There won't be a 4.5 because WotC doesn't need a 4.5

[scylis]

I hate the constant stream of erratas, corrections, erratas of erratas and corrections of corrections. Talk about fractioning the player base... "which rules doe you use ? Ad&d, D&D3 or D&D4 ?" >> "We are using D&D 4, with the July 2010 erratas."

The rules are already big and fat, with a lot of things to learn. If they change them every three months, it's impossible. I already hated that in 3e, with all the polymorph erratas. Most of those are due to the neverending quest for Absolute Balance.
Eeck. Throw balance in hell. Min-maxer will always find a way to abuse the system. The more rigidly balanced it is, the more they will be excited. The more erratas there is, the more loophole one can find, especially if the DM is not "errata-aware".


Dear WotC : Give us something stable, fun and evocative. Don't scorch the game with never-ending erratas and a steril, modronesque, quest for ultimate balance. Use your brain power to make new books about new things, not to re-re-re-rechange the book we juste learned to use.

And then, after a few years, start a new cycle, without too much modification, but with all the erratas in one cohesive block.

The main difference between RPG and CRPG is that patching our brain is tiring and painful, while patching a computer software is fast and painless. We are not machines, do no hope we will assimilate 174 pages of erratas each year when we are having fun with what we have.

I disagree with everything you posted on a fundamental level which cannot be properly expressed due to some small failing of my own and my currently rum-addled brain.

I might try to do a better job tomorrow (today? it's 4 AM where I am now), but I just wanted to set that up as at least a starting point, if not the whole point.

 

[nnms]

The rules are already big and fat, with a lot of things to learn. If they change them every three months, it's impossible.

The rules for 4E are actually pretty lean and easy to learn. Once you've got movement, types of actions, LoS/LoE and a few other things down, it's all exception based after that. Every additional thing you do is contained in the rules for that thing. It's why cards work so well for 4E.

And having a 100 page errata document doesn't actually change 100 pages of text. The amount of stuff that's erratad in a single campaign is quite tiny. One word on a power I might take. It's not the hardest thing in the world to open up a pdf and type the name of your powers into the search box to check for errata.

I think it's only "impossible" because you make it so for yourself.

 

[Dungeoneer]

I hate the constant stream of erratas, corrections, erratas of erratas and corrections of corrections. Talk about fractioning the player base... "which rules doe you use ? Ad&d, D&D3 or D&D4 ?" >> "We are using D&D 4, with the July 2010 erratas."

I really think that this fragmenting of the player base is all in your head. The whole point of the way the system is designed is that changes are not so drastic that if you sit down at a table where they're using different errata then you your character won't work. At worst you might ask to swap out of a power that's been 'gimped', but you won't suddenly find that your gnome rogue is tactically useless at somebody's table.

The only exceptions I can think of to this are extreme char-op builds constructed around cheesy loopholes that have since been erratted.

And of course you're overlooking the fact that anyone using the character builder (which is a lot of people, in my experience) is automatically up to date. Generally speaking, combing through a PDF for changes is not something that you actually have to do.

Again, this goes back to my original post: in 4e changes are a) not so big that they are incompatible with each other and b) easily distributed to players and DMs.

No fragmentation.

No big deal.

 

[holywhitetrash]

people will always find broken things it should be up to the group to say that those things can't be done.
wotc should just try and balance them as they are printed and if down the line it becomes broken just let it happen.
i personally love finding broken combos but i am not douche enough top use them and even if i do the dm will just house rule the combo later, problem solved.
and opening a pdf at a game table is not easy, i don't want to have to carry a laptop just to play dnd.
i don't like being forced to memorize every rule and then rememorize the changes to that rule.
a living rule system makes purchasing books sorta pointless, because there is nothing i love more than opening my book and wondering if they have changed that(sarcasm in text works so well).

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Yes, some people like to find broken combos. And some people like official ways to deal with it.

I can houserule them out perfectly fine. But i don´t mind suggestions, how to fix. Maybe actually we will see some updates undone.
I could really see some magic items with too good daily powers that were scrapped regain them under the new magic item rarity system. I would really lough, if the next update document loses some pages.

 

[scylis]

people will always find broken things it should be up to the group to say that those things can't be done.
wotc should just try and balance them as they are printed and if down the line it becomes broken just let it happen.
i personally love finding broken combos but i am not douche enough top use them and even if i do the dm will just house rule the combo later, problem solved.
and opening a pdf at a game table is not easy, i don't want to have to carry a laptop just to play dnd.
i don't like being forced to memorize every rule and then rememorize the changes to that rule.
a living rule system makes purchasing books sorta pointless, because there is nothing i love more than opening my book and wondering if they have changed that(sarcasm in text works so well).

I, as a player or a DM, shouldn't have to do the work of the people getting paid to write the rules just like I shouldn't have to write my own patch to a computer program to stop it from crashing continually, take the fast food burger I got back and make a new one because the workers there screwed up my order, or replace the faulty engine in my car that is a giant safety hazard and should be part of a recall all by myself.

I also do not enjoy a system that would require a DM to "police" the characters people are wanting to bring in to a game; being able to not have to worry about what sort of characters are being played as far as brokenness is concerned or that if a broken combo does show up, it will almost certainly be corrected to maintain balance is one of the chief selling points of 4E, to me, thanks to my own, personal experiences with the previous edition.

 

[Aloïsius]

i don't like being forced to memorize every rule and then rememorize the changes to that rule.
a living rule system makes purchasing books sorta pointless, because there is nothing i love more than opening my book and wondering if they have changed that(sarcasm in text works so well).

That's the point. I buy books. I want to use them. With a living rule, they are not only useless, they are misleading. It's not only about powers and combos, it's about the damn everything ! Skill challenge, skill uses, skill DC... there are changes everywhere in the rules you are using all the time. Changes in the "how to build a monster" section, I don't care anyway. But changes that makes you think "well, I may either trash my beloved book or make it look like trash", I don't.
If only it was just about the "blocked vision" rules... But in the DMG alone, they have changed the mount rules, the flying rules, the disease rules, the skil check DC, the skill challenge rules, the monster rules... It's not just about the individual powers a character chose to get.


As far as I know, there is no reprint of the core rule book with the full set of erratas... I know the i-pad is the future, but I'm not ready to throw away the pen&paper style right now, for a lot of reasons.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

A living ruleset is a consquence of organised play. Once you have organised play then there is pressure from that source to errata problems in the rules. This adds to the existing pressure from that segment that wants official errata to known isssues.
It would be unfair to participants of orgaised play to have individal DM's applying their own fixes to known rules problems.
Any other DM is free to incorporate or ignore errata.
I largely ignore (in that I rarely seek out errata information) but I use the Character Builder so I get a certain amount of it that way.

 

[Old Gumphrey]

Every group played DnD for oneself. Everyone expected houserules at a table. Switching groups was a pain, as you had to learn the game again and again.

I can't agree with this more. I've played with 3 major groups in 4e and I played the same game each time. There were a few minor differences in how people did things, but it was by and large the same game. Compare this to the earlier days when every campaign you played in had a long (and different) list of rules used only at that table, and I can't see anything but advantage in favor of the way it's done now.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

sorry...

I was responding as if you said: "I can´t DISagree with this more"... Its interesting how you EXPECT someone disagreeing with you...