D&D General The Crab Bucket Fallacy

[payn]

By what measure? Because by economic measures--units sold and dollars earned--every new edition has been the "most popular edition." We've had current and former staff explicitly say as much. The 3e PHB outsold the 2e PHB. The 3.5e PHB outsold the 3e PHB. The 4e PHB1 outsold the 3.5e PHB.

Lack of backlash? Every edition has had a ton of it. Yes, it was more contentious for 4e. 4e was also the first edition that launched in a world with a widely-accessible internet, and the echo chamber effect was, and remains, severe.

Run the numbers, pick the stats that support your case, disregard anything inconvenient, and you can literally argue that any edition you want is the "most popular edition." Because, again, this conflates the measure of the characteristic for the actual characteristic itself: surrogation.

5E is leagues better now, like a thousand leagues better. Paizo built a new edition, which is always divisive, based largely on 4E design (ironic isnt it?) and is doing better than ever. Thats how much larger the community is now! After ten years(!) they are doing a simple refresh of the ruleset and expanding into the digital market. Remember the last digital foray failure that had them cut the D&D team down to like 5 people? Yeah, they feel confident enough to expand into that ground for the future with 5E today.

Where are the inconvenient stats of 5E? Serious question; because folks are making the case the game is headed for failure and im not sure what they are basing this on besides personal preference.

 

[payn]

...what on earth does that even mean? How can something be "a better product" and yet be not better quality?

How can you have "better" with no quality involved??? "Better" is literally defined, "of superior quality or excellence"!

Remember Betamax?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Remember Betamax?

Is it back in pog form?

 

[Tony Vargas]

If you only have 18 skills and you give every PC 4 skills there's a high chance there will be a redundancy. If you give some classes like rogue additional skills and some races like elf additional skills, this increases the chance of redundancy even more.

Redundancy is only an issue if the non-combat uses of skills are so limited that they're always resolved by a single check against a single skill be a single character.
Furthermore, defining/balancing a class or character by giving it exclusive access to a skill is just a particularly narrow form of niche protection.

IMX with range of systems, too many skills is worse for a game than not enough, and open-ended skills, or skills otherwise added mid-stream, create incompetence....

Aside from Tool Use, which is open-ended, the 5e list of skills is fine. Or, could have been fine, if there had been a bit more depth to their use in the non-combat 'pillars.'

By what measure? Because by economic measures--units sold and dollars earned--every new edition has been the "most popular edition." We've had current and former staff explicitly say as much. The 3e PHB outsold the 2e PHB. The 3.5e PHB outsold the 3e PHB. The 4e PHB1 outsold the 3.5e PHB.

In terms of dollars, I'd heard that. I also recall WotC letting slip that the ol' Red Box, at something like 1.2 (1.5? IDK) million units was the best-ever selling single product. Which sure implied the 80s had the most units moved. 5e has surely broken that record.

Lack of backlash? Every edition has had a ton of it. Yes, it was more contentious for 4e. 4e was also the first edition that launched in a world with a widely-accessible internet, and the echo chamber effect was, and remains, severe.

I'm going to show my age again, but
The September that never ended.

There's no doubt that the edition war went far beyond the usual grousing that has accompanied every rev-roll since disgruntled fans fled the comparatively 'new' 1e for Arduin Grimoire. And not just because there were forums. Fans on use-net could have trashed 2e in favor of 1e, they preferred to lump all D&D together and trash it as ROLL playing. 3.0 caught some flack for being 'grid dependent' from Grognards who had completely missed 2e C&T. But the sheer level of toxicity the edition war managed to impose on the internet footprint of the IP was unprecedented and remains unequaled.

...what on earth does that even mean? How can something be "a better product" and yet be not better quality?

How can you have "better" with no quality involved??? "Better" is literally defined, "of superior quality or excellence"!

Better selling or more profitable product, being lower quality is easy to conceive. Use inferior materials to make an inferior product, save enough on production that it's more profitable.
Pour on advertising to make a product sell better without changing its quality, at all.

It's a better product from a boardroom point of view, it has the superior quality of selling more, excellence in delivering profits.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I say it several times in bold.

After a certain amount of times, I grow tired of repeating myself.

But I'll repeat myself again.

We all have to do it. It is what it is.

If you only have 18 skills and you give every PC 4 skills there's a high chance there will be a redundancy. If you give some classes like rogue additional skills and some races like elf additional skills, this increases the chance of redundancy even more.

Basically there aren't enough skills in 5th edition for the amount of skills each character gets automatically.​

This is doubly problematic if the skill spread is not even among ability scores.

Explain how this invalidates skill proficiencies as an out of combat class feature.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

5E is leagues better now, like a thousand leagues better. Paizo built a new edition, which is always divisive, based largely on 4E design (ironic isnt it?) and is doing better than ever. Thats how much larger the community is now! After ten years(!) they are doing a simple refresh of the ruleset and expanding into the digital market. Remember the last digital foray failure that had them cut the D&D team down to like 5 people? Yeah, they feel confident enough to expand into that ground for the future with 5E today.

Where are the inconvenient stats of 5E? Serious question; because folks are making the case the game is headed for failure and im not sure what they are basing this on besides personal preference.

Mostly, the ones that show 4e wasn't even remotely a financial failure (as is so often alleged), but rather that it merely "failed" by not being the stupendously successful edition Wizards sold to their corporate overlords. All while, y'know, being in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, having a closure of one of the biggest bookstores in the country, a murder-suicide on the digital tools team, etc.

Remember Betamax?

No. By the time I was more than a twinkle in my parents' eyes, it was already a dead format.

Doesn't really answer the question though. How can you have "better" without quality? VHS had several legitimate quality benefits. Yes, if we consider exclusively image quality and absolutely nothing else, early Betamax was superior to early VHS. However, the technological differences did not last all that long as the two tried to compete with each other, meaning that the usage of the medium--which is also a quality!--mattered a great deal.

And on that front, beta was dramatically worse. Proprietary and expensive tools. One of the important measures of quality in any visual medium--this applies to computer hardware as well, for example--is price per performance. You can get a state-of-the-art, unbeatable video card...usually for multiple thousands of dollars. Or you can do like I did, aim for the just-above-midrange, and wait for something to come on sale or come up refurbished (I did the latter with my current card, and have been nothing but pleased with it). Price to performance ratio is an extremely important indicator of quality--and VHS had Beta completely beat on that front, even as it slowly worked to improve the performance as well. Per Wikipedia:

Sony believed that having better quality recordings was the key to success, and that consumers would be willing to pay a higher retail price for this, whereas it soon became clear that consumer desire was focused more intently on recording-time, lower retail price, compatibility with other machines for sharing (as VHS was becoming the format in the majority of homes), brand loyalty to companies who licensed VHS (RCA, Magnavox, Zenith, Quasar, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Hitachi, Sharp, even JVC itself, etc.), and compatibility for easy transfer of information.

All of these are quality concerns which are not the same as visual fidelity concerns.

So: How can something be better, without any quality difference?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Better selling or more profitable product, being lower quality is easy to conceive. Use inferior materials to make an inferior product, save enough on production that it's more profitable.

But that is explicitly NOT a "better" product. It is a better selling product. But sales are not quality! That's literally what I've been arguing. It's why there's such an association in the public consciousness with "cheap, imported goods" being low-quality trash, while "Made in America" is meant to signify quality and craftsmanship (sadly, this is also not always true.)

Pour on advertising to make a product sell better without changing its quality, at all.

Sure. A mediocre (or worse) product can sell better with better marketing. That doesn't somehow magically transform it into being a better-quality product. It just means it sells better. Because sales are not quality! They are, at best, an estimate of quality--and, as you've just argued, skimping on materials, reducing build quality, amping up the marketing budget, etc. can all lead to a product that sells like hotcakes while being worse than the competition.

It's a better product from a boardroom point of view, it has the superior quality of selling more, excellence in delivering profits.

I must beg your forgiveness for rejecting the idea that the "boardroom view" is one I should pay attention to.

 

[Tony Vargas]

We all have to do it. It is what it is.

Explain how this invalidates skill proficiencies as an out of combat class feature.

It really shouldn't, based just on the number of skills, and the number of skills/character. It shouldn't take broad incompetence in the rests of the party, leading to everything resting on the performance of a single expert, to make having a skill as a class feature a meaningful way of contributing.
5e's skill system doesn't seem to be up to the challenge, tho. Thanks to BA and the d20 distribution, mere proficiency in a skill, or even proficiency and a high stat, doesn't deliver consistent performance within that skill. That's not even a black mark against 5e, since the point of BA, was to give everyone a shot at most checks (especially attack rolls, but checks in general).
But it does mean that, short of Expertise, you can't really hang your hat on simply having skill proficiency, and lacking it, and having your prime requisite add to only one skill, well, that's getting pretty unfortunate..

I must beg your forgiveness for rejecting the idea that the "boardroom view" is one I should pay attention to.

forgiven

 

[payn]

Mostly, the ones that show 4e wasn't even remotely a financial failure (as is so often alleged), but rather that it merely "failed" by not being the stupendously successful edition Wizards sold to their corporate overlords. All while, y'know, being in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, having a closure of one of the biggest bookstores in the country, a murder-suicide on the digital tools team, etc.

I didn't say 4E was a failure, I said 5E is much more successful. Like grew the community hugely that many indie companies are making more money than ever right along side it. They saw no need to fundamentally redesign the game to refresh interest and promote sales. They are looking at doubling down!

So: How can something be better, without any quality difference?

By appealing to factors of nostalgia and accessibility. 5E is designed to hit the feels, and its slower progression rate aimed at keeping casuals involved. They are not aiming the game at die hard aficionados because we are a much smaller piece of the pie. We scare away all the other fish. Those folks would think we are a bunch of dorks wasting our working day hours arguing this stuff. They simply dont care, and they really like 5E, while outnumbering us 9-1.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Mostly, the ones that show 4e wasn't even remotely a financial failure (as is so often alleged), but rather that it merely "failed" by not being the stupendously successful edition Wizards sold to their corporate overlords.

I didn't say 4E was a failure, I said 5E is much more successful.

Sounds like y'all are in violent agreement, there.