When did the FAQ lose credibility?

[Ridley's Cohort]

I have no problem with a FAQ that deviates from the RAW, but such deviations should be on purpose and noted as good practical advice. It is very confusing when the FAQ appears to contradict the RAW and you cannot tell why it was written that way.

Credibility evaporates with the perception of sloppiness. Answering the same way with a more nuanced and understandable presentation would have been preferable IMHO.

 

[Old Gumphrey]

When Gygax was writing sage advice, there were a lot less books and his answer was more authoritative.

Does anyone else remember one of the key selling points of 3e as listed in dragon magazine? One of the main reasons and new advantages of 3e was going to be a MUCH smaller number of sourcebooks. They were "cleaning up" all the add ons and crap to have a more streamlined system. Yeah, that lasted about a month.

 

[Elephant]

Oh, be fair. The supplement explosion took at LEAST 3 months.

 

[babomb]

Well, I don't know if this is still the case, but there were cases where the FAQ directly contradicted itself. I believe one such example was that the FAQ said that acid damage both ignored and did not ignore hardness. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence as to the quality of the research.

 

[wingsandsword]

When Skip Williams quit doing Sage Advice

Same here, I trust Skip Williams on rules calls. His calls might not be the best on occasion, but they usually were, and were pretty solid. He earned his reputation.

I do think the rapid-fire pace WotC has been producing books has been making things worse though. For about a year in 3e, books came out about once a month, and everybody could digest them. This month: Manual of the Planes, next month Oriental Adventures. Well, when they ran out of 1e books to retread, and 2e Complete Suchandsuch Handbooks to redo under different names and sometimes crunched together, then they really started making a whole lot more.

Now several a month, laden with "crunch": Base Classes, Prestige Classes, Feats, Spells, Rules Options, Monsters, and with each one comes more potential for something truly hideous to spring forth unnoticed. I'm pretty sure that Andy Collins has other duties at WotC other than being just the "Sage" rules answer guy, and keeping up with the constantly increasing volume of rules, and being able to learn them all, test combinations, and have enough skill to make consistently good decisions about the entire range of products, given the size of the range of products and the speed at which it is increasing, would be a full time job unto itself.

 

[MerricB]

I think it lost it in the first one ever, where you had Jean Wells answering questions with "look it up in the rules."

Cheers!

 

[Glyfair]

I think it lost it in the first one ever, where you had Jean Wells answering questions with "look it up in the rules."

Sounds like the D&D Miniatures forums. *

(I've never seen a rules rep for any other game actually not answer questions on their forums except when they were confirming someone elses answers. He just points to a post that in turn point to other resources - essentially he says "look it up yourself" in a good number of the cases. )

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

The FAQ is what, 99% accurate? Maybe 95% accurate at worst?

The FAQ "lost" its credibility the minute someone didn't find the answer they wanted and started posting on EN World how the FAQ isn't credible.

The FAQ is an amazing resource that never existed in previous editions (unless you had access to Dragon magazine). It's a great tool and a great form of system support that gets nothing but flak from people on this forum who overlook the 95% good for the 5% bad.

But to truthfully answer the original question, the FAQ never lost its credibility. It's just some people don't like it, plain and simple, and take every opportunity to make cheapshots.

 

[Voadam]

I've been posting here a fairly long time now, and when I started generally the FAQ was considered a good source of information. People would refer to it, and while there was always a few detractors, people would in general nod their heads and go with it.

But lately I've noticed more and more people don't trust the FAQ. I see statement like, "Its in the FAQ, though I don't know how much you can trust it." more and more.

So when did this happen, and why?

By definition the FAQ is not a primary rules document, that would be the actual rules and any errata. So I never really look at the FAQ and don't really care what it says. It is the RAW as modified by errata that matters for determining the rules.

So I guess I could be called one of those detractors from the beginning of the 3.0 FAQ as I never cared what it said when discussing rules.

 

[Fishbone]

I wouldn't say "lost its credibility" but I don't treat it as canon, which I used to, even though I shouldn't have. Expecting one fallible being to answer all the questions about WOTC's new and frequent cash-money grabs, I mean "supplements that enrich the game for all and are always balanced and easy to understand" is preposterous.