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[Rant] Do editing/proofreading errors drive you mad, too?
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Hussar
Legend
I remember that bit for the two vampires. 
On the map bit, I remember in SSS, Seas of Blood, the Crimson Abyss (way too many esses there) had a mistake on the scale of the maps. It made the distance from Scarn to Termanna about 17 THOUSAND miles. Or, to put it another way, 6 or 8 solid months of sailing with good weather the whole way. And then the flavour text had ships sailing between the continents in a matter of weeks.
Makes it pretty difficult to write naval adventures when the maps you're supposed to work from are completely bogus.
On the map bit, I remember in SSS, Seas of Blood, the Crimson Abyss (way too many esses there) had a mistake on the scale of the maps. It made the distance from Scarn to Termanna about 17 THOUSAND miles. Or, to put it another way, 6 or 8 solid months of sailing with good weather the whole way. And then the flavour text had ships sailing between the continents in a matter of weeks.
Makes it pretty difficult to write naval adventures when the maps you're supposed to work from are completely bogus.
jaerdaph
#UkraineStrong
Set said:
As someone who makes his living writing grants, I couldn't agree more. I've seen people trust and rely entirely on the computer to make decisions with spell check, grammar check, and the absolute worst, find and replace. Nothing beats a pair of human eyes, or more importantly, an extra pair of fresh human eyes.
MoogleEmpMog
First Post
Typos or minor statistical errors (especially in the skills section) don't bother me at all. Major disconnects like those described in the Magic Item Compendium do, however.
Rodrigo Istalindir
Explorer
Grammar and spelling errors drive me nuts. Errors in mechanics, or ones that were obviously caused by having too many chefs (such as the Highhold/Holdfast one), not so much. The latter two are a result of multiple people having their hands in what's being produced, and trying to hit a moving target in many cases. Things happen, and especially for third-party publishers, who don't have the resources, or really the time, for extensive rounds of editing.
The first, though, is just sloppiness. If you are going to call yourself a writer, there is no excuse to turn in that kind of work in the first place. The occasional typo is one thing (and given the quantity of made up words, I'll forgive a mistake there), but some of the stuff looks like it was never read by anyone.
But as others have said, it's hardly confined to RPGs. The number of novels put out today that have typos, mistakes, cut and paste errors, etc., is ridiculous. And it's pretty obvious to me that for certain authors, no one really edits them beyond basic proofreading at all.
The first, though, is just sloppiness. If you are going to call yourself a writer, there is no excuse to turn in that kind of work in the first place. The occasional typo is one thing (and given the quantity of made up words, I'll forgive a mistake there), but some of the stuff looks like it was never read by anyone.
But as others have said, it's hardly confined to RPGs. The number of novels put out today that have typos, mistakes, cut and paste errors, etc., is ridiculous. And it's pretty obvious to me that for certain authors, no one really edits them beyond basic proofreading at all.
guildofblades
First Post
>>So, seeing those types of errors in 3rd party product leads me to believe that the producer is either too lazy to care or thinks they're stuff is so hot that people won't mind. Either way, I remain unimpressed.<<
It is not that the publishers are lazy and rarely that that they think their stuff is the greatest thing since sliced bread, it is a issue of time and resources.
Larger (game) companies may have one full time staff editor, but that person then becomes responsible for editing absolutely everything and staying on schedule, which makes for a hectic pace that is bound to let errors sneak in.
Smaller companies can't afford full time editors so must chose between existing staffers pulling double duty and doing editing on top of their regular jobs, or they must farm out that work to freelancers. Both options come with a bag full of problems. Staffers might not be great editors and may suffer from work overload the same as the overworked single staff editor as the larger companies. Freelance editors can be either great or terrible and unless you have a solid work history with them, you simply can't predict which. The Guild of Blades used to use freelance editors and ran into all sorts of problems. Problems such as freelancers taking the advance pay and never doing the work, massively missing deadlines, handing in a manuscript having done virtually no editing, choosing to rewrite entire sections and changing trade names, races, character classes and even game mechanics without permission or telling us, etc. In the end, we chose that even though we have no professional staff editor, we would do editing in house by passing each manuscript across two desks and hoping we can catch most errors that way. Its not perfect and not even really close to perfect.
How to provide perfect editing in our products?
There are no good solutions. We could raise all of our prices by 50% and hire a full time editor, but somehow I suspect our sales levels by volume would not be maintained with a 50% price increase.
The simple reality is, hobby game publishing is a very niche industry. Unit volumes are small. So small, in fact, that in most other industries a product facing those kinds of unit sales would never get the green light for production. Most hobby publishers, the full time operations and the one man part time operation alike, keep doing hobby publishing because they love hobby games. Generally we face a very passionate group of customers, which is a great thing, but we know it also comes with certain production expectations that realistically can rarely be met. Most companies who try to met such expectations tend to become very short lives and join the long list of defunct publishers.
A practice we have begun is to do our initial publication, then after publication as we are made aware of mistakes, we have one copy here in house that we mark up and then those issues get corrected on future print runs. Its not perfect, but for the moment it seems the most viable option among several bad choices.
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com
It is not that the publishers are lazy and rarely that that they think their stuff is the greatest thing since sliced bread, it is a issue of time and resources.
Larger (game) companies may have one full time staff editor, but that person then becomes responsible for editing absolutely everything and staying on schedule, which makes for a hectic pace that is bound to let errors sneak in.
Smaller companies can't afford full time editors so must chose between existing staffers pulling double duty and doing editing on top of their regular jobs, or they must farm out that work to freelancers. Both options come with a bag full of problems. Staffers might not be great editors and may suffer from work overload the same as the overworked single staff editor as the larger companies. Freelance editors can be either great or terrible and unless you have a solid work history with them, you simply can't predict which. The Guild of Blades used to use freelance editors and ran into all sorts of problems. Problems such as freelancers taking the advance pay and never doing the work, massively missing deadlines, handing in a manuscript having done virtually no editing, choosing to rewrite entire sections and changing trade names, races, character classes and even game mechanics without permission or telling us, etc. In the end, we chose that even though we have no professional staff editor, we would do editing in house by passing each manuscript across two desks and hoping we can catch most errors that way. Its not perfect and not even really close to perfect.
How to provide perfect editing in our products?
There are no good solutions. We could raise all of our prices by 50% and hire a full time editor, but somehow I suspect our sales levels by volume would not be maintained with a 50% price increase.
The simple reality is, hobby game publishing is a very niche industry. Unit volumes are small. So small, in fact, that in most other industries a product facing those kinds of unit sales would never get the green light for production. Most hobby publishers, the full time operations and the one man part time operation alike, keep doing hobby publishing because they love hobby games. Generally we face a very passionate group of customers, which is a great thing, but we know it also comes with certain production expectations that realistically can rarely be met. Most companies who try to met such expectations tend to become very short lives and join the long list of defunct publishers.
A practice we have begun is to do our initial publication, then after publication as we are made aware of mistakes, we have one copy here in house that we mark up and then those issues get corrected on future print runs. Its not perfect, but for the moment it seems the most viable option among several bad choices.
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com
Slife
First Post
Well, what can you expect from people who learned how to spell in medireview times.Eric Anondson said:It only bothers me when it is horribly jarring. Like the old AD&D 2nd ed Encyclopedea Magica. Someone went through with a Find/Replace for the word "mage" and we ended up with a book filled with spells doing things like 1d6/level cold dawizard.
Andor
First Post
bold added for emphasisjaerdaph said:As someone who makes his living writing grants, I couldn't agree more. I've seen people trust and rely entirely on the computer to make decisions with spell check, grammar check, and the absolute worst, find and replace. Nothing beats a pair of human eyes, or more importantly, an extra pair of fresh human eyes.
That last bit is surprisingly critical. It's really hard to catch errors in your own work because your brain tends to read what you meant to write, rather than what you actually wrote.
Not that this serves as an excuse for poor editing. My personal worst gripe was in Complete Warrior where the same mechanic was used by one class and a few PrCs, and was described differently each time. And most of the explanations were dreadful. From a small publisher that can't afford a full time editor I could cope, but what's WotC's excuse?
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