Quote from: two_fishes;413889yyyeeeaaah, I know. And I know it's stupid to be bothered that this thing bothers people, but for some reason this particular complaint just gets under my skin.

Get over it.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;413850Forge ideas are sufficiently rampant that any serious game designer will have encountered them at some point. Maybe reviewing their whole silly Orcus/Flywheel/etc. development scheme would help point a finger at exactly who, but looking at the finished product the influences are IMHO quite apparent. [Other than that I vaguely remember Chris Perkins (I think) pointing fun at suffocation in the 3.5 Rules Compendium in suggestive jargon]

(Info from page 8 of "Wizards Presents:  Races and Classes").

For the Orcus I design stage (June-September 2005), it was Rob Heinsoo, Andy Collins, and James Wyatt.  They pushed the mechanics without being too constrained by "legacy" 3.5E stuff.  Who knows?  It may very well have been a free for all.

The first development team (October 2005 -> February 2006), tore apart Orcus I and rebuilt it.  This team consisted of Robert Gutschera (lead), Mike Donais, Rich Baker, Mike Mearls, Rob Heinsoo.

If 4E was designed to be "gamist" from the start, it could have started in the Orcus I stage of design.  The culprits at that stage, would have been Heinsoo, Collins, or Wyatt.  No idea which (if any) of these three guys are forgey.

The first development team's job was to recommend whether the Orcus I design was headed in the right direction, and how they should continue.  As to how much forgey stuff can be introduced at this point (if the original Orcus I design was not forgey from the start), in principle it could have came in during the "tearing apart Orcus I design and rebuilding it" stage.  What exactly went on in the rebuilding stage, is not known.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;413866You don't have to go digging, it's in the big list of rpg links.

Gamers are brain-damaged by their early "bad" rpg experiences, impediing their understanding of "story." In this respect, says Uncle Ronny, they are like child sex abuse victims.

This.  Good.  Thank you.  Now I have specific reason.  Thank you, again.

QuoteBasically the point is to explain why people are having fun with games when Uncle Ronny says they cannot be having fun. They only think they're having fun; their judgment is impaired, their perceptions warped by their early damaging experiences.

Put another way, when the facts don't fit your theory, change the facts. Ahem.

This reminds me of a lot of the attitude I ran in to from hard-core 3e adopters back in 2000 or so when I had just gotten back in to AD&D - "There's something wrong with you, you're just trying to recapture the past, shut up and play 3e, you'll never find a gaming group willing to play Gygax's shitty game" etc.  

Of course none of them were ... stupid enough to suggest it was because I had some child molestation issue going on.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;413912That's a post hoc explanation though. The reality is that 4e D&D does not bother explaining why some abilities can be used once every five minutes or so and other abilities can be used once per extended rest and still other abilities are down for only a random number of rounds before they come back online. The authors do not think this is important. And indeed, within the context of Forgesque "Gamist" design, it's not. Supposedly, the people who like "gamist" games are supposed to care only about how abilities recharge, not why. And obviously, that's wrong. People do care.

It pretty much comes down to the observation that most D&D players would be willing to have their character wear a live duck on their head or assless pants if it gave them +2 to Strength. But the part where this goes straight into crazy town is the part where the designers decided that this means that character equipment flavor does not matter. Which is clearly wrong, because only most players would let their butt cheeks swing for +2 to Strength. If flavor actually didn't matter at all, then everyone would uncover themselves for the bonus. And interestingly, if you drop the bonus a bit, to say +1 Strength, a majority of people won't put the damn duck on their head. Clearly, these "flavor issues" do have a value to players that is comparable to numerical advantage.

So when the 4e designers got all "Gamist" on us and took out the flavor explanations of things, they really did hurt the game. Just the fact that people like you want to write one back in demonstrates that removing that stuff caused genuine damage.

-Frank

Great explanation!  As a sim player, 4e left me totally behind because of this.  I actually don't mind a little narrativism, but the strong gamist/narrativist combo pack that the Forge is all about now is diametrically opposite to my chosen play style (you know, pretending you're a real character in a real world...  Not sure how we got away from that...).

The Orcus II design team (February-March 2006) had Rob Heinsoo (lead), Bruce Cordell, and James Wyatt.  They fixed up areas which were considered "weak" in the Orcus I design, and followed new design directions suggested by the first development team.  After they finished this design phase, they playtested it for several weeks and were not convinced the system was working.

At this point, the system may had "limited at-will powers" with a recharge mechanic of some sort.  It wasn't until mid-April 2006 (second) development, that Rich Baker and Mike Mearls came up with the at-will/encounter/daily power structure.

http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4spot/20090313

Heinsoo thought they were concentrating too much on the new design, without paying close attention to what 3.5E handled well.  From the sound of this, the original intention of 4E was to move completely away from 3.5E D&D.

As to whether 4E was intentionally made to be very "gamist" at the mechanics level, is harder to say.  Though if there were such deliberate "gamist" intentions, it probably would have showed up in these Orcus phases of design and development.

Quote from: Cranewings;413865I had a premonition that cyclon would be gone soon after werekoala made him cry.

Muhahahhhhhhh!!!

I mean, erm... who, me?

My only regret is that this banning will just add to his spiraling snowball of victimhood, and I won't get to see the truly epic explosion at the far end.

Looking more closely at Heinsoo's discussion of mechanics they experimented with in the design stages of 4E D&D, it didn't look totally "gamist".

http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4spot/20090313

For example, there's some more "simulationist" stuff like:  condition tracks, the weird damage system, multiple power acquisition schemes.

Quote from: ggroy;413946As to whether 4E was intentionally made to be very "gamist" at the mechanics level, is harder to say.  Though if there were such deliberate "gamist" intentions, it probably would have showed up in these Orcus phases of design and development.

I think you're badly underestimating how much of the final product was made at the actual last minute. How many subsystems were replaced wholly or in part with just a few months to go? Certainly the skill challenges system was. So was the multiclassing. Even the basic [W] damage calculation was referenced as getting a level bonus to each [W] as late as early 2008 - the entire combat math inputs were replaced with something much more grindy with just months to go on publication. And it's a matter of public record that the systems they came up with for those things were all deeply unsatisfactory and embarrassing.

The thing is that concentrating on the Orcus, Orcus 2 (Electric Bugaloo), and Flywheel stages is a complete waste of time. Because none of that shit actually got into the final product in any recognizable form. These guys were basically playing magical teaparty, with no hard numbers and no solidly defined rules interactions for almost the entire design phase. And what ideas they did write down were airy and nonspecific. Crap like "We should have a skill challenge system" and "multiclassing rules would be nice". And when it came to crunch time, most of that shit got dropped. Do you remember their non-apology apology articles about how they were dropping the summoning subsystem they had been working on because balancing the action economy is "hard"? Or the one about how they were deferring real multiclassing until the PHB 2, again because actually getting that shit working is "hard"? What about the one about how they were scrapping all of their death and dying subsystems because they couldn't get them to work? What about the one where they talked up how they were getting rid of the christmas tree effect and subsequently issued a retraction and an admission that they were constraining themselves to a small list of slotted bonus items?

The harsh reality is that 4e design appears to have spent about two solid years bouncing ideas off each other and writing each other memos about how they wanted a pony. Then they spent about 4 months scrapping all their pie-in-sky ideas and writing a torturous 600,000 word opus of raw numeric inputs that didn't even work. Remember, on release it wasn't just that the entire Monster Manual was based on a non-functional divergent number paradigm, the Skill Challenge system (the thing that was supposed to be the backbone of all non-face-stabbing actions) was not only shitty and uninteresting, but actually completely unworkable straight from level 1! Running the numbers on a solar powered calculator would have told you instantly that it was unworkable, but even playing through it once would have given you the same answer.

All that shit about "insights" that monsters didn't have to have backstories, motivations, or interesting abilities is very Forgesque. But it's also very much a set of excuses for doing a half-assed job right at the last minute. Which means that Forge theory didn't necessarily get embraced until the very last minute - possibly as late as November of 2007 - when it became clear that their original plan of playing magical teaparty at lunch until the game system crystalized fully formed in their out box was never ever going to work.

The bottom line of the story was that really none of the design work actually got finished or used. The entire "exception based design" thing was an excuse to have everyone just sit down and write whatever came to mind as fast as they could and jumble it all together. Remember, with the professional writers they had on staff, actually putting words to the page really wasn't that hard - it was about 30 man weeks worth of actual writing for the core books. And they had like 6 men doing the heavy lifting on the typing.

-Frank

Most of the numbers guys were gone. While I'm not a huge fan of 3e, it was solid.

Quote from: Werekoala;413950Muhahahhhhhhh!!!

I mean, erm... who, me?

My only regret is that this banning will just add to his spiraling snowball of victimhood, and I won't get to see the truly epic explosion at the far end.

Koltar can propably give us updates.

A good post from one of the few voices of reason in this mammoth of a thread.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;413955The entire "exception based design" thing was an excuse to have everyone just sit down and write whatever came to mind as fast as they could and jumble it all together.

I think the whole idea of D&D has always "exception based design", first by accident, then by purpose. The point is not to get it right, but to cash in on  updated exceptions, ridiculous options and, as the complexity accumulates, complete revisions. And much like Windows, the D&D of operating systems, it has proven to be viable business. And that is what counts.

The worst thing would be a smooth, elegant system, as no one would ever buy any of the later versions.

Quote from: jahud;413967The worst thing would be a smooth, elegant system, as no one would ever buy any of the later versions.

Does there even exist a smooth elegant rpg system to begin with?

Quote from: One Horse Town;413787Seanchai got pissy a while ago and drew a comparison that pundit didn't like - pundit tried to show him what it'd be like if that comparison was true - Seanchai cried 'victory' (which is all the rage these days) and the rest of us thought, "what a couple of dicks."

And the other folks he said he'd ban? If you recall, once he'd decided he was going to start banning the folks who were irritating him, that's when I compared him to the Big Purple mods. I didn't kick off the mess.

In other words, the guy who says we have free speech, that he's an exemplary mod, etc., said, basically, "I'm tired of being criticized. If you keep doing it, I'm going to ban you."

More difficult to defend when you look at it as a whole, isn't it?

Seanchai

Quote from: FrankTrollman;413912That's a post hoc explanation though.

Not really. It's right there on the pages of the PHB. From the explanation of basic attacks vs. martial power source, to the explanation on how sources "fuel" powers and abilities, and so on. It's just not as explicit as it would have needed to be.

I agree with your more general point on Forgism, how authors thought this wasn't important, and what ultimately drove the game's design, however.

Quote from: ggroy;413971Does there even exist a smooth elegant rpg system to begin with?

Why would there have to be one? I think you can call, say, a judge corrupt even if all the judges were corrupt to some degree. I guess with ideals that's kind of the point.

But tangled atavism aside, while not my favorite, GURPS (esp. Lite) is somewhat smooth and elegant, i.e., the basic system is moderately simple and highly versatile. Fudge is certainly smooth and elegant, but again hardly my favorite.