New errata for core books, dated 7/2/2008

[Tale]

So am i right to say..

If an monster deals me 10 fire, 10 psychic, 10 radiant, 10 acid and 10 thunder damage for an total of 50...

And i have 10 fire resist, 10 psychic resist, 10 radiant resist, 10 acid resist and 2 thunder resist..

I take 48 damage?

Or 8 ?

That looks an bit weird to me..

You take 48 damage.

 

[Regicide]

You take 48 damage.

As it reads, 48 is correct. My suspicion is they'll change it so it's 40.

 

[Goumindong]

Hypersmurf is right. The damage is multiple types. Such the lowest resist is the resist that is applied.

You take 10 lightning and fire damage and have 5 points of resist fire. The fire resist doesn't help you because the attack is lightning, you take 10 points of damage.

 

[Spatula]

IMO they should have reduced the difficulties by 5 instead of 10, and made the success/failure ratios closer rather than farther apart. My Skill Challenge house rule uses the table on DMG 72 but subtracts 1 from the required successes and adds 1 to the allowed failures. Stalker's rules also puts the success/failures closer together.

By keeping the number of skill failures constant , they are removing the tipping point, where above a certain % of skill success, a party is more likely to succeed at higher complexity challenges than lower ones. At least I think that's the intent. By setting it at three, they also make complexity 1 challenges slightly less swingy.

Personally I don't see the need to allow people to opt-out of the challenge, given the new super-easy DCs.

 

[butwait]

Two-thirds? Really? Two-thirds? Why not three-fifths, or five-sevenths? I like a lot of the errata, I think they were necessary, but this one just made me face palm.​

I believe the two-thirds accounts for the one-half level modifier and the expected bonuses via stats and magic items.

 

[Kraydak]

By keeping the number of skill failures constant , they are removing the tipping point, where above a certain % of skill success, a party is more likely to succeed at higher complexity challenges than lower ones. At least I think that's the intent. By setting it at three, they also make complexity 1 challenges slightly less swingy.

Personally I don't see the need to allow people to opt-out of the challenge, given the new super-easy DCs.

Yes they removed the tipping point. In exchange though, highish complexity challenges require success rates even closer to 100% on individual skill checks. This means that, say, for an Arcana based challenge, if one party has a 16 starting int wizard non-eladrin and a second party has a 20 starting int eladrin wizard, if the first party stands a chance, the second party auto (100%) succeeds. Extreme DC/skill modifier sensitivity FTW! The extreme DC sensitivity, of course, was the root problem of the previous system and so the "fix" is nothing of the kind.

If you want to use a (moderate or higher complexity) skill challenge that the party has a good (but not guaranteed) chance at succeeding at, you need to find all the party's appropriate skill modifiers (adjusted for everything, including aid-other) and carefully set the specific skill difficulty (easy/moderate/hard) and skill challenge difficulty so that the party's *best* skill modifiers/skill difficulty combination has the correct success rate. Then pray the party proceeds to chain that character/skill (or character skills, if you get lucky and the party can have several indistinguishable options). Anything else, and the party will either auto-succeed or auto-fail. The margin of error allowed on setting the DCs? About 1. Enjoy.

 

[Plane Sailing]

So am i right to say..

If an monster deals me 10 fire, 10 psychic, 10 radiant, 10 acid and 10 thunder damage for an total of 50...

And i have 10 fire resist, 10 psychic resist, 10 radiant resist, 10 acid resist and 2 thunder resist..

I take 48 damage?

Or 8 ?

That looks an bit weird to me..

Well, if you had a creature that *actually* did that (a prismatic hydra where each head did a different kind of damage?) you would take 8 damage.

You would normally expect to see something which did 50 fire-psychic-radiant-acid-thunder damage though, so you would take 48 damage.

To give a spell example. Prismatic Beams will hit targets with up to three beams, doing 2d6 poison and 2d6 fire damage and daze. Resistance applies separately here, because these are separate hits which do separate keyword damage.

On the other hand with Black Fire (Wiz 27), which does 6d6 fire and necrotic damage, you will only be protected by the lesser of your fire and necrotic resistances.

Cheers

 

[Spatula]

This means that, say, for an Arcana based challenge, if one party has a 16 starting int wizard non-eladrin and a second party has a 20 starting int eladrin wizard, if the first party stands a chance, the second party auto (100%) succeeds.

Which looks to be about the case here, with the super-low skill DCs.

 

[NMcCoy]

I'm willing to bet this is an unintentional result and may end up with another errata. I doubt anyone even looked at how the newly errata'ed rules interacted with each other. More of the same.

From the clarification given by WotC_Miko on these boards (which I can't find a link for), this has been the intent for quite a while - it brings the multi/ranger's 1d6-twice precisely in line with the multi/rogue's 2d6-once.

 

[fba827]

I hope this is still in time to fix the soon to be DM's Screen.

No such luck. If you check the errata page on WotC's site now, you'll see that, in addition to the three core books errata, they have an errata file for the DM screen now too...
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/updates