This thread reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell's TED talk where he describes how large groups with divergent tastes can broadly have their needs met by finding the clustering of tastes and then creating a line of products that aim for each cluster.

So without doing an empirical study, instead just from the hip, what would likely be the big clusters for playing D&D?

• Sandboxy open world that "keeps moving along" regardless of what the players do.
• Character based stories where the GM weaves plots around individual player actions.
• Tactical combat play where there are a string of set-piece battles leading to a boss battle.
• Dungeoncrawling push-your-luck old school style.
• Railroady (with player consent) play that funnels players along through an adventure.

The above isn't meant to be comprehensive or authoritative, just firing off a quick sketch of some possible clusters.

If you were on the 5e design team and wanted to follow this clustering approach to how the modularity would get mapped out, what big categories would you aim for?

The "spaghetti sauce" I intend to have should I decide to run 5e is going to be one where 1e's healing stands, not this "rest/long rest/short rest" nonsense.  You get jacked up, wanna keep pressing ahead and die as a result?  That's your own business.  Conversely, if the party elects to exit the adventure area (ruin, forest, dungeon, town) and get back to where they can actually REST (not the 5e term rest), cast some healing, re-memorize some spells?  That's their business too.

Maybe that state takes one encounter to happen, maybe a dozen, maybe the party finds a safe spot in the dungeon to hide out in and does their resting there...

My "sauce" though won't be constrained by some metric for n encounters per day = "adventuring day" or whatever.

Quote from: harpy;560759This thread reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell's TED talk where he describes how large groups with divergent tastes can broadly have their needs met by finding the clustering of tastes and then creating a line of products that aim for each cluster.

My reply to the spaghetti sauce analogy from this thread when Benoist brought it up about two months ago:

Quote from: Benoist;538047That Spaghetti sauce did it right.

Actually, no.  The spaghetti sauce lecture, like Forge game theory, is an argument for coherency.  The argument is that you shouldn't try to find the one right spaghetti sauce that meets everyone's needs somewhere around the middle but segment your spaghetti sauce to appeal to particular tastes, even if they are wrong for other segments of the market.  

That's the Forge coherency argument and it's wrong for D&D and, frankly, it can be wrong for food, too.  And where it fails is whenever you've got a group of people who need to sit around a table and share the same thing.  When you are engaged in a group activity, like role-playing or eating a large family dinner, it can make sense to pursue the middle ground that may make nobody as happy as they'd be if they had their ideal, but it also doesn't make them as unhappy as they'd be if they had someone else's ideal forced on them that didn't offer them anything.  

And that's where D&D 4e went wrong with the disassociated mechanics (and why Forge-type games generally sell a few thousand copies at most).  Yes, they enhanced the game for people who wanted a certain type of game experience but ruined it for people who look at the game through their character's eyes in the game world.  

It's like giving someone who hates chunky tomato sauce the extra chunky sauce.  It's like giving someone who hates strong coffee the strong coffee.  It's like giving everyone a tall class of orange juice with extra pulp and having the people who don't like pulp spit it out.  Yeah, giving people exactly what they want works when people make an individual choice, but trying to pick an extreme that everyone can agree on creates problems with groups.  Sure, the people who like the extreme will be more happy but it will turn everyone else off.  

So what's missing from him talking about people being only 60% satisfied with a product designed to appeal to everyone but being 78% happy with one that caters to their particular segment is that they might be only 40% or 30% or even less happy if a product designed for another segment is forced on them.  And when a group has to make a single choice for everyone, it's better that everyone be 60% happy than a few people 78% happy and others only 30% happy.

Finally, I'll leave you with this fond memory of classic Top 40 radio:

QuoteToday, radio stations generally do not try to program to everyone. Instead they target a specific demographic group and program to it. So, rather than playing all the hits you pick and choose from that list to fit your demographic. Today, instead of traditional "Top 40", you have Alternative Rock, Classic Rock, Urban Contemporary, Classic Soul, Adult Contemporary, Hot Adult Contemporary, Contemporary Hit Radio, Dance, Oldies and so on. Musicradio WABC tried to reach the audiences of all of this music and successfully did so for many years. But now with so many radio stations, music is fragmented into separate stations each targeting their own small piece of the music audience. This was the ultimate downfall of all the great AM Top Forty radio stations like WABC (and many others like WLS Chicago, CKLW Windsor/Detroit, KHJ Los Angeles etc.).

Was something lost? This is, of course, debatable. In my view, yes. Whenever "we" do things together we have a bond. We all listened to these great Top 40 radio stations in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. Ask anyone over the age of 30 if they ever heard of the Beatles, the Four Tops, Elvis Presley, or the Beach Boys and almost everyone can name their hits. Do the same for most any of today’s stars and even the 14-25 year olds won’t know the stars’ names from the "other" formats. Of course, the plus side is that you don’t have to listen to a lot of music you don’t like just to hear the things you do like. That is the basis for today’s music radio programming. Yet, a lot of the fun of a station like Musicradio WABC has been lost. Instead of trying to find that magic formula of what will appeal to most of us, we try to find some combination that won’t offend only a few of us. In my opinion, that’s too bad.

As an inherently social activity that requires one to get a group of people together to play, I think that anything that segments the already small hobby of role-playing into even smaller niches is a bad idea.

Quote from: harpy;560759

• Sandboxy open world that "keeps moving along" regardless of what the players do.
• Character based stories where the GM weaves plots around individual player actions.
• Tactical combat play where there are a string of set-piece battles leading to a boss battle.
• Dungeoncrawling push-your-luck old school style.
• Railroady (with player consent) play that funnels players along through an adventure.

I can handle just about all of these using most sets of TSR D&D rules. Caution: unless by "tactical combat" you only mean "rules manipulation tactics" (that is, where the tactics mainly come from knowing the rules and character powers and knowing how to take best advantage of them in combat) as TSR D&D does not have that type of combat rules except in the awful Player's Option books for 2e.

If I was designing 5e, I would try to ensure that players of any one of these styles or any combination of them could play D&D 5e and enjoy it. I'm in favor of "big tent" rules where D&D is concerned. I think designing a version of D&D that only caters to one or two of these focuses is a very bad idea.

Quote from: harpy;560759

• Sandboxy open world that "keeps moving along" regardless of what the players do.
• Character based stories where the GM weaves plots around individual player actions.
• Tactical combat play where there are a string of set-piece battles leading to a boss battle.
• Dungeoncrawling push-your-luck old school style.
• Railroady (with player consent) play that funnels players along through an adventure.

The above isn't meant to be comprehensive or authoritative, just firing off a quick sketch of some possible clusters.

The one I think you might be missing is the "Tactical character building" people i.e. the people that don't care about tactical combat necessarily, but want to spend hours building the mechanics for their characters  (the FantasyCraft and Rolemaster fans) ?

I do like John Morrow's answer though. Good points as to why its a bad idea to build a tight-focus game.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;560766The "spaghetti sauce" I intend to have should I decide to run 5e is going to be one where 1e's healing stands, not this "rest/long rest/short rest" nonsense.  You get jacked up, wanna keep pressing ahead and die as a result?  That's your own business.  Conversely, if the party elects to exit the adventure area (ruin, forest, dungeon, town) and get back to where they can actually REST (not the 5e term rest), cast some healing, re-memorize some spells?  That's their business too.

Maybe that state takes one encounter to happen, maybe a dozen, maybe the party finds a safe spot in the dungeon to hide out in and does their resting there...

My "sauce" though won't be constrained by some metric for n encounters per day = "adventuring day" or whatever.

I have to agree.

I have a theory that setting an 'ideal number of encounters per day/between resting' has a serious negative effect. Same with 'resting anywhere'

One of the delicate dancing acts a gm has to handle is the flow of the game, the sense of danger, and the degree of challenge.

When you have game elements like easy resting, encounters of the parties challenge rating, or a specific number of encounters per day.........

The players will intuitively, or intentionally take advantage. They will have an expectation that all obstacles can be easily defeated. They will not BE challenged.

The difficult part of this is for the gm. You have to learn how to perform that dance in a manner that makes the game fun for everyone.

As a general response to what John Morrow wrote, the reason I like the d20 system is because it's incoherent.  It's not a focused product--it's a general system that I can easily adapt to a setting and playstyle that I choose.

I agree that the "spaghetti sauce" argument as presented is stupid.  The real argument should be that "spaghetti sauce" (in the sense of meat sauce/bolognaise, whatever you call it) is the middle-of-the-road choice, most popular because of its broad appeal and not because it caters to a specific profile; if you want to make something that pleases a small group of people you make some special different sauce, but that will never be the best choice for general appeal, for that you want to go with tomato-meat sauce.

RPGPundit

Malcolm Gladwell is a corrupt hack.

He defends cigarette smoking...and gets paid by big tobacco, among others.

'nuff said.

What does "defends cigarette smoking" mean?

Quote from: Azure Lord;562104What does "defends cigarette smoking" mean?

The Wikipedia page on him does a wonderful job of detailing the criticisms that people have of him, including the criticism that our Prussian contributor was alluding to.

@ John Morrow. Thanks for the long and excellent post, spot on.

Malcolm Gladwell is very entertaining but he is also often quite wrong. Compare his analysis of why crime declined in NY with that of the Freakonomics guys.