D&D General The Crab Bucket Fallacy

[SteveC]

One of the conspiracy theories of the day was that they were trying to force you to subscribe to DDI so your stuff would be automatically updated.

I don't know that it's really a conspiracy theory. 4E is the last edition that I collected the books for. I used the offline character builder, and that was unofficially updated with every piece of errata as it came out. That was what convinced me that I really didn't need all of those books. I have heard that 4E was an edition that was patched like software. And for me, that really worked. When there were changes made, you would be able to automatically update them.

 

[Micah Sweet]

One of the conspiracy theories of the day was that they were trying to force you to subscribe to DDI so your stuff would be automatically updated.

I always believed that personally.

 

[Thomas Shey]

140 pages of errata.

Of course you can always simply question whether other editions would have had as much if they'd actually bothered to fix problems rather than just let them keep coasting...

 

[James Gasik]

I know I bought some Paizo rulebooks on PDF and they were updated without my knowledge!

 

[billd91]

I know I bought some Paizo rulebooks on PDF and they were updated without my knowledge!

Sure, they updated what was in my library on their site. But I had to download the new versions myself.

 

[James Gasik]

Sure, they updated what was in my library on their site. But I had to download the new versions myself.

Maybe I had my adobe set to auto update, I don't know. I'd bought the Advanced Class Guide, and a month later, some of the cool things in it were nerfed for reasons that purely had to do with Public Play, lol.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

140 pages of errata.

And? That's telling me they fixed things.

Are you seriously expecting perfection? Because that's a ludicrous position and you should know better if you're trying to push that.

 

[Zardnaar]

And? That's telling me they fixed things.

Are you seriously expecting perfection? Because that's a ludicrous position and you should know better if you're trying to push that.

My errata for 3E was 1 page.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

My errata for 3E was 1 page.

Okay.

That's kind of irrelevant to whether 3e was balanced. Because it wasn't. At all. No one denies this. You would need to rewrite every class in the PHB, many feats, most spells, and a boatload of items to get a balanced game out the other side.

This was literally admitted by Paizo directly. I can't remember the man's name, but one of their lead dev/design people made very clear that the reason they needed to make PF2e was that they couldn't fix the deep, fundamental, pervasive problems with the PF system--and 100% of those problems were inherited from 3e.

I would far, far rather have 140 pages of tiny fixes than 1 page of fixes and a broken mess. Any day of the week.

4e was a very well-balanced game. It got fixes to help improve that balance over time. Why—how—is that a flaw?

 

[Mistwell]

Okay.

That's kind of irrelevant to whether 3e was balanced. Because it wasn't. At all. No one denies this. You would need to rewrite every class in the PHB, many feats, most spells, and a boatload of items to get a balanced game out the other side.

This was literally admitted by Paizo directly. I can't remember the man's name, but one of their lead dev/design people made very clear that the reason they needed to make PF2e was that they couldn't fix the deep, fundamental, pervasive problems with the PF system--and 100% of those problems were inherited from 3e.

I would far, far rather have 140 pages of tiny fixes than 1 page of fixes and a broken mess. Any day of the week.

4e was a very well-balanced game. It got fixes to help improve that balance over time. Why—how—is that a flaw?

It was nearly universally agreed at the time, as much as such things can happen with D&D forums, that 4e had too much errata too often such that nobody felt comfortable updating the rules nearly every session at one point.