D&D 5E 5e and the Cheesecake Factory: Explaining Good Enough

[Ovinomancer]

The consumer is the final judge of quality, and businesses pursue quality in order to get sales. You can win all kinds of industry quality awards and get rave reviews from critics, but ultimately, the consumer is looking at a whole bunch of different things, and what's really annoying is that each individual consumer weights each factor slightly differently. If something sells really well, beyond the point where we can just call it a fad, resulting in very large numbers of satisfied customers, it's doing something right, maybe a few things really right, maybe a lot of things mostly right. Regardless, it's not a misstatement to say it's overall a high-quality product.

Again, I think this misuses quality. The consumer is the final judge of where, how, and on what they spend their dollars. Quality is an input to this, not the decision made.

I can absolutely say that a brand new, highly rated car is of good quality compared to the rusted lemon on the used car lot, but I might buy the latter because I can't afford the former. My choice doesn't reflect quality, but a different motivation. What consumers consume is not solely, and somethings not at all, about the quality of the product.

 

[Oofta]

You're just mixing quality with preference and claiming their the same. I can absolutely say that Restaurant A is of poor quality because they routinely cook their steak improperly, and that has nothing at all with how I prefer my steak.

You're mixing quality of the chef with my preference for how well done I want steak.

If the 5E books were incomprehensible I would not consider it a quality game. If a restaurant cannot cook a steak to order I would judge it poor quality.

D&D 5E passes the relatively low bar of quality of editing and writing. Any judgement beyond that is just preference.

 

[Ovinomancer]

There can be factors in quality that are somewhat mutually exclusive, although maybe Oofta's steak example isn't the best-chosen analogy. For example, in software, people like "more features" and "easy to use." The same user will typically tell you that they like both. At some point, feature-addition militates against ease-of-use. If you take the same product and deprecate some features in order to streamline the UI, some power users will regard this as a regression in quality. Other users will regard this as an improvement in quality.

The entire field of HMI engineering rests on the basis that there is some level of objectiveness to how UIs are presented. IE that quality of use can be evaluated outside of personal preference. They're using understanding of how humans evaluate and interpret stimuli at a psychological and physiological level, which is more than just polling people for their preference.

 

[embee]

My only quibble with this analogy is that the Cheesecake Factory menu is roughly the size of the PF2 Core Rulebook, not a WOTC book.

 

[Aldarc]

Well, don't expect techniques that only a film student will notice as a measure of quality either. Go ahead, just don't expect it to be given much weight.

Having a basic awareness of "how the sausage was made" doesn't make one a film student. Nor does casting anyone with an opinion as a film student or snob so one can dismiss them as being out-of-touch with the plebs make one a champion of the common people. This sort of criticism against criticism often exists to cast dispersions on expertise and protect something from any form of criticism. It reminds me of people online who argued that video games were art. I'm not opposed to that, but when other people treated them as art and subject to similar criticism as other forms art, those same people calling for video games as art got upset that people were criticizing their video games. It was trying to have their cake and eat it too.

The metrics were decided by someone who made a subjective classification of what "quality" means.

And those metrics of quality are vital for a wide variety of purposes in the food, health, and service industries.

It's kind of like wine. Unless you are a trained wine taster, most people prefer moderately priced or even cheap wine. Their opinion changes when they see the price.

Which tells us that the trained wine taster knows better what makes a quality wine than most people. It doesn't refute the idea that metrics exist, it only highlights that humans can be deceived and tricked based upon some of the metrics they commonly use (e.g., price).

 

[Ovinomancer]

You're mixing quality of the chef with my preference for how well done I want steak.

No, you're the one doing that. The quality of the steak on your plate will only be determined by your preference in that your preference set the condition for how that steak should be cooked. Your preference doesn't matter except as the goal for the quality of the preparation.

In other words, you can prefer medium rare, and I can prefer rare but I can, independent of you, judge the quality of the the steak you're delivered by how well it's preparation matches your order. If you get a well done steak, I don't have to share your preference to determine the quality of the preparation to be poor.

If the 5E books were incomprehensible I would not consider it a quality game.

What if I prefer incomprehensibility? Then it would absolutely be a quality game, according to your argument that preferences drives quality.

If a restaurant cannot cook a steak to order I would judge it poor quality.

Which has been my point for multiple posts and you've argued it with me. Odd.

D&D 5E passes the relatively low bar of quality of editing and writing. Any judgement beyond that is just preference.

That you have low bars because you're not interested in more isn't the judge of quality. And your low bars are just as susceptible to your argument about preference and anything else mentioned. You've created a situation where you say that things in Category A are immune to preference but things in Category B are entirely preference, but failed to establish any metric for determining if a thing is in A or B except that you say it is. This is a bad argument.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It's not an unreasonable theory.

It'd just be really nice if the Cheesecake Factory menu actually offered any...let's say "traditional English food," to pick something vaguely controversial yet also not at all unusual to the West. There's really no equivalent to a restaurant semi-actively disclaiming a specific cuisine, intentionally and meaningfully bringing up common pejorative jokes about that cuisine when discussing their future menu plans, doing its best to pretend that bits of that cuisine actually come from some other source or are brand-new innovations, or claiming to offer that type of cuisine only to later cut menu items that depended on equipment they couldn't afford to purchase and (apparently?) just hoping no one would notice.

5e's designers explicitly made edition-warring jokes (and no, I don't care that they meant them as jokes, it's still edition-warring literally out of the designers' mouths), talked a big game about martial healing and the "tactical combat module" only for both of those things to end up vaporware, had at least one instance of literally forgetting 4th edition happened (Monte Cook's "what I like to call 'passive perception'" debacle), and pretty thoroughly went out of their way to avoid similarities to 4e in content, theme, or crunch.

So: How does the "Cheescake Factory 5e" model handle the mix of intentional and accidental, overt and implicit, repudiation of 4e?

 

[Oofta]

Which tells us that the trained wine taster knows better what makes a quality wine than most people. It doesn't refute the idea that metrics exist, it only highlights that humans can be deceived and tricked based upon some of the metrics they commonly use (e.g., price).

It just means that wine tasters have dedicated time and effort judging things on defined standards. Whether those things are "good" or "bad" is completely objective. If given samples of wine without knowing the price, most people will prefer the moderately priced or even cheap wine.

Many people think Picasso was a genius. I remember going to an art gallery and one of the pieces of art on display was a piece of construction paper with a hole crudely cut into it to reveal a black piece of construction paper.

I don't think it's dismissive to state that I don't care for expressionist or modern art, people are free t like what they like. I just think "quality" is meaningless for many things.

I can judge the quality of Michelangelo based on his technical expertise and his David sculpture. Whether it's higher quality than Picasso's Guitar is subjective.

 

[clearstream]

There are any number of things that can be designed to appeal to niche markets; it is very difficult to appeal to a broad base of people. This is even moreso when you think of things that are specifically designed to be done in groups. Whether it is choosing a movie to all go to, or a restaurant, or any other social activity, there is often a preference that is better for the group than for any given individual.

It is far too easy, and too common, for people to overlook what it is that makes things popular. And I am stating that by not trying to be "the best" at specific topics, D&D (and 5e in particular) ends up being the best as a choice for a group (and across groups) specifically because it appeals to a diverse group of interests.

TLDR; you seem to have come into this with the idea that I was rubbishing 5e, and I'm not. Now, if you want to make your own points, please do. But stop mis-using mine, please.

It is true that your theory appeared to me to fall in the category of damning with faint praise. We seem to agree that 5E achieves broad appeal. But there is a strong sense - in your comparing it with CF - that you believe it achieves that broad appeal by compromising the quality of design. It might be that you are instead saying something about the players, but then you would seem to be denigrating their ability to discern good design. It lands in about the same place. If that is not your intent, then I will accept that on face value.

My point is that 5E achieves its broad appeal because of the high quality of its game design, and players choose it because they are capable of appreciating that.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Having a basic awareness of "how the sausage was made" doesn't make one a film student. Nor does casting anyone with an opinion as a film student or snob so one can dismiss them as being out-of-touch with the plebs make one a champion of the common people. This sort of criticism against criticism often exists to cast dispersions on expertise and protect something from any form of criticism. It reminds me of people online who argued that video games were art. I'm not opposed to that, but when other people treated them as art and subject to similar criticism as other forms art, those same people calling for video games as art got upset that people were criticizing their video games. It was trying to have their cake and eat it too.


And those metrics of quality are vital for a wide variety of purposes in the food, health, and service industries.


Which tells us that the trained wine taster knows better what makes a quality wine than most people. It doesn't refute the idea that metrics exist, it only highlights that humans can be deceived and tricked based upon some of the metrics they commonly use (e.g., price).

To do the comic book guy, most times in blind tests professional wine tasters fail to distinguish vintages. A few are the genuine thing, but most can't actually do the job they're supposedly experts at.

I think taste (the sense) is an area that's rife with preference loading and false standards.