D&D 5E What is Quality?

[Morrus]

I would say that an entertainment product that is highly functional is high quality. There is no way to measure quality of an entertainment product objectively. We can only look at the subjective experience of the people consuming the product. Do people vote with their time and dollars and continue to do so year after year. That doesn't mean that entertainment that doesn't sell is necessarily low quality, just that you don't see ongoing success without a quality product.

It's similar to movies. Some movies have a big opening weekend and then tank. Some movies see a growing audience after release. That means that for a lot of people, the latter movie is a quality use of their time.

Or at least that's how I see it. Either you can't talk about the quality of an entertainment product at all beyond basic coherence and reasonable standard of editing, or you can look at objective measures of people's subjective evaluation. I choose the latter.

Yes, we had this conversation. No need to recap. I fully understand your stance; I just disagree with if.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I would argue that you haven’t just described high quality, you’d described basic functionality. That’s the minimum standard you’d expect.

"Achieves basic functionality" is a level of quality. Not one normally to be praised (call it a C-) but a level above "lacking in quality entirely." Popular products rarely if ever fall below this line - McDonald's is definitely food, a Casio will stay on your wrist and display the current time, etc.

Any argument that 5e DnD is a low-quality product will run into this counterpoint: if the game sucks so much that it fails to be a playable or entertaining game, why do people keep playing it? Popularity does disprove this: 10 million people can't all be wrong about what "fun" feels like to them.

Now, popularity is only a litmus test for this middling standard: you can't prove something is high-quality via popularity. But you can prove that it works.

 

[Reynard]

Or positing that the success of a lavishly-illustrated, professionally laid out, extensively marketed, widely-distributed, giant corporation-supported cultural marker benefitting from 50 years of brand recognition is because of the game design.

4E has entered the chat.

 

[Oofta]

Yes, we had this conversation. No need to recap. I fully understand your stance; I just disagree with if.

What??? Someone disagrees with me???? Wait ... why isn't my ignore button working!

 

[soviet]

4E has entered the chat.

You mean objectively the second highest quality RPG of all time?

 

[Aldarc]

What??? Someone disagrees with me???? Wait ... why isn't my ignore button working!

"I have to bow out of this for a while ..." lasted a whole 22 minutes.

 

[Eric V]

McDonalds food does have qualities we can say are, in some way, positive - it is inexpensive, it is highly available, and it is pretty consistent across most of the USA.

Funnily enough, these characteristics also work to partially explain 5e's popularity as well.

5e being less bad for your heart, however.

 

[Reynard]

You mean objectively the second highest quality RPG of all time?

That word doesn't mean what you think it means.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Oh, and a game this afternoon for what I, and apparently millions of other people, consider a quality game.

Smugness does not become you...

As to the OP:

My reasons for saying 5E is a quality product is simple:

1. It's had relatively little errata and clarification. With 3.0 we had so many changes that they had to release 3.5. With 4E, it had a ton of errata starting almost immediately after release and Essentials was an attempt to make fundamental changes to the game (even if for many it was too little too late).*
2. The rules are coherent and largely without conflict.
3. It's the most popular TTRPG ever. WOTC's goal is to sell books, stopping churn of new editions is also beneficial.
4. People may pick up D&D because of brand, but they play and continue to play it because it works for them. History is littered with products that were once successful and are now forgotten because they let quality slip.
5. My opinion based on what I value. This edition works better for me and my group better than any previous edition.

1. I don't recall, personally, much in the way of errata or clarification with B/X or AD&D, either. But then without the internet we most likely just took care of any issue we had ourselves. There has been a landslide of clarification in 5E via Sage Advice, Twitter, etc. asking for clarification on things in 5E.
2. I would argue that is because the rules are largely incomplete. There might not be a conflict within your group, but I have seen a lot of conflict between groups. Because the rules are "open" by intent, RAI and interpretation is very different oftentimes. YMMV, of course.
3. As others have pointed out repeatedly, the popularity of 5E is not just about quality, but about mass marketing, the internet, and other factors which earlier editions had little (if any) benefit of. Very early on D&D had to contend with bad press, satanism, etc. which WotC has had little to deal with by comparison IME. "Gaming" in general (TTRPG, video games, etc.) does not have in any way the stigma associated with it that prior editions had to deal with. If you told someone you played D&D in the 80's, it was because you were likely a nerd or outcast and bonded with others who played. Today, you can be just about anyone, play D&D, and not have a very negative response to that--if any at all. Often, responses are positive now.
4. We don't hear about the people who pick it up, try it, and DON'T continue to play it, though, do we?
5. This is the largest factor of what determines if something is "quality" or not. (see below).

Quality is completely subjective, there is no way to gauge it so is pointless in really discussing it. The best you can do is identify what, to you, is quality and discuss why something is quality with those who share your views.

For instance many people love old LP records and think they are better quality than modern digital MP3s, others view MP3s as superior in quality to old LPs. Lots of people think different book series are quality (like Twilight and Wheel of Time), but others think the quality of the writing, story, etc. of those series is garbage. Fast food and chain restaurants are another place where some people find quality in the products while others don't. Some find games like Vampire and Shadowrun quality games, others don't like them because they don't like the rules/ design even if they like the concepts. And so on...

Anyway, I wonder how many players of prior editions of D&D still prefer, possibly play, those editions; and so aren't around here telling us? Perhaps they tried 5E years ago, didn't like it, and returned to those prior editions? I know many people (myself included) who play 5E simply because it is what others play--they have had no experience with prior editions before our games. I have two players to whom I showed AD&D 1E and played a quick session. They both really liked it, it was very different from 5E, and said they would play it again.

Do all these new players love 5E because of what it is/does or because that is what they have experienced and don't have anything for comparison? I am about to join a new group (hopefully tomorrow night) who recently started 5E. They have no prior D&D experience and know they aren't doing a lot of the stuff "right" (or so I've been told by a player...). I told him as long as they are having fun, they ARE doing it "right".

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Like, inspiration sucks. It’s bland and tacked on and most fans of the game ignore it. I don’t care how many units moved last month… inspiration is terrible.

Oh boy great example.

I mean, if I'm assessing quality and speaking relatively to RPGs over the last 30 years or whatever, D&D 5E is undoubtedly a high-quality RPG with some surprising flaws, and most of the flaws relate to one of four somewhat interrelated issues:

1) A number of systems seem to be tacked-on and not fully integrated, and some of the decisions don't seem to be fully considered.

Hit Dice being my example of choice. This seems likely to be a combination of changing from a more-modular to less-modular design, and going with some haste (which 4E and 3E also did, the haste thing). It also relates to point 3.

2) The definitely-optional systems and so on in the DMG are very poorly considered and constructed.

A lot of them needlessly group together a bunch of stuff, at least one is upside-down, and others seem to be the sort of thing you might muse about for a Dragon article, and then develop further before actually even publishing that Dragon article.

3) The design of the game overall, despite some really modernist and brilliant stuff like bounded accuracy and its attendant systems, is more retrograde than I believe it would have been had they not decided to make it an "apology edition" specifically.

This hasn't damaged the success of 5E measurably, because the high accessibility was an incredibly right choice (one 3E and 4E did not make), but it did harm the design and functionality of some classes/abilities/etc. I would not say this is a huge deal at launch, though it is quite distinctive. It also caused some bad, bad decisions to be made later on (see VGtM lore and so on) that are resonating to this day and are a bigger deal. WotC are addressing those though.

4) Failure to address the "post-10" problem in any meaningful way.

1/2/3E all had issues where they became less playable after 10 (I would personally say this was less of a problem in 1E/2E than 3E), and 5E does very little to fix that. People do play it after that, hey I have a level 16-ish game, albeit we don't often play that campaign. But there was no real focused effort to make this work. 4E, on the other hand, did make a focused effort to keep things playable at higher levels, and then Sideshow Bob Rake'd itself in the face with specific ability design at level 11+ (waaaaay too many abilities that use Reactions, Interrupts, or Immediate Actions). But it did try!

Nevertheless, the extremely accessibility of the rules - remarkable for a game that's either at the high of medium crunch, or the low end of high crunch - the speed with which a character can be put together, and the the frankly largely well-designed and pleasant to use rulebooks (the DMG being dramatically the weakest) mean that I'd assess 5E has in the upper tier of quality as RPGs go, both in form and aesthetics. Quite high in the upper tier.

So I mean if that pleases @Oofta to hear, great. I would say 5E is high-quality. It does contain some flaws of vary severity, and a few severely borked systems, but that's pretty good for an RPG. It's not like it's like, WW's Scion, for example, which was majestic, cool concept, and totally broken ruleswise top-to-bottom. That's what I'd call low-quality personally, despite attractive presentation and good concepts, the rules just were fundamentally crap.