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I was going to post this as a comment to NewbieDM's blog on this subject (newbiedm.com/2010/05/05/errata-more-erra...), but it turned into its own blog entry.

First of all, thanks to the designers for the regular updates. It's nice to play a game with such great support.

Second of all, a rant.

By and large, if you're reasonable, and you play with reasonable people, the errata don't matter a whit. I'd estimate that a good 90% of them consist of clarifications to things that no reasonable person was misunderstanding anyway. I don't need the errata to tell me that I can push a target up or down an incline - yet I read a comment (which I hope wasn't serious) that wondered if the wording of that erratum meant that targets couldn't be pushed off ledges!

There are several breeds of players that

I just ran through a skill challenge in a play-by-post game I'm DMing. I picked the primary skills with consideration as to what would make sense to the challenge and with any eye toward its simplicity (of design, not of the PCs accomplishing the challenge), rather than what skills the PCs were good at. I picked a Complexity of 3, which I thought reflected the lowercase-c-complexity of the actual situation, i.e. convincing three ghosts that they are ghosts and need to pass back through a shadow crossing into the Shadowfell. I used moderate DCs for their level. I discouraged the use of Take 10 and Aid Another for what I think were valid reasons, and imposed another -2 penalty on all checks due to another event taking place. They went ahead and used skills they weren't trained in.

And they

@Level30yinzer mentioned on Twitter that her PCs regularly blow past even the Hard DCs she puts in front of them. That got me thinking.

I have the same situation with my PCs. I have actually made a point of not scouring their character sheets for their weak and strong skills but for just run-of-the-mill skill checks I think there's a good chance their bonuses were already above the DCs. Part of how I deal with this as a DM is simply not to mind it. They built their characters well, made choices on which races to take, and which skills to train, and so I'm happy for them to be good at what they're good at and for me to focus on just narrating how they handily accomplish what they put their efforts toward.

Still, at some point I might want there to be an actual chance that my PCs will fail

I attended the DMG2-themed World Wide D&D Game Day today, at Gary's Game's in Seattle, Washington. A good time was had by all, though I had to leave early and didn't get to play in the second encounter.

The colloborative nature of the games was a blast. As the day was also International Talk Like a Pirate Day, the group I was in decided to give our adventure a bit of a pirate theme, with a piratical band of duergar pressing the young men of seaside villages into service and dark sacrifices - while an insane cleric of Tharzidun pulled the real strings.

Both groups decided that they wanted a "5-star, extra spicy" level of challenge, so the groups used a 2000 XP budget for each of the two encounters. That turned out to be more than enough for both groups. The group that faced our adventure was

The latest incarnation of the classic SF RPG Traveller contains an interesting concept that I think can apply to D&D: Group backgrounds.

Character generation in Traveller is eminently random, and is almost a game in and of itself. Characters are built up from early adulthood, through a career (or several careers), which can involve various ups and downs, connections, and bereavements, most of which lead to the character gaining skills. At the end of character generation (assuming the character survived....) more than one player might have a character wildly different than the one he or she expected, and somewhat less than ideally suited to the referee's plan for the game at hand. This is where the group background helps.

Based on the game he or she has in mind, the referee chooses a skill