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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6279725" data-attributes="member: 4937">All three?I'm not a big fan of analogies because they tend to obscure more than they explain.But if you insist on analogies, D&D is like Coke and the 4e fiasco is IMO almost identical to the New Coke fiasco with the added wrinkle that the Old Coke flavor had been made open source and the brand managers refused to support Old Coke but doubled down on their New Coke preference research in the belief that the Brand name was more important than the flavor people had come to love.   I can draw lots of parallels between the two - changing your product when it was in a position of dominance, fear of future market loss based on research, attempting to please primarily people who don't like your product in the first place, and research failure to recognize the problems with their sample set compared to their overall market.On the other hand, D&D is like sphagetti sauce in that with a classic marinara base you can throw a lot of random seeming stuff into it - anchovies, olives, hot peppers, and capers for example - and its still good and still recognizably something that goes well on pasta.   Heck, you could probably put Coke in your spaghetti sauce (if you were careful about how you did it) and come up with a new 'classic' sauce.  There has never been a single 'one right way' to play D&D and failure to recognize just how diverse the player base was and how many different ways of playing were actually out there ties back to the fiasco of 4e.   It's not merely that WotC tried to replace Coke with the fundamentally similar but different New Coke, but it is as if Coke took its full liine of soft drink products and tried to replace them all with New Coke.   It's as if WotC had this diverse line of sphagetti sauces like Ragu or something, did some taste testing to figure out what the most popular new taste would, and attempted to replace the whole line up with just that one jar take it or leave it while at the same time failing to realize that competitors could just come in and say, "Errr..if you liked your old sauce, you can still have it.  We'll make it for you.  And not only that, we'll use better ingredients than those other guys ever did because all their best cooks left the company anyway in frustration with Ragu's commitment to low quality ingredients."At a fundamental level, D&D is also like ketchup.  The snobs in the food world hate ketchup.  They are fundamentally convinced ketchup is terrible.  Everyone who cooks is convinced they could do something everyone would like better than ketchup if people weren't just like picky kids that only eat what they are familiar with.  Ketchup eaters are sneered at, by everyone from Steve Jackson to Ron Edwards.  Lots of people are appalled that ketchup is still around and popular.  If they could, they'd be like the food gaurdians of France that ban schoolkids from having ketchup.  But the thing is, people just like ketchup.  It's sweet, salty, and zesty.  It's a classic sauce.  Ban it how you like, schoolkids in France still want to put ketchup on their bland authority approved school food.   Fundamentally, D&D got a lot more right with classes and hit points and AC and so forth than the RPG snobs want to admit, and fundamentally so much of their competitive sauces are just gross or even if they are tasty, not necessarily the sort of thing you want all the time.</blockquote>

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