Proofreaders gets payment i BattleShop credits... after a while... eventually... hopefully...

Now for one of the more unwelcome Questions:
How many of the old guard that basically made up shadowrun to be what we know it to be today is still on board?
We know Jason is still there, Ancient History too. who else?
It seems to me as if most of the Freelancers have left. And Adam. And Jennifer. And i think someone else whom i forgot.

I left, but that's not recent news. Ghost Cartels was the last project I contributed to.

Yeah, figured it would be easier to ask who was LEFT instead of WHO LEFt this time around . .
Don't tell me there's only Bobby and Jason left of the old group? O.o

Playtesters in the same fashion.


Ha! When I hear "old guard" I think of guys like Weismann, Hume, Dowd et. al. Some of them are no longer with the living, much less any company producing SR books...

OK, then let's narrow it down a bit:
How many of the people from SR3 are still there?

Uh...not many. Of those, I couldn't tell you exactly which ones are "gone" and which ones are still around. Jason Hardy did some freelancing back then (editing, not sure about writing and too arsed to look), Lars Blumenstein and Tobias Wolter of course, and myself (although just barely, seeing as my contributions were fairly tail-end). Sort of blanking on anyone else, the freelancing pool's been...shrinking.

Been afraid of that answer . . Even if shadowrun is not dead/dieing, i'm afraid it might just not be the same ever again like this <.<

I'm a new freelancer at CGL, but having done fiction work in media tie-in (Transformers: Legends), I can tell you right now that unfortunately such a thing would be a losing proposition for the freelancers.

First, while we own the copyright on what we write, we do not own the copyright on SR specific terms and characters. For us to accept payment from anyone that is not an official license holder of the product is a legal nightmare. Think about how many people get sued these days for pirating and copyright infringement. While CGL may appreciate and encourage fan additions to the product, it's not the same for the freelancers. Some of us have signed contracts, all of us have signed NDAs (non-disclosure agreements), and basically we have an informal, but totally enforceable legal agreement with Catalyst to let them earn money off our work.

If we were to suddenly accept money to publish product without giving CGL their cut, we'd basically be cutting our own throats. The only way it would be a remotely acceptable risk is to officially resign from CGL and then post fan product without expectation of pay. Which none of us really wants to do.

The thought is appreciated. It's nice to hear that so many people love SR so much that they want it to keep going. But the legalities behind licensed IP are tricky and a dangerous minefield to walk through. I don't have much of a reputation yet, but I've been working too hard for what little I have of one to blow it all by making the mistake of accepting money from someone who cannot legally give me permission to publish original (but copyrighted) material.

If the fans really want to do donations to help the issues along, I suggest talking to Jason Hardy, who can then talk to CGL management, about setting up a fund to go to CGL for the sole purpose of paying freelancers. Kinda like when you donate to a college fund and can tell the board of directors how you want the money to be used. I don't know if CGL would accept the terms dictated by the fans, but it is the safest course, legally speaking, and is the least likely solution to cause further problems between the freelancers and the company.



Guys, please don't knock on Jennifer for being the short-term financial person. I don't know her well, but I saw the effects of her work. She did an amazing job with what limited resources she had. I'm sorry to see her go because she knew how to get things done. Being a database admin IRL, I understand the whole issue of ethics better than most and while I don't know what problem she encountered (and don't intend to ask), I applaud her decision to stand firm on her principals. Most people would complain about the problem, but give in anyway just to protect themselves.

Weeellll . . . lookie here . . guys, we have a new Freelancer *pokes it* O.o
Welcome, to dumpshock. Also, we are mostly big fans of Mrs Harding.

All that being said, now that I've caught up on the rest of the thread, I realize my post sounds a little preachy. I truly did not intend that. And if I've stepped on any toes in the process, I apologize.

Hey! That tickles!

Thankee for the welcome. Fair warning, though, I lurk more than post.

Well THAT's certainly nothing new for the Freelancers.
Well, Uncle Drake being the exception and an exceptional blabbermouth as well of course *snickers*
But it's what we love about him. That and his sense of humor and his weird outlook on stuff too ^^
Fair warning from me: Don't take us, and especially me, too serious.

Correct. We get to contribute something, however minute (at least in the case of my contributions, which are a meager 17,000 words or so over a period of a lot of years), to something we love. Shadowrun's been a big part of my life since it first appeared on the shelves lo these many years ago. I was thrilled just to see my name in print for all my playtesting and proofreading for Mike Mulvihill back in the Man & Machine days, I'm still proud of all the cleanup and work I did to make Cannon Companion a better book than I think it would have been otherwise...and the stuff I got to write for Target: Matrix was my first professionally published work. I still get the occasional email about Azziewatch, and that's been ten years or so since I wrote that.

So I can look back, as can any number of the freelancers here on this forum, and say with complete honesty, "I made Shadowrun a better game, and the fans are happy about it, and we're all better of because of it."

That doesn't change for an instant that it took a frelling long time to get paid for Target: Matrix. It doesn't change for an instant that I didn't get my signed copies of the contract for Running Wild back until well after the book had seen print and I'd received my author's copies. I'd like to be paid for my work on RW because I need to fix my wife's car and I owe her an anniversary dinner that was going to be paid for out of that check (she was busy having my son right before our last anniversary, and events conspired against us for a while, which is why I still owe her that dinner). Since we're coming up on our next anniversary, I'm going to owe her two dinners now.

All this, I guess, is just me being long-winded by way of saying you're right, we do trade some monetary gain for other things of value...but that doesn't mean we don't need to be paid.

Define "old guard" here. I'm still around, though I'm mostly silent these days. I started, as stated elsewhere, by playtesting and proofing Man & Machine. Does that count?

Demme. I always forget about Padraig.

It's easy to do. I didn't do that much in the scheme of things, not when you hold it up next to other people's contributions.

Welcome to Dumpshock, Catadmin. I look forward to your work (have we seen any yet?).

Heck, of course you count ya old fart! ^^
*looks at your signatures last line*
And another one to go . .

Don't read too much into that. I've had a substantial and reasonable discussion quite recently with Jason Hardy and, while I won't be writing anything for the game anytime soon, once everything shakes out, we've both left the door open to my possibly becoming involved with Shadowrun again in the future. So we'll see how it goes.

Aaah, okay, then that is something a bit different i think.
Well, good, at least some of the old guard still staying on board.
Hopefully, you all get what you deserve. And i mean money <.<;,

Here's what I don't get.

I understand this is an industry born out of mom & pop companies. I also realize that in the last decade, game companies have had to mature in order to compete with other media outlets (notably the MMO's and other video games). The products of these upgrades are awesome, but also costly -- books are pretty as fuck and well written, but cost $15-20 more.

So why are game companies run like this, with regards to their finances? Is it the nature of not having stockholders watching over them? Is it the whole understaffed thing? Is it based on how newspapers and magazines pay their freelancers? As someone who would like to write for a living someday, this.. this just boggles my mind. Then again, I've been dealing with a lot of managerial.. quirks lately, and I'm starting to think the world needs better business people out there.

Yea, I think the last two that I, well "admitted to" is the best way of saying it I guess, working on have yet to see PDF credits (just verified that I received credits for two of the four I've worked on). But I use them to get minis, T-shirts, and dice though, not the game PDF. Usually the credit arrives a week or more after the PDF is available and I've already picked it up.

Carl

All of those factors working together.

Few people who are creative enough to want to create and run a game company have run a company before. They don't have very deep pockets, so they typically don't hire people with the experience they don't have. Everything is more complex and both takes longer and costs more than they had planned for. Things that seemed like a good idea don't seem like such a good idea when they realize they need an accountant (that they don't have money for) to do the taxes.

Even when you have everything on the business side working you get things like the lead designer lying about how much progress he's made, which leads to a very expensive booth at Gencon with no product to sell.

It's not easy, particularity the first time you try to do it.

I'm sorry to say this (because I know what monsters these things become), but the freelancers need to unionize just to get at least two things changed in the industry.
1) Prompt payment of services - Contracts need an additional layer penalizing late payments, possibly dipping into additional royalty percentages.
2) Independent verification of sales - Writers don't get paid for unaccounted sales. I don't know how the current system is set up, but it seems silly to rely on the word of the guy that going to pay out of his pocket.

If you guys can get those things done without a union, all the better!

We're freelancers. Work-for-hire agreements. No royalties. Only flat fees.

It is worth noting that not every game company works the same way. Some issue advances, and some contracts are based on royalties. However, keep in mind that most gaming freelancers tend to follow properties that interest them rather than financial motives.

It's also worth pointing out that there are a lot more people who want to write gaming materials than there are opportunities to write. Even if you've got a proven CV.

Agree with AH. Also, unionizing freelancers in any industry...has been tried. Repeatedly.

The AFL-CIO would love to know of a way to pull it off, because they have zero penetration in settings with freelancers and other independent contractors. (Outside of the theater and screen/film acting and the associated professions, which takes a story in itself to explain how that happened)

The reality is that, yes, there's a glut of writers/artists. especially with RPGs.

It is not an exaggeration to say "there are plenty out there". There are.

Hence, unionization would generally fail.

I say this as someone supportive of the unions. The reality is that they will never penetrate the creative enterprises.

With the possible exceptions of the National Writers' Union (UAW 1981) and the Writers' Guild of America, probably among others.

As to compensation agreements, it's true that there are a bunch of types. I took a consulting fee for the game I wrote for Frito-Lay's advertising agency (I forget the name), CGL gives me payment per word, and my contracts with Atlas include an advance and a royalty. For future work, anything might happen (although I've never been paid in chickens), as long as all parties agree.

I'm probably one of the longest involved freelancers, and have been for some time. THanks for forgetting about me, AH.

I've never been real prolific in my actual writing, but I started with doing conventions and writing tournament game stuff at the tail end of SR2, started playtesting early in SR3's development, and joined the freelancing team shortly thereafter.

Obviously, I'm sticking with the game and CGL for as long as they'll have me. I love the game too much, and getting paid has always been a secondary concern. A distant second, at that. But I certainly understand those who do walk away, and even agree with them.

I think maybe I have battered wife syndrome

Bull

I didn't. Does that make you feel better?

Surprisingly, yes

<grin>

Why do I imagine these lines delivered by agent Friday of Dragnet...

Oh hell I'd love to discuss this more.

White Wolf shot itself in the foot with a bunch of bullsh*t during the ramp-up to nWOD. They told us it'd be cheaper, when it was more expensive than anything previously (by more than double at initial release. 30 for the blue book and 40 for the core vamp book = 70 bucks to play vampire. It cost 30 to buy the big green book a few months earlier). They said the two books were necessary to give us even *more* setting-specific material, but when you go through each of the core books, they all read the same as oWOD, just with the dice mechanics stripped (as well as any real setting development). They told us they'd be scaling back on the metaplot, instead they gave us an empty setting, save for some thematic elements, and a bunch of mechanics. They gave us hardcover splat books fresh out of the gate that cost 30 bucks or more, instead of the soft cover splats for 20 a pop. I have no problem doing legwork, but for 70 bucks I want a goddamn setting (Dark Heresy is an excellent example where you pay a premium for a setting. The system kind of is crappy, but lord above does the setting make up for it!), not just dice rules. They promised us a streamlined live-action experience, and instead we got essentially a stripped-down tabletop version of the game, where you had to carry a deck of cards around (!) to simulate dice rolls. Yeah, rock-paper-scissors sucked in the old MET games, but they at least didn't require props for mechanics. Oh, and the books were prohibitively expensive.

Much has changed about nWOD since it launched, but good lord what a horrid launch. I haven't bought a white wolf book in years, simply because they completely ceased to be interesting to me. They stopped generating ideas and plot hooks and started selling me mechanics. They nerfed werewolves to appease vampire players, and insisted that everything be crossover capable. Changeling was made into... something boring... I heard Mage was excellent but by the time it came out I had burned out on WW. Promethean made me laugh. WW isn't the company it was a few years ago.

Sadly, I can't think of much to make this an on-topic post. If it needs to get deleted for res-ing an old threadjack feel free to.

D&D 4th edition prevents me, flat out, from using my most powerful tool in my GM kit to create tension, stress, and a sense of urgency: Scarcity of resources.

Specifically, you're kewl powerz.

I wrote a fan adventure for 3/3.5 called "The Longest Night" about a party of 5th level characters investigating dire wolves in a town in the hills. Turns out, after tracking down a lot of false leads, the dire wolves actually were learning hunting tactics from werewolves. On the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year, the werewolf pack attacks the town in a night-long siege. The party isn't strong enough to take on the pack all at once, and anyway the pack doesn't attack that way, but harries and wears down the defenders and the townfolk throughout the night, using hit and fade tactics. The PCs have a choice then. Try to cover as much of the town as possible (they can't be everywhere though), or concentrate the townfolk to defend them easier and endure a massed attack that they probably can't defend against. Each spell, even the level 0 cantrips, became gold, and when to use each precious spell was of vital importance, because it was impossible to refresh your spells.

I cycled the adventure around and it got really, really good reviews among the gamers I know. It was tense, stressful, even reaching moments of terror. Simply getting as many innocent people to survive felt like an immense reward for the heroes. It remains one of my best written adventures of all time.

For giggles, we adapted and ran it with a new group in 4th ed. None of the tension or stress remained. Sure, your once a days popped and that was it, but you retained something like 80% of your effectiveness and nobody even threatened dropping during the siege. It was a disappointment.

Shadowrun I can only imagine would suffer for such a rules adaptation. It already has the potential to twink way too strongly (I'm beginning to ask "why bother?" with wireless entirely for example), and the removal of most of the limitations on a given character would be... frightening. Imagine if most spells for example didn't even cause any drain rolls at all?

I like D&D 4E for all it's flaws and quirks well enough, but I also tend to treat it more like an extended game of Warhammer QUest or Descent than a true roleplaying game. It's a tactical mini's game that we can roleplay with between combats to advance a greater storyline. Not much different than D&D ever was, it just has a different flavor, and it scratches that itch I still get that's leftover from my Warhammer Fantasy/40K days.

The thought of SR using that system, though, makes me skin crawl. Even worse than the thought of Cancer-Causing Shadowrun D20.

@Dixie: I can think of several ways to push that encounter to make it more difficult, but without knowing the specifics, I can't comment too in depth. And this is the wrong forums to do so anyways But keep in mind that Healing Surges only get you so far in 4E, and it's real easy to run out of those after just a couple encounters, and if you push the players through several of them, they'll be running on fumes, Encounter Powers or no. But D&D 4E generally doesn't seem designed for that kind of scenario. It's designed a bit more to let the PCs be Big Damn Heroes.

Bull

Please, use the receptacle provided for the proper sorting and warehousing of your hatred.

I expect you to issue yourself a warning, in the interests of evenhanded application of the TOS.





P.S. Posting in Orange, instead of anti-Orange, would have been a bit too much, right? *cough*

Yes I get paid in credits. I work both as a sourcebook proofreader and as a missions proofreader. The sad thing is that I heard about all the trouble via this thread and only bumps in the night from any of the other sources.

When I was thinking about this, I have to also say that as a proofreader I get paid pittance working for a gaming company compared with real world costs. It's a great way to start, but a few dollars is in no comparison to being paid a competitive 10 euros a page at 1560 characters a page, which I was paid for to work on any text.

James Wallis, in an interview on OgreCave about closing Hogshead said this:

"On the other hand I've been doing some freelance journalism recently, and that's reminded me that I can earn roughly ten times what I could in gaming for an equivalent amount of effort and words, and I will be working with professionals who are likely to edit my work properly, print it when they say they will, and pay on time.

Basically, if any company in the games industry is prepared to pay me a reasonable amount – 'reasonable' by the standards of the real world – then I'll happily design and write games for them. Otherwise I can't let it be any more than a hobby."

Unfortunately, gaming prices are going up because the gaming world has become smaller, the writers have matured (back when 500 dollars was a large amount, now you can barely afford spare parts to your wife's car with that), and overall lifestyle prices in the West have equally risen.

Pretending to be a moderator is grounds for a warning too

Consider us both warned. I'm sure Redjack is going to yell at me in the morning anyways.

Bull

What did you do now old Bull? ^^

When folks start with 'old guard' I think of the folks that did SR1 and the start of SR2. Chances are that if a RPG property survives (and prospers) across multiple decades, you'll see a lot of different folks working on a product. Very few stick with the property from beginning to end, some take breaks (either forced or voluntary). Saying that if freelancers leave, things won't be the same is of course right, but how many freelancers have left (and returned) in the last two decades?

<offtopic>
When I think of SR, I think of the cover art of SR1/2, the concept art for the Yamaha Rapier, the Ares Dragon, and the Eurocar Westwind 2000. I think of a Stuffer Shack™ foodfight. While SR3 was mechanically a lot better then the previous two incarnations, the presentation was already starting to go in a direction I wasn't fond of. SR4 was even worse, I didn't even get so far as to evaluate the mechanical aspects. The same thing happened with D&D 4E, although I have all the books, it didn't capture my imagination. Some folks don't care for things like artwork/layout, I do in my game books.
</offtopic>

If CGL is pulling the books due to 'negotiations' with freelancers, I'm curious why no BT books were pulled. IMHO it's:
1.) The SR freelancers pulled together and made a very compelling argument to CGL (pay us or stop selling, if not face legal action?).
2.) The BT freelancers aren't as cohesive a group (or not yet anyway).
3.) The BT freelancers do get payed on time (maybe BT is doing financially better?).

As for why you get these financial difficulties, folks who start RPG companies usually do so due to to the love for the game (as the freelancers do) and not for the money. Very few RPG owners can handle accounting, especially when your small operation gets large, hiring a good accountant is expensive because that's generally not someone who does it for the love of the game. If your lucky you get someone that knows what (s)he's doing and doesn't cost an arm and a leg, the problem is that often such qualified personnel don't stick around (look at the folks who recently left CGL).

I've heard rumors that Aaron would like to be paid in ponies someday.

Jason H.

If he has a wife and/or daughter, it's certainly understandable right? ^^

He is either a front man for the meat industry or has a fetish for "My Little Pony"

Judging by some of the posts by BT freelancers that have been deleted from numerous threads on those forums, I'd imagine this isn't so true. They're simply not posting on DS, and the place they are posting is removing or modifying a fair number of posts.

Thanks for the welcome. And no, you haven't seen any of my work for SR, though I hope to change that soon. I have, however, helped with editing on Eclipse Phase recently.

Nah, I just use "I've always wanted a pony" as a running gag (for me and my friends, anyway) for when some poor service worker asks me if there's anything else I want. Incidentally, as a result I do have a shocking number of ponies in various media, from small toys to artwork to an office chair reupholstered to look like a pony; it's hazard of comedy.

If the pony joke works so well for you, Aaron, you should try upgrading. "A winning lottery ticket would be nice."

Let me know if that works for you. @=)

He can't have that. It's my line.