I think that reaction stems from differences of opinion around what good and okay mean.
Because I agree with the basic sentiment. That’s basically the same argument i make except with ‘okay’ replacing good.
I'd argue there are absolutely some people--including some in this thread--who have used "good" however, if not stronger terms.
The place "good" always throws me most is in comic book grading, where the best one can say about good is that it's better than "poor" or "fair", but is still really bad compared to the ones most folks actually want.
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Historically how important has it been to be first, especially in games and more broadly in all other industries. Sports might make a good starting comparison - it’s really hard for a new sport to totally take off. We get some hype around certain newer ones at times. But they all mostly remain fairly niche. Usually fairly quickly peaking in interest.
But sports is large enough to support 4 or 5 dominate ones and a dozen or so slightly less popular ones before you get to truly niche levels.
A number of those became popular not too far from the same time, however, or became popular in geographically separate areas. All the most well known ones (soccer, American football, baseball, ice hockey) coalesced into what we think of them sometime in the mid to late 19th Centuries, and even basketball, the new kid on the block, didn't start forming long after. An important issue is that they all emerged prior to mass media, too, so it was hard for any of them to become dominant except regionally.
In the early 1900s, was it Boxing and Horse Racing that were king? And then Baseball? I'm trying to avoid looking up how sports media in the newspapers worked back then to see what the big names were.
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Well, see above - what does "technical masterpiece" mean? Isn't designing a thing that you can't kill with a stick a technical achievement? Isn't having high gas mileage a technical achievement? These are qualities of the leaders in the mass market - Honda and Toyota.
We should beware of what we might call "sexy" technical excellence - speed, acceleration, and handling are all technical achievements, sure, but they have little to do with actual use off of a race track. Having the largest payload or towing capacity only matter if you actually move large loads frequently, and so on.
So, yes, it does depend on what you mean by quality. There is no such thing as general technical quality. There is only a long list of specific technical qualities we are interested in. And if we don't list what we are interested in before we decree what is "good design", the assertion is at best unsupported, and at worst it is misleading.
If all people cared about was getting to destinations we'd all be driving generic but reliable econo boxes or taking public transportation. Depending on the size of your family you might be driving a minivan.
How you decide what qualities of a vehicle are important is very subjective. There are some objective things you can measure from cost of ownership to how quickly the car can get to 60 from a dead stop. Other things like styling and overall design are highly subjective. My brother-in-law loves his Tesla but the unintuitive design of the interface and other factors leaves me cold. Literally. They had it set to 68, it was chilly when we borrowed the car.
And then there's the time you really need to get that sheet of plywood home, need to bring a car top carrier worth of stuff with too, or want to comfortably seat six...
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Sure.
I think the heteroglossia you talk about in the OP as in people playing the same game differently happens in other RPGs as well.
Thinking about Vampire the Masquerade as a big popular game with a large player base I think plenty of people were playing it differently.
Vampire supers.
Personal horror.
Politics.
Cross-over urban fantasy.
Those who are excited about metaplot and or lore.
Wow I miss some of the VtM games I was in in the mid 90s. Might have to see if I can find anyone local interested again. I think I've only been in one D&D game that came close to capturing a sizeable chunk of the feelings from VtM - and it wasn't the D&D rules that particularly led to it.
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I’m currently running a game called The 13th Fleet. It both removes Position/Effect from play and takes place in an entirely different setting than Blades.
You’re starting with your conclusion that D&D is more flexible than other games and then doing everything you can to support that conclusion. Despite evidence to the contrary.
The Changing the Game section makes it very clear that nothing is off the table.
There’s nothing greater about the flexibility of D&D.
The 13th Fleet is a Forged in the Dark game that does exactly the things you said the “Changing the game” section omitted.
Your comments have done nothing to show how D&D is more flexible than Blades in the Dark. Yet you claim it’s true. When someone else pointed it out, you said it was the fault of others for not explaining the text in full.
If you’re going to claim that D&D is more flexible than another game, then it’s on you to show how. No one else is gonna do your work for you.
As for the flexibility of either game…I don’t know how either game is “more flexible” than the other given the context of changing the game. How would either game not be changeable?
Is it accurate to say that BitD is to FitD as D&D is to d20? (Not in terms of development but in terms of whether something is a system instead of a game?).
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