09-17-2020, 02:48 PM | #11 | |
Join Date: Sep 2007
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Re: GURPS books / authors
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09-17-2020, 03:16 PM | #12 |
Doctor of GURPS Ballistics
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Lakeville, MN
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Re: GURPS books / authors
Fair. Iomega stock did put my sister through college, though: I recommended the ZIP drive to my dad casually my first year in grad school. "Wow, these things are amazing." Buy low, sell high, and second child goes through college. Woo hoo. ;-)
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09-17-2020, 03:43 PM | #13 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: GURPS books / authors
What GURPS calls a playtest is really more of a peer review. It's rare that your material actually gets tried out in game play; even with people who play once a week it's hard to fit a significant playtest into the time allowed. But playtesters are expected to ask all sorts of difficult questions.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
09-17-2020, 07:43 PM | #14 | |
Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: Saint Paul, MN
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Re: GURPS books / authors
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09-18-2020, 03:27 AM | #15 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: GURPS books / authors
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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09-18-2020, 06:33 AM | #16 | ||||||
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: GURPS books / authors
Late to the party because I've been struggling to catch up after having a computer die and then configuring a new one, but here's my $0.02 as the GURPS Line Editor. I'm splitting my reply in two because it's long. :)
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I've seen authors take two years to finish the first draft of a 21-page supplement . . . and I've written a 48-page supplement during a single night of insomnia and the day that followed (although I needed two more workdays to clean up the babbling). Quote:
On the slow end, final drafts have sat in queues for editing, then layout, and then art for a year or more at each step, and then been held back for sale until a specific event (e.g., a horror item at Halloween) or opening (e.g., the surprising success of a hot new film in the same genre). A four- or five-year wait isn't unknown; a longer wait isn't inconceivable. Quote:
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GURPS' reputation for being crunchy is on the gamers' side of the fence, not the creators' side. It's a 35-year-old system with a vast library spanning four editions. That means it has a supplement for almost every big thing and an optional rule for almost every small thing. Staying ahead of that when running or playing in a campaign can be challenging. But writers are usually focused on narrow topics, and so don't interact with most of the library most of the time. Quote:
Speaking as an editor, I'll be honest and say that templates and ability builds are two of my least-favorite things. Quote:
New (and sometimes, experienced!) writers grossly underestimate how many times they'll have to go through their entire manuscript to propagate a change resulting from a rethink, an editorial comment, or a playtest comment. Then how many times they'll have to read the whole thing from start to finish to make sure they caught and fixed all the inconsistencies. Even if you're just changing "+4" to "+5," or deleting one word in a section title, you have to go through all that. Some writers get fatigued and decide to leave this stuff to the editor . . . and that's another of my least-favorite things. I can't overemphasize how this can turn what should be a quick, easy edit into a multi-month slog that ends up putting your project on the dreaded "indefinite hold." Yeah, if your project gets stuck behind something like Ogre or the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game . . . well, it'll be waiting forever to get reviewed, into playtesting, edited, laid out, and on the market. SJ Games is a small, independent publisher with few staff, despite its age and reputation (and certain fatheads online who claim otherwise). This is the main way in which working on GURPS can go slower than working on other games: It is a true system, it does have a large library, and we do insist on internal consistency. So if you choose a project that we know will interact with concurrent projects, we're going to insist that you hold your horses and get with the authors of those other projects to make sure that your collective work is consistent.
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Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
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09-18-2020, 06:33 AM | #17 | |||||||
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: GURPS books / authors
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An outline can make or break a project. Writing well without an outline is absolutely possible, and can be a fast way to create a breezy supplement, but it's something that very few writers can do . . . and the ability to do it is unrelated to general skill as a writer. We're comparing symphony orchestra members working from sheet music to jazz men jamming at 3 a.m.: Both can be amazing artists, and each is engaging in a valid form of expression, but there's a reason why cities and large institutions fund symphony orchestras, not jazz clubs, even though the former are a lot more costly. Quote:
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In the sense that more than one staff member works on GURPS – mainly, Steven Marsh handling contracts and scheduling; Nikki Vrtis laying out manuscripts, indexing, and sometimes editing; and me reviewing outlines and drafts, coaching writers, checking rules, editing, and proofing – there is a "GURPS team." But in the sense of staff members who have read and understood every GURPS rule for decades, can spot rules or stats problems when reading at full speed, and can recall all the places where there are related ideas to be consistent with, refer to, or quote . . . well, there is no "GURPS team." There's me. That's it. Nobody else at SJ Games can do that even a little. So there's a serious "key person problem" that writers just have to live with. Quote:
I've talked about "consistency" several times. We absolutely insist that GURPS materials fit into the line, the library. That's an issue of voice and presentation as much as of rules. Working alongside me and the rest of the "GURPS team" is the only way to get that right, so we insist on inserting ourselves into the process at the query, outline, and first-draft level. Something that arrives already written won't fit in the way we need it to. Writers working on GURPS need to accept that they are hacks doing work for hire for somebody else. They aren't working on vanity projects. They have a line to toe. Yes!!! I hate to be a Microsoft shill, but: Buy a legal copy of Word. Ideally, buy the most recent version. Learn to use it. Specifically, learn to use what it calls "styles" – learn how to view them, how to keep Word from automatically applying or altering them, and how to use SJ Games' styles in that context. Many writers over the years have assumed they could submit a .txt file and expect SJ Games to format it. Many have tried submitting .rtf files or other funky file formats. A few have tried to cheat their way around Word by using various free emulators, or by writing in other word processors and exporting as .doc or .docx. Do not do this. Buy Word. Master Word. Then master using Word our way. Anything else is shooting yourself in the foot . . . with a Minigun. Quote:
A little-discussed step in our process is that after a writer submits their first draft, I review it in exhausting detail and send back comments with the expectation that the writer will submit a second (not final!) draft for use in the playtest. Thus, all "playtest drafts" have in a sense been cleaned up, meaning that playtesters get a rare glimpse at something close(r) to what SJ Games is expecting. If you write your first draft to this standard, you'll be ahead of the curve. Of course, learning what playtesters expect is learning what gamers expect. That's important. But I consider what I said in the previous paragraph to be even more important. Quote:
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In case any of our playtesters are reading: We never expect you to integrate our stuff into a game and literally test it in play. That said, though, we love it when people do. Both peer review and actual play are important to making a project great.
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Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
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09-18-2020, 06:45 AM | #18 |
Aluminated
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: East of the moon, west of the stars, close to buses and shopping
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Re: GURPS books / authors
And I do think there's a sliding scale here. A big book of rules likely has more than any group of players can reasonably get through in actual play over the playtest period, but when I've written adventures, the playtesters have largely actually played them, in whole or in part.
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09-18-2020, 06:52 AM | #19 | |
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: GURPS books / authors
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Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
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09-18-2020, 08:17 AM | #20 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: GURPS books / authors
Looking at this from the writer's side, on one hand, relatively few of the comments I get back from my editors (which usually means Kromm) are about stylistic issues, which I like to think means I've gained some sense of house style. But on the other, I've had more than one person say that I have a distinctive prose style in my GURPS writing (for good or bad!). So I think you can have your own voice even within the constraints of house style.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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