Dream job. Hell and gone from all family and friends. Can only get into the industry if you’ve been in the industry already.

Fate, why must you mock me so?

I know that WotC employs proofreaders. I also know that scheduling demands, time crunches and industry limitations allow for a few errors to slip through. They do far better than most other technical publishers in terms of grammar and typo proofing, IMO; where they have some stuff slip through is in the gaming mechanics, and that stuff is very, very difficult to catch. If you’re a fresh set of eyes, you’re not intrinsically familiar with the nuances of whatever alternate rule or build or whatever is going on. If you’re not a fresh set of eyes, you have the background you need to know what’s going on … but you’ve probably read over the stuff so often that it makes your eyes blurry.

It’s not surprising that once a product gets released, thousands of rabid fans catch mechanical errors that a staff of 5 or 6 did not catch. It’s simply a numbers game.

In all seriousness, I almost feel guilty taking such an obvious pot shot at WotC, but I can’t say they haven’t deserved it. The editing on all WotC publications, from games systems to supplements and even in novels, has just been so notoriously, comically bad for so many years that my friends and I have seriously come to doubt that WotC even employs editors. So many of the mistakes they leave in their work regularly could have been caught by even the simplest of proofreading jobs, and one could (and should) demand more than just a basic proofreading for books devoted to rules text.

Ah well. I hope they get someone good. They need a good editor.