Erratatouille
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\’era-‘ta-‘twê n: a seasoned stew made of typos, mistakes, miscalculations, unforeseen problems, and incompatibility.
I met on Wednesday with Chris Tulach, Stephen Radney-MacFarland, and Sam, who works in customer service, to discuss my acquisition of the errata responsibilities over the next few weeks. Errata for supplements has admittedly been few and far between, but in our discussion of the upcoming months, we talked about what efforts we might take to be more consistent.
Mostly the discussion centered around my efforts to coordinate the different errata resources. The process goes something like this: each week, customer services and online productions record all the mind-boggling questions and issues that people have. Then, depending on which supplement we’re focusing on, I go online and search the forums for material that constitutes errata. I bring all the suitable material from the three resources together and we discuss it, deciding what should become official errata and what shouldn’t.
The crew has already compiled the errata for Spell Compendium and Magic Item Compendium and that should be available soon—we’ll be ratifying it next week. The next target will be Player’s Handbook II. Now I don’t want an onslaught of messages saying, “You printed “teh” on page 42,” but I would extend an open invitation for lists of problems or major concerns. The more information I can gather, the more thorough the errata will be.
My personal reasoning for taking on the errata responsibilities are concerned with 4th Edition. Once 4th Edition is released, the 3rd Edition errata will stop and we will focus on concerns with the present edition (which hopefully—given the amount of development and playtesting going in–will be few). As an editor, knowing the errata and the changes to rules, monsters, classes, etc., puts me at great advantage in performing my job and keeping mistakes from being repeated in future supplements.
Another factor that will change the face of errata is the implementation of the database, which plays such a central role in our management of 4 Edition. With the institution of ebooks that accompany one’s physical copy, we have the option of keeping one’s ebook updated with the latest changes, from the very small (a “+2” instead of a “+3”) to the very big (changing the text of an ability or feat). That’s not to say there still won’t be a physical copy of the errata, but we might simply compile quarterly changes made in the database into a readable format, rather than the sporadic release that now exists.
I don’t have a specific date for the release of the Spell Compendium and Magic Item Compendium errata, but it should be sometime soon. I know that Stephen mentioned one of the topics being addressed was runestaffs. Look for that in the coming week or two.
