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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6844965" data-attributes="member: 996">Obvious reference to Heroes of Shadow, there, OK.   I'm not that familiar with Pathfinder's publication history, what was their 'terrible book?'  But the "because updates: slow decline" hypothesis doesn't seem to fly for both.  IDK about PF, but the decline of Essentials to HoS was pretty rapid, and mapped more to the withdraw of resources than the use of updates.  Maybe it's really happening on the other side of the equation, perception? The issuing of frequent errata, though delivering incremental improvement, results in the perception (at least, among some fans) that quality must have been low, while the absence of it (even if due to policy or lack of resources, and in the face of obvious problems) creates an impression of high quality?  If the 'fixed' class is that much better, then it needed to be fixed (or it's been made broken).  I doubt that'd happen, or, at least, happen consistently.  The way the DM runs the game, the rulings he makes in game, the nature and variety of challenges he presents, can easily overwhelm the differences between a 'fixed' and 'broken' class, if such ideas really even have meaning in the context of 5e.  That touches on one thing the devs have come out and said, that errata wouldn't make sense for 5e because each DM has already 'made the game his own.'  Maybe it's just putting a high-minded spin on a necessity of working with a much smaller staff, and maybe the positives of a slow pace of release are, too.  But, that doesn't make the ideal expressed invalid. (And why wouldn't you.)  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I thought that was your position, not Zap's?   There are huge differences in perception - including the perception of the DMs who are making that decision to opt in.  An errata or clarification or a new printing has an air of 'officialness' that would convince many to adopt.  A supplement, however official, is easily dismissed by the 'Core Only' set.  3pp is unofficial, but at least professional, and would find even less common adoption, and has earned a pretty poor reputation in the d20 era.  Fan-made doesn't even have the air of 'professional' to mitigate against the loss of 'official.'  Then there's the medium: an official book you can hand to the DM to take a look at has a better shot than a print out or url - dead-tree publication says it's good enough someone invested real money in a print run - that clearly (from experience) doesn't have to be very good, but it's a higher bar than posting something on the internet. To be fair, it's not a /strange/ space, it was seemingly the norm for a good 10 or 15 years for D&D, but it isn't the space where 5e has chosen to position itself.  It's 5e thinking, it's a better tactic for the position WotC is in with D&D atm, and it works very well for 5e, IMHO.  And, it's true, it's not last-decade (or even last-two decade thinking).  It's 1980s thinking.</blockquote>

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