Editing Whine

[DreadPirateMurphy]

While I know it is hard to find time to properly edit work, and I know companies like WotC generally produce good work...

[WHINE]I get really irked when I see obvious mistakes in products like Stormwrack.[/WHINE]

Under magic items, pricing for living figureheads: "...49,000 gp (blue or bronze), gp (red or silver), or 56,000 gp (gold);"

Stats for Magnificent Captain's Coat: "Moderate abjuration, transmutation [air]; CL 5th; Feat, control winds, endure elements, other requirements; Price 11,000 gp; Weight 4 lb."

I'm not saying I don't like the book. I'm the type of nitpick whose skin crawls when he sees a missing price or placeholders that nobody went back to fix, and seeing both of these on the same page triggered a need to vent.

Anyway, that is all. Venting is done.

 

[Infiniti2000]

Want some cheese with that?

Anyway, I largely agree. What many of these books need are multiple editors, each with a different focus. The first should be content and/or continuity, the next rules-based, and the final one should be spelling/grammar/missing text. Unfortunately, most companies will combine them all into one person, and that person is understandably overwhelmed by the extreme amount of work and will miss things. Even worse is when the author is asked to do editing.

 

[John Cooper]

I understand completely.

 

[BOZ]

mutltiple editors is a fine idea conceptually, but perhaps you've heard the phrase about "too many cooks"...

 

[philreed]

mutltiple editors is a fine idea conceptually, but perhaps you've heard the phrase about "too many cooks"...

There's also the issue of "return on investment." Few RPG books make such an amazing amount of profit that there's money to put into more rounds of editing.

 

[DreadPirateMurphy]

Like I said...I understand why mistakes slip through. Heck, I'm in the software industry.

I'm also overly sensitive to these things, and have been known to mercilessly mark in red pen the work of my subordinates. Just today I marked up a transposed "compose/comprise" usage and at least TWO sentences ending with prepositions.



I tend to agree with BOZ about multiple editors. Now, there is a difference between an editor and a proofreader. I would be all over seeing some extra proofreading to catch the obvious stuff, like poor grammar or obviously missing text.

True story: In college, I had a professor in a programming course who was in the process of writing the textbook as he was teaching the class. He would hand out copy, and he offered to pay $1 for each error we found in the text.

After the first few responses, he started to politely ignore my e-mails.

 

[Infiniti2000]

mutltiple editors is a fine idea conceptually, but perhaps you've heard the phrase about "too many cooks"...

Well, they'd edit it one at a time of course.

As for ROI, yeah, I realize that. If wishes were fishes . . .

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Its the obvious ones that hack me off the most...like the 2Ed Monstrous Compendium Oriental Vampire that was IDENTICAL to the standard vampire (the original version was VERY different)...Classes that are proficient in weapons that don't show up on the equipment lists...prerequisites that don't exist, or worse, circular prerequisites.

Geh...too much reliance on spell-checkers + too many long hours too close to deadlines = shoddy proofreading.

 

[MerricB]

[WHINGE]Then there are the cut/paste errors, and the find/replace errors. (Have a look at the d20 Weapons Locker one day).

I really hate it when Wizards makes those sort of mistakes. They know better.

The worst mistakes in stat blocks come from continually changing the text and then not checking to see that the stat blocks need any alterations...[/WHINGE]

 

[ThirdWizard]

"See Page XXXX" really irks me. I think I've seen it twice in WotC books. Grrrr...