D&D 5E Xanathar's Guide errata coming

[S'mon]

S'mon approves this change (though healing spirit hasn't been used IMCs afaicr). Along with Contagion I'll be using the errata'd version.

 

[Umbran]

Mod Note:

Folks may have noted that... there's a lot of stuff going on in the world right now.

Please don't add to it. Don't make disagreements here personal. Don't be dismissive and rude to your fellow posters, either.

Treat each other with respect, please and thank you.

 

[Iry]

It's okay to have unreal feelings. All of my feelings are unreal. I act like whatever people think I should act like, but I'm totally neutral inside. Except sleepy. I definitely get sleepy.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

...
RPG rulebooks are non-perishable. They aren't consumed via use. People do not want to replace them. What makes RPGs fun for most people isn't learning an all-new set of dice rolls to swing a sword, it's going on imaginary adventures with your friends. The "standard" approach is to release a badly designed product, run it into the ground with rules splats, and solve everyone's problem of being stuck with a crappy, broken rule set by releasing a fresh, clean new one...that you intend to eventually break. In other words, the business model revolves around making your customers unhappy, eventually ruining their experience, and offering to save them with an expensive reboot.

What this does in the long run is degrade your brand appeal. I'd rather go with somebody who doesn't make me rebuy the core rules just to un-break things, and so would most people. People who like learning rules just because they love nerding out over new mechanics are a tiny niche, so the fact that some teeny-tiny company can keep a few thousand niche users happy via frequent rules reboots isn't really relevant. There are all kinds of strange, niche markets out there.
...

I love learning new RPG rules, and I still completely agree with you about wanting the stuff I buy to not need replacement. The less energy I have to spend learning new D&D the more energy I have to learn new other RPGs.

Eventually the art of RPG design will evolve and become capable of doing it right-er the first-ish time, so that a game doesn't have an endless stream of versions, but we're not there yet.

 

[jgsugden]

As a player of the game, you have three choices:

1.) Play in a game that uses the errata.
2.) Play in a game that does not use the errata.
3.) Don't play in any D&D games.

3 seems like an overreaction. 2 seems like it'll be harder to find than 1, and won't be an option for AL games run under AL rules. 1 seems, to me, to be an option that allows for a great game experience and the least trouble for most players.

If you're concerned that this ruined your game manual - the book doesn't have a lot of value and will not, ever. You're not losing significant money (or gaining it) due to the errata.

If you're worried that putting stickers or paper in your book to add the updates to it will damage your book, the risk is minimal. I keep papers in all of my books and they're fine (except the very first 5E printings which had defects). However, you can just keep the printouts of the errata outside your book.

If this is truly something worthy of your frustration and worry at this time, thank your lucky stars as most of the world has bigger fish to fry.

 

[tetrasodium]

As a player of the game, you have three choices:

1.) Play in a game that uses the errata.
2.) Play in a game that does not use the errata.
3.) Don't play in any D&D games.

3 seems like an overreaction. 2 seems like it'll be harder to find than 1, and won't be an option for AL games run under AL rules. 1 seems, to me, to be an option that allows for a great game experience and the least trouble for most players.

If you're concerned that this ruined your game manual - the book doesn't have a lot of value and will not, ever. You're not losing significant money (or gaining it) due to the errata.

If you're worried that putting stickers or paper in your book to add the updates to it will damage your book, the risk is minimal. I keep papers in all of my books and they're fine (except the very first 5E printings which had defects). However, you can just keep the printouts of the errata outside your book.

If this is truly something worthy of your frustration and worry at this time, thank your lucky stars as most of the world has bigger fish to fry.

There's no games going on at the FLGS I normally run my (AL)games at & I expect that's the norm pretty much everywhere right now, but aside from a few hardcore types that tend to use AL rules to their advantage in munchkiny ways* most of the AL tables tried to be strict but changed things up a bit when everyone agreed if someone brought it up.

*Ie the old don't take magic anything till $NiceItem drops then declare you have no magic items to automatically get the ring of protection/gauntlets of ogre power from lmop or whatever that used to be a problem. A player coming in & knowing the adventure like he studied it on the way in or checking it on their phone mid game is another example.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Just remember, everybody's an idiot at something.

I love learning new RPG rules, and I still completely agree with you about wanting the stuff I buy to not need replacement. The less energy I have to spend learning new D&D the more energy I have to learn new other RPGs.

Right. For the same reason, I'd rather learn a new board game than a game that is almost exactly like Risk, but a bunch of new technical subtleties.

For a while, I kept buying D&D clones with the intent to play them...then I realized that the reason I never played them is the chore of learning new rules for playing a slightly different version of what I already play sounds like a real drag. If I'm going to learn new rules, it needs to be for something different, not a new spin on "Human Fighterman and his three Elf Friends go off into the forest to slay the owlbear."

 

[Prakriti]

For a while, I kept buying D&D clones with the intent to play them...then I realized that the reason I never played them is the chore of learning new rules for playing a slightly different version of what I already play sounds like a real drag.

I purposely avoid other D&D-like games and D&D editions because they all mix together in my head. It makes it very hard to DM when you can't remember which rule belongs to which edition. When I first started DMing 5E, for example, it was probably a year before I worked all the 3E-isms out of my system, and I never even played 3E. I just read the PHB.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I purposely avoid other D&D-like games and D&D editions because they all mix together in my brain. It makes it very hard to DM when you can't remember which rule belongs to which edition. When I first started DMing 5E, for example, it was probably a year before I worked all the 3E-isms out of my system, and I never even played 3E. I just read the PHB.

I played a few sessions of 5e with a DM who had just gotten the rule books for the first time. He had never played anything except 3.5, so he had no concept at all of D&D rules having ever been different. So he immediately said, "WTF, these ability scores are too low! And you don't have enough feats! They really screwed this up!" and had everyone jack up their ability scores and hit points and let them choose a bunch of extra feats.

Then he kept whining about how the party was facerolling every encounter.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Fireball is more powerful than baseline for legacy reason (that I personally don’t agree with). Healing spirit doesn’t have that excuse, and is one level lower than our beloved fiery nuke.

Hexblade on his own is not broken at all, but it does horrible things to the game with multiclassing (optional rule, I know. Not a problem at my table, I houseruled the problem away anyway).

It doesn’t, though. It just synergizes well with some other classes. It doesn’t break anything.

And I don’t care about legacy. I’m saying that HS is a spell that hits above its weight class, and that’s fine, there are other spells that do the same. Fireball is just one example.
You disagree that it’s okay to have a few of those, and that’s fine, but I’m not especially interested in continuing to debate that.