Do we know how much of the errata/typos being found now in SR5O will be in the actual 1st print run? When will the 2nd print run be? And lastly will the PDF be updated with errata as it's found and put into print?

Trying to decide if I should preorder or wait for a cleaner version.

First print run? Sadly, none of it; it was already at the printer as this round o' stuff began to surface.

Second print run? No idea; gotta sell out of the first run before we can do that. Depending on how quickly that happens, errata should be in there, but if it winds up happening too fast, it might not be until the third run. I don't see that happening, personally, but I've been wrong before.

The initial for-sale PDF probably won't have the fixes in them; I don't know that there's enough time. But the fixes are supposed to go in and the PDF updated as things progress. There have been a LOT of talks, some with me and some without, about this.

To judge by previous releases? The errata will be in Pegasus' German-language printings. Catalyst will happily ignore its existence until SR6, but print items in later splatbooks that only work if the errata are actually in play.

This is a personal bugaboo of mine, and I'm working really hard to correct this.

I don't mean to sound overly critical, but really?

One of the things that surfaced was a block of text that was outright removed from the game because it was a playtested possibility but was ultimately decided not to be used in favor of another option (which was also in the material).

I've been trying to give CGL some benefit of the doubt on stuff like this, but if these errors are showing up in the printed version then I am not going to buy anything they put out. None of it. I wrote letters to them about the issues in War! (including one to Topps) and it's starting to look like they haven't changed.

This is the CORE BOOK for a NEW EDITION. You can afford a few extra months of editing to make sure issues are fixed. And for almost free. All they had to do was not-print it while they put out the preview PDFs, and take feedback from us: ten thousand eyes eager to dissect, discuss, and critique.

Its not that easy. Printing books have tight schedule ( on part of the printer company), you get "slots". Miss the slot, good luck getting a new one in the next time. And CGL have to pay bills as well.

Sometimes even to Freelancers.

SYL

Thank you, and I sincerely wish you luck.

Well the sad fact is that there's little reason to buy the non errated book.

Also im pretty damm sure that the no errata for SR4 books isn't your fault.

Ditto.

Me too, Patrick

HougH!
Medicineman

Then playtest sooner, get the preview out sooner, hire more editors, get a later slot, or find another printer. Seriously, it's worth the investment.

If it sells out in the current form, someone may decide it isn't worth the investment.

"Selling out" is hardly a measure of success. If the print run is only 1000, doing that would be easy. Even if 50% of the fanbase is utterly disgusted and doesn't even attempt to buy a copy.

Then again...


_{Edit for more representative image}

I think in this day and age it would be better to released the pdf, and set up a print run for 3 months later, then you have 3 months to get errata fixed and you can still update the pdf after FLGS get their copies. Meanwhile people can be complaining about all the mistakes in the pdf

Hence why I referenced the previews.

Because those were PDFs, not intended to be permanent, and freely available to everyone.

And chock full of errors that are now going to be printed.

Though that is a very good point, it can be frustrating for those who do NOT want the book in PDF form and having to wait months on end for the hardcopy.

It was what put me off SR4 a few times as the delay between PDF and print version here in the UK was atrocious sometimes. Especially as it didn't always seem like there had been any fixing anyway.

Eventually I did just make the jump to PDF, but I do still like a proper book as printing off pages just is not the same.

Again why I mentioned the preview PDFs...

I just have trouble imagining who would buy the book despite the glaring errors. If not for the fact that the second run of printing won't happen until the first run is sold out, I can't picture people buying a book they know is badly flawed instead of just waiting for the fixed version.

I personally won't be buying the book in anything other than an updatable PDF format until it's actually been fixed sufficiently to justify the purchase. I may not even bother switching over to SR5 for a number of months, or maybe even a year or two, if at all, unless I see measureable improvements in the quality of the work. I can always keep playing SR4 with my group, and even bring in new ideas from SR5 as house rules.

~Umi

Sadly the masses don't have any idea about errors.

And then I remember the second printing with errata of SR4.

Oh.

Right.

Your Friendly Local Gaming Store will be the ones who get burned, if anyone, as they'll have hard copies of SR5 sitting around... and if the general populace notices the errors before buying, those copies are just going to gather dust until they go on ultra-clearance someday or some poor schmuck who doesn't know better buys them.

Neither is very convincing towards getting people to stock the game.

Thanks for the info. Makes the PDF version seem a better choice. Shame that the errors already found are not going to make it into the print run.

Looks like I'll have to use white out and post it notes for use at the table.

There's been a few RPG companies now that have put out low-cost or free 'beta' versions of their rules well before the offical finalized print run.

I have to imagine this results in a LOT more polish for the books involved.


-k

I just want to tell you both good luck. We're all counting on you

Patrick's busting his hump to get a document compiled and okayed by TPTB. Literally from the day we breathed a (very brief) sigh of relief and went "Whew, it's done!" and a final draft was sent off to the printers, we started working on getting this errata together.

I know it's not in the same ballpark as, well, not needing the errata in the first place -- but if nothing else, please believe me when I say that we, the writers, aren't taking the need for errata lightly. We want the end product to be awesome, not just playable, and guys like Patrick are how it's gonna get there.

Sadly this does nothing to help the suckers who end up buying the first printing books.

This is simply untrue. I have 4 different PDFs of SR4, and 3 different DPFs of SR4A, and each never version contains errata from the previous version.

Buy it when it's first released, and you get a link to each new version released.

The corebook is almost unique in this regard, most other SR4 books didn'¨t get any errata at all, even when one existed, it just wasn't released.

And once again this doesn't help those poor inviduals who end up buying the first printing of the physical book,

And I have 3 PDF editions of Arsenal. The third has all the errata items reverted to their original, incorrect first printing state. Most of the books have never seen any sort of errata. Trusting that the process will work based on a single outlier data point hardly seems prudent.

So what it boils down to is: "Will I buy a copy of the core rules I cannot actually play with just to get a possibly-already-used-by-someone-browsing-the-book-in-store code for a HammerLI 620 in Shadowrun Online?"


...damn my completionism!

Frag that noise. The number of typos Critias and the rest of us caught before the book went to print far outnumber the ones we missed. True, there's some cleanup to do, but in three and a half decades of gaming I've almost never seen a game book without a single typo in it.

TYPOS . . are not that big of a Problem . .
Dorfs losing Thermo and Trolls paying 50% more for Cyber.
Things like those? That is a Problem.

Quoted for Truth.
Those aren't typos, those are rules changes that when pointed out those of you who were working on the document said, "Wait, I thought we fixed that."
Because the first one was a layout issue (text got linewrapped into a hidden location) and the second was a playtest idea that was scrapped (and should have been removed entirely before you even hit typo-proofing).

It's the catch-22 of proofing though sometimes. Did something similar for college English.

If you know the product you are looking over, you know in your mind what it is supposed to say and sometimes when your trawling through tons of words it sees the overall picture but misses a detail inbetween the ends. Sort of an expanded version of when you see a word that is mispleled and your brain automatically fixes it so long as it can see the over word/intent and you might not even notice. ( A good example is the misspelled word in this sentence)

On the flip side, if you have someone new to the product proofing to get around the first type of error they can spot the obvious errors but miss items relevant to the setting, imagine something like the aforementioned thermo vision because the new guy might not know the runts even had it in the first place.

I do wonder though when some of the persons have mentioned here how they did spot items but because they were only proofer and editor has final control the error still went through. If I am paying someone to proof for me and I do not listen to what they turn in, why did I ask them to proof in the first place? But again it is not always so easy. It probably depended on how many final editor types were on hand and projects. It is a company like anywhere else and the workload is always large I would imagine.

It's a furniture polish and a dessert topping.

Sometimes a typo changes the meaning of a sentence, sometimes drastically. When you have a rule book, an error can change a rule, but that doesn't make it not an error.

Note to self: Do NOT ask for the dessert over at Aaron's place.

If you caught that many, then I shudder to think how bad the pre-printing drafts must have been before that!

Judging from the typos and major rules issues we've pointed out here in the previews alone...

I need to go watch that movie again. It always makes me smile, and I could use that right about now.

I support this! I have long since co-opted a phrase from that movie to inject silliness into random conversations when people lose their train of thought. "... a hat or a brooch or a pterodactyl?" Sadly it's come to the point that my friends will cut me off and say, "No, not a hat, brooch, or pterodactyl. It was something else." Once in a while, much like a broken clock, it is a hat, brooch, or pterodactyl. On those days, I'm glad I stopped sniffing glue.

More on topic: This might come across as heresy to some, but there are some of us that simply use the rules as written; warts and all. Errata is a benefit, but not required. If something needs to be houseruled because we think it's a stupid rule or it doesn't make sense, we houserule the problem passage/item and move on. My table will discuss things to reach a consensus or have the GM make a ruling if consensus can't be reached. No, things aren't always that simple, but we generally believe in the KISS principle when it comes to these things.

Some of us remember our 5c guard gods fondly (and bought pantheons of them). I tell you, the look on the GM's face is priceless when you whip 'em out in an emergency. (You have what?!?) Especially if the gods in question have been on every version/copy of your character sheet and they've okay'd it every time. Now *that* was a game breaking typo. (Uh, doesn't the book say dogs? I just thought you really liked dogs and mythology. Oh. No, apparently not. It does say gods. )

This is not to dismiss the very valid concern that errata is important in some cases. I generally prefer errata, when available/necessary. I just don't think it's the end of the gaming world when it's not.

Now I feel the need to chase children off my non-existent lawn and complain about hills and snow.

-Temperance

I still need a silver-topped cane myself.
(And a lawn...)

You kids, get off my LAN!

To be fair, this reflex should have been drilled into everyone by 4th.



I have to agree with this, but at the same time..... well, a certain way of doing things was set up in the last edition and never really changed. Hoping anything different just because there's a 5 slapped on it instead of banking on faith I ran out of.

In short, Thank god for patrick goodman.

I'd kind of hoped that CGL had changed after the snafu that was War!.
But they haven't.
And they'll pay the price in the end.

The D&D 4 PLayers Handbook has a 27 Page Errata PDF. The DMG is Errata is 7 pages long. For 540 pages of material between two books. Which is just a little more than the SR5 book clocks in at. And WotC has a staff of full time editors and a hell of a lot more money to throw around for this sort of thing.

We did pretty damn good with a much smaller team and much lower budget.

Too true.

And thanks

Well all in all this thread convinced me to get both the preorder and PDF.

I know that the team has taken a lot of criticism on the forums and to Bull, Critas, Patrick and the rest - thank you for all your hard work.

Im really looking forward to upgrading from SR3 to 5 in the coming months.

At least there is an errata published, so...

Yes, and the D&D4e errata for both books took a couple of years to compile. This looks like it might happen shortly* after the physical release for SR5. Okay, it's not perfect, I grant. But SR5 is heading in a direction that is better than SR4 already. (At least on that front.)

* For various values of short.

-Temperance

YSMV (Your Shortly May Vary)

I will only believe it when I see Errata: All Errata on the SR4 Website is at least 3 years old and came out even before War. Let's just face it, they were probably all released back when Synner was Line Developer. Hell some Books did not get an errata published at all (Augmentation, Runner's Companion). So I say even if the writers compile an errata, the only one who will profit form it, will be the German Players because they will get the errata in the first German Printing. In the US they will include it in the Second Printing and let you buy the book again.

cya
Tycho