Hi there - long time lurker here, finally registered because of this post:
shadzar wrote:
You don't bring in someone who doesn't like D&D but loves MMOs, in order to spearhead the mechanics of D&D.
Just another reason why Bill Suckadick (or however you spell his name), should have nothing to do with R&D of D&D, because he never knew a thing about it either or who to put into a D&D team.
David Noonan was probably canned because the crappy video podcast DMing job he did, and because he didn't agree with the way his cohort for the podcasts did D&D.
Why sucky behind the camera, he had a good grasp of D&D and would have been far better to lead a D&D team than either Bill Suckadick, or Mike Mearls, for any facet of the game.
Dan Noonan was actually pretty formative for 4E. He not only led the first playtest ever for it (in house, naturally), he also wrote the first ever document as to what the design goals for 4E were to be, and he wrote that all by himself. That document was then given to Wyatt, Collins, and Heinsoo, for them to write up the first attempt at 4E (Flywheel over whatever it was called). The story doesn't end here. Some months later Heinsoo and co. returned their first draft of the rules to Noonan. Noonan looked it over, returned it, and basically stated that his design goals weren't really met in an adequate way.
You can read up all of this story in the two 4E preview books "Wizards presents". In these, Mearls (or was it Heinsoo, I forget) even grudgingly admits that their initial attempts at 4E fell short of Noonan's expectations - and then takes a stab at Noonan in the vein "but then, Noonan hadn't stated the design expectations very clearly - or so it must be admitted in hindsight". The idea being that 'we failed at delivering the design because Noonan wasn't clear as to what he wanted'.
So basically, while I wouldn't go so far to detect
bad blood in the crowd versus Noonan, it's pretty obvious that they had disagreements and stated them rather frankly. But yes, Mearls and co. are on record for failing the standards of Noonan.
Returning now to shadzar's post, I'm a bit amazed that Noonan gets so much credit in the Den by anyone. I thought the Den's review of
Complete Divine had pretty much cemented the view that his ability to design something solidly is limited at best. (Or is the idea that Noonan is the go-to guy for a person with vision, and then leave it to someone else to develop it?) Personally I think Noonan is best suited to write adventures. I thought
Slaughtergarde was a pretty decent effort in terms of encounter design.
And finally, shadzar's post which attempts to contrast Noonan to the MMO crowd seems to me off. Not only did Noonan, since departing WotC, settle to design MMOs.
He was also the first one to point out how 4E's class roles are heavily oriented by MMOs and how that's a good thing. But perhaps that's a case in point of ym above speculation - Noonan would be the kind of guy who thinks a controller type of PC would be neat in a game like D&D, and then Mearls & co. fail to design one at the mechanical level.
Finally, though, the two WotC layoffs after 4E was released featured Noonan in the first year (2008) and Heinsoo in the second (2009). To me they let go of the two minds driving 4E's earliest design. There are a myriad of ways to interpret that, but my impression is that neither of these guys really was a team player coddling to Slaviscek's grand non-view of where 4E is supposed to go.
