Update Madness!

[Zaran]

I enjoy getting eratta. It tells me they are trying to make the game better. I just wish they would fix what I find important!

 

[Mithreinmaethor]

Did the old CB keep multiple copies of a given power? I was under the impression that if you chose to only view PHB content, it would show you the current version of each power, not the version published in PHB.

There was no way in the Offline Character Builder to choose whether or not you used or did not use errata. All you could choose is which books and even down to specific powers for your game. But they would all still be the most recent version of the powers.

 

[Zaran]

There was no way in the Offline Character Builder to choose whether or not you used or did not use errata. All you could choose is which books and even down to specific powers for your game. But they would all still be the most recent version of the powers.

This is why we should send feedback when they make a change. It's because of intelligent feedback that WotC backpedalled in the cleric nerds.

 

[Windjammer]

The Character Builder is much of the problem, though... A good example is the recent change to "Come And Get It", the 7th Level Fighter encounter power. Our party Fighter has had the power for months and loved it. She didn't know it had been changed until a week ago in the middle of a combat halfway through the gaming session. It took her completely by surprise, and threw us all for a loop.

This. Every DM advice book published by WotC in the last ten years (DMGs 1 and 2 for 3.5 and 4E, DMing for Dummies 3.5 and 4E) severely advises against the DM changing house rules mid way through the campaign.

Bizarrely, WotC have no problem to do just that on a monthly basis. The CB software is basically the tyrannical whimsical rules-change-prone DM campaign-wrecker WotC so much likes to warn against. What makes it worse is that he's the guy who isn't even a socially integrated part of your play group. He's literally the bully who walks over to your table and changes your table rules.

Whatever 5E is gonna do about incorporating digital tools, this has to go. Badly.

 

[Truename]

Just to counterbalance the opinions so far: I love the updates. I love feeling like the game I'm playing is constantly getting better. I look forward to the discussions of what was fixed, what was nerfed, and why. I love being able to tell my players they can use anything in the Compendium without worrying about game balance or players overshadowing each other.

The actual effect on my home game is minimal--the last update that significantly affected one of my players was the Pacificist cleric nerf, or maybe the Barbarian hide thing. As a DM, the updates have practically zero effect on me, because I don't keep close tabs on the players' stuff.

I actually wish WotC would be more aggressive with the updates--I'd like to see all the pre MM3 monsters retired or revised, for example, to make my Compendium searches simpler.

 

[Obryn]

Because I think the problem that PBartender is expressing is really that in the old, offline character generator a group could decide which set of updates they wanted to embrace.

In the new online character generator world all the updates are automatically there. Every time someone levels up and prints their character sheet and cards again there could be any number of unsuspected changes (Come and get it is called out as a case in point).

If you kept the offline one updated, that's not the case... That also meant you didn't get any of the new content.

With that said, I thought this thread was a year old because WotC has severely scaled back the amount of updates in the past year. Personally, though, I like the erratupdates.

-O

 

[Pbartender]

I'm honestly having difficulty understanding your problem, or understanding what you want WotC to do about it. Did they force the fighter's character sheet to change mid-battle? Did they forcibly take away the Cannith Goggles?

You are completely free to control if and when errata take effect in your game. If they're too frequent, just set your own schedule on when things can change. And if something you weren't using gets errata'd... well you weren't using it, so I don't see why you're worried about it.

What kept you from ignoring the change to CaGI? Do you never write down/print out character sheets and rely on the CB to look up powers mid-session? If you really do this, then yes, you're necessarily committed to closely following errata. But if the fighter had the old CaGI on her sheet, I don't see why you couldn't have stuck with it.

We have no control over if or when or what gets changed in the online Character Builder. In Character Builder, there is no option for using an earlier version of a rule, and there is no option for using customized house-rules.

Also, like neuronphaser, my players only really access the Character Builder once every month or two when they level up their characters and print out a fresh character sheet. Those character sheets are the rules reference we use at the table. While everyone is generally familiar with everyone else's powers, we still look to the printed character sheets for the details and numbers and will notice even small changes then. But that also means that changes are always noticed until in media res when the action is flying high. It's the sudden shock of not having the rules work the way you expected them to that causes much of the consternation.

It's not even really the changes that area problem, mostly. Our Fighter's player, for example, understands why they changed Come And Get It, and though she thinks the change might have nerfed the power just a little too much, she still likes it, kept it, and uses it. But the way they automatically implement the errata and updates is making it difficult for us as a group to assess and assimilate those changes before we decide to implement in our game.

It feels as if we have no choice as to whether or not want to use any given update, and it's been rubbing me the wrong way lately.


EDIT: Plane Sailing + Windjammer == My problem, precisely.

 

[DracoSuave]

Wow, you make it sound like every class's most used powers get changed every month or something crazy like that.

Turns out, it's only a couple things here and there.

It's not like the old polymorph days.

 

[Pbartender]

And then there are the ones that matter, such as the Stealth rules, the rogue-can-sneak-attack-every-turn rule, updates on DCs, and the like. Those don't necessarily appear on the char sheet, but if you look the book up for them they'll lead to more headache than anything else, as opposed to using the updated versions.

This is another part of the problem...

Powers and feats and equipment on the character sheet get updated to reflect these sorts of rules changes. The books on my shelf that we use as a reference during the game don't, however. And very few of the players in my group are fanatical enough about keeping tabs on all the errata and updates that float down the pipe.

But that disparity between the updated character sheets and the unupdated rules can cause a lot of trouble in the middle of a gaming session.

Wow, you make it sound like every class's most used powers get changed every month or something crazy like that.

Turns out, it's only a couple things here and there.

Like I said in the OP, forgive my hyperbole.

However, it often does seem that way to us, not so much because it is that way, but because we don't notice the changes until we try to use the relevant rule. Sometimes it takes weeks before we notice.

So, if WotC sends out an update that makes (relatively) minor changes a half dozen rules this month, we might run across all of them for a month and a half or so. But even as minor as those changes are, they stop the game dead for us on average once a week. And every time it happens, no matte how small the change, it stops the game cold and kills the momentum of the action that had been taking place.

For us, it's constant small annoyances, rather than occasional big problems, that are snowballing into a big problem.

 

[Locutus Zero]

Sure, ideally the CB would let you say "I want the 2nd revision of this power, not the 3rd.", but the scope of that feature is just too great for the dev team to handle. As a developer, I can imagine how many fundamental changes to the system would have to be made to allow multiple version of each power. The behind-the-scenes database side would be a challenge, but not terrible. The real problem would be in the UI. Almost every panel of the CB would need to be redone, not just adding a checkbox or something, but probably a whole new pane.

I think the best solution would be to allow one to create one's own powers. The UI to create this would be very complicated, but at least it wouldn't interact with the rest of the UI. There would also be a lot of bugs at first (or a limited set of what you could do with your homebrew powers). But once you made a power, it would be a fairly simple matter for the devs, I think, to allow it to be usable. Homebrew would just be its own source.