Number47
First Post
Re: Re: One thing no one has mentioned so far...
Let me clue you into some of the realities of printing. First of all, WOTC probably didn't do all the prepwork for the print production. They don't have in-house printing, do they? Secondly, the actual designer did a great job. The text is legible, the art and general layout is excellent and, most importantly, all the design elements are consistent. But what you are complaining about is content. The people who enter the text and format it to fit the book are low-level grunts. They have absolutely no authority to do anything other than what they are told. They have to go up to the boss and tell him, there's no room to put this chart on same page as information it goes with. So the boss looks at it for ten seconds and says, put it over there instead. This is compounded by the fact that books have a set number of pages before the text is entered (usually based on multiples of sixteen, but for a large-run book, probably thirty-two). You simply can't throw another page in. So, when you are told that you have ten pages to put so-and-so section in, you must crowbar that text into ten pages. Personally, I would have loved it if they put the full spell description with each spell, instead of "Like this spell that's on another page", but it would've increased the cost.
Then we get to the biggest gripe, proofreading. That should actually be split into two categories, proofing and fact-checking. The proofing is fairly straight forward, look for spelling and grammar errors and get them fixed. They did a great job on that. I find scarcely any spelling or grammar mistakes, and there is probably no book in it's first printing that is error-free. As for the fact-checking, this was a brand-new game. It had only been played by playtesters, and I doubt that the fact-checkers were play-testers themselves. So it hadn't come up for a lot of those "limited circumstance" facts that we keep finding. I find virtually no errors in facts that are grand and sweeping.
The only way that the core books would have had less errors would be if they had produced the ruleset as written, not released it, increased the playtesting pool by a factor of ten, and waited a year for it to be released. Would you have liked to pay $50 a book in order to avoid the minor errors that only munchkins and rules lawyers have found?
Now, I don't buy splatbooks. But if there are mistakes in those, remember that you are getting a book that is much less widely bought then the core books, thus the printing cost is higher per-book. So, less staff to produce the book, no color, soft-cover and the fact-checking probably stayed internal to the group working on the book. I find it amazing that these splatbooks were playtested! That shows real dedication on the part of the company!
Ask the average D&D player if they have problems with the rules. The ones who don't memorize the books. The ones who play on the weekends, but have jobs and families the rest of the time. The ones who have no idea what a smackdown is. I think they will tell you, individually, that they might have found one rule or chart that didn't make sense to them. That's a pretty darn good record. Does nobody here remember 2E?
Ranger REG said:
Let me clue you into some of the realities of printing. First of all, WOTC probably didn't do all the prepwork for the print production. They don't have in-house printing, do they? Secondly, the actual designer did a great job. The text is legible, the art and general layout is excellent and, most importantly, all the design elements are consistent. But what you are complaining about is content. The people who enter the text and format it to fit the book are low-level grunts. They have absolutely no authority to do anything other than what they are told. They have to go up to the boss and tell him, there's no room to put this chart on same page as information it goes with. So the boss looks at it for ten seconds and says, put it over there instead. This is compounded by the fact that books have a set number of pages before the text is entered (usually based on multiples of sixteen, but for a large-run book, probably thirty-two). You simply can't throw another page in. So, when you are told that you have ten pages to put so-and-so section in, you must crowbar that text into ten pages. Personally, I would have loved it if they put the full spell description with each spell, instead of "Like this spell that's on another page", but it would've increased the cost.
Then we get to the biggest gripe, proofreading. That should actually be split into two categories, proofing and fact-checking. The proofing is fairly straight forward, look for spelling and grammar errors and get them fixed. They did a great job on that. I find scarcely any spelling or grammar mistakes, and there is probably no book in it's first printing that is error-free. As for the fact-checking, this was a brand-new game. It had only been played by playtesters, and I doubt that the fact-checkers were play-testers themselves. So it hadn't come up for a lot of those "limited circumstance" facts that we keep finding. I find virtually no errors in facts that are grand and sweeping.
The only way that the core books would have had less errors would be if they had produced the ruleset as written, not released it, increased the playtesting pool by a factor of ten, and waited a year for it to be released. Would you have liked to pay $50 a book in order to avoid the minor errors that only munchkins and rules lawyers have found?
Now, I don't buy splatbooks. But if there are mistakes in those, remember that you are getting a book that is much less widely bought then the core books, thus the printing cost is higher per-book. So, less staff to produce the book, no color, soft-cover and the fact-checking probably stayed internal to the group working on the book. I find it amazing that these splatbooks were playtested! That shows real dedication on the part of the company!
Ask the average D&D player if they have problems with the rules. The ones who don't memorize the books. The ones who play on the weekends, but have jobs and families the rest of the time. The ones who have no idea what a smackdown is. I think they will tell you, individually, that they might have found one rule or chart that didn't make sense to them. That's a pretty darn good record. Does nobody here remember 2E?
I agree with Numion, but for different reasons.
