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<blockquote data-quote="Luke" data-source="post: 456567" data-attributes="member: 602">No problem.For what its worth, I agree that it shouldn't have been released without templates.The templates and the prestige classes are huge gaps, that are hard to explain.I recall well over a year ago, one of the very first (and last) public posts by a Fluid programmer was about how cool it was that they had weapon size adjustments coded in - as an example of how complete their rules adherence was, and I thought &quot;pretty cool&quot;. I also recall that at about that time they admitted that they saw and copied somebody's fan spreadsheet, or something, where there were different columns for the same treasure table (minor, major,...). An alarm bell went off in my head then, since this should have been obvious from the core books themselves...To risk being unfair, I did wonder if the team as a whole were as proficient with 3rd edition material as we were led to believe.Really, you shouldn't need to depend on programmers being domain experts (3rd edition rules masters in this case). WotC should have defined what they wanted clearly enough in their requirements, so that QA prevented things like this happening.On the other hand, it was a *lot* cheaper to throw the core books Fluid's way, and say &quot;Here. See what you can do with this...&quot;.I suspect that the initial vision (full intenet game with maps, graphics and sound) made it just too difficult (expensive) to properly define *requirements*. Well defined requirements are absolutely fundamental to successful software developement.I further suspect that it was hoped that the overall sexiness of the maps/sound etc would create a very forgiving attitude to full rules adherence.Once the sexy bits got chopped out...</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Luke, post: 456567, member: 602"] No problem. For what its worth, I agree that it shouldn't have been released without templates. The templates and the prestige classes are huge gaps, that are hard to explain. I recall well over a year ago, one of the very first (and last) public posts by a Fluid programmer was about how cool it was that they had weapon size adjustments coded in - as an example of how complete their rules adherence was, and I thought "pretty cool". I also recall that at about that time they admitted that they saw and copied somebody's fan spreadsheet, or something, where there were different columns for the same treasure table (minor, major,...). An alarm bell went off in my head then, since this should have been obvious from the core books themselves... To risk being unfair, I did wonder if the team as a whole were as proficient with 3rd edition material as we were led to believe. Really, you shouldn't need to depend on programmers being domain experts (3rd edition rules masters in this case). WotC should have defined what they wanted clearly enough in their requirements, so that QA prevented things like this happening. On the other hand, it was a *lot* cheaper to throw the core books Fluid's way, and say "Here. See what you can do with this...". I suspect that the initial vision (full intenet game with maps, graphics and sound) made it just too difficult (expensive) to properly define *requirements*. Well defined requirements are absolutely fundamental to successful software developement. I further suspect that it was hoped that the overall sexiness of the maps/sound etc would create a very forgiving attitude to full rules adherence. Once the sexy bits got chopped out... [/QUOTE]

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