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Old 08-06-2018, 07:52 AM   #81
Kromm
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Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard View Post

I disagree with your final assertion, at least as far as maintaining consistent style is concerned.
I'm with you. Anthologies are fun to read but hell to edit owing to differences in voice, style, and competence from writer to writer. Anthologies for games are even tougher to edit due to differences in the comprehension and – more important – interpretation of the rules.

I remember the sheer amount of energy we spent developing guidelines for the GURPS Who's Who volumes, so that all the entries would in theory use the same standards and interpretations. Despite that, characters were all over the map in terms of both level of detail and the mapping of real-life competence to game stats. Banging that into shape was a Herculean task – and even so, I can't "unsee" the differences in outlook when I revisit those books.

Collections of monsters, traps, and spells are especially troublesome, as each entry reflects the gaming habits of the contributor. People whose idea of "normal" is 1,000-point characters don't see things the same way as those who run zero-to-hero campaigns. Gamers who consider character death routine don't see things the same way as those who fudge everything to allow heroes long lives. And then there are all the specialized biases around subjects such as "Should PC wizards be squishy background support or major crowd-control in combat?", "Should dragons be party-killers or a source of teeth for necklaces?", and "Which is the real danger in a dungeon: monsters or traps?"

I'm not saying I'd never entertain anthologies for GURPS Dungeon Fantasy and the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game, but there's a reason why those games' libraries feature just one or two authors per volume.
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Old 08-09-2018, 01:29 AM   #82
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I don't want to seem like I'm dogpiling here, but I also have experience editing a multi-author work. I edited Catalyst Game Labs's Technical Readout: 3085 Supplemental, and it was frankly brutal. Not only was it over a dozen different authors, at least one is not a native English speaker. While part of the conceit of BattleTech's Technical Readouts is that they are meant to reflect different in-universe viewpoints, there still had to be a consistent tone throughout - as if, again in-universe, they had been collected and edited by a single person.

While I spent the most difficulty converting the native German speaker's entry into more-natural American English, every page needed a substantial amount of work. When you have a single author, you quickly get a grasp of their particular style and idiosyncrasies, which speeds up the editing process. You can more-easily find their errors and shift their voice, if need be. With a dozen, I had to keep going back over everything to make sure the tone matched from one page to the next.

And that's before authors break with the template and Style Guide entirely, but their contributions were too good to just throw out...
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Old 08-09-2018, 07:24 AM   #83
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And that's before authors break with the template and Style Guide entirely, but their contributions were too good to just throw out...
Yep.

A lot of would-be writers seem to think: "Gak! It's a 60-page formatting guide with tens of thousand of words of rules! And that's just the download – it doesn't even include the dozens of web pages on style! Plus the software . . . I don't use that word processor! Screw it, I'm just going to write and let the editor take care of it."

Writing is work; writing the way a publisher wants you to write is hard work. You can be the world's best writer in terms of ideas, research, organization, and grammar . . . but that's only 50% of the picture. If you plan to write for pay, you have to learn your publisher's style, formatting, and preferred software and settings. The first step to failure as a writer is to believe that stuff is the editor's problem, not yours.

Which is why it's hell to compile contributions from many casual writers who don't think it's worth absorbing thousands of words of guidelines just to write an 800-word article.

Anybody who thinks SJ Games' rules are strict should try writing for a prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal.
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Old 08-10-2018, 04:30 AM   #84
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The other thing is that if my independent RPG project fails to sell, I just have a little bit less mad money, but if my gaming company's product line fails to sell, I am unemployed. So companies have to think harder about prices and markets than freelancers do, often while paying rates which mean that most of their writers are deliberately ignoring economic considerations to contribute to the hobby or be part of the RPG industry. That is going to create tension!
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Old 08-10-2018, 07:12 AM   #85
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Being a long time RPG player, I have seen that almost all the periodicals have gone away. Which is too bad, because they were to me, very value added. Some games like Traveller the New Era and MegaTraveller got a few more years of quality support because of periodicals.

However, GURPS needs to make money, and if drivethru and POD provide that profit margin, so be it.

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Old 08-15-2018, 03:07 PM   #86
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It was the Daily Illuminator for July 11th. There were two that day by a hiccup.

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/archive/July_11_2018
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Old 08-17-2018, 11:59 AM   #87
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It was the Daily Illuminator for July 11th. There were two that day by a hiccup.

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/archive/July_11_2018
Thanks! I heard about it through unrelated forum threads and could not find SJG's official take either.
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Old 08-18-2018, 03:08 PM   #88
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I agree with Andrew on this one: I just had cause to edit eight submissions from six or seven different backers for characters, and it was very challenging. Each makes different mistakes, has different assumptions about what's fun, and (at least in the DFRPG case) brings along different levels of "oh, you mean that's NOT how you do this?" when it comes to point accounting, trading points for disads or whatever. It's VERY challenging and time consuming.
.
While I was proofreading (uncredited) your character sheets I was amazed that people were actually buying main gauche over knife.

Was a surprise that anyone thought it was worthwhile - so much that I went back and read the rules.
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Old 09-01-2018, 08:39 PM   #89
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Originally Posted by Kromm View Post
But to quote the linked Daily Illuminator:
Even we don't have all the articles in a handy, indexed form. We also don't have the staff resources to throw at updating the stats and formatting.
Is there anything readers and subscribers could do to help generating an index to Volume 2? I'm guessing not, maybe it doesn't hurt to ask. I have a spreadsheet list of (probably nearly) every article/url that was freely available at some point, with some words about each.
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Old 09-02-2018, 01:15 AM   #90
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This may have been mentioned and I simply didn't see it, but rather than a total shutdown of Pyramid, wouldn't going to quarterly releases be better? You'd maintain the inroads for new talent there. And when things improve l, it'll be easy to ramp up to bi-monthly issues, and then hopefully, releasing monthly issues again.

Dropping the rigid themes would likely be necessary. I'd personally like to see such quarterly issues, that are large enough for POD. Pack an adventure in every issue should help with that, and also address the "GURPS has no adventures" meme.
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