Whipped Topping Edition Wars
by Tom McNeil

I grew up eating Cool Whip non-dairy whipped topping.  It may be to whipped cream as margarine is to butter, but it’s what my mom bought, and since mom could do no wrong, it’s what I ate – especially on top of pumpkin pie.  Sure, I’d had real whipped cream from time to time (it was different, but just as delicious), but whenever I wanted whipped topping, I grabbed the tub of Cool Whip out of the fridge, scooped out a dollop and plopped it onto whatever I was trying to improve.  Sometimes I just ate it straight.  I like Cool Whip, but as I got older (and older and older), I found myself using less and less whipped topping.

One day I discovered that the makers of Cool Whip had come out with a new product.  Behold! Cool Whip in a can – just like Reddi-Wip!  Now I could spray Cool Whip onto my favorite dessert targets just like real whipped cream.  Excitedly, I bought a can and tried it out.  It was exactly what it claimed to be.  Before I finished it,  I realized that if I had really wanted whipped cream in a can I would have bought Reddi-Wip.

And so I did.

I found that I liked Reddi-Wip better than the Cool Whip I had been using for four decades.  Now I buy Reddi-Wip.  Ironically, or perhaps tragically, in an effort to make a product more like their competitor’s product, Kraft Foods convinced me to buy their competitor’s product instead.

What does this have to do with role playing games, you ask? Well, one night, I was sitting at my computer desk, contemplating my defection in the battle of whipped topping loyalty,  enjoying a bowl of bananas and Reddi-Wip (my new favorite snack), when I looked down and noticed my recently purchased Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition sitting on top my well-loved and much used Dungeons and Dragons Version 3.5 Player’s Handbook – and it all became clear.

I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons – in various editions and with some of the same people – for almost thirty years. There were a couple of side trips to other games, like Alternity, but we always came back to D&D. When the announcement for 4th edition came out, it was at a time when I was starting to want something new. Now 4th edition was coming out and it was going to be just like the D&D I love, only better, faster and more fun than 3.5; but this didn’t make me want to try the new edition.  It made me want to try another game system.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not interested in starting (yet another) edition war.  I know nothing about 4th edition.  I just wasn’t interested in trying a new version of the same thing.  If I was going to try something new, I wanted it to be something totally new.  I looked around at several things and eventually decided to try Savage Worlds.  Our group tried it out, loved it and wants more of it.

I can still buy Cool Whip in a tub.  I’ll probably enjoy some at mom’s house over the holidays.  We can – and still do – play D&D 3.5.  In fact, my group will be enjoying some of that on the day I wrote this post.  Will we ever try 4th edition? Probably, along with some other games.  Some day we might even try an MMO.  (There are those who would claim that an MMO would complete the analogy.)  In the meantime, there’s going to be a lot of Savage Worlds in our group’s future.