D&D General What Does New Coke Tell Us About Designing for D&D

Snarf Zagyg said:

ou're not wrong. Then again, since my Snarfticles are stored In his house at R'lyeh, where dead Cthulhu waits dreaming, it's not like it's that easy, either. Besides, we all know that recycling is good for the Earth!

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I could have gone the rest of my life without ever knowing Snarfticles were a thing.

Snarf Zagyg said:

Slowly this began to pay off - and it accelerated with the the '70s "Pepsi Challenge" ad campaign, showing people blind tasting colas, and preferring Pepsi. By the early 1980s, as difficult as it might be to believe now (with Coke back to dominating Pepsi, albeit in a market that is moving away from cola), Coke was in danger of losing its position. In fact, Coke's leading position at that time was only due to distribution deals it had- not due to retail sales.

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The Pepsi Challenge continued well into the late 1980s. I went on a trip to Wet 'n Wild (a chain of water parks) in Garland, Texas where I participated in the challenge. If I picked Pepsi then I received a prize (chips, candy, something like that), but if I picked Coca-Cola I received nothing. I don't know if the tests in the 70s or early 80s were like that, but I can't imagine Pepsi was using or even collecting the data from the campaign in the late 80s.

Snarf Zagyg said:

But all of this was tied into one very large thing that, in retrospect, it seems impossible that The Powers That Be at Coke missed- Coca Cola (like all colas) is really just flavored sugar water. What mattered when it came to Coke wasn't even so much the exact taste, as it was the brand association with that taste.

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I'm gonna stop you right there. The taste matters. If you serve me Pepsi when I ask for a Coke I'm going to notice the difference immediately. My father was one of those weirdos who didn't care if he drank Coke or Pepsi. When he came home with Pepsi once I was mortified, asking what possessed him to do such a thing. When he told me it was ten cents cheaper than Coke I told him I had plenty of dimes in my room.

Snarf Zagyg said:

Similar concerns arise in the context of D&D. Just because something is "better" in terms of design, doesn't mean it's necessarily right in terms of D&D's brand. That doesn't mean that D&D can never change; obviously, it has seen numerous changes, both large and small, in the fifty years it has been around.

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I agree with this. D&D needs to provide a certain experience for me and the reason I opted out of 4th edition is because the game no longer provided me with that experience.

Snarf Zagyg said:

Instead, I am more interested in the way that this is an instructive example in terms of what it means to design for a brand. We have a lot of good conversations about proposed changes to D&D. What many people don't fully understand, and what I think WoTC continually grapples with, is the extent to which they can make changes.

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While I'm not opposed to change, 5th edition is not the same as AD&D which is not the same as the 1974 D&D, I do sometimes think to myself, "Why are you playing D&D?" when I hear some proposals. While no game is above criticism, not all is equally valid, and I find it odd that anyone would complain that D&D isn't good at emulating every form of fantasy. That's not what it was designed for. D&D is kind of it's own animal when it comes to fantasy. It's like complaining my Porsche 911 isn't as good at hauling hay as my Chevy Silverado.

EzekielRaiden said:

The main problem with the "oh, we can't make any changes or we'll piss the fans off!" rebuttal is that that precise thing also leads to disaster: a brand that cannot adapt, that treats all possible development or innovation as totally unacceptable to the customer base, will also fail. We see this sort of thing all the time, it's just not as Big and Flashy and Notable as New Coke was.

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And that's never been true of D&D as its been in a constant flux since 1974. I agree with you, if D&D doesn't change with the times it will eventually disappear.