Discussion: More "stealth" errata

JoeNotCharles · 26th October 2009, 07:52 PM

I just discovered that articles appearing in Dragon Magazine Annual have changes compared to the full-issue versions. Namely, Reaper's Touch is now listed as Shadar-Kai only (ha! Vindicated!)

So now we have changes made between the original article-only PDF's and the full-issue PDF's (which, to be fair, they warned about upfront); between the full-issue PDF's and what's in the Compendium and Character Builder; and now between the full-issue PDF's and the hardcover Annual. It seems obvious that the Annual > full-issue PDF's > original single-article PDF's, and probably they mean for whatever's printed in the Compendium today to be the definitive source (but how can we tell the difference between changes made to be errata and changes that are errors introduced when compiling the Compendium?) But they don't publish a list of what's changed in each version, so they only way to know when something's been overridden is for somebody to check the most recent publication for everything.

Here's where this gets interesting: right now the charter says we automatically accept things published in hardbacks, and in the Dragon full-issue PDF's, one month after publication, and errata published on the errata page immediately. There have been a couple of cases where articles published in Dragon later appeared in a hardback with slight changes (the only ones I can name off the top of my heard are the spells in the Illusions article, which are also in Arcane Power, and the Warforged article which is in the Eberron Players Guide with only minor changes). Now with the Annual, a whole bunch of articles are being reprinted, possibly with changes.

We don't have a general plan to deal with this. According to my reading of the charter, right now both versions are legal - you're able to take Illusory Wall and specify whether you're using the Dragon or AP version, which work differently. The obvious strategy would be to say that whenever something appears in Dragon magazine and again in a hardback, the hardback version takes precedence. But I'm sure down the road there will be a corner case where they print a prestige class in Dragon and then a nearly-identical prestige class in a setting book, and it's not clear if they're meant to be the same or just two authors using the same title and coming up with similar powers, and we won't be able to automatically apply this rule.

Anyway, just mentioning it. I don't want to start overhauling the proposal system again, just want people to be aware that the Annual is out there and it does make at least one change.