Lax editing standards as long as updates are free?

[DaveMage]

I believe Monte's wife is a professional editor, and worked on most if not all of the Malhavoc products.

Correct.

If they used any special process on Ptolus, it should be the standard.

But it wasn't just Sue Cook - Brian Gute and Miranda Horner are listed as proofreaders. Stellar job by all involved!

 

[Dausuul]

Extensive errata is not an acceptable solution for a physical book. I have enough work to do remembering my house rules without remembering yours as well. Unless you're going to send me a replacement book at no charge--which seems unlikely, given the expense--I expect a dead-tree book to get it reasonably right the first time. I suppose I could tolerate getting a .PDF with errata-ed versions of all the relevant pages, so I could print them out and glue them over those pages in the physical book. Or a sheet of stickers with errata-ed text on them, to stick over the appropriate paragraphs.

For electronic books or DDI-style services, if you send me an updated version free of charge, I'm okay with that, unless the original was so poorly edited as to be unusable.

 

[Dykstrav]

I wouldn't say it's a waste of time... I mean technically you're still practicing for those 2 good takes, you can just afford to also film it (and every so often get lucky with an unexpected good take.)

I also found it sometimes helped people be more, relaxed, when ever I would do digital projects and just film it all. With the film projects they concentrated too much on getting it "right" instead of just getting something good.

Shrug.

Yeah, there are strong arguments for and against on both sides of that particular issue. Helping the talent get cozy is certainly important, especially since almost every actor nowadays is a method actor. For some applications, it's even a good thing--when you're working on a commercial, for example, you might as well shoot everything. You're usually only shooting one day anyway and working from a minimal script that can be cut several different ways, so options are good.

I think that my perspective on it isn't popular though. When a director or D.P. wants to shoot twenty-some takes of everything and cut it together into a "super-take," it's usually the 1st A.D. and the script supervisor that get to hear the griping about it because we're supposed to monitor day-to-day productivity. I can't count the number of production supervisors that have told me to gently ask a director to move on once we've got two good takes... But everyone has a different idea of what's important.

As for the editing mistakes... I wonder if this is a sort of hold over from video games... Seems like nowadays games are just released before all the final bugs are ironed out just to meet a deadline. Then the player just downloads a patch to fix the remaining bugs before playing.

Yeah, I've noticed that myself. Some of my favorite PC games of all time (Temple of Elemental Evil, Vampire: the Masquerade Bloodlines) were released with major bugs. I do think that it's not a problem isolated to the tabletop RPG industry... Many people these days seem to have the idea that it's okay to do shoddy work and fix it later.

As I stated earlier, I think technology makes this seem a bit more acceptable to people than it used to be... But it stills annoys me. I also don't understand why we tolerate this level of slack-handedness in some industries and not others. It amazes me that people shrug and happily download .pdf errata for $30+ hardcover books that are 300+ pages long... But if someone screws up their order for a $6 meal in a drive-through window they're raising all the hell they can muster.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Not good enough for me. But then again, I like physical books and you cannot update them.

Inconsistent rules are one thing, that can be hard to fix or identify, but I fail to see why Page [XX] is impossible to find. I happen to know most wold processing programs can use a weird function called [search]

That is basically my position as well. Do it right the first time. I am not asking for perfection- I know perfection is impossible- but a lot of the errors I'm seeing would be caught with live editing.

(I had a statement to that effect for years in my sig, but had to edit it out as my sig got larger...)

 

[Psion]

In reviews of several supps I was interested in, the reviewers pointed to numerous spelling errors, typos and, heck, even inconsistent rule usage that should have been caught in editing. The publishers responded and promised to make updates in future editions and provide them for free.

Many buyers are pleased with the responses. Thus, I wonder if there's some sorta growing tacit agreement among buyers and sellers these days that it's okay if there are errors in the product as long as corrections are made and the updated product is sent free of charge.

Thoughts?

It might not be surprising that I think it makes it better, but certainly doesn't make it okay. Especially talking about printed books. I want my printed, unmarred, unstickied book to reflect the way that we play it.

THAT SAID, in the opposite vein, I have seen a few ranters post about how the existence of errata/updates type document are an indication of a particular problem with the publisher. That does not follow. It could be (and from what I've seen, more likely is) the case that the products of other publishers who don't have errata doesn't mean they couldn't use it. More likely, it reflects a fire-and-forget policy or we-can-do-no-wrong attitude amongst the publisher.

 

[Fifth Element]

Man, what?

Quote the sentence immediately after that one, and you'll see what he means. "Never" not being literal here, but the point stands.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

It might not be surprising that I think it makes it better, but certainly doesn't make it okay. Especially talking about printed books. I want my printed, unmarred, unstickied book to reflect the way that we play it.

Amen.

 

[Dragonbait]

I saw the writing on the wall when Mongoose released a Conan RPG that was virtually unplayable due to the poor editing. It was so bad that they almost immediately released a revised edition. And then they offered to let people who had bought the original so-awful-we-had-to-immediately-redo-it edition purchase copies of the revised edition at a reduced price which still made them a profit on every copy sold.

And people thought this was great customer service on the part of Mongoose.

BESM d20 Revised Edition had something similar - They made a BESM revised edition which was meant to update the system to 3.5 and include some new rules. Their first printing, though, used the wrong files and was just a reprint of the previous edition (3.0 d20). The second printing contained the correct updates.

I don't know if they offered a swap or even a discount for those who purchased the 1st printing.

 

[Umbran]

Thus, I wonder if there's some sorta growing tacit agreement among buyers and sellers these days that it's okay if there are errors in the product as long as corrections are made and the updated product is sent free of charge.

Thoughts?

I don't think there's any such agreement. Historically (and speaking in a broad generalization) editing and proofreading on RPG books hasn't ever been particularly good, and such policies as you describe have not been the norm. Getting any response at all, much less an acceptable one, is probably refreshing to some customers, but I don't think it has become widespread enough to be the generally accepted way of doing things.

 

[Nifft]

"Never" not being literal here

You simply must fill me in on these new figurative uses for "never".

Cheers, -- N