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Vic did it just a few weeks ago. Let me go find it.
So, Chris did take a look at the thread. It just took a couple days. It remained locked, though, which is honestly weird because, while that thread was criticizing Paizo, it wasn't any kind of "hostile." People just thought the casting to change alignment was dumb and were talking about it.
Oh, no, it very much got hostile in there. The posts just got deleted.
Accounts got suspended and banned over it.
In any case and to bring this back to topic, errata or FAQ or the art in the books or whatnot can only kill your fun if you allow it. If you find yourself purchasing a book only for a singular feature, perhaps hold off for a bit until errata/FAQ come out to see if that singular feature survives.
Sure, you don't have the best and newest, but you also don't have the disappointment of losing something that clearly means that much to you.
In any case and to bring this back to topic, errata or FAQ or the art in the books or whatnot can only kill your fun if you allow it. If you find yourself purchasing a book only for a singular feature, perhaps hold off for a bit until errata/FAQ come out to see if that singular feature survives.
Sure, you don't have the best and newest, but you also don't have the disappointment of losing something that clearly means that much to you.
By that argument, you'd be losing something before you even had it. Which may perhaps be better for you, but you're also losing out on a potential amount of fun.
Crane Wing was a prime example of the former for me. I thought making and playing a character with that sort of unique and cool feature would be very fun to play. I never got the chance, and even by seeing the errata take place, did it absolutely upset me.
And I'm not a person who's played the pre-errata Crane Wing.
In any case and to bring this back to topic, errata or FAQ or the art in the books or whatnot can only kill your fun if you allow it. If you find yourself purchasing a book only for a singular feature, perhaps hold off for a bit until errata/FAQ come out to see if that singular feature survives.
Sure, you don't have the best and newest, but you also don't have the disappointment of losing something that clearly means that much to you.
By that argument, you'd be losing something before you even had it. Which may perhaps be better for you, but you're also losing out on a potential amount of fun.
Crane Wing was a prime example of the former for me. I thought making and playing a character with that sort of unique and cool feature would be very fun to play. I never got the chance, and even by seeing the errata take place, did it absolutely upset me.
And I'm not a person who's played the pre-errata Crane Wing.
Perhaps so. But then you won't have invested any cash into it, which seems to be one of the sticking points for some.
Again, at least for me and perhaps others, fun is where you find it. A singular feature being removed or changed -- assuming that your table even recognizes the change -- does not kill any fun. I'll just move to the next idea, the next concept, the next avenue for a character.
I wonder how people react when they encounter house rules that remove options from the game? Do you books somehow become less valuable?
In any case and to bring this back to topic, errata or FAQ or the art in the books or whatnot can only kill your fun if you allow it. If you find yourself purchasing a book only for a singular feature, perhaps hold off for a bit until errata/FAQ come out to see if that singular feature survives.
Sure, you don't have the best and newest, but you also don't have the disappointment of losing something that clearly means that much to you.
Mind you, Paizo has shown us that can be multi-year wait time if that's the case.
Mind you, Paizo has shown us that can be multi-year wait time if that's the case.In any case and to bring this back to topic, errata or FAQ or the art in the books or whatnot can only kill your fun if you allow it. If you find yourself purchasing a book only for a singular feature, perhaps hold off for a bit until errata/FAQ come out to see if that singular feature survives.
Sure, you don't have the best and newest, but you also don't have the disappointment of losing something that clearly means that much to you.
Yup. But by then the forums will have gone through everything "wrong" with the book -- for a given value of wrong -- several times and you'll have an idea if your money is well spent.
The thing that bugs me most about the trends of FAQs and Errata is that they seem to be pushing the game towards a sort of meta-design "center"
The fringe stuff that expands character options in unusual ways gets "hammered back in," and usually changed in such a way that those options will never see play again.
Crane Wing, Racial Heritage, Dervish Dance, Two-Weapon Fighting Metaphorical Hands, Totem Warrior, Scarred Witchdoctor, Bodyguard... none of these things were actually bad for the game. For the most part they were interesting and functional designs. They caused some arguments, but they weren't clearly and obviously game-breaking.
Occasionally something showed up like RageLancePounce, Divine Protection, Spirit's Gift or Paragon Surge, which needed to be scaled back because they were better than literally any other option available for the characters that qualified for them. I'm going to discount those clear and obvious cases for the sake of my argument.
Here's my stance-
If there is a character option that is completely ubiquitous and all but required for a character concept to work, that option either needs to be scaled back, or more options of similar power need to be created.
Power Attack. Spell Perfection. Color Spray. Pounce.
As long as these things exist in the game, I want to have more things that challenge them for my character resources. I want to agonize over this stuff. I don't want to play a game where not taking a particular option is completely stupid. If we are going to have these Sacred Cow options that are clearly better than others, we need to have other options that are just as good.
Unfortunately, the FAQs and Errata are slowly but surely narrowing the concepts that people will explore wit their characters. That's the end result. It isn't just that the Bodyguard feats got nerfed in a way that clearly goes against the intent of the original design. It's that now, people are not going to make bodyguard characters. There isn't a functional way to do it anymore, so we just won't see them. That's really sad to me.
Any time something like that happens it is a loss for the game itself.
And while all this developer time and energy is being spent sweeping interesting options into the trash bin, the Snowcone Wish Machine is still an option for absolutely any wizard higher than 13th level, no matter what build or feats they have.
Most of the rules errata has been fine.
The item errata isn't killing character, but it is killing items and dropping diversity back to just the big six.
Most of the rules errata has been fine.
The item errata isn't killing character, but it is killing items and dropping diversity back to just the big six.
That's true. I have less of a problem with item errata because I tend to play at lower levels where the Big 6 isn't quite so necessary. I can definitely see how item errata would decrease the diversity in mid level games though.
It's worse when you realize some things(like Scarred Witchdoctor or casting spells from other lists) are removed/changed right before something extremely similar(Kineticist for Con based 'casting' and the Spell Sage wizard archetype for casting other classes' spells) that things get even worse.
Maybe an Unchained II book (with more OPTIONAL rules) is a better way than steady errata, even if it delays corrections by a year or more.
Except they aren't optional anymore. Paizo is making product now that REQUIRES Unchained to use, like the Magical Child vigilante archetype. This is a huge change because it's the only time they've done something like this that I am aware of. After all, none of the new classes use only Words of Power or Armor as Damage Reduction, right?
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Those types of responses that say "If you don't say yes you are a terrible GM" do exist, but they are corner cases, just like the GM's who give the "I don't have to explain anything to you. Feel free to go home" are rare.
Most people in my experience in real life, and on these boards are more reasonable. Most GM's aren't tyrants, and most players don't have the sense of extreme entitlement.
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I don't think people take so much frustration out on things themselves being banned/nerfed to oblivion, but more on the reason(s) why things are being banned/nerfed to oblivion.
Now, there were more than one or two things they could have done to solve this issue, and they were quite easy in comparison to what they can already do. Off the top of my head, they could have very easily:
1. Banned the Master of Many Styles archetype from PFS. This would be a very obvious solution, because this is what enabled the "cheese" from above to happen, as the only reason players are getting complete Style Feat Chains are through ignoring pre-requisites, which Master of Many Styles provided, and if people were abusing Crane Wing, I'm sure there were other, less notable options that were likewise being abused, like Crane Style, and if you tried to play a Songbird of Doom, they likewise did the same thing.
2. Banned the Crane Style feat chain from PFS. Similar to above, this is also an obvious solution that would quell the PFS GM's complaints about players using an option way earlier than it was intended to be taken. To be fair though, this is the equivalent of PFS GMs complaining about Shield Master being taken at 6th level by a Ranger, even though the original feat requires BAB +11, and plus it's not as encompassing a solution as above, because it still doesn't prevent things like Panther Style abuse.
3. Errata'd the Master of Many Styles archetype to still have to fulfill Monk Level/BAB requirements. This is not such an obvious solution, but it is perhaps the most surefire way to apply a fix universally (across more than PFS) without absolutely destroying the archetype's functionality.
But you know what they did before any of those very sensible things? They decided "Hey, let's apply this stupid restriction to the feat, and by doing so make the third part of the feat chain broken, the second part of the feat chain a pointless endeavor, and the first part of the feat chain the only good part! And instead of doing a simple PFS-only fix by banning stuff (where those were the only places complaints were being placed at), let's make it a universal fix so that players who don't play PFS can deal with the PFS issues too!"
I don't care if it was done out of a reactionary (yes, pun intended there) backlash from PFS GMs outraged over players playing the same abusive combination over and over again (almost like Dervish Dance Magi player #1863234), the point is that there were much simpler, much easier, and much more obvious choices to make besides the one they made, and they still made it for reasons unknown besides what's apparent to us (which is "PFS GMs wanted everyone to feel their pain").
Even if they did try to make things "right" with a follow-up errata (which, by the way, only served to fix the stuff that was broken before the original errata took place, Crane Style feat chain still sucks, and Master of Many Styles is a silly archetype now), it doesn't change the factor that there were still much better and more favorable options out there for them to take, well before this course of action was brought to the table. (Did I also mention this is like, my third or fourth Crane Wing errata rant? Because it is.)
There's also the matter of matching the reason for the nerf to the kind of nerfs being applied, and people do get frustrated over that sort of thing too.
They could have nerfed the +1 Luck to AC, and it'd still be decent. They could have nerfed the Critical Negation to be only a 25% chance, or a 50% chance, or just made it the 1/ever as they did, and it'd still be decent. They could have nerfed the price, making it a more expensive item, nad it'd still be decent. As long as it's "decent," the term that I used above, it's not "too good," the term that it fulfills currently, right? So then either of those nerfs could have been appropriate (in my opinion, the Critical Negation would've been nerfed, if only to better fulfill flavor purposes), and it would not have invalidated its usefulness as a valued and coveted item.
And having a disagreement with how they handle FAQ/Errata doesn't always mean "I don't want this nerf at all, waaah!" it can just as very easily mean "I don't like how this nerf was handled, it would've done better and still got its point across if it was done in X manner." And in both of the above cases, I fall under the latter category, even if I personally feel that a FAQ/Errata was never needed in the first place.
I would prefer more playtesting to be incorporated somehow. It seems a lot of the time new options arent thought through before release...
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if online SRDs & PDFs kept records of errata's and rules changes for everything and you could still see the old versions of everything, I'd care a lot less about this situation, but as it stands Paizo is basically enforcing it's own form of historical revisionism on it's product and I'm definitely not a fan of that.