D&D 5E What is Quality?

[FrogReaver]

Why would one not, as you have suggested below, define things such that these differences are categorized out? This seems a weakness of your overall proposal: either you have your categorization that excludes comparisons you don't want, but which seems to exclude other comparisons you do want, or you don't, and thus comparisons I'm making are appropriate.

One could attempt to. One's audience has to agree that your categorizations are reasonable.

Turn that around: it is not about what the user is trying to accomplish, but what ends the designer is trying to support. Yes, end-users will bring whatever ends they wish to use the product for. The designer of something is, however, trying to make a product that will provide one or more ends for which users may desire said product. That's where focus vs diversity is a design consideration, and thus, something that factors into quality.

Whether the designer achieved his goals doesn't make a product quality. That a designer made a very focused product or a very unfocused product, or even something inbetween isn't something I care about when I consider quality.

And I would argue that such categorization is you inserting arbitrary divisions that make comparison impossible. We could always object and demand finer and finer comparison until nothing could be compared because no other products could possibly match. "Oh well it has to be a burger fast food joint; you couldn't compare Taco Bell and McDonald's. But it also can't be focused on the dining experience, because McDonald's is clearly catering to the take-out crowd; you wouldn't compare it with Applebee's or Red Robin. Oh and don't forget that it needs to be specifically a very cheap fast-food takeout-focused burger joint, because McDonald's isn't trying to compete with something like Chili's or the like, that whole 'six-dollar burger' thing at Carl's Jr./Hardee's is definitely not the same," etc., etc. This ever-finer categorization results in the inverse of the apples-and-oranges problem; we start needing to compare Granny Smith apples from Washington state harvested in the early part of the season (e.g. October) but kept in good preservation conditions until early winter (e.g. Christmas), otherwise it's not a fair comparison.

Yes. You get it. While I agree it's not ideal, that's how quality works. We don't compare the quality of a cup of orange juice to the quality of a battery. Too dissimilar. We don't compare the quality of a D battery to the quality of a car battery. Etc.

Suitability, as a category, is specifically what enables related but still cross-category comparisons in a useful way.

I submit cross-category quality comparisons are meaningless. *Unless one uses new categories where the comparisons can now be meaningful.

 

[Seule]

5e is clearly a game that works for many people, and presumably does what it was designed to do well, for example it's easy to learn with low overhead and draws in new players really well. It also plays as a spectator sport for all the same reasons.
It's not the game I want to play but that doesn't make it not good, just not for me. It's clearly been very good for the gaming industry as whole, we have many players now who wouldn't be playing if my preferred games were the flagships of the industry.
I'm sad that it's the first edition of D&D that I really haven't enjoyed, but that's on me not on the system. I have other games to play.