Froze_man's page

Regardless of how long it takes to get a FAQ done, whether three days or three months*, we are never ignoring FAQ issues. I spend time each week looking at the FAQ queue and prioritizing which questions we should get to sooner rather than later. Except in weeks where we're off at GenCon. And weeks where I'm off on vacation. And weeks where most of the design team is away (such as me catching up on email and other work after being away for 10 days, or Jason getting ready to leave for DragonCon).

ShadowcatX wrote:

Would it be possible to get you all to post a quick forum message (or edit in the post with the clicks like you've done other posts here) in the threads that you (plural you) are looking at? It would also let us know when we no longer need to bump threads in an effort to get more FAQ clicks.

All flagged threads are being looked at. No threads need to be bumped. Once they have clicks, they stay in the queue until they are answered or cleared.

Everybody needs to understand (or at least accept) that if there's a week where we don't answer an FAQs, there is a good reason for that, and the reason is almost always the word "deadline." Like "the deadline for sending this reprint to the printer is this week, or we won't have it in stores in time for the holidays." Or "the deadline for finishing these scenarios is this week, or we won't have them at GenCon." Or "the deadline to get the firsts drafts of the Advanced Class Guide classes to the freelancers is this week, or we'll be cutting into the time period they're supposed to be designing support material for those classes." Or even, "the deadline to get this to the editors is Friday, because if it slips a week the editors are scheduled to work on four other projects that week and they're already at capacity."

And if we finish those deadline issues early, or have a week where there are no urgent deadlines, then we (the design team) can see about getting some FAQs answered. Nobody wants all of those FAQs...

Thanks for the info, I would love to see this post (or a reworded version of it) stickied somewhere, maybe at the top of the Rules Question forum. Having a clear "We aren't ignoring your questions: How the FAQ process works." post might help clear out some of the frustration before people start bumping threads and complaining.

I've run a couple campaigns where I've used DMPCs, they can be really helpful as a gm, especially for those circumstances where you want to point out things that the characters should clearly know, but that the players have clearly forgotten. They're also really handy for those times where you want to say "Really?!? That's your plan?!? Are you out of your bloody minds?". In both cases it comes across as being a little more natural coming out in character from an NPC, and a little less ham handed.

On the other hand I've seen the flip side, playing in a 4E game where the GM was running a DMPC that was a high-end epic tier character (fully stated out) using his epic bluff to convince us he was a slightly bumbling henchman... To make matters worse the GM's idea of hints were things like having the real character sheet on the table amongst his notes where we could see it... (after he said that I started using a screen in my games for a while...) Needless to say I can understand why some people would be very much against the idea.