[adzling]

From what I hear, they had a large group of testers and even conducted polls. Some of the new parts of the system even came from suggestions. A larger-scale test I do not think Catalyst could have handled logistics-wise, especially when you look at the people that would have shouted down a lot of the changes entirely, which would have made it very hard to actually improve the system. So I understand the ideal, but I do not find it a plausible scenario.

42 is not a large group for a game as complex as shadowrun

yes some new parts of the system came from suggestions, that doesn't mean those suggestions were the right ones to use OR they were executed on well.

i can't speak for others but i can tell you I did want changes/ revisions from 5e to make the borked subsystems (matrix/ rigging) playable, simplify things and reign in magicrun. If the changes that Catalyst proposed did not address those issues then yes of course I would have complained.

I don't agree with your assessment that Catalyst could not have made a public playtest work, there's all kinds of ways Catalyst could have made it work.

[Banshee]

42 playtesters with notable overlap ((Rules team also playtested, etc.))

That is all that are listed in the credits, I alone had 12 players who did not get credit, so who really know what the total number ended up being... but I also agree there would have been a huge benefit to having one more round of playtesting that was more open.

[KatoHearts]

42 playtesters with notable overlap ((Rules team also playtested, etc.))

That is all that are listed in the credits, I alone had 12 players who did not get credit, so who really know what the total number ended up being... but I also agree there would have been a huge benefit to having one more round of playtesting that was more open.

Must have been sacrificed to the page count god.

[Hephaestus]

42 playtesters with notable overlap ((Rules team also playtested, etc.))

That is all that are listed in the credits, I alone had 12 players who did not get credit, so who really know what the total number ended up being... but I also agree there would have been a huge benefit to having one more round of playtesting that was more open.

I hate to say it, but even if every playtester had multiple groups totaling to 12 players each, that's still only 506 people. I would be really interested to know how many total sessions were played using the rules at each phase of rules revisions, especially how many were run using the rules that made it to print.

[GuardDuty]

"Only" 506 people...exactly how many people do you expect playtest these things?  As I said, I don't know what would be considered standard, but I would have thought 500 to be extremely excessive...

[KatoHearts]

"Only" 506 people...exactly how many people do you expect playtest these things?  As I said, I don't know what would be considered standard, but I would have thought 500 to be extremely excessive...

cough pathfinder 2e cough

[FastJack]

"Only" 506 people...exactly how many people do you expect playtest these things?  As I said, I don't know what would be considered standard, but I would have thought 500 to be extremely excessive...

cough pathfinder 2e cough

Paizo has about 100 employees, two RPGs (which use the same base rules), and one card game. Catalyst Game Labs has about 35 employees and produces Shadowrun, Shadowrun Anarchy, Shadowrun Crossfire, BattleTech, Mechwarrior, Leviathans, Dragonfire, Cosmic Patrol, Valiant, and a myriad of tabletop board games.

[KatoHearts]

"Only" 506 people...exactly how many people do you expect playtest these things?  As I said, I don't know what would be considered standard, but I would have thought 500 to be extremely excessive...

cough pathfinder 2e cough

Paizo has about 100 employees, two RPGs (which use the same base rules), and one card game. Catalyst Game Labs has about 35 employees and produces Shadowrun, Shadowrun Anarchy, Shadowrun Crossfire, BattleTech, Mechwarrior, Leviathans, Dragonfire, Cosmic Patrol, Valiant, and a myriad of tabletop board games.

How many employees does the Lancer crew have?

[dezmont]

Well its weird.

SR is actually a transmedia powerhouse because its this highly valuable IP with a history longer than most people currently PLAYING RPGs. Its up there with Traveller in that sense. It has that DEEP LORE going for it that means its very hard to just replace shadowrun with another product of the same genre.

However, Pathfinder is run like a Brand, with a capitol B. Catalyst Game Labs definitely is playing catchup on that front, despite the fact Shadowrun is a Cultural Thing, and is only now really starting to try to mine its setting for other game designs. If I HAD to guess, that is in response to Pathfinder really figuring out how to make an RPG line more than an RPG line for the first time (D&D definitely was a cultural icon but mostly was about how much you liked D&D and were reskins of other Hasbro games like Clue, while pathfinder has like 6 different boardgames despite being only some odd 10 years old), and probably seeing how succesful the Android setting, the 3rd big competing cyberpunk setting to enter the arena for gaming, doing EXTREMELY well as a card game (until they lost/gave up the license, the story is unclear), 3 different board games, and FFGs official cyberpunk setting overall.

So the employee count may not be suited to SR's needs right now as a burgeoning trans-media product (And I think SR has a LOT of strength for that. I literally have tinkered with an Urban Brawl wargame using a stripped down 5e rules set and low powered characters you draft), forget about Catalyst game lab's overall needs, but it does make sense why despite Pazio having less on its plate it has lots of employees.

However, while curating consumer feedback IS definitely a job far less trivial than what most people might thing (It basically is a Quantitative Researching job, which actually does require at least some specialist knowledge, I have a minor in research in fact and am going for a postgrad degree to get better at it!), it scales extremely well once you have someone who knows what they are doing (Like me! Just saying~) in that sifting through data, surveys, and feedback is as easy to do with 506 people as your entire customer base. This is why despite having way more employees than Shadowrun has working on it (lets not count freelancers because this is beyond the scope of their work and this inability to handle large scale products is a clear flaw in the freelancer system), Pazio probably had roughly the same number of people collecting data as Shadowrun did for its playtests, or only slightly more. The primary difference probably is that was that one person's entire job during the playtest period, or at least a major part of it, while CGL had to shove it onto someone else's plate, and they may not have known fully how to do Qualitative research (again, not because they are dumb, but because its deceptively tricky and is, again, something people generally get a degree in!).

[penllawen]

Paizo has about 100 employees, two RPGs (which use the same base rules), and one card game. Catalyst Game Labs has about 35 employees and produces Shadowrun, Shadowrun Anarchy, Shadowrun Crossfire, BattleTech, Mechwarrior, Leviathans, Dragonfire, Cosmic Patrol, Valiant, and a myriad of tabletop board games.

Is this supposed to make us feel more forgiving of Catalyst's missteps? It makes me wonder what on earth they're doing, being spread so thin. We have been told SR6e is selling very well. It's had two big, successful Kickstarters in recent times. Why doesn't it have more people?

[wraith]

Well its weird.

SR is actually a transmedia powerhouse because its this highly valuable IP with a history longer than most people currently PLAYING RPGs. Its up there with Traveller in that sense. It has that DEEP LORE going for it that means its very hard to just replace shadowrun with another product of the same genre.

However, Pathfinder is run like a Brand, with a capitol B. Catalyst Game Labs definitely is playing catchup on that front, despite the fact Shadowrun is a Cultural Thing, and is only now really starting to try to mine its setting for other game designs. If I HAD to guess, that is in response to Pathfinder really figuring out how to make an RPG line more than an RPG line for the first time (D&D definitely was a cultural icon but mostly was about how much you liked D&D and were reskins of other Hasbro games like Clue, while pathfinder has like 6 different boardgames despite being only some odd 10 years old), and probably seeing how succesful the Android setting, the 3rd big competing cyberpunk setting to enter the arena for gaming, doing EXTREMELY well as a card game (until they lost/gave up the license, the story is unclear), 3 different board games, and FFGs official cyberpunk setting overall.

So the employee count may not be suited to SR's needs right now as a burgeoning trans-media product (And I think SR has a LOT of strength for that. I literally have tinkered with an Urban Brawl wargame using a stripped down 5e rules set and low powered characters you draft), forget about Catalyst game lab's overall needs, but it does make sense why despite Pazio having less on its plate it has lots of employees.

However, while curating consumer feedback IS definitely a job far less trivial than what most people might thing (It basically is a Quantitative Researching job, which actually does require at least some specialist knowledge, I have a minor in research in fact and am going for a postgrad degree to get better at it!), it scales extremely well once you have someone who knows what they are doing (Like me! Just saying~) in that sifting through data, surveys, and feedback is as easy to do with 506 people as your entire customer base. This is why despite having way more employees than Shadowrun has working on it (lets not count freelancers because this is beyond the scope of their work and this inability to handle large scale products is a clear flaw in the freelancer system), Pazio probably had roughly the same number of people collecting data as Shadowrun did for its playtests, or only slightly more. The primary difference probably is that was that one person's entire job during the playtest period, or at least a major part of it, while CGL had to shove it onto someone else's plate, and they may not have known fully how to do Qualitative research (again, not because they are dumb, but because its deceptively tricky and is, again, something people generally get a degree in!).

That's the thing.  Shadowrun isn't really a transmedia brand.  Everything people liked about SR Returns was set in the 2050's, and done by people who wrote those earlier works with FASA.

The one game set in the CGL-era SR setting?  Flopped.  Never made it out of beta because the devs ran out of money and there wasn't enough support to make more of it.

CGL has, on the whole, produced a net loss to Shadowrun's marketability as a property with 5e and 6e.  Being organizationally unable to manage a serious playtest, on top of lacking sufficiently skilled game designers to catch basic issues in the mathematical models that underpin their system is both inexcusable and par for the course.

[penllawen]

Hey @wraith: Can I just say there's a Big Bad in my campaign right now called Wraith who used to be a technomancer but was merged with an AI so he's now literally a ghost in the machine? So your username and bio is hitting very close to home for me!

[FastJack]

Paizo has about 100 employees, two RPGs (which use the same base rules), and one card game. Catalyst Game Labs has about 35 employees and produces Shadowrun, Shadowrun Anarchy, Shadowrun Crossfire, BattleTech, Mechwarrior, Leviathans, Dragonfire, Cosmic Patrol, Valiant, and a myriad of tabletop board games.

Is this supposed to make us feel more forgiving of Catalyst's missteps? It makes me wonder what on earth they're doing, being spread so thin. We have been told SR6e is selling very well. It's had two big, successful Kickstarters in recent times. Why doesn't it have more people?

Catalyst is made of people from FanPro and fans who scrounged up their own personal capital to purchase the license so BattleTech and Shadowrun didn't die when FanPro went under. In that regard, they are very similar to Paizo. However, Paizo had started out in 2002 as the magazine publishing arm for Dungeons & Dragons (producing Dungeon and Dragon magazines) until 2007. Whereas Catalyst was formed of designers and such, Paizo was formed by publishers, two very different business outlooks.

[Finstersang]

Take out alchemy and enchanting.  Take out technomancers.  Take out rituals.  Move those to splatbooks.  Give the real core stuff the proper treatment.  Then whatever a rule doesn't cover, the fluff can help you intuit.  It's spread too thin right now.

Word. I mean, I can understand Technomancers. Not everyone like them, but they are considered Archetypes since 4th and 5th Edition and some players might have been bummed out if they would have been cut.

But I highly doubt that anyone would have missed Enchanting and Ritual spellcasting, especially in their current state. That would have been just right for a supplement that takes time to properly introduce and elaborate these concepts and come up with some fresh ideas and mechanics instead of this piss-weak, stale, gimmicky bullshit. I can´t even blame the "writers" of these sections, as there is almost no new writing, just Copy&Paste from 5th Edition with some haphazard tweaks. Putting that shit back in the book was already a mistake.

Oh, but we have a whole page and examples for Flamethrowers. One of them even uses the wild die mechanic that was seemingly forgotten halfway between.
There are no flamethrowers in the gear section. But hey, it´s something 

[penllawen]

Catalyst is made of people from FanPro and fans who scrounged up their own personal capital to purchase the license so BattleTech and Shadowrun didn't die when FanPro went under.

I am aware of Catalyst’s humble origins, and in 2007 when this happened it would have been a good reason to cut them some slack... but that was 12 years ago. Today, Catalyst is a professional games firm, publishing games it wants people to buy. That makes it fair game for critical appraisal - which is what 6e is getting.

Also: as long back as 2010, Catalyst was rich enough that the founder accidentally spend three quarters of a million dollars from the company accounts and nobody noticed for a year. It just raised $2.5m on a Kickstarter. I don’t think it’s poor, or deserving of any pity or special treatment for being small.

In that regard, they are very similar to Paizo. However, Paizo had started out in 2002 as the magazine publishing arm for Dungeons & Dragons (producing Dungeon and Dragon magazines) until 2007. Whereas Catalyst was formed of designers and such, Paizo was formed by publishers, two very different business outlooks.

This sounds backwards. Let’s go back to this for a moment:

Paizo has about 100 employees, two RPGs (which use the same base rules), and one card game. Catalyst Game Labs has about 35 employees and produces Shadowrun, Shadowrun Anarchy, Shadowrun Crossfire, BattleTech, Mechwarrior, Leviathans, Dragonfire, Cosmic Patrol, Valiant, and a myriad of tabletop board games.

Surely with those numbers of people, the business models here are: Pazio is designing games, Catalyst is publishing them (and paying freelancers to do the designing.) Catalyst has too few people to actually be building games.