4E: Massive Skill Challenge update

Take a look at the DMG errata. Whoa.

That’s not small changes there. I was just expecting “knock off the +5 to Skills at the bottom of the chart on pg. 42″ but here there’s massive revisions. I’m glad this happened before I actually started up my campaign. I’m also glad they didn’t just leave it as I figured it’d be the biggest diverging point of play for 4E groups.

It’d be nice if there was a little design discussion about this change, though, since we got so much design theory behind everything else. It’s not as bad as AEG’s “What TN Chart?” gaffe with 3rd edition Legend of the 5 Rings, but still. With changes that big, something, somewhere, went really wrong between “things we design, things we playtest, things we revise, and here’s what ends up in the book”…

I really hope they fix this in the next printing of the books.

ETA: Of course, I also started thinking, “Gee, I hope we don’t go down the road of software, where games are being sent out half done needing patches” but then I remember that this kind of makes up most of the history of the hobby, along with the assumption that people were supposed to fix the rules themselves. (I remember someone berating me for actually following the rules in a trad game- “But you should have known they wouldn’t work” as the defense for me criticizing the game…)

So in light of that, a month turnaround for errata is improvement!