D&D 5E Kind of confused about the staggered releases.

[doctorhook]

Asking if this is something to be annoyed about is something that would upset me. It would be like asking if when I ordered fries with my Cheeseburger and getting pickles instead and saying... "is it worth getting annoyed at" Should we bring it to attention of the company? YES!! We paid for something. We should get our monies worth too. If it is a rules breaking error it should be both pointed out and dealt with! Saying is it worth getting annoyed about would just add fule to the fire in my opinion and should be avoided.

I'll admit that asking if something is worth being upset about may not have been the smoothest move on my part. That said, your sentiment above is hyperbolic and ridiculous; you ordered a cheeseburger meal with fries and that's (metaphorically) exactly what you got, except one of the fries was slightly burned! The fries were not completely omitted or forgotten about, nor were there pickles where there should have been fries.

Do you really believe that you didn't get your money's worth for the Player's Handbook because of an error in the spell section? Because there are 319 other pages in that book, and I suspect you plan to use many of them.

Actually Ravenheart, 3.0 was released in the SAME Month. Aug 2000 AT Gen Con. I was there that year when it was. I bought the books as well. Yes they were full of errors and I did not use them to say that they were not full of errors, but that it is not an excuse that having a staggered release, that they will limit the errors, it very well could but in it's history RPG core books typically release in the same month. 4E did as well and again it was full of errors. But again this is all due to their proofing the books enough ahead of time. Will any game book be without errors probably never but it should never be so glaring as the past two editions were and looks like we might be getting the same problems.

So one can't be blamed for being upset.

That's weird, because when I got my 3E Player's Handbook in August 2000, it had a mini-Monster Manual and mini-Dungeon Master's Guide inside. Strange that they would include that with the explicit intention to tide players over until the MM and DMG were released if those books hit the market at the same time, don't you think?

FJW, If they had planned it correctly we would not have had to wait for all 3 of them, which they could easily have done. This is more of a marketing ploy on their end (I believe) and they are hoping to build up anticipation. The books are already at the printers I am sure and being printed already. If they are STILL editing and revising the rules for the DMG it is to late in the game and they are bound to make some mistakes.

"WotC is staffed by a bunch of idiots and crooks who don't know how to plan a release correctly and are just withholding our precious books as a marketing ploy," is the sort of thing that won't get you very far around here, because it's fallacious nonsense. Ditto for, "If they are STILL editing and revising the rules for the DMG it is to [sic] late in the game."

 

[Haffrung]

Honestly I think that's BS. You can totally have an error-free book. It's going to cost you more, but you can.

You've had a couple people who are editors or technical writers already explain to you the cost-benefit of proofing. I love how people who don't really know anything about an industry think they know better than the people who work in it for a living.

RPG seems to be more prone to errors. I own tons of scientific books, and despite their sheer size the number of mistakes is much lower, and in many cases it's zero.

I really doubt there are zero. And I'm certain the time and money put into the editing and proofing those books far exceeds that allotted to the WotC team. I know customers hate to hear this, but there's a strong correlation between cost and quality. Want a book edited like a text book? Be prepared to pay the price of a text book - a lavishly illustrated text book.

But all this is just to explain why games always have much worse editing than scientific books, not to justify the traditional bad quality of a RPG book. It can be error-free, but between people wanting to have the game asap, designers needing to have it ready to sell it, publishers wanting to minimize cost, and everybody wanting a completely new edition built from scratch every few years, eventually it's damn hard to lower the error rate.

Every technical document has time pressures. In my industry, the documentation is often tied to software releases. And management sure as hell aren't going to delay a release if the documentation isn't ready. It all comes down to resources - how many people (and people mean money) can you thrown at the problem. How many technical writers do you think WotC employ, anyway? And I don't mean D&D geeks who have learned to write and edit - I mean dedicated, accredited professionals? And if you want both, then you're going to have to pay through the nose, because that's a very rare skill combo.

If we're talking about non-WotC or Paizo books, they're typically not even edited or laid out by professionals. At that scale, RPG books are a largely amateur cottage industry. You're not going to get professional quality when it's someone's sister-in-law who took a couple courses in Microsoft Word in college laying out and editing the book on weekends for some extra cash. As in most other things in this world, you get what you pay for. The RPG industry attracts amateur enthusiasts because there simply isn't enough money or security to attract dedicated professionals.

Actually it is a typical to release most core rule books in the same month as part of the same release. WotC has done this before (3rd ed and 3.5 and 4E.) So They should be able to do it again. Mitigating the errors is not an excuse and to say that is one though. The errors that WotC typically has in a book is due to poor editing on their end. Mitigation is not an excuse on their end at all.

Can you name some RPG companies that have better editing?

 

[Li Shenron]

You've had a couple people who are editors or technical writers already explain to you the cost-benefit of proofing. I love how people who don't really know anything about an industry think they know better than the people who work in it for a living.



I really doubt there are zero. And I'm certain the time and money put into the editing and proofing those books far exceeds that allotted to the WotC team. I know customers hate to hear this, but there's a strong correlation between cost and quality. Want a book edited like a text book? Be prepared to pay the price of a text book - a lavishly illustrated text book.




Every technical document has time pressures. In my industry, the documentation is often tied to software releases. And management sure as hell aren't going to delay a release if the documentation isn't ready. It all comes down to resources - how many people (and people mean money) can you thrown at the problem. How many technical writers do you think WotC employ, anyway? And I don't mean D&D geeks who have learned to write and edit - I mean dedicated, accredited professionals? And if you want both, then you're going to have to pay through the nose, because that's a very rare skill combo.

If we're talking about non-WotC or Paizo books, they're typically not even edited or laid out by professionals. At that scale, RPG books are a largely amateur cottage industry. You're not going to get professional quality when it's someone's sister-in-law who took a couple courses in Microsoft Word in college laying out and editing the book on weekends for some extra cash. As in most other things in this world, you get what you pay for. The RPG industry attracts amateur enthusiasts because there simply isn't enough money or security to attract dedicated professionals.



Can you name some RPG companies that have better editing?

It's not at all a matter of knowing the industry. It's a simple law of nature that if you put more effort in your work, you reduce the error rate or risk. You can't have zero error probability, but you can have zero errors. In other words, you cannot guarantee there will be zero errors, but the higher the effort, the lower the error probability, the higher the chance there might be zero errors (a lucky person could write a zero-error book in one take).

This is why saying it's impossible to have a zero-error book is BS, and it seems to be sometimes thrown as an excuse.

And anyway, the very simple proof that there can be zero-error books is that if you publish them, collect the errata for let's say 1 year, and then reprint them, the reprint can be very much error-free. Maybe you check again for another year and a couple of errors still spring up. Then reprint a 3rd time. After a couple of rounds, they will be error-free.

Who said doing so comes without a cost? I'm speaking against those who say it's impossible. Then I also said why it's not very reasonable for a RPG book to hope it's error free in the first print (but if there will be other print runs in the future, it might be possible, considering that rumors are talking about VERY FEW errors found so far in the PHB).

 

[Umbran]

Who said doing so comes without a cost? I'm speaking against those who say it's impossible.

Yes, you're correct that, in a literal sense, it is not impossible to have an error free book.

By the same token, having an error-free first printing is not a reasonable expectation. We should expect some errors in the first printing. Literally impossible or not, as a practical matter, there will be some. Such a book with *no* errors would be an extreme surprise.

I think that effectively satisfies both sides - you get that it isn't literally impossible, the others get that it is okay to accept a few errors at this point.. Can we move on, then?

 

[Agamon]

Right. Striving for perfection is one thing. Achieving it is certainly another.