D&D 5E What is Quality?

[Minigiant]

Just remember. 5e is the most popular edition but almost every fan of it knows the PHB ranger and its subclasses were designed poorly. Most can say that the game was mostly great and still point to that blemish. So something can be high quality and have flaws worth open criticism.

Heck the Hunter and Beastmaster STILL don't follow the current design of 5e just becase WOTC doesn't want to state that the subclasses are missing its bonus spells and errata the PHB.

 

[Campbell]

My number one example when it comes to a lack of a link between game design quality and popularity is Vampire - The Masquerade. Don't get me wrong. It had great product design - a compelling setting, great art with a phenomenal sense of attitude, reached into a new market. Great business stuff. Great setting design. Crap game design. Overly complex systems in areas of the game that run counter to its core ethos, terrible GMing procedures, reward systems that run counter to its procedures. The only way to get a functional game out of it was to pretty much ignore all of its rules.

I still have nightmares about Celerity Turns.

 

[James Gasik]

My number one example when it comes to a lack of a link between game design quality and popularity is Vampire - The Masquerade. Don't get me wrong. It had great product design - a compelling setting, great art with a phenomenal sense of attitude, reached into a new market. Great business stuff. Great setting design. Crap game design. Overly complex systems in areas of the game that run counter to its core ethos, terrible GMing procedures, reward systems that run counter to its procedures. The only way to get a functional game out of it was to pretty much ignore all of its rules.

Boy as a long time VtM fan, I can't agree with this enough. Just thinking about Obtenebration level 3 and trying to make sense of it (let alone all the arguments about it) is the stuff of nightmares.

 

[Vaalingrade]

My number one example when it comes to a lack of a link between game design quality and popularity is Vampire - The Masquerade. Don't get me wrong. It had great product design - a compelling setting, great art with a phenomenal sense of attitude, reached into a new market. Great business stuff. Great setting design. Crap game design. Overly complex systems in areas of the game that run counter to its core ethos, terrible GMing procedures, reward systems that run counter to its procedures. The only way to get a functional game out of it was to pretty much ignore all of its rules.

To say nothing of the scenario design.

Anyone remember the NPC everyone hated, but who got more powerful and more prominent with every release until he was like a double werewolf mage-pire?

the 90's was filled with absolutely trash meta-arcs that sold gangbusters.

 

[James Gasik]

To say nothing of the scenario design.

Anyone remember the NPC everyone hated, but who got more powerful and more prominent with every release until he was like a double werewolf mage-pire?

the 90's was filled with absolutely trash meta-arcs that sold gangbusters.

The lesson to be learned here is that crossover games are bad. Do not attempt!

Hey at least when Samuel Haight hit the Underworld, someone had the good sense to soulforge him into something useful!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

My number one example when it comes to a lack of a link between game design quality and popularity is Vampire - The Masquerade. Don't get me wrong. It had great product design - a compelling setting, great art with a phenomenal sense of attitude, reached into a new market. Great business stuff. Great setting design. Crap game design. Overly complex systems in areas of the game that run counter to its core ethos, terrible GMing procedures, reward systems that run counter to its procedures. The only way to get a functional game out of it was to pretty much ignore all of its rules.

Similar arguments apply to PF1e. Its own designers were eventually forced to admit how flawed and broken its design was, even though, as Oofta and others are quite eager to point out, it managed to overtake 4e on one voluntary measure of physical sales. Like, the designers themselves were forced to admit that the game design of PF1e was holding them back because of its low quality, and that it thus needed to be replaced. A product that sold extremely well in its market...that its designers eventually called, pretty much straight-up, badly made.

To meet or beat your sales targets does not tell you that you made a high quality product. It means that the state of the market, the state of your company, your marketing efforts, the interests of the consumer, and the actual product itself aligned successfully. Only one of those things, the product itself, involves any notion of quality—which means you can (and, for many products, do) see situations where the other factors dominate the equation. E.g. Umbran's analysis of McDonald's. The food is precision-optimized to trigger pleasurable responses in the consumer, regardless of nutritional value or ingredient quality: precise levels of fats, salt, sugar, monosodium glutamate, etc. This, coupled with consumers finding utility in the food being inexpensive and quick, mean that it sells well, even though it is unhealthy, nutrition-poor, weak on flavor beyond those really basic hindbrain-pleasers, and low in variety. You know...the vast majority of reasons humans choose to eat food for apart from "not starving to death."

 

[Umbran]

Obviously not. But in this grim future, will people who were perfectly happy with 5e and have problems with 6e, 25e, Super Advanced Dungeons AND Dragons ("ampersands are so last century!") Mega Edition, or whatever they call it be told "there is nothing wrong with the new D AND D because it's making more money"?

They will be told that, just a much as they are told, that the game should absolutely be changed to change an individual person's pet preferences.

If you complain about sales being used as an indicator, you should also complain about "Well, I personally like this better, so your published game should match me!"

 

[Helldritch]

I don't care for McDonalds and haven't eaten there this century. On the other hand, McDonalds has extremely high quality control standards. You go into a McDonalds and order a Happy Meal and it will be a Happy Meal whether you're in Fairbanks or Miami. You'll also know that the place will be well lit and clean. On the other hand, while I don't eat out often I do enjoy a burger at Culver's now and then. For me? A burger and a shake on average has been more satisfying and enjoyable than highly rated expensive restaurants I've tried. So for me, by and large that burger is a higher quality. There's no accounting for taste. Just like most people can't tell the difference between an $18 bottle of wine and a $3,000 bottle of wine.

Having high quality control does not mean your product is of top quality. It guanrantees that it will be the same in all units of production. Nothing else. A fast food is not good for your health and while I do enjoy McDonald's, it does not mean that their food is top quality for my health. It is not.

So ... classical music is higher quality because you say so? I would say that they're different, it doesn't make one higher quality. It depends on the goals of the people making the music. For one person Wagner might be da bomb, for someone else it might be Rhianna. While Rhianna isn't on my Spotify list personally, she has very high quality production and concert standards. Many bands hit big and then flair out because they simply can't sustain a quality product. Whether that's because they were one-hit-wonders who just happened to get lucky or because of personal issues with the performers.

Not because I say so, but because most professionals in music will tell you so. Look at a partition of Bethoven, Mozart, Iron Maiden, Metalica and so on. You will see that partitions from hip hop, rap and pop are rather anemic both instrument wise and accord wise.

When it comes to 5E, if it wasn't a popular product they would have been like one-hit-wonder Blind Melon or Nickleback who were big for a while but had so, so many issues.

And so was Vampire the Masquerade. At a time it was bigger than D&D. A fad is just that, a fad.

If your books fell apart you should have sent them back for new ones. I did (twice, different books) and not only did they replace it with no questions asked and no receipt, they also sent me an additional product as well. I agree the printer of the books wasn't great quality but their customer service was quite high quality.

Learned that you could that a year after the repair were done. And my repair still hold fast! That was quality repair if you want my opinion

Yeah, nothing is perfect. I'm not saying 5E is the highest quality RPG of all time because I don't know how you would measure that. But 5E seems to be a quality product for millions of people, more people play every year. For a game when there's so much competing for our spare time to accomplish what 5E has to me indicates that for a lot of people it is a quality product.

It sells. It is a testament for its popularity and I am really happy that it is so. But it does not mean that there are better RPG out there. IF D&D was such high quality, you would never see so many house rule and 3pp trying to correct its mistakes. The 5ed of D&D is a great one, no one dispute that. But it does not mean that it is really such high quality as an RPG.

People have voted with their dollars and time.

And that is what popularity amounts to. Nothing else, nothing more.

And again, I want to be clear. 5ed is so far one of the best edition of D&D. No argument there. But it is hardly perfect and some of its bad choices are reflected in the game play and the criticism we see on this very forum and many others. It is a workable edition that does not need that much tweak to work as you want. And in that, it is why it is a success.

 

[Helldritch]

But in this grim future, will people who were perfectly happy with 5e and have problems with 6e, 25e, Super Advanced Dungeons AND Dragons ("ampersands are so last century!") Mega Edition, or whatever they call it be told "there is nothing wrong with the new D AND D because it's making more money"?

In this grim future there will be only Edition War!

 

[Oofta]

A car that is inefficient, uses cheap materials, offers minimal to zero safety features, etc. is not, by any reasonable definition, a quality car. It may be popular, it may sell extremely well, it may have other virtues, but quality is not among them. And yet there have been several cars which meet that definition, including the first mass production car, the Model T Ford. By design, it was made to be cheap to make, and to turn a profit mostly via sales volume. It was a direct rejection of the way cars had been designed up to that point, where they were luxurious, comparatively safe, finely-engineered custom builds, sometimes literally hand-machined from the best materials available. The Model T was specifically intended NOT to be a high-quality car, but rather to be a high-utility car.

Depends on how you define quality. I think that at the time, the Model T was a quality car because it was well suited for the bad roads at the time and quite versatile. Since it was not hand made (which IMHO is over-valued for discussions of quality) you could get replacement and add-on parts that were not available for any other vehicle. Even if other vehicles had been less expensive, it suited the needs of people better than other vehicles.

Any car from that era would not be considered high quality today, even if I do think some are awesome. I go back to my comparison of a Casio digital watch to a Rolex. A Rolex is far, far more expensive and decorative. It is not inherently a higher quality time keeping device. A Rolex is only high quality if you value the extravagant nature of the watch.

Something being popular does not, in any meaningful way, communicate that it is a superior product, neither in design, nor in execution, nor in materials. Popularity tells you that, in the context where the product was deployed, it was seen as a desirable purchase. Higher quality products are not at all guaranteed to be the bestseller, not even guaranteed to be in any particular position. Indeed, the bestseller is usually the cheapest product that doesn't fail too often nor too severely. Even that last one, severity, is up for debate if the catastrophic failures are rare enough. Consider the Pinto, very popular until the whole exploding gas tank case came along.

A thing may sell, it may in fact sell extremely well, and still be a mediocre product. A thing may have very low sales, may barely sell at all, and still be an excellent product. Popularity does not meaningfully sort for quality. Note that this goes both ways; I'm not inverting the fallacy either and saying that popularity indicates something is a bad product. I'm saying that there is no relationship, not even correlation, between sales volume and quality. If there were, we'd see a lot fewer crappy, crappy blockbuster video games that somehow still made bank.

In specific, this reasoning is a form of argumentum ad populum, a subtype of appeal to authority. It would be a fallacy to assert that this means popular things are bad or wrong. Instead, popular things are...popular. There may be many reasons why they are popular/sell well, with quality being just one, and frequently quality is not the most important concern. If we wish to make assertions about the quality of a sold good, we must ground them in the actual...you know...qualities of that good. For physical objects, the materials from which they are made, aka the "production value." For most things, the design and utility (since most products have SOME kind of utility value, even if minimal). Ease of use, interoperability, elegance, etc. Sales don't tell you anything about these things.

The RPG marketplace is competitive, it's easier than ever to publish a new game. I judge quality in part on if it delivers what people desire, for entertainment products like games. So yes, popularity is one of the best way of measuring whether or not a game is entertaining there is. If D&D had spiked and seen declining sales it would be a different story.

Do you have any actual ideas on how to judge quality?