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General Tabletop Discussion
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Worlds of Design: The Plight of the New RPG—Quality of Writing
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<blockquote data-quote="niklinna" data-source="post: 8686347" data-attributes="member: 71235"><p>People notice, but they may not always complain...they might simply walk away. The first time I backed a crowdfunded RPG project, when I got the draft PDFs they were riddled with misspellings and typos, "dawizard"-level global find/replace glitches, contradictory and ambiguous text, and even a few power descriptions that were word salads—like, blatantly nonsense text. There had clearly not been any kind of internal proofreading before they sent out the PDFs.</p><p></p><p>The feedback process was tedious, but I went through the main book and sample characters in the brief time allotted and reported multiple problems on every single page. I didn't even have time to get to the accompaning adventure book. Good thing they crowdsourced their copy editing, so other people could perhaps handle the secondary material? I had also backed at a level where I got to contribute a custom character, and at no point did anyone other than myself do any editing (the other backers' final characters had many blatant mistakes and typos). The designer I was assigned clearly had no interest in looking at my revisions as I sent them in, nor was there any talk of playtesting.</p><p></p><p>After all that, it turned out that was going to be the one and only feedback round, and when the final PDFs shipped, they were still full of errors. I haven't backed or bought anything from them since, and I'm super leery of backing anything any more.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Haha! I'm helping a friend who's never written a book before, and he had no idea how many revisions after the first draft would be necessary to have anything approaching a readable text. He's is a bit of a genius scatterbrain, though, so that's a factor....</p><p></p><p></p><p>So true. I did writing and editing for the first part of my tech career. I'm sometimes tempted to go back, but I rarely felt appreciated, even though I enjoyed the work.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="niklinna, post: 8686347, member: 71235"] People notice, but they may not always complain...they might simply walk away. The first time I backed a crowdfunded RPG project, when I got the draft PDFs they were riddled with misspellings and typos, "dawizard"-level global find/replace glitches, contradictory and ambiguous text, and even a few power descriptions that were word salads—like, blatantly nonsense text. There had clearly not been any kind of internal proofreading before they sent out the PDFs. The feedback process was tedious, but I went through the main book and sample characters in the brief time allotted and reported multiple problems on every single page. I didn't even have time to get to the accompaning adventure book. Good thing they crowdsourced their copy editing, so other people could perhaps handle the secondary material? I had also backed at a level where I got to contribute a custom character, and at no point did anyone other than myself do any editing (the other backers' final characters had many blatant mistakes and typos). The designer I was assigned clearly had no interest in looking at my revisions as I sent them in, nor was there any talk of playtesting. After all that, it turned out that was going to be the one and only feedback round, and when the final PDFs shipped, they were still full of errors. I haven't backed or bought anything from them since, and I'm super leery of backing anything any more. Haha! I'm helping a friend who's never written a book before, and he had no idea how many revisions after the first draft would be necessary to have anything approaching a readable text. He's is a bit of a genius scatterbrain, though, so that's a factor.... So true. I did writing and editing for the first part of my tech career. I'm sometimes tempted to go back, but I rarely felt appreciated, even though I enjoyed the work. [/QUOTE]
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