The Gaming Den

As I've raged about before, 4E's errata policy, more than the broken promises and DDI vaporware Mearlsian fappery and shitty expansion modules and Bruce Cordell having a job, ended up ultimately turning me against the edition.

I'm not an anti-errata hardass. I believe that it's a necessary evil. On the other hand, I also think that 4E D&D went way, waaaay too far. When I last stopped counting the game had over a hundred pages of errata in a little under three years. That is fucking ridiculous.

So if I was put in charge of just errata policy and nothing else, after verifying that my revolver was indeed empty and I that had a mysterious immunity to cyanide and/or Salisbury steak, here's what I would do instead.

[*] The biggest change that I would implement is to determine whether something actually needs errata. Let's face it, the majority of nerfs in the 4E document were knee-jerk crybaby whining. There were some things in it that were so overpowering that they immediately wrecked normal play (like Orbizard or the Battlerager Fighter as-is) but there was a lot of stuff in there that was of a 'waaaah, this guy has 3 higher AC than the guidelines say that he should have!' caliber. That shit can sizzle on the grill for some time. You don't want it to be there, but it's not going to derail an otherwise-functioning game.

[*] Running a close second in priority is that instead of going 'Surprise buttsex Errata!' I'd propose changes months if not years in advance except for fixes that simply had to be implemented immediately. They'd be proposed changes, not implemented changes, with the caveat that the list is subject to change at any time. Especially nitpicky and fanboyish tables can choose to implement them, but it'd come at the understanding that the original rules are what are going to be used in official interpretations, supplemental materials, and official events.

The reason why we do this is so that we won't lose the trust and gain the skepticism of people who bought material prior to the errata. Even if we spot mistakes, the purchasers don't feel like they've wasted their time as much as until we do an official revision or, Koresh forbid, a new edition altogether the changes won't go it. This approach also has the advantage of us not Inertia Nerfing someone into oblivion; if the average power level of the game goes upwards but the class missed out on power creep, then we can just scrub it from the errata list without having to do double-errata bullshit. 4E D&D has fucked itself several times by nerfing a class like the Avenger or Warlock too hard and then watching the class fall behind. And then fucking up and making the Warlock overpowered after some material creep, but that's another story.

[*] To emphasize a point made but buried above, the changes would be publicly proposed well ahead of it. That way, democratic debate and CharOP boards and sarky boards like a certain hatepit that shall remain nameless can debate whether the errata goes too far, doesn't go far enough, or is just totally out to lunch. This will help prevent locking my ruleset changes in a fanboy bubble, as fanboys instinctively cling to creator hegemon and all things being equal are more likely to blindly defend decisions made a short time ago than a long time ago. Fanboys are still going to be biased to my decision just because I made the decision, but hopefully the passage of time will give some time to let criticisms sink in and the hype to fade.

I'd put out the book. Do a series of web articles sort of like an "Ask a dev" explaining possible house rules or fixes to any sort of random problems or mistakes. Then on the 1 year anniversary of the book, I'd release an errata document for the book that takes the most common or best received hotfix and implements it. Possibly with additional rulings.

So your release cycle is
Day 1 - Book
Day 2-364 - Mention any issues in a weekly/monthly web column and possible fixes. If no issue, no mention. You are mentioning multiple books in the same column.
Day 365 - Errata.

Anything past day 365 doesn't get an errata unless its hugely damaging. Nothing gets any errata before then unless the same situation.

But that's pretty much the cycle 4E D&D does. I mean, sometimes they do extra errata for shit way back like Martial Power or the Adventurer's Vault. But your cycle would have like 75+ pages of errata instead of 100+ if nothing else was changed.

Eh. Early Errata should focus on editing mistakes rather than rebalancing.
Hopefully, your book was perfectly edited when it went to print, but realisticly they're made by humans, multiple humans, and mistakes creep in. Like daWizard.

Then you've got clarifications, in cases where your wording is misinterpreted.

Rebalancing should come later or not at all, unless you've screwed up terribly.

I'd forward every issue to a key team of top experts, who would then evaluate it before passing it to a top team of key experts. They would then, in a very grown up way, assign it "badness marks", on a scale of 0-5.

0: why are you wasting my time?
1: a minor typo or whatever, it doesn't affect gameplay/you know what it means (the weapon that deals 1d3 damage (Small) or 1d43 damage (Medium)).
2: you might want to fix this at some point (Toughness is shit), or the wording is a bit confusing (does Blade Barrier move with you?).
3: this thing is fairly rampant, and impacts on fun in a serious manner, but technically the game still works (Fighters and Wizards). Alternatively, something that comes up every now and then and requires a debate as to how it works (Rogue Bonus Feats, Sneak Attacking with flasks, the spell with a duration that "causes Fatigue").
4: this seriously impacts gameplay, either by grossly sitting outside the power curve in a way that ends the game for players (CR 5 things with CL 11 Blasphemy at will) or actually stopping the game from moving forward (example for this is probably a Rifts thing, I dunno) or frequently causing stops for confusion ("Is the base number to hit a 4+, a 5+ or a 6+?").
5: the game cannot actually be played. Not only is there a crucial problem, people don't even know how to fix it at the table. Best example for this would be character creation rules for HOL, but that's a joke anyway.

Every month there is an audit, and anything that has 4 or 5 "badness marks" gets instant committee oversight to work out a solution, test the solution, and decide on what will be released in "We have identified the cause of the problem and fixed it" form. Also, the people responsible will be beaten with sacks of concrete on live TV.

If people are lucky, there'll be a reprint a year later with all issues of 1-3 badness marks dealt with. If the company as a whole produces more than 100 points of badness in a year, the committee automatically files for the prime minister to place the entire country in detention.

Koumei wrote:I'd forward every issue to a key team of top experts, who would then evaluate it before passing it to a top team of key experts. They would then, in a very grown up way, assign it "badness marks", on a scale of 0-5.

0: why are you wasting my time?
1: a minor typo or whatever, it doesn't affect gameplay/you know what it means (the weapon that deals 1d3 damage (Small) or 1d43 damage (Medium)).
2: you might want to fix this at some point (Toughness is shit), or the wording is a bit confusing (does Blade Barrier move with you?).
3: this thing is fairly rampant, and impacts on fun in a serious manner, but technically the game still works (Fighters and Wizards). Alternatively, something that comes up every now and then and requires a debate as to how it works (Rogue Bonus Feats, Sneak Attacking with flasks, the spell with a duration that "causes Fatigue").
4: this seriously impacts gameplay, either by grossly sitting outside the power curve in a way that ends the game for players (CR 5 things with CL 11 Blasphemy at will) or actually stopping the game from moving forward (example for this is probably a Rifts thing, I dunno) or frequently causing stops for confusion ("Is the base number to hit a 4+, a 5+ or a 6+?").
5: the game cannot actually be played. Not only is there a crucial problem, people don't even know how to fix it at the table. Best example for this would be character creation rules for HOL, but that's a joke anyway.

Every month there is an audit, and anything that has 4 or 5 "badness marks" gets instant committee oversight to work out a solution, test the solution, and decide on what will be released in "We have identified the cause of the problem and fixed it" form. Also, the people responsible will be beaten with sacks of concrete on live TV.

If people are lucky, there'll be a reprint a year later with all issues of 1-3 badness marks dealt with. If the company as a whole produces more than 100 points of badness in a year, the committee automatically files for the prime minister to place the entire country in detention.

I read this and can't help but think of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yghFBt-fXmw

I was actually referencing this

Honestly, I think the secret to errata is to sell your book as some kind of wiki-esque app that can auto-update. Rules sections can be linked to one another for ease of reference, typographical errors can be fixed immediately upon detection and no one will care, and when you issue a major errata all you have to do is maybe save the previous version of the page in an archive accessible from the main page that has the new fixed rule. Updating your rule books is automatic so you don't have to cross-reference your hardback copy with a ton of errata pages.

Actually being competent should also hopefully cut down on the amount of major rules updates you need to release in the first place.

In 2nd edition they used stealth errata. The rules were fixed and tweaked here and there as each new printing went out and the official rule about it was if anyone notices you use the newer version and otherwise don't sweat it. Kind of annoying when it came up in game, and in the age of the internet where people will list the fixes anyway, you may as well just tell everyone, with a note that errata is super-optional for your home games.

But 2nd edition never fixed some stuff, instead spending pages and pages of their mags and supplements defending crappy ideas like their unarmed combat tables and Stoneskin. And seriously, it's easier to fucking well fix Stoneskin than keep defending it.

4e was the same with never bothering to fix skill challenge incentives and then spending so much defending how it worked, and 3e with never fixing Polymorph Self (just steadily reducing it to a short duration combat buff) and spending so much on tweaking around the edges and giving out alternate features for monsters and so on. Never tackling the basic problems of the freedom they'd given casters, at all, just hacking away at a few of the best spells (still, with Pathfinder).


So, to learn from that. You should fix something if it takes less resources to fix it than it does to defend it, explain it, or compensate for it as it currently is. If it's not costing you anything like it is, leave it the fuck alone.

If the only way you can think to fix caster-warrior disparity is 4e, think again. That's changing everything about everything to fix a much smaller problem. Don't do that. See also 4.5, where they changed everything about how the basic classes worked and changed nothing important about how they felt or played out at the table, all that work for nothing. Bad news.

Pathfinder does both.
They have stealth errata, where they print new versions of the book without listing the changes.
And an official errata list.
And the FAQ system which also does a lot of errata.
And sometimes blog posts with errata in them.
And new books which errata the old books.

Guess that is actually more than two ways.

It's like you've been reading my mind, Chamomile.

Although it's still good to have a book version so people can play it in the dark, signal-blocking basements of a university, without owning a computer.

Auto internet updates are a pita though.
They work for computer games because the computer does all the work.

It is a huge pain if I have to reread the rules all the time to see if they got updated or not.

That is a fair point, ishy. I should go look for a More Convenient History extension of some sort sometime.

Well the shelf-life for a Hasbro-Era D&D edition is only three to four years before the ".5" or "essential" revision of that edition launches and then another three to four years before the next full number edition launches.

With that in mind I kinda think that errata should mean errata in the publishing sense -- fixing typos and layouts and other mistakes which made it through editing, limited to printing correcting errors like "1d6 ∞ 10", "See page XX" and such.


The majority of the sort of "rules changes" that 4e released as "errata" can probably be put off until the incremental edition revision.

You then have a Sage Advice or Save my Game or Developer Blog or something similar where you have someone with official standing provide officially unofficial suggestions for rules which people find problematic. And periodically, after the CharOP folks and the RPGA and such have had a chance to digest the suggestions you go back and a formalize a few of those previously suggested tweaks for the most common / most severe problems as "Official Rules Update"s

tussock wrote:But 2nd edition never fixed some stuff, instead spending pages and pages of their mags and supplements defending crappy ideas like their unarmed combat tables and Stoneskin. And seriously, it's easier to fucking well fix Stoneskin than keep defending it.

Don't blame the edition, blame the management, like HASBRO, TSR management at the time knew NOTHING about games or gaming let alone errata, so not everyone had time to "fix it" let alone playtest it.

So the way to do errata right, would be have management and designers that accepts that they are NOT infallible, and to actually give a damn about the game, rather than just forcing things to churn out at breakneck pace without a second of playtesting or what have you, cause "those stupid gamers will buy anything and everything we put out." Or so that ignorant fucking [EDITED] thought!

it aint pretty, but similar to the thing with 4e and its online database, 2nd had CORE RULES and in it there was a "Webhelp" section that had crappy RTF files, an annoying buy useful WinHelp set of files (where all my 2nd quotes come from, thus few to no page numbers as it doesnt have pages and insert the copyright notice for me), and the HTML files of the included books. those 6000+ HTML files is an easy way to do errata like the 4.0 online thing for this day and age. Errata something, then at the end of a week or so, bundle the errata like the playtest packs and let people download the errata and overwrite the existing HTML files and you can always keep up to date.

dont get me wrong, i love physical books and prefer them, but there comes a point like now that i dont even get them out unless i want to ENJOY reading them. so keeping them updated could be as easy as when one print run runs out, you do the errata like tussock mentioned stealthily in the next print run.

for POD and PDF or whatever, you just update when you can and put the month and year in it so people know which version it is.

the main thing is to PLAYTEST. you can have the best delivery system there is, but if you dont know what to do to "fix" something like say... "social challenges" then there isnt really any point.

4e treated errata as a video game style patch in the worst ways.

Release broken shit, continuously and constantly try to fix it after the fact using errata. Oh, and compound this even worse than all video games by making your team in charge of balance the worst one out there.

Of course this doesn't work for a print medium, because all of your changes are not behind the scenes. You have to read, comprehend and change all the errata yourself making it obvious. Then the errata actually blows and FUCK 4e.

How to do errata? This is print, do your damnedest to make it so errata isn't needed. After that a few things will still slip by. Fix the egregious offenders once, only once, and make sure your fix actually works. Limit yourself to this. If your errata passes 2 pages per book (which is already outrageous) fire your play testers and people in charge of balancing it the first time.

What you cannot do is attempt to fix something more than twice (and twice is really pushing it) and still fail. What am I saying here? Fuck skill challenges.

Maybe I was unclear.

My system ends with 2-3 pages per book tops. For the whole system there is a lot, but giving it out at a set period and only once lets people expect it and be aware of how to handle it.

I don't think anyone minds printing a page out and sticking it in the back of the book. People mind doing that 7+ times, because I can't get my act together. Who knows when you need to print a new copy again.

Also, you specifically exlude the bloat waste of time errata that 4e included like "This should be d6 not d8 damage" and that stuff. Only fixing things like "Whoops truenames don't even work. Do this instead" or "Here are some skill challenge rules that are playable. Our bad".

Koumei wrote: character creation rules for HOL

That was resolved in the Buttery Wholesomeness! expansion.


In my ideal world, errata gets OBE by a two-stage release model. If you release all your books first as cheap rags, then as nicer bundled hardcovers, you get a natural opportunity for errata, and you get an especially nice pulpit for announcing it.

From the point of view of a publisher, the ideal method is probably to publish your book anonymously. Then nobody can complain directly to you about the errors in your system. Hell, the errors might even become part of your mystique, i.e. "I wonder what this system would have been like if the author was around to fix all of the errors?"