Bull didn't write it...and I like to think that if he had proofed that section, we would have been spared spiritual barriers and Dollars. Say what you want about him, I can't imagine him slipping up on Dollars vs. Nuyen

Just so you can Understand us Germans
Our Nazi Past is as disturbing to Us as 9-11 is to You.
Imagine how You would feel if someone wrote a similar "Run" in the Twin Towers (killing the Spirits of Firefighters and Office Workers that died there, etc.....)

with a final Dance concerning this Topic
(because I really don't want to talk about it anymore)
Medicineman

The start of the thread was supposed to be positive.

Well, anyways, I stand with Bull on that one.

ok that plot hook sucks and is of bad taste, but doesn't deserve more than ignoring it. I mean, it's not like writin a full Werewolf book about Nazi's and the Umbra and... No?


Those subjects are touchy. But honestly, I can't stand how much hate backfires with this.

I mean, why not just ignoring? Why? Especially in these troubles days when you can get murdered for making parodies of Allah? I know the scale has nothing to do between the two, but this philosophy works for both: "Common, it's not worth hate."

(I hope this won't be misunderstood it's just supposed to be a call for peace)

That is of course a possibility. But then again Jason Hardy was responsible for WAR! and is responsible for SR5. If you a really want the answer for "what happened to dumpshock" you should not ignore one of the many reasons. It´s not about errata for everyone.

SYL

I second the call for peace. I value the opinions displayed, but there's no fixing that book now anyway. I dislike it, personally (some parts more, some parts less), but that's not the point of this thread.

Sadly, yes.

Shall we get on with the original topic? Please? Because I really am interested in that.

I used to come here mostly for ideas. Ideas on how to tweak my game, ideas on different uses of gear. I come out here to learn new tricks and to get notified on the holes in the system to be avoided.
It seems to me that some freelancers did so, too. Because as I remember it, the splash grenade packed with something slippery that finally made it into stats in "Spy Games" originated here, and some time before that book (or am I wrong?).

I think that this forum is the most knowledgeable think tank on Shadowrun, but has a tendency to be impolite and to hold onto grudges.
Lately, Dumpshock seems to be stuck, though. Not many original ideas on how to play the new edition (or even the recent old one), just a lot of "Yeah, fifth edition is bad anyway." That's sad, because this place used to be awesome.

That's how I feel about it. Granted, I don't read every thread and mostly pick to my own interests. But still.

>Edit<

Forget my question. The topic's come back on track now apparently, and I don't want to derail it again.

Because somebody was wrong on the internet.

I agree with Bull insofar as that section has become a symbol for every grudge people harbor about the product line -- but that's because the section really is spectacularly bad, even without any undead Jews. In fact, those undead Jews only are a problem because it was written without regard to how "ghosts" work in SR.

So I'm fine with not mentioning the War, but don't tell me it was just overhyped...

I'm going to say this as calmly and politely as I can.

There is no perspective in which that part of War! having been published as written is excusable. A writer produced it, editors (presumably) read it, it was approved for publication. It is a (per Bull's statement) throwaway adventure hook that is literally illegal to publish in Germany, SR's main overseas fanbase. If it didn't matter, who could even defend it being published as a good idea?

This is why a few people here don't have much goodwill for giving the flaws of new publications passes. Because there have been glaring flaws, which have been defended as not a big deal, for years.

Edit : Improved civility, this topic hits a nerve with me.

I'm not knocking ya or nothin, but your opinion is exactly one of the reasons I stopped buying anything that was more "plot" based for SR. Year of the Comet was... Well, I wasn't a fan, I'll tell ya. I think I gave my copy to a younger guy who was getting into SR about the time I was burning out. Not sure. But, yeah, I jsut got increasingly disenfranchised with the way the setting was going. And it kept going that way, so I just said "frag it" and pauled things in the late 50s, early 60s, ignored most of the events after-that.

So at best, I play in a divergent SR universe from the canon, and I'm happy with that. Shadowrun isn't about the epic battles of household names, but about unknown, unseen criminals who are either remember in obituaries, or retire to some quiet place and live out their days in relative comfort. It's my opinion that nothing the runners do should ever seriously alter the setting to the point that regular people would know.

Not necessarily defending Bull (or anyone else involved) there but I'm hard pressed to find any German law that would have made that fiction "illegal to publish". Yes, we're pretty sensitive - if not over sensitive - to the underlying subject and we do have a lot of laws that revolve around that particular aspect of the past ... but none that would have prohibited the (1 to 1 translated) publication of said plot hook except for "good taste" and "avoiding economical suicide" on that (and future) product(s) of the franchise.

Nonetheless, ...



... if it really had been that unimportant they certainly could have spared themselves the trouble.

Now that is a part which has really gotten disconnected from reality: German law restricts certain kinds of speech deemed harmful to society, but a couple of paragraphs with a possibly distasteful approach to the Holocaust don't come close to meeting the banhammer.
I guess the idea stems from the fact that German law and "youth protection" is famously trigger-happy when it comes to PC games, but that does not extend to other media.

To put things somewhat into perspective: The fucking Turner Diaries are legal here. They are on the list of media considered "socio-ethically disorienting" for the youth, which brings extra hoops even for adults, but still very much "legal to publish". Udo Walendy also initially made that list for declaring everybody but Hitler started WWII, but successfully sued to get off.

I always wondered if part of where the plot came from was due to the divergence of ED from SR.

While SR retains their dragons and IE, they have to tread a lot more carefully about any other crossovers, so as to not overly step on another company's IP.

So while they continued to use some older Age artifacts somebody probably lifted a page from a fairly new show at the time in the form of Warehouse 13, to where artefact like devices were being spawned in this age.

Now they could have bizarre items without being tied to ED and handwave it through the low ebb in mana.

The premise is interesting, even if the application should have been handled better.

Honestly, I'm pretty sure it was probably contributed by someone with Bull's attitude, who didn't think it was a problem and just wanted to toss in a traditional RPG dungeon crawl hook as a sidebar without ever considering the implications.

Same guy who threw in poisoning gypsy wells into war! as well i think?

For what it's worth, I take great comfort in my abilities as a writer and/or designer when my work doesn't garner any comment on Dumpshock. =i)

I bought every 4th edition PDF but skipped from 3rd to 4th and never played it till I started a character on an online game a few weeks ago. I double checked, and indeed I own War... I've been slowly reading those 4th PDFs because I'm in that online game...but I guess I'll be skipping War since there seems so much hate generated by it.

We've moved apart but I personally know Frank Chadwick who designed a lot of those old SPI games, Command Decision, Space:1889 etc and is about to have his second novel. Plenty of people don't like the way he designed things . But I got to tell you, I have nevr seen him phased by someone's criticism about anything he's published. If the critism is valid and there's a work around he incorporates it into his next game. If you take everything personally being a game developer isn't the job for you.

Having said that. I wish people would state why they think something is broken without resorting to saying thing like 'it's stupid', 'it's a piece of turd', etc. You can get your point across without breaking Wheaton's Law.

In the case of War!'s issues, generally 'It's stupid' is the kindest criticism available. When the book includes a submersible escape to the sea from a landlocked city 8600 feet above sea level on a plateau in the middle of the Andes mountains, down a river that has a 515 foot tall waterfall just 20 miles out of town. Said falls dry up in the winter at times.

Just total basic research failure.

On the topic of basic research failures, I'll just go ahead and take my lumps, I guess, but this is kind of what Bull's talking about (and, in fact, he mentioned that somewhere in his post, but seems to have been overlooked because of the much-more-understandably-emotionally-charged complaints about War).

It doesn't matter if we like War or not, or if we're actually defending War, but just by pointing out that this claim is incorrect -- this repeated, and repeated, and repeated, claim -- I know I'm lining up to take a punch for appearing to defend War, but...oh well. I want people to dislike War for things that are actually wrong with it, and not for this, so I'm going to pipe up. That wasn't in War. There's nothing in War, at all, about this. People say it, but it just plain didn't happen that way.

That was in Deadly Waves. And, furthermore, there's nothing at all about an escape to sea. There's nothing about docks, or Bogota being a port city, or the submersible going all the way to the ocean, or anything else that people parrot over and over again. The exact quote, the entire quote, is "They can also serve as a way out of Bogotá, if you have the connections. There isn’t much of the way in amenities, so remember your own bucket." That's it. I don't care for it one way or the other, but I wish people would just get it right when they complain about it; what book it's in, and what it actually says.

But just like Bull mentioned, people play "telephone," even in the internet age, and it gets repeated, and changed in the telling, over and over again, until I've seen people -- pedantic, bright, people, who otherwise know their game lore -- claim stuff that simply isn't true. But it gets stated with such certainty, and it gets repeated, and it's in there with so much other stuff to be mad about, that the accuracy doesn't matter, it just gets repeated again. Like it did right here, right now.

Hate stuff if you wanna hate stuff. Lord knows, I do. Let's just hate stuff for the right reasons, huh?

100% agree. BTW we wanted to go back to the topic, not restart a flame-thread that is aeons old. WAR war a bad book, agreed. Because of several reasons. Also agreed. But this is not the topic folks.

Crit is certainly right that War! is a dead horse, but the legacy of what it started lives on. The failures of that book live on to this day: from the poor editorial direction, the shoddy content control, poorly thought out rules, totally ignoring the proofreaders (and not paying them, I'm still waiting on my credit from four years ago), and accepting work that required that much proofreading in the first place.

We do harp on War! for being the start, but it didn't end there. Those same problems are still going on, and probably deserve more mention.

See what I mean about letting that one go? It's just an ugly situation and we're all better off just moving on.

As you can see, more than a few of us still keep an eye on here, and the other Shadowrun places online, and even contribute chunks here and there. Mostly there, confessedly, but that's because Dumpshockers can largely take care of themselves... you don't need the help that newcomers do, since you've pretty well got this. Yeah, we're giving you new toys and new plots officially, but tossing stuff onto the boards, not so much.

But you guys *are* our community.

And I always appreciate the feedback, good or bad, as well as direction. When you want new politics, we try to get new politics in there. When you want new magical threats, we try to get them in there. When you want old favorites revisited, we try and get that done, too. It's slow-going, and there's quite a few things that get slaughtered by wordcount and opportunity, but we do try.

Keep in mind, this doesn't mean true fanservice. We're not going to give you want you want every time. Sometimes, for the narrative, you have to go the other way. Maybe we kill someone that you like. Maybe the badguys get a win. Maybe some rule hole gets closed down to improve the game but your characters all used it and you're ticked. It has to be done now and then because, all fanservice all the time? That route never ends well for anybody.

All I ask is that when you vent at us, as is *absolutely* your right, at least keep it current? Let's say from Storm Front, which closed the book on SR4 and opened up plots for SR5, onwards. We know editing's an issue and it's getting improved each time, but still a problem. Valid. Totally valid and being worked on, ut it's still not perfect. (But don't expect absolutely perfect. There's not a game produce made today without at LEAST a typo in it, no matter the company. Getting the number as close to zero as possible is the ultimate goal here.)

So, Storm Front, forward. Can we run with this as a mutual bridge? Otherwise, it's kind of like picking on Dolph Ziggler by making fun of his time on the Spirit Squad. He's moved on and gotten better. Let's all try to do the same.

Who's Dolph Ziggler?

Storm Front?
Was that the one with the Dragon Civil war and eating 70k people in GeMiTo in 6 months?
Or was that the one with the nanite virus via secondary touch and matrix infects you and takes over your brain?
Or that Ares has a bad new Rifle and is goign down because of that?

I lost track somewhere . .


Dolph Ziggler is a Wrestler with WWF.
Wak you silly people ^^

This is the spot I have to jump in, because this exact description is my job right now, only with my boss being both the "person in charge" and "the end user" and still not getting the fact that his disappointment is because of his own inability to give direction.



Fuck. </rational discussion>

Don't mistake a symptom for the disease. Just sayin'.
(Mind you, the rest has some validity.)



The WWE now.

And, yes, I be silly, but the point's a valid one. People get better over time and with practice. I just couldn't think of many actors who I could slot in as quickly and who still have neatness to 'em. I mean, I could compare the lead from House to his old job on Black Adder, but people are likely to miss that. Harrison Ford's move from Bellhop to Star Wars ROgue's a good one, but Ford's ... not exactly been good for a while.

Hrm.

Ariana Grande of today compared to 'the airheaded one' from Victorious?

Lor dknows we all have bad Goth poetry in our old high school Trapper Keepers.

The goal is to *get* *better*.

... Nerd! *snickers* ^^

It's true.

Heck, if it wasn't for the age cap, I'd be trying out for King of the Nerds (on TBS) even now.

(But I'd wash out on the calculus. It's what stood between me and my Comp Sci degree! Harumph!)

Dumpshock has absolutely no value to a freelancer.

Let's imagine you are a freelancer and you are writing a piece for CGL. From the moment you propose and submit you cannot discuss anything about what you are writing until the moment it is published. By the time it is published any feedback is useless for that piece of writing. The feedback is also effectively useless for any future feedback since none of it is worth the pain of reading.

Dumpshockers have two courses to give feedback. Stand up and be counted by contributing directly to the next piece of writing. Or you can review and discuss in a manner that encourages the freelancers to want to read and interact with you.

Everything else is just yelling into the dark.

This is so wrong.

I'm not even sure if this is serious. I remember a rather solid thread with criticisms for pretty much every page of Storm Front. From dragon hordes to Red Anya being privy to what the Great Dragons discuss on their secret meetings, and runners being hired to loot an exiled Great's hoard. (I believe that was also the thread where the claims of "professionalism" meaning "paid for that work" were first thrown around in response to the criticism of such writing being simply unprofessional).

Furthermore, every consequent major release got a dumpshock discussion worth hundreds of posts. Has that lead to any improvement in... well, anything, even editing? Has the new ruleset become any less of a disappointment for that? Has the material being published become any more accommodating of existing fluff for that? Or is the counter-argument still "stop discussing War!", as if the newer releases are principally better?

Dumpshock discussions are by now, for all I see, indeed yelling into the dark. The publisher is not interested in pandering to the desires of some handful of grognards; that investment simply does not pay off for it, when even the stuff like Parazoology or Core Fifth is bought up.

You say this as if 'contributing directly to the next piece of writing' is a matter of effort rather than employment.

If feedback on the quality of their work is demoralizing and discouraging to the freelancers then that says something about the quality of the products they are putting their names on. I don't mean to be a dick, but that's how it is. If you put out a product with your name on it, you need to be prepared for critical reception, especially if the product doesn't hold up to the hype.

Even if we limit our discussion to Storm Front forward, how does that absolve the nightmare proofing/editing state of SR5 core? Or that the core SR5 books have ended up with 4+ page errata documents full of things that were straight up left out?

SR5 : http://cdn.shadowruntabletop.com/wp-conten..._SR5-Errata.pdf
Street Grimoire : http://cdn.shadowruntabletop.com/wp-conten...rata.pdf?4713c7
Run & Gun : http://cdn.shadowruntabletop.com/wp-conten...rata.pdf?4713c7

That's just the official errata, there is an entire forum full of it over at the official forums. Run Faster's been out six months and hasn't yet had any published despite a growing thread of issues over on the official forums.

This is a clear and ongoing problem, and no amount of 'they'll get better' solves it.

getting better is nice, inasmuch as it actually happens. getting better before asking us to pay for it would be a lot nicer.

they've had poor incorporation of basic proofreading for a while now; either they aren't listening, or aren't having it done, or should find different people to do it (and based on what we can observe, it's probably the first of those options).

so not only are they asking us to buy stuff before they get better at it, but they don't really seem to be getting particularly better at it.

and on a side note, while it certainly isn't worthwhile to get drowned in negativity, there are good things to be gained from coming here as well. it may not be good for those who don't have a (very) thick skin, but if you aren't too bothered by the negativity, it can actually be a good place to be.

Sounds like the plot to a bad 80s Japanese video game.

This is what I was talking about. "It's stupid' isn't a constructive criticism, it's a subset of the Red Herring Fallacy.
It has no place in a conversation other than to inflame the person/people who don't hold your viewpoint.
It also doesn't help the game developer improve upon errors he made.
And let's face it- is it more important to humiliate the game developer or is it more important he recieve constructive critism that he can use to improve his products in the future.

PS I apologize to those of you who are offended at my use of him as a neutral pronoun- it's how I learned it, and it's how I'm comfortable writing.

DireRadiant made me think about one point:

Why no communication about the next books beeing worked on?

This puzzles me strategically.

For exemple, Red Brick always stated pretty explicitely what they would work on, on it generated excitation. This is a good thing for the upcomming release, a chance for the autor to grab ideas and a good way to get of feel of the communities expectations.


So what's the point of that politic?

Speaking only for myself, I don't talk about what I'm working on because even if I thought I'd get a positive reception, NDAs say I can't talk about stuff until official channels talk about it, and because if I decided to talk about it earlier, anyways, I still couldn't/wouldn't use any ideas that I might find on the internet somewhere.

When you feel strongly about something, it can be difficult to quantify precisely what you are upset about.

If you do not feel strongly about something, it is less likely that you would be posting about it.

So in effect, you are looking for the sweet spot where you are pissed enough to do something about it but not so pissed as to be incoherent or capable of only venting.

From the amount of vitriol, you can gauge the depth and scale of the screw up. You won't know where or how you did so. But eventually someone will calm down enough and be rational enough to post a list of constructive criticisms.

As far as I am concerned, what the writer needs to do is look for these nuggets and scale them up to fit the size of the crowd's reaction. As an example: I EPIC fail at music. So I am one of those people that all I can do to criticise lousy music is to say that it SUXXORS. Someone who is better at music can come along and articulate my complaints better.

So Dumpshock doesn't allow images, but I'm sure many of you are familiar of the animated .gif of Michael Jackson eatting popcorn.

That's me right now - just picture it in your mind.

~Umi

I suspect they stopped publishing previews because people were tearing apart the errors in them and then being appalled that they persisted into published versions.

Valid point.

However it should be added that the negative points of WAR! were already discussed to death, with full details and interpretatoin for literally every sentence in the book. Even on the German official forum there was 26 page Discussion. So if you want to talk about WAR! you will find every argument and counter argument known to men in the archives of dumpshock, Pegaus, rpg.net, SR4forums, SR Nexus etc. And it can be assumend that those who participate in the disccuion *know* these arguments. After all both sides (those defending that Bogoto can be escaped vie sub and those who don´t like the Ausschwitz Adventure Park Raiding idea, how amusing it may sound as a dungeon crawl) talked about them in full details for the last years.

After such a long time with hundreds of pages of discussion everywhere it can be understandable if someone shortens the discussion to a "one sentence statement". You would be right of course if we would discuss Boston Lockdown (AFAIK the latest of the books) and would only have the point "Its Bullshit" or "It´s chocolate cookie in paper form" and nothing else.

########################################

Why no Paizo system? Public available full beta previews where the community can comment and improve the books from the beginning? Of course the line developer from Paizi incorporates feedback from the community, playtesters and authors back into the original document, unlike in some other RPGs.

SYL

Really?

Deadly Waves IIRC.

SYL

Didn't you get the last Telephone call Critias?
But yes, Deadly Waves.

Slow, the spell.
There. Have a the word 100% valid complaint about War! Because nothing about it makes a lick of sense.
Can we move on now?

Great, thanks.

Now back to "not installing a firewall on my office network because I know jack and all about how to do so, but my boss is too cheap to hire somebody who does and I'm 'close enough.'" I told him I don't know what I'm doing and the instructions that came with it aren't working as expected and he told me he didn't like my attitude (note: the Internet has been down for 24 hours now and we haven't been able to do much actual work).

Calling the book we don't want to discuss but somehow still do horrible isn't a red herring, "it's horrible" is the mutually agreed-upon starting point. Even by the authors, Bulls complaint about the Auschwitz chapter being blown out of proportion still included the obligate "War is a terrible book".
Naming that book in a discussion about SR5 releases on the other hand might qualify, because for all the problems they have, they just don't compare to War! (in a positive sense).

You are entitled as anyone is to your opinion- and if you think calling something stupid is appropriate, so be it. I don't.
However, I minored in Philosophy and got perfect grades in every class associated with it. Starting an argument with its stupid or he's stupid is a subset of the Red Herring Fallacy.

But if we were going to discount every single argument that is technically a formal or informal fallacy on this site we would have to dicount most of the threads.

Now, if I could only have gotten perfect grades in typing and spelling that might be more useful to me now

Every single announcement you make creates a set of expectations and stresses. I wrote about it a bunch here: http://adamjury.com/2013/making-announceme...falls-products/

Of course its serious.

(Interesting that the three examples all come from the same chapter, but, that's no biggie ... I was in the threads earlier and I know my stuff got grumbled about as well. Some of which was valid, some of which I disagreed with, and some of which was a matter of editing.)

I don't remember Storm Front being blasted that badly, in general, but one or two chapters didn't land as well as I'd have liked. Still, that's a topic that's chewable.



Editing's getting better each time, and writing's improving. Is it, say, the Return of Nigel Findley? Not yet, but new writers have been brought in and are digging in, older writers are helping where able, and the art continues to kick ass.

As for fluff, there are several of us who go through and try to double-check things for clashes. One or two things get through, but I can't think of anything huge off the top of my head that made it through. (There's one thing I didn't -agree- with, but it wasn't my call, not my writing, and not my job to say otherwise.)

However, here's a great place for you to chime in with any direct fluff issues since Storm Front. The ones I know about, I'll chime in as best I can. One or two might be tied in with NDA stuff, but where something was changed, or where we screw up, I'll let it be known if I can. I'm still ticked at myself for a hiccup with some corporate fluff I made. It happens, and I have to be more careful in the future.



There's, like, what, five of us writers in this very thread? Six? You'll forgive me if I don't match my view of shouting into the dark with yours, I hope.

An errata -does- keep rolling out, due to, you know, feedback, which comes from here, the official boards, and other places. It's slow, and a tad tricky since it's asking people to do work for free, but it -does- keep rolling out.

I'd love for a day to come along where a book is perfect at launch, but I don't know of *any* RPG book ever made that hits that level, so I can just hope for a continuing reduction in mistakes. Those who want to help can, of course, ask to be proofreaders.



And then there's this. I, for one, don't want to go up against anything legal. This is why you see me use Currrent Project or Future Product on a regular basis, rather than, say, "Book of Totally Awesome Guns!" or whatever. Until the people above say otherwise, it's radio silence and I ain't about to be the one to break it.

And, yeah, using ideas that are on a forum that you read is all KINDS of legal knot issues that I, for one, don't want to get involved with. Noooo thank you. So, would I like to bounce ideas of you guys to see where X or Y could be improved? Hell yeah! But, not allowed. Heck, I've had to bail out of several threads that I'd have loved to read because it's been too similar to something I've got on teh way, or am currently working on, and I can't risk cross-polination.

And that makes for a Sad Panda.

This is a statement that requires support. Run Faster still has the same off page references, spelling errors, misplaced charts, and references to qualities not yet published anywhere that have been a plague on the SR5 line. We are 5 core rulebooks and two full years into this edition, and basic editing is still lacking. I personally think we're well past the point where 'it's a little better' is acceptable quality from products that CGL wants $50 a pop for.

I disagree with this pretty aggressively.

If I'm writing something, there are three major reasons I hit the forum. For this example, let's say I'm writing a location book. (Note: I do NOT write for CGL in any capacity, and all of my Shadowrun work involves drop bears, but I do sometimes get paid for words.)

1) Basic research. Shadowrun as a setting goes back for like a million years. I've been around for a long time, but not THAT long. What has already been written? What's established canon, and what's head-canon? Dumpshock knows. Someone has asked about that location, and with a little searching, I can find those discussions. That gives me references, clarifications, issues. Yes, I still need to do my own footwork and follow up on those leads, but DS tells me what some of those leads are.

2) Problems that need fixing/fan things that are really cool. I'm writing a setting book, so what settings questions do people have issues with? They're asking where all these Native Americans came from? well maybe I can look into that. They want to know how modern industry survives in an environment rife with paracritters? Alright, let's make sure we talk about how that works out. Someone found out about this awesome cult that lives in the middle of the area I'm researching? Yoink! A lot of people want more dark and gritty, or more epic, or more whatever. Let me see if I can work some of those plot hooks in there.

3) Post-publication do-betters. Apparently people don't like that I write it "ShadowRun" instead of Shadowrun. The editor didn't catch that, but there it is. So now I know for next time. People Really enjoyed my side bars, or felt my chapter was too dry. Next time, I'll do better.

None of this involves my posting at all, and therefore, it doesn't violate any NDAs.

Sure, dumpshock can't force freelancers to read and integrate comments. For a freelance who refuses to visit, yeah, we're shouting in the dark. But do freelancers benefit from visiting? Absolutely.