we all knew being a Holy Man was dangerous

Hey guys! I’ve decided to bump my monday Mazes and Monsters retro-clone because I am having so much fun liveblogging the D&D starter set. Mazes and Monsters will return next Monday!

The cleric path through Starter Essentials set has to take a confusing detour that all of the other classes avoid: the winding sideroad of Weapon and Implement Dependency.

“You should write down two different attack modifiers: one if you’re attacking with a weapon, and one if you’re channeling power through the holy symbol you carry (which is called an implement). Your weapon attack bonus is your Wisdom modifier +2. Your implement attack bonus is the same as your Wisdom modifier.”

OK, so with my implement, I get a +4 bonus, and with my mace, I get +6, right? Not according to the graphic showing the cleric’s character sheet. According to the fake-handwriting font, the cleric has a sword all of a sudden, and it has a +8 bonus.

This is probably a cut-and-paste error: the fighter has a +8 sword stat-block. The cleric should have a +6 mace. I’d complain about this mistake confusing the kids, but honestly, I don’t think it’ll do that much harm. This is a SOLO GAME. You can PLAY WHATEVER CLASS YOU WANT. Who’s ever going to play the cleric?

There’s also the possibility that this is not a printing mistake at all: maybe this is secretly a used copy of the Starter Set. Maybe some jerk kid wrote in these crazy erroneous numbers in my copy of the book. If so, I hope the kid drew a sweet character portrait somewhere in the book. Other people’s character portraits are hilarious.

More Red Box thoughts…

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One Response to “we all knew being a Holy Man was dangerous”

  1. Rev. Lazaro says:

    Jeebus….I’m starting to see why they already scheduled the next errata in October.

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