Do publishers fear the John Cooper review?

[Crothian]

What is "one less reviewer that can look at our work" supposed to mean? That you welcome constructive crticism but blacklist reviewers who give it?

Dark Quest Games publishes books through EN Puiblishing; and EN Publishing has John Cooper edit books for them. Since he does editing for them its not really ethical for him to review other books though do.

 

[Vanuslux]

Dark Quest Games publishes books through EN Puiblishing; and EN Publishing has John Cooper edit books for them. Since he does editing for them its not really ethical for him to review other books though do.

Oooooooooooh...now it all makes sense. Shows what I get for posting in the wee hours.

 

[Darrin Drader]

I'm going to dissent a little here. First, though, I'm not familiar with John Cooper's reviews, so its hard for me to say one way or another with authority. I spend a lot of time creating stat blocks, checking them, rechecking them, showing my work, but at the end of the day its still entirely possible that a mistake creeps in. My question is simply whether it makes a whole lot of difference if an NPC has 15 hit points instead of 13? How is the game using that stat block considerably worse if the human NPC doesn't have that extra skill point per level? I guess I just get tired of all the nit picking when the end result is that the game still plays pretty much the same either way.

 

[Krug]

I think it's the overall impression it gives to readers. True, it doesn't really matter, but if the list of errors extends for pages it shows that the publisher shows a lack of familiarity with the rules or a lack of care with stats.

 

[Keeper of Secrets]

Yes, the integrity of the product is at stake. A few errors would barely be worth mentioning, in my opinion. But when you see pages and pages of mistakes listed, that goes to poor planning.

 

[tensen]

What is "one less reviewer that can look at our work" supposed to mean? That you welcome constructive crticism but blacklist reviewers who give it?

It means.. he gave us detailed enough work, that I gave him a job assignment.

 

[tensen]

Dark Quest Games publishes books through EN Puiblishing; and EN Publishing has John Cooper edit books for them. Since he does editing for them its not really ethical for him to review other books though do.

Actually not accurate.. but that was a good assumption.
Not all our products get released through EN Publishing. (Dark Quest released our last two products, Lost Prehistorica and Dweomercraft: Familiars under our own banner.) And we have our own staff, so we probably wouldn't have used an editor from EN Publishing to complete our work when releasing through EN Publishing.

You will note that he did a review of our last product released. I liked the result of his detailed analysis... even though he didn't get us a fantastic score. I believe it was 3/5. I chose to accept that as a sample of his work, and hired him on.

 

[JoeGKushner]

My question is simply whether it makes a whole lot of difference if an NPC has 15 hit points instead of 13? How is the game using that stat block considerably worse if the human NPC doesn't have that extra skill point per level? I guess I just get tired of all the nit picking when the end result is that the game still plays pretty much the same either way.

Most of the errors he finds are definatly combat related. Wrong armor class bonuses, wrong attack bonuses, wrong number of feats. If you're getting paid to do something then complaining that having it wrong doesn't effect the game is the wrong attitude to be coming at it. Some dude over at Necromancer was crying that he hated writing stat blocks. Uh dude, you're in the wrong business then. When a player can get killed because like Creature Collection everything is wrong from CR to # of attacks, then yeah, the game isn't going to be played pretty much the same way.

 

[Vaxalon]

Some dude over at Necromancer was crying that he hated writing stat blocks. Uh dude, you're in the wrong business then.

If every author who hated writing stat blocks quit the business, it would be pretty hard to find good authors.

 

[Tav_Behemoth]

I image the pdf guys like him more since they can edit their books fast and get them out to anyone who bought them. From the print companies we have heard that reviews don't do them a lot of good anyway, so they might not actually read them.

As I commented last night re: John's review of A Swarm of Stirges, I think a critique at the level of detail he provides is a great boon to publishers. (It might be less useful to consumers in deciding whether to buy the book - but once they do, it makes great errata!)

Any author who tells you they don't read reviews is lying - as a rule, we're all desperate egomaniacs (which is why some of us are too close to our work to benefit from constructive criticism).

And whether or not a review affects sales shouldn't matter to anyone. I'm certain that thoughtful, serious reviews -- the kind EN World is famous for -- affects the overall quality of the field, by setting a critical standard that readers are led to expect and publishers are inspired to strive for. If anything, I think gaming needs more harsh reviews, the kind that say "this level of quality is unacceptable if gaming is going to move forward." In the early days of SF criticism, Damon Knight built a reputation based on taking no prisoners, which made it even more effective when he pointed out examples of the best the field could achieve .