D&D 5E Game Design and Pizza Analogies

[Stormonu]

So (serious question) is there a way to make D&D like when you order several pizzas - one guy orders the meat lovers, someone else gets the supreme and another gets the vegetarian special?

I think that's the bigger problem - not that we're just eating from one pizza at the table, but that the guy over at the next table still wants a pizza, but wants pepperoni & black olives not the anchovies and feta cheese your group decided to have. Something I guess, akin to having one group playing something that resembles BECMI, while another game table down the block is playing a 5E D&D that looks like 4E.

 

[Mercurius]

As someone who makes homemade pizza, I think this analogy is missing something crucial - the quality of the ingredients. All cheese pizzas aren't created equal, so if you're starting a new pizzeria the first thing you do is try to make the best cheese pizza you can - with quality whole milk mozzarella, well-spiced organic tomato sauce, a deliciously chewy crust, etc. This forms the basis for all other pizzas.

From there, different groups of people can come in, order that base pizza with whatever toppings they want. The same base pizza, but different toppings depending upon who is ordering it.

Voila, you have the 5E D&D that Mearls & Company were shooting for.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Of course, some people see it this way...

The group has been ordering the same kind of pizza at Pie of the Coast for a while, and even though it isn't everyone's favorite, it is mutually agreeable. Let's say its a double pepperoni with mushrooms & extra cheese.

Then some new people joined the group, and there were enough of them so that the next pizza agreed upon was Hawaiian, with Canadian bacon and pineapple. Some decided to stick to the other style, going to The Paizzoria or making them at home, even if it meant they weren't dining with their buddies because they'd have to go get it somewhere else, while wondering why the newbies didn't just go to Luau Louie's instead of coming to the pizza parlor.

Then Pie of the Coast decided they weren't selling enough Hawaiian pizzas, and said they'd discontinue it. Instead, they'd offer the pepperoni & pineapple with a buffalo sauce, based on market research.

And some of the newbies started wondering if they could get Hawaiian pizzas at Luau Louie's...

Me? I'll be eating at Nero's HEROes, where I can basically get whatever I want.

 

[Ichneumon]

After thinking about this, it's become clear that D&D Next needs to be the sort of game that accommodates actual pizza.

So far, the signs are promising. Its default theatre-of-the-mind combat style means more room for pizza boxes that isn't being taken up by maps & grids. Quick action resolutions mean you can get your turn out of the way and grab more pizza. Also, a cohesive ruleset means the DM and players don't need to keep reaching for the rulebooks during play, giving more freedom to get their hands good and greasy.

In analogy hand, I'd call D&D Next a satay pizza. Not overly daring, but not the plain base that extreme compromise would require. There's enough to provide a tasty treat for a good proportion of D&D players, with room to modify it to fit the preferences of even more people. It's a nice compromise between too exotic and too plain.

 

[Obryn]

Oh god people I wasn't asking for more pizza analogies!

Pizza analogies are terrible.

I recommend ice cream analogies instead.

 

[Ichneumon]

Oh god people I wasn't asking for more pizza analogies!

Pizza analogies are terrible.

I recommend ice cream analogies instead.

The recent Wandering Monsters article indicates that the D&D Next ice-cream will be four-tiered.

 

[Lokiare]

I like my pizza analogy best:

A small Parlor started making cheese pizzas which sold extraordinarily well, mainly because no one in the area had heard of pizza and certainly had not had any food with MSGs (very addictive neurotoxins) in it. they expanded and grew and started making a few other kinds of pizzas: pepperoni, sausage, olives, bell peppers, and onions. Many peopled liked the variety, but many also wanted to combine the topings onto one pizza. Then the pizza parlor which had begun to grow large at this point decided they would do just that and consolidated all their pizzas into one pizza. This went over well everyone loved the pepperoni/sausage/olives/bell peppers/onions pizza and didn't complain if they had to pick one or two toppings off. In fact that was the tag line of the parlor "pick off what you don't want".
Then they started adding tons of new ingredients to the point that the pizza was no longer popular and anyone that made pizza got sued by them. Eventually their customers got tired of getting sued when they made a pizza at home and went elsewhere.
The parlor slowly dwindled until it was just about bankrupt and then luckily was bought up by a much larger restaurant whose main feature was pasta, but many of the owners remembers the pizza parlor fondly and wanted to keep their signature crazy pizza alive, but they knew they had to make some changes so they trimmed off a lot of the more controversial toppings and streamlined the recipe and it was a huge success, not even close to the pasta business but enough to hold its own for a little while, until the pasta restaurant was bought up by a chain of larger restaurants that owned many many different kinds of restaurants, then the profits on the pizza wasn't enough for the large chain and so the pasta restaurant had to try to reboot their pizza to make it better.
They listened to their audience and made the most meticulously designed pizza ever which was wildly popular like their previous pizza, but not quite as popular as the chain wanted. The chain then used its ownership powers to fire or drive off nearly everyone involved with the pizza recipes except for the new guy that had just started with the pizza before last. He knew a little bit about pizza, but didn't even understand what made the last pizza popular, yet he was tasked with making a pizza recipe that would satisfy all the customers that had ever had pizza by any restaurant.
To this end he tried starting with the first pizza and adding the ingredients of each succeeding pizza after it, only to find that some combinations simply would not work. What he ended up with was an unwieldy wildly different pizza each time it got cooked which only a few people like each time. So he started updating his resume all the while acting like he solved all the problems for the great unveiling, knowing full well that there is no way to satisfy everyone, especially if they have wildly different preferences. He knew when the curtain came up on his recipe that he would likely be out of a job like the last 4 or 5 cooks before him.

The moral of the story is "Make multiple pizza lines simultaneously to satisfy all people rather than trying to blandify one pizza for everyone."

 

[Sadras]

I'm hungry now.

 

[Gorgoroth]

Damage on a miss baked into 3 core PHB classes, including the fighter (the most popular class in the game), ranger, and paladin (my favorite class), is like sprinkling anchovies randomly on every pizza anyone who enters the store orders.

Only a DM can ban things, and that's one person. That's analogous to the parent who's paying for the pizza putting their foot down. But if it's up to the "kids", then no, you can't put stuff that other kids are allergic to, even in the same viscinity on the same pizza. One pizza = one D&D table. Even if one player at my table picks damage on a miss, I cannot sit through that sheer asinine idiocy, I'd rather slice my eyeballs open with razorblades or staple my scrotum to my chair than play such a mind-warping game of intellectual self-assassination and doublethink.

If no one can come to terms with what to put on there, you have to go with a plain cheese pizza, that offends no one. And people like Obryn, who are lactose intolerant (or, in this case, D&D Next intolerant), should just stay home and eat something else instead.

Sorry dude, you're wasting your time with D&D Next if you don't even want to play it at all, regardless of whether one or two things are in it or not. Furthermore, you're wasting everybody else's time here because it will likely never appeal to you. How do I know this? By your own words!! You make up stuff on the spot as reasons to like D&D Next, like suddenly you love all PC races having 30 speed, as if we don't see right through that.

You haven't posted a single thing about PC speeds needing to be homogenized and then you write in my thread about D&D Next demihuman speeds as if your opinion is pertinent. You are not even going to be a paying customer!! And you're trying to tell the pizza shop how to run their business!! And you don't even like Pizza! Because you're lactose intolerant! And you're telling other kids they shouldn't like pizza either, because it excludes you.

Well.....Too bad. D&D Next is largely great, except for one or two glaring pieces of crud, and if it weren't for those, they'd have a hit. But with those, you still don't like it enough to play it, so that's TOO BAD FOR YOU

 

[Obryn]

Yeah, I think it's clear you're not actually reading or comprehending anything I'm writing.