That is, I'm surprised that WotC knows that this massive problem exists, and that nothing is getting done to fix it, not that the problem exists per se.

[Darth Rabbitt]

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

Does this include cursed items, and if so, cursed items like Bowls of fuck you death no save Watery Death and Girdles of Sex Change that cause hours of debate over what happens when a character that had their sex changed meets a (2e) Nymph or Fox Woman (or other creatures that have effects that only work on characters of a specific sex, if any)?

[FatR]

Well, the sample characters for the playtest are up:

Fucking piddly shit one-round effects remain in full force? I'm suddenly stopping caring about 13th age.