Probably. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

Your faces are garbage, let's go!

No transaction gives either party the right to be NOT NICE.

The DumpShock Terms of Service only require that you play nicely here.

There are no exceptions for feeling you've bought a piece of garbage giving you the right to be NOT NICE.

There are no exceptions for feeling you've not bought a piece of garbage to be NOT NICE.

If you are being NOT NICE, you need to go somewhere else, but you can't be NOT NICE here.

Play nicely folks.

Yeah, there are a lot of negatives to parse, but you all know what I mean.

All right, thanks to the NDA I can't give specifics, but I have proofread more than a couple SR4.5 products. Sometimes, corrections I made didn't always make it into the final revision. Usually some form of correction did, but not always. I remember one in particular: I was mildly chastised for trying to be an editor when I'm only a proofreader, because I was trying to break up a particularly convoluted run-on sentence. I could not fix it as a proofreader, and so I was mildly annoyed to see it left unchanged in the final product. I've also seen stuff that needed an editor's touch not get altered.

Now, as for the writers: while I might be excessively snarky in my proofreader comments, that's part of my job. Overall, they're not a bad bunch, but IMO they suffer from a lack of editorial direction. Everyone is largely left to their own devices, and there's no plot oversight-- the "editors" are largely a bunch of glorified proofreaders. They check grammar and spelling, and that's about it. No actual fixes for bad structure, and no unifying vision for the line.

So, yeah, slamming on the writers when it's an editorial problem isn't a good idea. No writer puts out perfect work, it's up to the editor to polish it and make it shine.

Which is not a situation unique to "official" proofers. The same has happened to me, as a writer doing some proofing, more than once.

Word.

That... is not encouraging. It means the editors aren't doing their jobs at all.

If we dig through Catalyst's garbage, we might find discarded printouts of the new core rulebook.

In a nutshell, yes. Most are, actually. Many are even worth buying. CGL sailed some self-made rough waters and lost a lot of great writers, but not all new guys are bad. It just happens War! was written by the less-than-elite people at CGL under problematic circumstances with next to no editing, proofing, or discussion. Some authors clearly are much more communicative amongst the writers' pool, peer-reviewing their stuff. Some are not. I think it shows in the product.

Among the highlights of Hardy-era SR4 publications are Way of the Adept/Samurai, Safehouses, Elven Blood, The Land of Promise, the entire Season 4 of Missions, and the two novellas. Dirty Tricks, Spy Games, and Conspiracy Theories all have their flaws, but are decent splatbooks overall. Most published adventures (Horizon Serices, Artifacts series) and hook books (Jet Set, Twilight Horizon, Artifacts Unbound) can be used with some adaptation. The gearbooks are usually okay too, despite some power creep and rules hidden away in super awkward places; the para-series is at least amusing (though, even though she made great progress as an artist, Kat Hardy's illustrations in the first critters pdf are rather painful), and you can get some mileage out of most publications, even stinkers like Attitude, Clutch (where the lesser dragons actually all were fun to read and potentially useful; only stuff about the greats made my eyes bleed) and stormfront. Even 10 Mercs and EuroWars Antiques contain, objectively, more useful stuff than garbage, though the crap is very strong in these. None comes close to War! in terms of pure offensiveness.

Saying "CGL never produced worthwhile stuff after War!" is unfair. However, there are persistent problems that also should not be hidden, most notably editing quality (alternates between 'kinda okay' and 'horrible') and some authors' persistent problems with writing for Shadowrun, not some generic D20 urban magic system. Yes, Shadowrun comes with a trainload of baggage. Deal with it.


Is that a surprise? Though personally, I think that is more of a ressources question, and a question of how quality CGL wants theior product to be. Which is a decision made by Bills, not Hardy. Same with the release of Errata - they're probably not Hardy's call to make, they're Bills'. Hardy's problems are more a lack of organisational skill and a tendency to gloss over mistakes instead of facing them and then repeating them (compare Attitude, War! and stormfront).


It's a different kind of violence. Boyle wanted to make Shadowrun into what now is Eclipse Phase - upgrade the setting to Transmetropolitan/Ghost in the Shell standards and beyond. Taylor went with this, by and large, and scerewed up with several timeline issues (Deus is unknown - Deus is being taught in schools).

Hardy seems to try and take SR back to the feel of 2E. At least he does now. However, he presided over three of the four worst sourcebooks in (American) Shadowrun history, the other being the work of FanPro Germany, the Germany SB - worst in quality, worst in adherence to canon. He brought a bunch of writers onboard who have either no interest in the system's baggage (which is a millstone around writers' necks, I'm sure, but there are ways around that, like a wiki to look things up) or plain no interest in informing themselves, just in churning out many words for being paid. And he doesn't seem to be very good at leading people.


Some more than others, at least judging from the product. stormfront is a great case study in this, I think.


I wouldn't say so. Your stuff usually is at least mediocre (though I can't say I remember everything you wrote and probably came down on something; it happens). You're new and have difficulties with canon sometimes, but you never made up scalpels of jew mauling +3. Neither do you actively troll fans and accuse them of not doing enough to work around your mistakes and instead dare to complain about submarines traveling up a 120 ft waterfall. Look, at least with me, some bloopers by new authors will not send me into a frothing rage; I'll just call them out. Stuff that is either as offensive as the cute plot hooks in War!, the Fucking Mary-Sue Corps, or screws with immersion, suspense of disbelief and canon all in one like the Triump of Aztlan, on the other hand, has that potential.

Also, as a general note, I at least try to differentiate between author and their work in my reviews, if I write any. I even said something nice about the work of one of my least favourite authors, and came down on the guy I then thought was the best talent CGL had over zombie apocalypses and cheap oWoD flavors. I cannot say I always manage this, probably fail more often than not. But saying all CGL has done so far is crap is just unfair. They even managed to pleasantly surprise me and get me interested in a blatant cover-my-ass plot in one of their bad books, just because the new guy writing it seems to be a pretty decent writer.

Proofing a rulebook is a monstrously huge task, since by and large saying "provides a +2 bonus" when it's meant to say "provides a +4 bonus" isn't something that can be quickly fact-checked.

It's only 500 pages.

And we haven't even gotten to errors which are spellings of words which are correct spelling but the wrong word. Like Assessing skill instead of Assensing.

No, but there's over two dozen proofreaders out there. Just using our corrections isn't difficult, and the rest can be handled by editors.

Proofing a book is actually easy. We just check for grammar and spelling errors, which theoretically frees up an editor to catch the errors you're referring to. The fact that our corrections aren't being used means someone's not paying attention at the wheel.


That's still not encouraging. While I don't want to slam on Hardy, I do think the line needs more dedicated editors, with Hardy approving the final product. An assistant line dev, in other words, so Hardy can focus on promotion and other Shadowrun lines.

To be honest, I never pay attention to whose stuff I'm proofing, and I don't know if they give you our proofing comments. If so, try not to take the snark personally, it's my way of trying to push writers to do better. Still, I very much doubt you're the weakest writer (unless you're the one who writes in huge run-on sentences. Those take for-fricking-ever to untangle. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) ), you're definitely not the weakest I've seen.

Still, for a project like this, a good editor is more essential than a good writer. I don't think it's fair to slam on you when the error isn't in writing, but in editing. Past Shadowrun teams have had both (Mulvihill, for all his flaws, was a good editor, and the Shadowrun writing team at that time was legendary) and now you don't. Without that leadership provided by a good editor, even the best writing will sink in quality.

The line needs a publisher with an interest in quality product. If Pegasus can manage that after the disaster that was end-time FanPro, CGL could manage too. The problem is, I think, mostly ressources.


That goes without saying.

I have "fond" memories of a proofer who tried to correct any instance of a shadowtalker using slang or contractions. Because career criminals and other miscreants obviously would not do that. Crowdsourcing corrections and integrating them is more complex than it looks like, because the bottleneck is fact-checking all of them.

(Yes, it's better to have it done, of course. But it's not magic pixie dust.)

It's not a question of resources, it's a question of priorities. CGL has treated the Shadowrun RPG like the red-headed stepchild for a long time. If they decided to focus more on a quality game, I'm sure they could manage.

4 pages of thread and all I got out of it was that I still haven't bought Sim Dreams and Nightmares. I really need to beg the wife for money for it.

I've seen you say this multiple times but haven't the corps been the mary sues of the uiverse since 1e? Or are you talking about specific corps that are getting extra special attention?

He's not talking about "corps" as shorthand for "corporation," but "Corps" as in "the Marine Corps." They got a rather extensive overhaul/update in a recent e-book, and not everyone digs it.

I think it's a reference to the Free Marine Corps, actually (think that's the right name).

I love your work, CanRay.

Okay how is that different than the mary sue wildcats, paladins etc.There are plenty of super special secret soldier groups in the SR universe why is one more so much worse. I obviously missed this ebook, but somehow I doubt it goes further than the crap about paladins.

Amen! I'll second, third, and fourth that!

I don't know what this means. Can someone help me out with what it means to be a "Mary Sue", please and thanks?

Ditto. That the Ghost Decade starts out with the wrong date twists me up something fierce. I can post errata, but I don't think I can drop in whole re-written paragraphs without getting in trouble soemwhere along the line.

But, oh, how that one haunts me.