Kishin said:
You know, the author of the insect lycanthrope article could have very well missed that particular installment of Random Encounters. I know I certainly had never seen it before tonight.
This is rather silly thing to be up in arms about.
Actually, it is, because it's really inconisistent to people's games when WotC publishes two or three pieces of material that are all related yet have some startling differences between the two. It's silly to have to decide whether you should use Dragon's template or WotC's template. Both are 100% official D&D sources, but which one has more priority?
Case in point, the Fiendish Possession rules. We've seen it come up in
Book of Vile Darkness. Then they went and made it a prestige class for fiends in
Fiend Folio and called
Fiend of Possession. They went on to state that you can use either one, but obviously not both, whatever suits your game. Fine. THEN they go and redo the possession rules all over again in
Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss without a sidebar to fix the Fiend of Possession prestige class. So now you're stuck between 3 different models. They also have the problem of double-naming feats and spells for some odd reason. There's 2 Divine Justice feats, one in PHB2 and the other in FCII, but both clearly have different mechanics.
It's just been getting really old and ridiculous. It is isn't difficult to avoid repeating someone elses material, if only the game designers would pay attention to the work of their peers as well. But they don't.
You'd figure, by now, they'd have a central database for all their work to avoid this sort of thing.
