To be fair, WotC posted the first 4e errata within a handful of months of release, and that file has been updated on a nearly monthly basis, incorporating all new published product in the line, continuously ever since.

Or, you know, download the errata (draft 1 of which I submitted about 20 minutes ago).

cool, look forward to seeing it go through

That is pretty good improvement from SR4, good to see Jason has gotten over his hate for errata

I think it's more of 'Patrick volunteered and presented it to him as a done thing' than getting over it.

Both augmentation and runners companion erratas where done, but still never saw the light of day(well according to some companion errata was included in the newest hard copy=

Put this right up front... the problem with early early PDF releases is it actually turns off the FLGS from carrying the product. Think about it... you have Edge of Empire now hitting store shelves only. Or something like SR where a lot of 'pre-sales' have gone to online shops so people can get the book + early pdf.

Right now you have the worst of both worlds... as the FLGS gets a second bite at sales and has to deal with direct competition from the likes of drive-thru rpg or battleshop as well as amazon. Your brick & mortar shops generally are in trouble in most places. The only ones i see thrive are the ones which combine both retail sales with dedicated play space and actively embrace providing a place for gamers to find/meet other like minded gamers. It does people little good to own a game with no one to play it with or find like-minded players in their local area.



Patrick it really doesn't matter much. The problem is jmhardy. The more I hear about changes in the new edition the more I'm convinced he was a poor pick for line developer. Even if I do grant he was handed a dog's dish with the money/legal problems early on.... the game lost most of it's better authors. The current crop is enthusiastic but largely unprofessional.

His 'war' on all errata in prior editions stacks the deck against him even more now. As I don't expect to see rules abuses fixed in any official or consistent manner. In fact, I expect to see worse rules abuses rather than fewer based on things he's ok'ed in the past. The current crop of playtesters as a whole I must take either as largely incompetent or ignored by the powers that be.

*Again this is only my personal anecdotal experience* But the only experience I've had with people I know to be playtesters is that they tend to be 'yes' men who brag about their friendship with writers and care more about plot/meta/setting than about rules. Even to the point of bragging that they ignore the rules! What's the point of play testers who don't care about the rules! *Again that is only my personal anecdotal experience*



I see this edition as a lot like SR3. And SR3 was the dark days of the game... it was nigh impossible to find a game for the most part I found... and when you did rules varied wildly table by table. As it was an open question which SR2 splatbooks were being houseruled in or if errata were being followed at all (remember back then errata was largely a snail mail send a SASE thing). I know I was not the only person turned off by this... I know a few GM's who'd go for a different game system entirely rather than have to argue differing house rule/errata constantly or have to deal with a player lobbying to use something from a prior edition book.

Isn't D&D 4th edition like the anti-Christ of gaming though? Please don't use it to set production goals. We hold you to a higher standard than that.

Heh. Regardless of yours, mine, or anyone else's opinion on the overall design of D&D 4, the fact remains that Wizards of the Coast is the largest game company out there and have the most resources to throw behind a product. My point was simply that things happen.

I like to occasionally compare it to a Stephen King or JK Rowling book. Books that sell Millions of copies, and have some of the biggest publishing houses behind them. These are places with more editors and proofreaders on staff than you can shake a stick at. And yet, I still find typos and grammatical errors in their books. Not often, usually only a couple per book, but still... the fact that they slip through on something that big... It puts it in perspective a little.

But that also doesn't mean we can't work to fix it. And we are.

4E D&D defintiely isn't hated for its PRODUCTION VALUES. Those are quite nice.

I think that in a perfect world, the publication of a rpg rule system today would be as simple as having a markdown document in a version control system (like a git repository) where the company's authors can push their content to, while fans can clone it and pull the latest changes whenever they feel like it.

This would open up a *huge* number of of new possibilities.


For example, talented people from the community (which there are quite a lot of) could branch their own personal versions off the main development line to add their houserules into it for use in their group. Also, other people could then use those rules pretty easily, and if the company so choses it could even merge certain houserules back into the official "canon" rules branch.

When playing with new people, you could very easily establish a common ruleset by just linking everyone the specific version (commit) of the ruleset that you want to use.

With a flexible markup language, designers could establish their own stylesheets for the document, enabling a multitude of different looking "eBooks" of the system - all while having the same content in all of them.

The access to the rules repository would of course only be possible after having paid for it (book-wise, most likely, or even a more expensive, one-time "all-inclusive membership" for instant access to all future content) so that all the smart and hard-working folks working on the content can get their paychecks.


All in all I think that errata files and static documents are really nothing more than a relict of the past, considering today's possibilities. Rule Systems in RPGs have, im my opinion, really become a lot like software today. They evolve, change, live. They are not fixed and set in stone anymore.

Of course i know all this is only utopia right now. But sometimes, it's just nice to dream.

Or you could just do like Pathfinder did, and make an open-access rules depository and make your money selling offline copies and adventures. Either works.

+1 for your dream

It seems some companies are going to the open-source or pay-what-you-want model, so this seems like a step that's not so far...

That wouldn't necessarily work for Shadowrun. Pathfinder was able to poach some of the DnD crowd in the shift to D&D 4th ed. Personally, I'm among the few that openly liked a lot of what 4th ed had to offer, and I STILL like Pathfinder as a tabletop RPG.

My first intros to Shadowrun were inconsistent in the earlier editions; my first REAL, consistent game was SR4. I didn't start out in Eclipse Phase, Netrunner or Cyberpunk 20X0, and I'm not familiar with anybody who did. What similar works and pre-established fandom does Shadowrun have to poach from? How much would you be willing to spend and to put up with in order to play in "official" Shadowrun games? Heck, considering the subject matter, that's just ASKING for piracy/fanbase rebellion

Right now, Shadowrun lives on its publications, both physical and digital. Digital has a lower overhead (and therefor overall cost); RPG crowds, from my experience, have an above-average tendency to prefer physical copies if possible. Considering the type of business this is, and the fact that publishing companies aren't as solvent as they used to be, it's the best possible option available (minus hiring the freelancers to assassinate/extract the WotC talent).