quality of recent WotC products

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

That's certainly fair enough. I just wouldn't want to see WotC relying on it for their stat-blocks. (Well I would, but my understanding of it is that it would require a total rewrite in order to make it reliable enough to catch all the small errors creeping into the statblocks).

What would be nice is that you'd get a 'synergy bonus'. If your writers did a stat block long-hand, and you keyed it into the program, if they didn't match you'd either catch a mistake before it made it to the printed product, or you'd find a bug in the program. Win-win.

 

[smerwin29]

Just for the sake of my curiousity, has anyone here ever applied for a job at WotC and taken the editing test?

 

[Arcane Runes Press]

Just for the sake of my curiousity, has anyone here every applied for a job at WotC and taken their editing test . . .

No, I haven't.

I'd love to take their test, but all the design team openings I've seen require Bachelor degrees... and I'm married.

HAHA.

For the most part, I pass over minor stat block errors in purchased, so they don't bother me too much from WotC.

My primary issue with WotC D&D books is they tend to be dry. Very, very, dry. So they don't excite me as much as more flavorful offerings from other companines.

That said, I've still purchased and enjoyed some WotC offerings lately.


I suspect (meaning, guess) that both the dryness and consistent, minor stat block and editing mistakes are a case of too many cooks in the kitchen.

Most WotC books have a list of writers, developers and editors that read like the population of a small town. With that many hands working on a book, I suspect there are minor changes made at all levels that result in minor errors, as well as the leaching out of much of the flavor.

So, instead of seeing books that really fire on the creative cylinders, we see books that play a bit conservatively - and the minor errors in stat blocks are the results of people making tweaks to make number totals (BAB, saves, AC) fit defined design limits, without remembering to go back and change the abilities, skills, and feats that created those totals.

Patrick Y.

 

[wedgeski]

So, instead of seeing books that really fire on the creative cylinders, we see books that play a bit conservatively - and the minor errors in stat blocks are the results of people making tweaks to make number totals (BAB, saves, AC) fit defined design limits, without remembering to go back and change the abilities, skills, and feats that created those totals.

I think this is very likely to be part of what's going on.

 

[Pants]

I think that lately, the overall quality of WotC books has been rising, barring the Planar Handbook and Complete Divine. Frostburn, Serpent Kingdoms, Unearthed Arcana, and Libris Mortis. The year started out kinda shakey, but it has progressively gotten better and better.

However, Monster Manual III and Libris Mortis really represent an all time new low in editing standards. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy Libris Mortis, but the book is riddled with errors. Most of them won't be noticed by the casual reader, but just a little indepth investigation will yield countless small grammatical, typesetting, and rules errors. Then again, Libris Mortis and MMIII were pretty much released alongside Frostburn, a book that, to me, looks almost relatively error-free, while being superbly cool (pun intended).

 

[John Cooper]

Let me see...I started reading Libris Mortis on the 20th of October or thereabouts, and finished it yesterday, for a total of about 12 days. During that time, I spent probably an hour or so on weeknights, and maybe an average of 3 hours on each day of the weekend. I'd guess it was somewhere around 20 hours over the course of nearly two weeks, in all. There's absolutely no way I could get through a book that size (and with that many stat blocks) in 8 hours, as someone suggested earlier. What slows me up aren't the straight monster stats (I've gotten so I can pretty much do them cold, since I don't bother to check Skills, which would be the really time-consuming chunks) but the NPC stats, especially if they're multiclassed characters. Frankly, I don't trust myself not to mess up by trying to do those sorts of computations in my head, so I have to pull out the PH and DMG to double-check the adept's BAB or what level a barbarian gets Uncanny Dodge and that kind of thing. Also, remember that those 20 hours are not just devoted to reading through the book and doing stat computations in my head (or looking stuff up), but also documenting everything on sheets of legal paper so I can refer to it later when I type up the review.

And as for the review, that's a good chunk of time right there on top of the time spent reading through the material. Reviews like Libris Mortis with huge chunks of stat errors take forever to type up (I think I spent over four hours, all in all, just typing up my review in Notepad).

 

[GlassJaw]

Hey John, thanks for chiming in.

There's absolutely no way I could get through a book that size (and with that many stat blocks) in 8 hours

Ugh, I wish I hadn't thrown out that number in the first place. It was just a number I picked out of a hat. My point was that if if WotC spent some time devoted only to editing, the quality of the books would improve greatly. Would they be perfect? Absolutely not. But they would be much more "bearable."

The best course of action is to take the book and divide it up amongst a few people, including the stat blocks (so one person isn't doing them all). Even if they can't get to everything, they are much better off than they started.

Proofreading and editing aren't rocket science. You just have to want to do it. From what I've seen, WotC just doesn't want to for whatever reason. Frankly I wish they would because I might buy some books that I would otherwise be on the fence about. Right now, I'm just really squeamish about sending money WotC's way.

 

[MerricB]

When I consider the quality of rules material that Wizards has been putting out recently, I'd say it's been extremely high. The new feats, spells and so forth have generally been excellent.

However, the editing of the stat blocks has been letting them down. Also, little development problems like setting flesh to ice (in Frostburn) as a 5th level spell. (Huh?)

Cheers!

 

[Li Shenron]

While Diaglo said he was joking with his first comment, I thought he quite catched some good points as well.

I quite rarely see books of other kinds with hardly any errata, but it looks like errors in RPG books are the norm, and the majority of the customers don't seem to care much for them. I guess the nature of the content (which is very technical, but at the same time has not a "true" meaning as a scientific/technological publication) is such that mistakes are much easier and proofreading is much harder.

But the real point is IMHO that customers just buy it anyway, and they're more concerned about getting the book as soon as possible - some would often even pay more to have it 1 week earlier, which is sometimes incredible to me - or don't have time to worry because there's already the next book coming!
While usually any other book gets printed a few times, and the second print already has all the errata found and corrected, RPG books gets printed with the same errors (except the core ones hopefully). Perhaps it depends on the fact that the overall number of copies printed is so small that there is only one print, of course.

Still, normally when people around here buy any book and find lots of mistakes in it, do you know what happens? They bring back the book to the shop and get a refund. The worse the print of a book, the more people return it until the editors notice that it's actually more proficuous to check their products better before they go to print. But the RPG business is different, we customers are so "aficionados" that we whine a while about the quality but at the end forgive the publisher (the main one at least) as long as the next book is somewhat better.

I really think that a business is much more lead by the customers than it is by the producers after all, so let's face that what we get is actually what we ask for (averagely speaking, obviously).

 

[Kerrick]

As an RPG designer and editor, I can see both sides of the argument. On the one hand, WotC's poor editing is shameful and embarrassing. I wouldn't want to put MY name to a book like that. SPELLCHECK! It's part of Word, for the love of all that's holy. The last thing I do before I send it off to the secondary English editor and the mechanics editor is run it through a spellchecker. My typing and grammar are good, but I still make mistakes - transposed letters, missing words, missing punctuation - especially if I've been changing things. It doesn't take but a couple hours to run a spellchecker on a 200-page document. And hire a decent mechanics editor - a missing point here or there is no big deal (it's almost expected, with that many numbers) but MMIII and LM were just rife with them. I mean, really - how can you have the bonuses right and have them NOT add up correctly?

On the other hand - From John's review of Libris Mortis, it would appear they have only ONE person doing the main editing. That's a lot of work for one guy. You can't catch everything, no matter how times you run through it - it just can't be done. Plus, as someone mentioned, you have people going through and making last-minute changes and tweaks (and I know how that is - we do it too; you see something that doesn't quite look right and adjust it), and that just messes everything up.

I think what they need to do is streamline the process a bit. Set a deadline, and stick to it. Say, "Okay, the book will done on this day. There will be NO further adjustments, tweaks, or corrections made after that date, so you'd better either get them right the first time, or make sure you have it the way you want it before it goes to editing." Now, I don't know how things work up there, so this might be totally unrealistic, but I think it would cut down on people subverting the editor's work.