Alarums & Excusions: Of D&D Podcasts, Errata, and Other Diverse Discourse
I hope that everyone is having a Happy Memorial Day, I certainly have been – despite that the weather outside has turned from several days of rain to bright, sunny, and massively humid, at least in my little corner of the world! And due to being in the midst of a holiday weekend, with the requirements of visiting friends and family, I’ve not had time to quite finish all my projects for the week…
As you might know, the big project I’ve been working on was Part II of the Leaders Roundtable blog, which I was hoping to complete for today. But sadly, it’s a bit delayed, but I should have it out on this coming Friday. Of course, part of the delay was due to the holiday fun, but there has also been a lot of issues with access to DDI resources. I was a bit vexed about not having access to my DDI account on several occasions this past weekend due to problems with the WotC servers – not sure what that was all about – but despite that, I should complete my research. Part II of the Leaders Roundtable will be looking at the Healing and Bolstering powers of Leaders, and comparing the various classes abilities to grant healing surges, regeneration, temporary hit points, damage resistance, increased defenses, and saving throw bonuses to allies.
And speaking of “Leaders Roundtables”, I got a chance to finally listen to the D&D Podcast, and heard the “spin” Crawford and Schubert presented on the changes to the Cleric (Templar). On some of the points, I do get what they were trying to do with the Cleric. In particular, as a DM, I do agree that the Cleric should not have the damage output with their controller-like powers that meets or exceeds primary Controller class powers such as a Wizard. And the reduction of the size of AoEs and bursts does make a certain sense, particularly for smaller maps in dungeon settings, to prevent any class from attacking every monster in the encounter with just one use of a power! But I still think R&D went too far with Turn Undead, and the power is now simply too weak at Epic Tier to be a serious threat from damage – even with undead vulnerabilities to radiant effects. I agree that the damage should have been reduced some, but not to the extent we saw.
I particularly liked that someone wrote to the WotC podcasters about the need for transparency, and I heartily agree with that sentiment! There seems to be a real pattern here of WotC making changes to the D&D product line and the content which do not sit well with their fans (ie. the customers!), and then having to do a massive spin campaign after-the-fact in order to calm the community. As I mentioned in a previous blog, it would logically make considerably more sense to publish proposed changes beforehand, and let the community debate on them a bit before making a final decision. There are all kinds of laudable benefits to that sort of transparency, not the least of which is less customer outrage and a strengthening of the bonds between the publisher and the community.
As a DM, these sorts of errata changes put me into a very unenviable situation. I have the choice to either accept the changes, and make my players unhappy, or ignore them, and create a logistical quandary with character creation and record-keeping. The latter choice of simply ignoring the errata also creates one heck of a precedent, forcing a DM to have to rule on each change for every class that has ever had a nerf. I want to make sure that my players are having a good time, and when their classes are changed from one day to the next, it’s hard for a DM to maintain a sense of “gaming satisfaction”.
Now I know that there were some in the blogging community who commented negatively about giving one of my players a platform to voice his angst over the changes, but honestly, the recent Marlett’s Musings were hardly the most outraged voice shouting back at WotC over the Cleric changes. There were WAY more irate gamers on the message boards, who said things considerably more nasty and viciously than Marlett did, and no one thought to censure them. After all, isn’t that one of the great freedoms of a blog – a chance to speak out or about a topic one feels passionately about? Clearly, WotC want feedback, and have solicited it regarding their Class Compendium, so I fail to see why some of my fellow bloggers in the community should take exception when I present some of that feedback on my site.
WotC needs to be careful about doing too much of their creative R&D process in a vacuum. Dungeons & Dragons has become its own social networking beast, and its fans are numerous, well read, and capable of voicing their opinions and concerns in scores of places on the internet, from blogsites to message boards. It would be far better to harness the D&D social-networking-beast and use it to make improvements to the game, than to ignore it and then occasionally provoke it.
And the real concern that I have is in thinking about what happens when there are simply too many changes to the D&D 4E, and not all of them welcome by the players? Will we reach a point where the players simply stop using Character Builder altogether because their campaign does not use some or all of the errata? Sure in times past, everyone’s campaign had its own set of houserules, but as D&D gamers, we all agreed on the general core of the rules-as-written from the PHBs and DMGs.
But what worries me is what might happen when the D&D community becomes fragmented over whether to accept the core rules themselves anymore. There will be some that are all about RAW, others that ignore some certain parts of the so-called errata, and still another group that refuses to acknowledge any changes, and just play out of the original books. Perhaps my fears are unfounded, but as a fan of D&D, it does give me a bit of pause, and makes me hope for that we will see less errata in favor of more content, and not the other way around.
So until next blog… I wish you Happy Gaming!
About The Author
I must say that I fall into the third group who ignores all errata; my group is cool with it but it does get crazy with all the different version of powers. Treating D&D like a MMO, where updates are done continuously and all the time, is a mistake in its entirety. D&D would have to be available online in PDF form for this to even be worthwhile.
Also, if they would just reprint the #%*# PHB with all the new errata in it, that might take some of the sting of my tremendously red marked PHB (well, my friend’s that it; my deluxe PHB doesn’t have a single mark).
Well, it looks like WOTC may be listening to the transparency request. For the articles this week, is “Playtest – Warlock Updates.”
One ability that unfortunately is not available in the new character builder is being able to pick which rules updates, via selecting articles and books available for your campaign, you wanted to use. The current CB is all-or-nothing option. Which makes it even more difficult to not use the updates, or be forced to do all of the hand calculations.
I wonder if WotC might not be better off marketing updates as expansions, sort of like WoW. Preview and discuss changes during the year, and then roll them out annually.
Then, in the CB, you could choose which expansion you wanted to abide by.