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Sunday, August 24, 2014

Mustard v. Ketchup

I appear out of the mists of obscurity to share a link to this article. It has no direct references to RPGs, nor does it include anything potentially gameable; it's about how mustard went from one variety to several, and explains why ketchup is having trouble doing the same. Mustard, it seems, as well as most other things like coffee and spaghetti sauce, can be sorted into several "market segments", or personal preferences, if you prefer. Ketchup, on the other hand, has been perfectly blended to have universal appeal; creating different varieties, so far, has only resulted in tastes that tilt too far in one direction or the other.

The question I have that ties this all back to RPGs is: is D&D mustard, or ketchup?

7 comments:

  1. At the buffet I go to, they have three kinds of ketchup and seven kinds of catsup.

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  2. We've got Burman's mustard at our house

    I'm gonna have to say RPGs are more like ketchup. Old-school D&D, especially Basic, is probably the closest to a Platonic ideal. Thing is, there is some variety of taste, and hobbyists have been experimenting with that since the beginning, but the alternatives are all very niche. TSR, and later WotC, tried to maintain that ideal by appealing to every group, but this just resulted in a lower amplitude. WotC probably fixed the amplitude issue with 4e, but now it's a totally different product with narrower appeal

    Personally, I'd love to see the old ideal brought back; old-school D&D sold as box sets in toy stores, like Monopoly or Clue. All those other flavors can be sold as niche products to the enthusiasts

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  3. OD&D is Classic Yellow, AD&D is Spicy Brown--my personal favorite edition and mustard flavor--while 2nd Ed is Grey Poupon, and 3e/Pathfinder is clearly Honey Mustard. 4th is probably some particularly pungent garlic-jalapeno concoction. 5th is looking to be some kind of yellow-hued yet spicy hybrid with a hint of honeyed horseradish.

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    1. We need finer divisions. Besides being vastly superior to its successors, 3.0 differs sufficiently from 3.5 and Pathfinder to warrant a separate mustard (likewise with pre- and post-UA versions of 1e). The Basic line should probably also be addressed

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    2. You're right; Basic deserves to be Honey Mustard.

      I'm out of mustard flavors and don't really know very much about the various versions of 3e/Pathfinder--there were feats involved, right?--so I'll defer to greater mustard/gaming connoisseurs on those.

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  4. The problem with this analogy is that, where it comes to taste, there is no right answer. Where it comes to gaming, there is.

    Individual taste always varies. There is no right answer when it comes to taste for an individual. However, with metadata, it's possible for a company to get an idea of the right taste for a product that's sold nation-wide. A company can produce a product that tastes just right for enough of the population that it will sell and make money.

    But that's for taste. That's for a single sensory experience (dual if you consider that taste and smell as closely linked). D&D is a multi-sensory experience. (It can easily be a multi-media experience if you have the right tools.) And it's an experience with as much variation (if not more than) as taste. Yet there is a common element between all roleplaying games: it's a social activity. As a social activity, there are rules. And where there are rules, it's possible to break them.

    There may be different flavors of the game (different rulesets that appeal to individual tastes) but there is a wrong way to play the game, and so there is a wrong way to design and market it.

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    1. Although I agree that there are wrong ways to design and market a game (meaning that the design puts off too many people to be successive and that the marketing's effect/cost ratio is too low), it doesn't really follow from the fact that there is a wrong way to play the game (meaning that game rules are broken).

      Just like there is a wrong way to design and market mustard and ketchup flavours, and there possibly are ways to taste them wrong (meaning that one may use a particular flavour in a way that was not intended); but the two are not related.

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