Some time ago, I did a read-through of Wizards Presents: Races and Classes, which was a preview design document for D&D 4th Edition. One of the first sections in the book was a timeline of the development of 4th Edition leading up to the release of the Player’s Handbook.

What caught my eye was the implication that there was some other large-scale design in the middle of development that was “abandoned”, or perhaps veered-away-from.

According to the history in Wizards Presents, the pre-design for 4th Edition begins in early 2005, with Rob Heinsoo, Andy Collins and James Wyatt as the three key developers.

In May 2005, they conduct a design workshop, and that’s where they agree on explicitly defined party roles (what we would see eventually as Defender/Striker/Leader/Controller), three tiers of play of ten levels each (Heroic/Paragon/Epic), and “a system that provided powers for all classes”

From June to September 2005, the designers start working on something that codenamed “Orcus I”. The output of this work was a document that included eight classes, abilities for all of them, monsters, and rules.

The next part is important, so I’ll just lift an excerpt straight from the book:

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 we named it) was headed in the right direction. Make recommendations for the next step.

Outcome: The first development team tore everything down and then rebuilt it. In the end, it recommended that we continue in the new direction Orcus I had established. This recommendation accompanied a rather difficult stunt accomplished in the middle of the development process: 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. 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 3rd Edition were a bit extreme, but the experiment was worth it.

We know that Tome of Battle was officially released in Aug 2006, so the timeline fits.

From February to March 2006, they work on “Orcus Phase 2”, but here Heinsoo writes that after playtesting, they thought that Orcus was not going in the direction that they wanted.

And then we get to April 2006, and another excerpt:

One Development Week: Mid-April 2006

Team: Robert Gutschera, Mike Donais, Rich Baker, Mike Mearls, and Rob Heinsoo.

Mission: Recommend a way forward.

Outcome: In what I’d judge as the most productive week of 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 3.5 handled 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

What I’m getting from these passages is that, contrary to popular belief, Tome of Battle was not a testbed of ideas that would make it to 4th Edition, beyond the very broad concept of “all classes should have abilities”, but rather it was an entirely different approach to class abilities that 4th Edition at some point deliberately diverged from.

The next section of the timeline seals it: from May to September 2006, Rob Heinsoo, Andy Collins, Mike Mearls, David Noonan and Jesse Decker work on a different document, codenamed “Flywheel” which “move[s] closer to 3.5 by dealing properly with powers and resources that could be used at-will, once per encounter, or once per day”.

After that, it’s an almost straight line from Flywheel into the development of the main Player’s Handbook that starts in October 2006.

The whole sequence of events fired up my imagination because one of the regular criticisms against 4th Edition is that it made classes feel to “samey” to all be working off of the At-Will/Encounter/Daily power model, but at the same time people look at Tome of Battle as a proto-4th Edition when that book’s power model looks nothing like AEDU!

Think about it: the Warblade starts combat with three available Maneuvers, and then recovers them with a Swift Action followed by an attack, or some other weapon flourish that consumes your Standard Action. That means that, under the Tome of Battle model, you can use the same maneuver over and over again, within the same encounter, with the only limit being the one-round breather you might need to take to recover Maneuvers.

It’s not AEDU, and it also avoids the narrative trap of a muscle-powered Daily ability: if Brute Strike is “a powerful blow that rends flesh and shatters bone”, why couldn’t you use that over and over again? Well, Tome of Battle allows you to do exactly that, while still co-existing with the Daily-limited Vancian magic of a traditional Wizard or Cleric.

One wonders what the edition might have looked like, and how much better the reception might have been, if the team had continued with a design that allowed for stronger mechanical differentiation between class archetypes.