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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 2398245" data-attributes="member: 22424">I've deleted the actual 'guesses'. They're all quite correct, of course.There are also two other factors that I think apply:Firstly, I think it's unlikely that many of the employees are professional software engineers or database experts. To build a tool to model the monsters would require getting some sort of outside help, which of course costs money. The business case for spending that money is probably not there unless the product is intended for sale - I don't expect that the savings in stat-block generation times is that great, since they can survive a problem with a relative few stat-block errors, especially if they produce timely errata. (Now, if gamers en masse boycotted all products with more than a tiny number of editing mistakes, that might well change. But that's unlikely to ever happen.)Secondly, the effort involved in writing a program/database for your own use is significantly less than the effort in creating a program suitable for mass consumption. If I put together a program for my own use, I can be reasonably sure I won't make mistakes in data entry through ignorance, and can also be reasonably sure I will be willing to live with the occasional crash due to bad data (provided it doesn't delete my painstakingly entered data set, of course). If the product is being sold commercially, though, higher standards are required.(An interesting analogy springs to mind: if I'm writing an adventure for my own use, I can cut out a lot of redundant tasks - I know for example that my party are unlikely to use divinations to research the adventure location in advance. If I were to write up the same adventure for submission to Dungeon, however, I would need to consider these things. Not to mention the difference between writing the adventure in my own shorthand for my own use, and writing everything out in comprehensible English. Plus, of course, I only need to tailor my own adventures to my own group, whereas a Dungeon adventure needs to be suitable for a wide range of groups.)</blockquote>

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