Page XX?

[arscott]

There's also at least one Page XX error in Into the Shadowhaunt.

I imagine such an error is even more embarrassing when it shows up in your 12 page promo material.

Fortunately, it seems like all such errors are for the GM's eyes only. The players will never have to know.

 

[Lizard]

It's not "code" it's a document.

My 2nd edition PHB had a page XX typo in it. Must have been a Wotc time travel publishing experiment.

"Code" does not always mean "a program". A "code" can also be a flagged bit of text used for layout, for example, "XX" is a code. "BEGIN_SIDEBAR" is a code. Etc. In Ye Olden Dayse, before WYSIWYG, all formatting was done with codes. You'd type in things like \\i to start italics, or whatever.

 

[Joshua Randall]

I've also worked in the publishing industry, and seemingly no matter what you do, errors creep into the finished product.

In the greater scheme of things, "see page XX" is pretty minor. It's inconvenient for the reader, but it's not like the content is wrong. I've presided over far more serious errors, such as the wrong numbers in a table. *doh*

 

[Belen]

They did. There was a last pass.

What they didn't do was another last pass. And then another, and another and a fourth and fifth final pass.

Or to put it in other words: a final pass is always made, but won't catch all errors. Ever.

It's a reality of creating complex books like the D&D core rules.

Sure, the "page XX" is easily caught if you look for it. But I'm totally sure someone was banging with a hammer on the heads of the people putting the print masters together, screaming "ARE YOU DONE? ARE YOU DONE YET? WHAT ABOUT NOW? ARE YOU DONE NOW? I HAVE TO SEND THIS TO THE PRINTER NOW! NOW! ARE YOU DONE YET? CAN I HAVE ICE CREAM? ARE YOU DONE? I'M SO TELLING THE ROUSE IF YOU'RE NOT DONE NOW!".

Publishing is not a business for quiet contemplation.

/M

Um...not true. A good copyeditor will catch such errors.

 

[Belen]

Thanks!

For what its worth, Maggan has it exactly right. The D&D core books constitute a huge and immensely complex document; so long as deadlines exist, no document on that scale will ever be perfect.

As long as I've been in the publishing business, much of that as an editor, I've never, ever received a new book from the printer without discovering some sort of error within 10 minutes. (With my editor's eye, I frequently notice typos in other publishers' books as well--not just game books, but novels, nonfiction, childrens' books, and so on from publishers big and small.) The trick isn't one of attaining perfection, but of ensuring that only the most trivial of errors slip through your net. Missing a couple of page refs sucks--I'd be embarrassed if they were my responsibility--but in a document that contains literally hundreds of cross-references, it's amazing there are only two. (Much worse than a "page XX" would be a "page 65" that actually refers to the wrong page, and I'd be very surprised if there were any of those!)

I'd like to go on record with this: Kim Mohan is an editing god, and he has an incredible team. Anyone who finds fault with Kim's work simply has no appreciation of the scale and complexity of what he does!

Are you guys not using modern edit express/ editech programs? Those programs would have identified XX fairly quickly and generated a query for the copyeditor. Then again, maybe they have yet to get throughout the industry.

 

[Marius Delphus]

I seem to remember hearing somewhere that they use InDesign for the Mac. I could be wrong, of course.

No copyeditor is perfect. Even stellar copyeditors miss stuff from time to time. Sometimes "bonehead" stuff that they look at two days later and curse a blue streak because they missed it. The memory cheats, and perception is faulty. You read a passage of text five times, and it looks just fine, but your mind has filled in a blank word where none exists, or edited out a superfluous word as if it doesn't. Humans, in short.

Deadlines loom, procedures give way to shortcuts, and there just isn't time for that one last "sanity" spellcheck that would have caught "dawizard" or "page XX." That errors slipped through is not merely unsurprising, it's expected. The more so in a project the size of the Core Rulebooks, which amount to, what, over 600 pages of fairly dense text? At the same time, just to make things fun, the marketing materials need proofing, the covers have come back with faulty color registration, somebody's baby needs to go to the E.R. RIGHT NOW, and somebody's stalking the halls snarling about the "GSL" but nobody wants to get close enough to find out who it is. This is a hypothetical scenario of course, but a publisher's life is a mess.

Not because WOTC is sloppy (AFAICT, they're anything but), but because it just is. Now I'm not saying we should be endlessly thankful for the books we got, but sometimes the fact that things got done with anything like 95% (maybe 99%!) perfection is astounding... literally astounding. As much as I might have done a few things differently, I think WOTC did a great job with the books themselves, and my hat's off to them.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

"Code" does not always mean "a program". A "code" can also be a flagged bit of text used for layout, for example, "XX" is a code. "BEGIN_SIDEBAR" is a code. Etc. In Ye Olden Dayse, before WYSIWYG, all formatting was done with codes. You'd type in things like \\i to start italics, or whatever.

Hey, I still like to use LaTex. Not that I get to do that in my Microsoft Office dominated workspace, but...

 

[Maggan]

Um...not true.

Well, I guess all my years doing publishing has been a lie then.

/M

 

[delericho]

It's not "code" it's a document.

Of course, if it were code, then this would apply: any piece of software always has an infinite number of errors in it. Because no matter how hard you try, and no matter how many errors you remove, you will never get rid of them all.

Given the size of these books, they are remarkably free of errors. Which is not to say WotC shouldn't be looking for ways to reduce that number further in future products...

 

[Thunderfoot]

Page 176 of the DMG: "See "Bonuses and Penalties" on page XX of the Player's Handbook"
Page 191 of the DMG: "Refer to page XX in Chapter 4 for details of different sorts of doors and portcullises"

That's all in the three core rulebooks (I think).

Not too many, but still: surely it's an error that is laughably easy to catch. Just search the proofs for XX... it would take, what, half a minute max?

I can confirm these two - I'm looking at my hardback printed copy of the DMG that I got from my FLGS right now.