Shadowrun
Catalyst Game Labs => Catalyst's Shadowrun Products => Topic started by: Rallen12 on <05-18-15/0225:43>
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Shadowrun was the first RPGs i found and it was my favorite but i started learning about other systems and only now did i come back and i see that alot of people are unhappy from product reviews and such
what's the deal?
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Th first books of 5th Edition suffered from numerous editing problems that were due to a bad proofreading process. It has gotten much better on the latest releases.
Apart from that, some people may not like some of the changes to the rules, or the latest plot developments. It's very subjective, I guess.
Personally I love SR5, probably the most fun I've had with Shadowrun since SR3. I like the fact they've gone back to a darker and grittier atmosphere, where things can go south very fast.
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As Marzhin said, the early books had a lot of problems, that have mostly been resolved now. My main issues with 5E basically all tie into the fact that opportunities for customization have been greatly reduced from 4th edition. As someone who greatly enjoys systems like Champions, M&M, BESM, and the like, being able to tweak things to fit my vision is key to my enjoyment of the game. The main issues I've got with the new system are:
Priority System - I've never liked the priority system, as it basically forces people into certain routes, rather than allowing them the flexibility to choose things how they like. 4th edition's Point Buy system was much more elegant, in my opinion.
Weapon Mods - We haven't had the rigger book yet, but weapon mods got kicked straight in the balls comparing this edition to the last. I liked being able to mod a weapon to my tastes. To borrow from the Marines, "This is my Predator IV. There are many like it, but this one is MINE."
Technomancers - TMs got thrown in a cell with Bubba the Love Troll and sandpaper instead of lube. They went from being the swiss army knives of the matrix, though less reliable in their abilities than regular matrix users to being shoehorned into only being hackers and being substantially both worse at their job than deckers and less versatile than deckers. And they kept all the drawbacks that balanced their utility with a hacker's reliability in the last edition, making them even worse. Hell, there was an entire technomancer Stream (like a mage's Tradition) focused on rigging and interacting with drones, and now TMs can't even jump into a drone without Submerging. Any TM Riggers out there (and yes, TMs made some damn fine riggers in 4th) got the shaft harder than the 'stars' of gangbang porn trids.
Redundancy - Part of the problem with the Priority system and the changes to Hacking/Rigging is that they absolutely murder party redundancy. In 4th, it was easy for each person in the group to have a primary role, and then a secondary or tertiary role that they could step into if need be. When speaking of a Face, for instance, they're always nice to have, but what if they catch a case of dead? What if you have things to do at two places at once? Having someone who can step up, even if they aren't in the same league, can make the difference between a milk run and all hell breaking loose. Most teams usually only have one Matrix specialist. In a standard group of 4-5, you have Magic, Muscle, Matrix, Face, and usually a second gunner, especially if the mage isn't combat-focused. In 4th edition, a Hacker could pull double duty, rigging a couple drones, or a Rigger could hack if need be. That redundancy was utterly wiped out, which means if the Hacker or Rigger takes a case of lead poisoning, the entire run is dead. Before, redundancy allowed you to at least try and finish the run.
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I can't entirely agree with everything Mirikon says, but I definitely agree on the customization aspect. SR3 had significantly more options than SR4, and SR4 had (so far, going by Run & Gun) significantly more options than SR5. This is not a good trend to my mind, and though a lot of gear can relatively easily be modified to fit SR5 rules this does mean that one must have the previous edition books.
I also agree with the point made about Technomancers; they are easily the hardest archetype to play, followed closely by riggers simply because of the lack of rules. Players wanting to use these archetypes will have to make sure to talk to their GM in-depth to make sure that they are on the same page where rules are concerned, because there is a lot of potential for interpretation in the rules.
On redundancy, I feel this is only relevant if the table plays a very highly specialized game; if you go by the examples in the book and the sample characters from the main rulebook and the beginners box set, there's plenty of room for overlap between player characters. Magic is the only thing to my mind that can't be compensated for, but a cheap deck and an agent program might be able to do in a pinch and most vehicles still have manual controls or can be remotely operated by someone with a high reaction score and a few ranks in pilot groundcraft. Sure, these characters won't be as good as the dedicated rigger or decker, but I also don't think that's a reasonable expectation given that riggers and deckers aren't supposed to be fully fledged street samurai or spellslingers. Again, unless the table requires high degrees of specialization to the point where players are throwing 18 or more dice for their primary skills, it is quite possible to build in some redundancy in a team.
In terms of books:
Core has a few problems, but nothing that in my opinion cannot be houseruled or worked around.
Run & Gun is mostly straight forward, though the lack of modifications and focus on demolitions is a move I won't understand. I really like the inclusion of Combat Maneuvers, but I don't expect these rules to be used too much, which I feel is a shame.
Street Magic is plagued by a significant amount of odd and arbitrary rules, some of which make absolutely no sense to my mind. Still, it's a decent supplement for the lore and for spellcasters, but it definitely has potential for a significant overhaul.
Run Faster is in my opinion the strongest book of all released so far from a rules perspective. There's a lot of good content (including the return of the Karma character generation method), solid in-game lore, and I found it to be just an all-around good book.
I've enjoyed pretty much all of the supplements so far; Bullets & Bandages is my least favourite because it was mostly a 4th Edition book in my opinion, with Stolen Souls (despite its layout issues) and Lockdown the strongest by far.
If there's one thing I wish Catalyst would do better, it would be to leave rules and lore well enough alone. Keep the two clearly separated, because having to flip four pages to find some vague details about a piece of gear (I'm looking at you, Stolen Souls) is something I find to be decidedly unpleasant. I also didn't appreciate the sheer amount of snark in Run & Gun (some of the descriptions of weapon accessories just felt like the writers straight up lashing out in some sort of way in poor attempts at humour), so I was very glad to see that Run Faster had neither of these issues. I firmly believe that we're in for a lot of good content if Catalyst can keep up the good work evidenced in Run Faster and Lockdown.
TL;DR
Some poor showings early on are more than made up for with recent releases, in my opinion.
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Quality control has been bad enough it's made me wonder if it's not better to go back and play 4th. 4th was overall a good ruleset but it had a few structural issues -- elemental dmg was too much, I didn't liek the initiative pass system, etc. The matrix has needed to be redone forever. The broad, sweeping changes to 5th ed were great! I think limits (accuracy) work well (largely poorly implemented outside of combat, though), new initiative is better, new matric is WAY better, a lot of well thought out tweeks here and there.
BUT, there are almost two contradictory rulesets in the main book, and it's like elements of one weren't thoroughly erased, and they cause confusion. And mostly the new rulebooks have been VERY hard to read, street grimoire had LOTS of cut & paste that was sorta thoughtlessly ported over from 4th without considering how poorly they worked with new changes (and a few times, I've seen bits broken off, still cut&paste, to be in an "add-on" book). It's clear that often two different people are working on two different sections and no one is making sure the two sections make sense with each other, or follow the same format, or anything, really. Run Faster is a pretty OK book, honestly, but for instance the sections telling you how to make infected characters, vs those telling you how to make shapeshifters, are laid out completely differently. Obviously the two types do work differently, but I'm mostly thinking how they chose to explicitly address new vampires not getting regeneration (which is a good change) but dual natured, silver vulnerability and regeneration aren't even mentioned under shapeshifters. More broadly, I'd like them to follow simpler formats.
Generally speaking, the fluff has been great. And that's important! But this is a crunchy game, rules matter. I feel like the "state of the rules" is going downhill with every new book. The amount of errata/FAQ to fix it would be enormous, and Catalyst has shown no will to even do half of it. (The SG errata, for instance, didn't cover most of what needed).
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From what I've read here should I hold my plans to collect 5e and scour Amazon and eBay for 4e books? Lol
But seriously, having not read 5e yet I'm very sad to see the priority system come back. I loved 4e point buy creation. It gave me perfect customization. Is it possible, or rather Easy, to create using 4e then convert to 5 for play?
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You can pick up a lot of SR4 PDFs from the bundle of holding (https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Shadowrun4E) right now. Really cheap when you consider you're getting almost every worth wild expanded rule set.
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From what I've read here should I hold my plans to collect 5e and scour Amazon and eBay for 4e books? Lol
But seriously, having not read 5e yet I'm very sad to see the priority system come back. I loved 4e point buy creation. It gave me perfect customization. Is it possible, or rather Easy, to create using 4e then convert to 5 for play?
For reference, there are some alternative chargen options in Run Faster. Once you've got your feet wet...might be of some interest. ;)
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Personally, I think the priority system (or at least the Sum to 10) is awesome. It would have been nice if Run faster had the old point buy system, updated. The karma system isn't really a replacement, as its exponential, rather than linear.
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I really enjoy SR5
Can't wait to get my hands on Lockdown
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some things have been made much better in 5th (Dedicated hackers, combat adepts, mystic adepts), some things have been made worse (TM's, aspected magicians).
Riggers are still left stranded without an expansion book and suffer from a lot of vague or badly worded rules and the car chase mechanics are still not great (though are improved somewhat from 4e)
Weapon mods got axed and the early books were a mess of copy pasted crap from 4e and terrible proofing.
The catalyst guys admitted things weren't up to scratch and have got their heads down and really turned the quality around. the last couple of books have been decent and i'm really looking forward to seeing the new matrix expansion book.
In short, things are fine and improving from there
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Pros
- Lower power starting characters (4th was way too powerful)
- Better archetype balance
- Alternative names for vehicles
- Rules feel much cleaner overall
- The book itself is more visually appealing
- Vastly superior initiative system (best change imo)
- Magic is more balanced
- Ware costs considerably more
- Cyberdecks are back!
Cons
- Matrix is slightly better but still very long winded and hard to memorize
- Grenades are still a giant mess though slightly better than 4th
- Rigger rules are extremely confusing and rigger combat is very slow
- Recoil is a nuisance for GM in large battles
Should you play 5th?
Yes. I think 5th is the superior product. It isn't perfect, many books are yet to be released, but I think it's a very fun system.
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I think most of us are cheering for Shadowrun and wish for it to do great.
While 5E brought some refreshing improvements to the rule set, it also brought more that its load of quality assurance issues, integral rehash of material from previous editions and fluff to rule ratio is a lot worse than prior editions (No fault to the fluff writers, the fluff IS good but I didn't buy a novel did I?).
Even more distressing to me is that I am guessing there are some severe management issues. No production schedule is publically released, lack of product support through rule supplements is uninspiring, quality assurance is abysmal, edition problems are rampant and incoherence between products suggest lack of a global vision for the system.
As such I have stopped buying 5E products after the magic supplement and wait to see significant improvement before I get back in. I come to the board every once in a while hoping to read that products are improving or that the Brand has been sold.
Rapier
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@Rapier - might be worth taking a look at some of the recent reviews out there. Things aren't perfect, but have improved in the past year (imho).
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As such I have stopped buying 5E products after the magic supplement and wait to see significant improvement before I get back in.
Check out Run Faster.
I come to the board every once in a while hoping to read that products are improving or that the Brand has been sold.
Ownership of Shadowrun is by Topps. Production of Shadowrun RPG is Catalyst via a license from Topps. Topps can sell Shadowrun without impact to the players.
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AJ what I can sense is that a lot of people are working hard to make things better. I just wish management would get out of the way.
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Ahh, you mean the people making sure the business keeps running so they can continue to make the products?
Honestly, you pretty much stopped at the low point, there's been a steady improvement since SG.
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@Rapier - at the end of the day, you, as the consumer, make the final call. Changing can take time...I feel things are going in the right direction, but, that's my opinion. As others have noted, it might be worth your time to check it some of the more recent releases and see how they stack up. Currently, I'm particularly partial to Lockdown ;D
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Currently, I'm particularly partial to Lockdown ;D
So am I, coincidentally. I thought Lockdown was by far one of the better sourcebooks published, right up there with Renraku Arcology: Shutdown, Brainscan, System Failure, and Bug City. Slight spoiler alert:
When the reference to Dayus (or however it was misspelled) was made, I got chills. And the whole diary in the life of a Lockdownee was just pure gold.
I might be a fan of Shadowrun, but I don't consider myself a fanatical one. I am fairly vocal in my criticism of some of the design choices that have been made, but after what I saw in Run Faster and Lockdown, I am more than happy to deal with some poorly written rules if that's what it takes.
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Overall-
On the plus side
5th ed is much easier to introduce a new player to. Its still crunch heavy but build points in 4th ran off some players of mine. They literally looked at the core book and said no way, I am not going to the trouble of learning that.
I think the core mechanics of 5th, including the changes to decking and the minor changes to magic, are very sound. I would rather play those than 4th. With the occasional house rule to patch omissions in the rules, its certainly playable.
On the negative side-
Editing and production quality are inconsistent. Core book is ok if you get the 2nd printing, I think Run Faster and Run and Gun were reasonably well done. Street Grimoire was more iffy, but it has a bunch of traditions and a expended spell list, which is nice to have. It completely lacked some thing that some people were expecting, such as rules for custom spell design or even just inventing formulas for known spells from scratch. Other sections were simply. . . puzzling, both in their mechanical implementation and how they would actually affect a game.
The last two main books, Data Trails and Chrome flesh (I have data trails, chrome flesh I have not seem yet, but I have heard multiple reports) are fluff bombs. I was deeply disappointed in Data trails, both in the amount of useful material that was actually in it, its almost non-existent table of contents and complete lack of an index, and the fact that areas that needed some real mechanical love, like technomaners, got almost no attention. I don't know how much hard rules are actually in Chrome Flesh, but I am hearing the same thing, tons of jackpointer fluff, meaningless TOC,, and yet again no index.
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While Chrome Flesh is indeed heavy on the fluff once again, I get the feeling it's better balanced than Data Trails, with some meaty crunch as well.
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While Chrome Flesh is indeed heavy on the fluff once again, I get the feeling it's better balanced than Data Trails, with some meaty crunch as well.
They definitely added some new 'ware & drugs.... but the end of the Drug chapter which was going strong just falls apart & the Addiction Mechanic wasn't touched. Their Example has a guy who Custom Drug is Addiction Rating 10 & Addiction Threshold 8! He's Burned Out in a Month and dead 6 weeks later after burning his Attributes to 0... that's not a good example. Couple that with the fact that the Rules for Addiction Threshold & Addiction Rating aren't even given and I had to Reverse Engineer them to guess at it to post in the Errata thread. Whoever wrote it obviously didn't know the Addiction Rule Set. Which we undoubtedly wonky & needing a revision but now they have become wonky & lethal, with the changes made to the Drug Reaction rules. It's anytime you take more than 1 drug (including things like Stimm or Trauma payches) you have to start rolling instead of stacking attribute boosting drugs. Heck with the way the rules are written there's a decent chance you can get addicted to the immunosuppressive drugs if you get surgery for new ware during game play.
Overall it's definitely one of the stronger books with good content but that's saying something when there are huge chunks missing, the issue about Lockdown Cybersuites (which work for a video game being one shot packages) so Cybersuites had to become Bundles which weren't handled that bad... just not that impressive, &the complete LACK of any crunch at the end regarding Cybermacy, CyberZombies, Cyborgs disappeared entirely, & I correctly guessed how the CFD issue is being resolved which I concede CFD did make a good Plot Arc (I still hate it though.)
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the complete LACK of any crunch at the end regarding Cybermacy, CyberZombies, Cyborgs disappeared entirely
That's what you get for speculating ;)
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Being a long time Shadowrun player and GM, Does anyone remember hackerjacks?, here my thoughts I love the evolution of Shadowrun from 1st to 3rd after 4th came out I decided I would not be going on buying the new edition 4th seemed broken from the start. lat last year while I was hating on 5ed D&D I picked up the main book for Shadowrun 5th yes this was a 1st printing and I have seen worse 1st printings. To me 5th compares very well tp 3rd which was the best.
I think part of the complainants are because people have been expecting to much in the books, we know that there is a Technomancer book coming next year and Riggers never get loving in the main book. Weapon modification did not come out in 3rd until the paramilitary book and they did 2 magic books.
As for to much Fluff this is a RPG not a Miniatures combat game Fluff is an important tool for both players and GM's
No so far I've been very happy with 5th now if they could just not put the vehicle guide in the riggers book.
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As for to much Fluff this is a RPG not a Miniatures combat game Fluff is an important tool for both players and GM's
Some "fluffy bits" in the core book (one to three chapters) is good to give a feel for the setting of the game, but aside from that, those bits really need to be kept out of rules source books and confined to their own publications, IMO.
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ALL4BigGuns I truly have to Disagree with that I would reather have fluff thru out all of the source books, each book having the flufff that goes with it than trying to publish books of pure fluff. White Wolf did that and ended up with a large number of books that sold in very small numbers because they were fluff dealing with only GM's or one type of character. These Fluff books ended up being a major drain on the company and bad for bizz. besides what most people are calling fluff is either important Role-Play info or great plot hooks. If you want a game with no Fluff go pick yourself up a copy of "Hero System" no fluff just rules.
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One of the things I like about SR, IS the heavy inclusion of fluff with the rules. The flavor/context makes it a lot more interesting when reading and consumption of the rules easier (fro me).
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I like the fluff, but too much is too much for a crunch book.
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Core rules sources should be 90% new mechanical material and 10% "fluffy". This is because these are the most expensive of the books and any less rules material makes the source worth less than the price tag. The more minor publications should go to around the 50/50 split.
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Interesting...I don't equate crunch to value...hadn't thought about it like that.
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I can't entirely agree with All4BigGuns on the exact 90/10 thing, but I'd definitely take a look back at Arsenal, Augmentation, and Street Grimoire from 4th Edition. These were significantly more rules heavy than their 5th Edition counterparts, and I personally prefer it that way. So, while I may not agree on the specifics, I definitely agree that the focus should be on rules rather than fiction, as I firmly believe the latter belongs in setting and source books rather than rule books.
I'd also add that I think interspersing in-setting information in the common sourcebooks players buy somewhat lessens the impact on these events because players will have most of the information already. Some people are good at not metagaming, but one of my favourite Shadowrun moments to this day remains the bug reveal in the Universal Brotherhood arc. Not to sound like "one of those guys", but with no internet and no PDFs that story figuratively blew my mind in it's unexpectedness.
I'd also be remiss if I didn't comment on how the lack of a proper table of contents and bookmarks for Data Trails and Chrome Flesh exacerbate this mix of fiction and rules. When I use the PDF bookmarks to jump between chapters I more often than not find myself scrolling through 10 pages of fiction to get to the rules. Recently I've started using the indexed tables in the back to find page references more than anything, but I really can't stress enough the usefulness of good ToCs and PDF bookmarks. Colour me spoiled :)
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I don't know exactly what the "correct" ratio should be between fluff and crunch should be but a rule book's priority should be about rules. Just looking at the bioware chapter of Chrome Flesh and I see 15 pages of pure fluff before even getting to the equipment and rules covering said equipment which consists of another 17 pages which contains plenty more fluff as well. This seems to me to be a tad out of whack for a book that is supposed to give me the mechanical framework to run a game. Even then I could live with that except for the fact that in this edition the writers repeatedly fail to state the rules in such a way that are clear, concise, complete and non-contradictory.
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Yup, too much fluff is too much in a crunch book ;-)
I still hold by my observation that a new line editor is needed and a new editing process in general.
5e has suffered far too long under poor management despite repeated and constant feedback to that effect from the community management has not gotten to the heart of the problem and just continues to color in around the edges imho.
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The flavor/context makes it a lot more interesting when reading and consumption of the rules easier (for me).
Until you need to read a full paragraph to find a single attribute effect of a Drug or Geneware that, on closer inspection, doesn't actually fit in the fluff sentence because for sure no one in universe would call it that way.
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I have to admit; I was disappointed with my last two purchases (Data Trails and Chrome Flesh). While Shadowrun 5th Edition Core Rulebook surely had a few flaws and editing problems, and the followups Street Grimiore and Run & Gun showed a few more of these.. I was thoroughly impressed with Run Faster, and thought the team had found its swing.
The last two books, however, seem to be products of confusion in design, and deadlines (Origins & GenCon). Both had an immense amount of story and fluff text, that while definitely valued; seems to have resulted in a great deal of other things being left out. Data Trails was lacking for a great deal of Technomancer Love that had long been talked about and wanted; and Chrome Flesh felt more like a tome of small stories with some mechanics worked in.
I enjoy the fluff, immensely, and I have to give due credit to the writers; but I feel that for the products being sold, the volume was not appropriate. The fact Data Trails is soon to be supplemented by another PDF just to fill in Technomancers (I surely hope this PDF is free) and the information I feel should have been in the Data Trails rulebook, and Chrome Flesh missing out so much I'm finding myself better suited to rereading Augmentation and adapting it, leaves me frustrated. Especially in the latter; even if Biodrones / Cyberzombies and the like can't be made anymore with the whole CFD problem, I feel having the rules for them is still appropriate. The existing stock may still be manufactured, or even more valuable; but those have to be made up by hand for their lack of coverage.
All this after Street Grimoire and Run & Gun, even with their flaws, had a good ratio of fluff to crunch and plenty of usable material; and Run Faster that surely needed some proof reading but was an all-round good product? I would say ; my opinion of Shadowrun is simply to get the basic books, and do the rest by hand-wave or 4E as inspiration.
And yes, the usual plug about recent efforts in Tables of Contents and Indexes has to be mentioned. While for a player not a problem; being a GM and having to try and find things in a hurry in those books when it comes up is truly a pain.
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Hahaha you're a funny man!
The fact Data Trails is soon to be supplemented by another PDF just to fill in Technomancers (I surely hope this PDF is free)...
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Allow me my dreams of a cheap fix to a product! But yes. I am wholly aware my dreams are likely a folly.
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I've run/played all of the editions since first. 5th ed is a blast. I'm currently running two games, one at my FLGS and one at a private residence and I'm also playing in a "Resident Evil" style game using SR rules at the same FLGS. The rules system runs smoother than previous editions. The only problem I have is the publisher of the SR books, well just the core rulebook actually. Mine as well as a friend of mine's core rulebooks are falling to pieces. Just damn shoddy binding jobs. This shouldn't happen. I have tried and tried to get a response from Catalyst but they have completely ignored my several emails. Even my FLGS is hesitant on stocking up on SR products because of the problems my friend and I have been having.
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I'm definitely in a Love-Hate relationship with the Edition right now. I guess when you love something so much it cuts a little deeper when you're disappointed.
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the complete LACK of any crunch at the end regarding Cybermacy, CyberZombies, Cyborgs disappeared entirely
That's what you get for speculating ;)
No need to rub it in... so supposedly Wakshaani did mention another potential Splatbook with that in it. I forgot the goal was to carve out as many Splatbooks as possible. Not that mad about the lack there.... the hideous ToC & heavy Fluff use with the vague unexplained Rules (Modular Connector/Modular Cyberlimbs or Qualities which turned out to be cool just annoying without explanation here... and those dreaded Custom Drug/Drug interactions table!!!) Hard to get that mad about the 13th most annoying thing about the book.
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I can't entirely agree with All4BigGuns on the exact 90/10 thing, but I'd definitely take a look back at Arsenal, Augmentation, and Street Grimoire from 4th Edition. These were significantly more rules heavy than their 5th Edition counterparts, and I personally prefer it that way. So, while I may not agree on the specifics, I definitely agree that the focus should be on rules rather than fiction, as I firmly believe the latter belongs in setting and source books rather than rule books.
I'd also add that I think interspersing in-setting information in the common sourcebooks players buy somewhat lessens the impact on these events because players will have most of the information already. Some people are good at not metagaming, but one of my favourite Shadowrun moments to this day remains the bug reveal in the Universal Brotherhood arc. Not to sound like "one of those guys", but with no internet and no PDFs that story figuratively blew my mind in it's unexpectedness.
I'd also be remiss if I didn't comment on how the lack of a proper table of contents and bookmarks for Data Trails and Chrome Flesh exacerbate this mix of fiction and rules. When I use the PDF bookmarks to jump between chapters I more often than not find myself scrolling through 10 pages of fiction to get to the rules. Recently I've started using the indexed tables in the back to find page references more than anything, but I really can't stress enough the usefulness of good ToCs and PDF bookmarks. Colour me spoiled :)
All of this ^^^^^^^
I found that clicking on the next chapter than the one I want and rolling up to the end works best for this tragedy of a ToC. Just makes it annoying without getting to the wanting to chuck my phone the room like it's the one "who fucked up by not formatting the pdf properly" level
Bugs were definitely better than CFD.... crazy world where I miss Bugs. Hopefully the Monad build their ships and fly the fuck away never to be heard from again in the next book..... or would that be me "speculating" again?
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In general, I would say that 5th is the best edition I have enjoyed due to the rules design (and I have every edition still sitting on my shelves). But there are definitely a few critiques that go with it.
My first is the fluff vs crunch others have mentioned. Previous editon sourcebooks have on average always had more rules than what we see now. I like fiction, but when I buy a game book I want the game represented in it moreso than the fiction.
To give an example, here's a comparison between Unwired and Data Trails:
Unwired is 207 pages. 136 of those pages have mechanics and game content. Technomancers are fully detailed and still have all their now-missing goodies (like Paragons).
Data Trails is 183 pages. 74 of those pages have mechanics and game content.
The game content between these two books is also vastly different. Commlinks in Data Trails seem neglected. What is defined as the single greatest piece of gear to a runner gets some bland phone apps and the inability to run actual programs. Rules for Form Factor are light, almost negligible (add to cost/availability, but gain nothing like armor rating, etc like previous edition cases). The highlight of the book should be the section on modifying gear, but it too comes up light. Adding Persona Firmware sounds great, except there's no table for what the Persona's stats are (Persona stats are always linked to a device, so what device do you use?). I think the idea behind some of the new content is good, but I come away with the perception the writer knew what he was envisioning already and didn't think to write all of it out for the rest of us to comprehend (so we're left guessing how some stuff works).
Chrome Flesh. I don't need to say much here. Yes it has lots of fluff, but what's included in rules more than compensates. Its jam packed with old and new goodies. After Run Faster, it is by far my favorite sourcebook.
Looking back at some other sourcebooks, Street Grimoire and Run n Gun were good, but they could have been better. Here we come back to customization, which seems sorely lacking in 5th edition. Street Grimoire had none of the spell creation/modification of previous editions. The sections on item creation seemed a bit drab, not enough info on using refined, radicals and orichalcum. The Talismongering chapter went on and on, and then didn't really offer any crunch to make reading it worthwhile. Oh, and Spirit Mentors. Guess most of them from previous editions have been wiped out by Horrors, so we're left with fewer choices.
In Run n Gun, the big hole is definitely all the previous gun customization being gone. Instead, there's a chapter dedicated to the mathematical details of blowing up buildings. I don't mind the explosive creation part, but I'd say the rest is of rather limited usage to players compared to weapon tweaking.
Last thing I'd say is storylines. Universal Brotherhood was by far the best. Followed by love of that wacky Harlequin. Then all of the interesting characters from the classic modules and campaign books (Mercurial, Euphoria, Deus, various dragons, etc). Sadly the it-kills-your-characters nanovirus comes in last. Way too apocalyptic unless your goal was to bring a campaign to an end (and possibly put you on the hit list with your fellow players). We need adventures with more iconic NPCs and returning enemies you love to hate. The campaign books are nice if you want to fill in the blanks for your group, but sometimes its hard to beat a good old fashioned module.
The good thing to take away from all of this is that there's always room to add more to the game with future books. I'm hopeful that maybe there's a Big Book of Customizing out there on the horizon to bring back a big portion of mechanics that are missing. Or individual pdf supplements that will fill in the gaps. Either way, 5th edition is a good successor to the previous editions, and on the average I've been pleased by most of the current products.
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Funny hearing how other editions have had less fluff than hearing all 4th edition books being named. Sorry guys but I played 1st-3rd and ran all 3 there fluff level was much closer to 5th than you think. Less short stories mostly only one a book but the rest was always there and useful. I just got done going thru my copy of Chrome Flesh and I am impressed not I have many new ideals for my up coming game. I've played Cyberpunk back in the day and it was a minimums fluff in books game and that one of the reason I jumped to SHadowrun when it came out.
Come on people this is a RPG here we are not playing D&D the fluff adds to the game.
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Funny hearing how other editions have had less fluff than hearing all 4th edition books being named. Sorry guys but I played 1st-3rd and ran all 3 there fluff level was much closer to 5th than you think. Less short stories mostly only one a book but the rest was always there and useful. I just got done going thru my copy of Chrome Flesh and I am impressed not I have many new ideals for my up coming game. I've played Cyberpunk back in the day and it was a minimums fluff in books game and that one of the reason I jumped to SHadowrun when it came out.
Come on people this is a RPG here we are not playing D&D the fluff adds to the game.
Incorrect. Man and Machine might have a page or two here and there in between sets of rules info, and once getting into the meat of the matter, it has a short blurb of a paragraph for description before giving the mechanical information needed to use the implant/rule (with the exception of the Nanotech chapter, which has 10 pages right at the beginning--the largest amount of pure 'fluff' in the book). Cannon Companion is the same way. Magic in the Shadows probably has the highest 'fluff' percentage of those books, but the magical side of things always has needed more explanation.
Third edition books on par with Fifth in terms of "fluff" would be things like SOTA books and Year of the Comet (mainly 'fluff' with just a few mechanical things here and there).
You are, however, right about one thing. Third edition had a pretty good balance between setting information and mechanics information. They didn't go too overboard on the 'fluffy bits' and they had a decent amount of clear rules information in the rules books. Most 'fluff' was saved for source books outside of the core rules supplements.
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Your name says it all All4BigGuns you happened to mention some of the most useful books in the game there those beginning the SotA books at least on the GM side. Shadowrun historically does not produce GM books other than a few area source books mostly done towards the end of an edition. One of the things I love about the current edition is that the fluff helps fill in that gap. For the most part in shadowrun GM's do not need extra rules but background Fluff can be a great help with setting and adventure ideals.
Man & Machine came in at 160 pgs Chrome Flesh is 240 pgs
Man & Machine has half to two thirds the new toys that Chrome Flesh has
So pages to toys you are either running about the same or less
I like the new books for the most part I only wish both the editing and the play test was better so we would get less errata. Also unless they have it and I missed it we need a Errata PDF posted some were
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If you were to segregate the fluff and mechanics totally in Man and Machine, you might end up with 25 pages of the fluff out of that 160. Do the same with the 5e counter part you would likely end up with close to 200 pages of fluff. This is ludicrous for a core rules supplement.
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Descriptions of the new items listed in the book are not fluff if you want a game that is all mechanics try hero system. You can not seem to count it seems Chrome Flesh is running by my count about half and half as far as fluff goes if your a player and not a GM. More like 25% fluff 75% rules and useful information for a GM. and still more than Doubles the number of new cyberware and other toys when compared to Man and Machine. Sorry there are not enough Big guns for you.
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Cyber chapter probably has about 2/3 what M&M had in it, and you have to dig through a mountain of fluff at the beginning to get to it.
Bioware chapter probably has 1/2 what M&M had in it, and you again have to dig through that mountain before getting to it.
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So were not suppose to count cyberware that you do not like Okay your right this is a bad book just send your copy to me and I will make sure it get into the hands of someone that can use it. Meanwhile I'll understand that you do not run the game and think that all the books should only have stuff for players not info for the Game Master's who works so hard to make your weekly games fun and interesting.
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I went through Chrome Flesh and Data Trails. If a page had a rule on it, the page number is included below. (So I'm counting as "rules pages" a lot of what people might call "fluff pages".)
Chrome Flesh: Pages 25, 50-65, 71-93, 107-124, 145-167, 176, 179-193, 222-238
= 114 "rules pages" (48% of a 240-page book)
Data Trails: Pages 43-49, 51-53, 55-66, 76-77, 86-88, 90-91, 93, 95-96, 98, 100, 102-105, 110-120, 145-165, 178-182
= 75 "rules pages" (41% of a 184-page book)
Both of these Core Handbooks are over 50% fluff (Data Trails is nearly 60% fluff), even counting entire pages as "rules" that really only have rules in a tiny sidebar or for a single statblock.
For comparison, Man & Machine (SR3): Pages 13-50, 54-60, 62-79, 90-100, 105-124, 126-136, 138-140, 142-158 (Plus an index, which I'm not counting!)
= 125 "rules pages" (more than 3/4 of a 160-page book)
And Augmentation (SR4): Pages 20-23, 31-49, 60-71, 86-94, 105-117, 120-135, 151-176
= 99 "rules pages" (56% of a 176-page book)
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Meanwhile I'll understand that you do not run the game and think that all the books should only have stuff for players not info for the Game Master's who works so hard to make your weekly games fun and interesting.
I am specifically talking about Core Rules Supplements. These things should be expanding on the rules for the character types that their material influences. Both Data Trails and Chrome Flesh fail at that in favor of throwing several stories in that just take up space. Those could easily have been done as a novella or story anthology for those interested in them in order to make room for rules expansion and clarification.
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So GM's should not get any rule support or background support? WOW! You most hate your GM. I agree that they should keep the short stories down to one per sourcebook but the rest I see as very useful. But than I'm an evil GM.
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Cyber chapter probably has about 2/3 what M&M had in it, and you have to dig through a mountain of fluff at the beginning to get to it.
Bioware chapter probably has 1/2 what M&M had in it, and you again have to dig through that mountain before getting to it.
Cyber has almost double what Augmentation had for 4th edition.
Bio has almost double what Augmentation had in 4th edition.
I tried to include everything from both chapters that wasn't in the main book, minus a couple of things, then added about the same number of new things on top of that. You might want to do a parts count. (And, yes, there's also lots of fluff for each on top of that! I like writing, what can I say?)
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Thank you Wakshaani from this GM to you I love the book the only thing I agree with these people is that we should cut down to one short story pre book. The rest should go into a companion anthology
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Oh, there're vbalid points in BigGuns' stuff, don't think I'm dismissing him! The modular limbs needed more page space, for instance, to really hammer them out, and the Wireless Router is gonna be the albatross I wear for a while, but raw page count isn't always the best measure of content.
For instance, Arsenal has 8 pages of drones, generating 28 drones.
SR5 Core has 2 pages of drones, generating 11 drones.
Rigger Black Book had 8 pages of drones, generating 9 drones.
There's a lot of different value in each one, with art, descriptions, fluff, and rules all in different ratios.
Compare Run and Gun to, say, the Street Samurai Catelogue (A word I never, ever manage to spell correctly, ack!) ... Different books have different ratios. People tend to value different things differently! Some feel bad if new toys don't have art, for example, while others don't care. Some don't care about fluff, while other people eat up things like:
"The CAS 'Alabama'-class air superiority fighter is awesome, with tight turns, great climb, and a surprisingly cutting-edge aiming system for dogfights (even if that kind of combat is so last century) ... but if you get one on your tail, here's a hint: They can't dive to the right. Cuts off the flow of gas to the engine and they stall out. Small design flaw that could save your life.-" Kane
No mechanical note whatsoever, pure fluff, but *neat*, and has historical parallel. (And a terrible name. There's a reason I don't name planes!)
Trying to give everybody something they'd like is tricky, but I'd rather give everybody a lil' than give one person everything and the rest nothing. Forty pages of drone stats in the Sr5 statblock style, with nary a description of anything? I'd pull my teeth out with a pair of pliers.
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I agree and I hope your talking about 4th's rigger's black book I've been hopping for a true Rigger's book since the begining all I keep getting is a vehicle guide with a couple of Rigger rules throw in. In the pass everyone has gotten more out of the RBB than the Rigger's have. I hope that will change in this edition
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Some fluff is important, no doubt.
For example product or item descriptions as you note Wak.
It's the endless reams of fan-fic and shovel-text that you have to wade through to find the actual content.
It's made 100% worse by not having a TOC that is helpful in the slightest.
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So GM's should not get any rule support or background support? WOW! You most hate your GM.
How about you stop trying to 'put words in the mouth' of others? Edit: Oh, and stop telling people that because they disagree with your seemingly anti-mechanics standpoint that they should go to a different game.
"Fluff" can (and does) change from table to table, so it needs to be kept as light and general as possible. Edit- At least in core rules supplements that players will be using for character generation. Specific story lines can be good, but aren't suitable for inclusion in a source heavily used by players. One person pointed out the reason for this already. It dilutes them and kind of kills the surprise of the story line.
Rules and mechanics, however, should be identical at every table barring usage of printed Optional Rules. This means that rules and mechanics need to be as specific, clear and comprehensive as possible (there should be a rule covering 99.9% of situations a group may encounter).
For comparison, Man & Machine (SR3): Pages 13-50, 54-60, 62-79, 90-100, 105-124, 126-136, 138-140, 142-158 (Plus an index, which I'm not counting!)
= 125 "rules pages" (more than 3/4 of a 160-page book)
Wakshaani, this is a good baseline to go by, only every "rule page" needs to be significantly rules rather than a sidebar or single line here and there.
A need to put more focus on actual rules and mechanics is the only weakness you have, man.
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Descriptions of the new items listed in the book are not fluff if you want a game that is all mechanics try hero system.
I'm currently attempting that with the main 5th ed book to see how it works out.
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EDIT
Asked to remove because it was considered beneath me. Not sure I agree, but it's gone nonetheless.
Not for nothing, but PMs on these forums are a TERRIBLE way to attract my attention....
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I can only speak for myself here, but I actually deeply enjoy the fluff-to-rules ratio with a few exceptions.
I mean, the lack of drones is *killing* me as a GM, because drones can make excellent (and bodies for AIs, until we get CAST/TRACES back). And while I completely do not agree with the chosen echoes given in DT, I know that Tmancers are getting their own buff down the line, so I'll simply ignore that they exist until I get that and have my rootkit back. There's other bits noted, such as the lack of creation rules for vehicles, spells, weapons, etc, which were given in the 4E equivalent books, but we're not looking at a complete rules line. Vital stuff first, cool stuff people want but don't *need* second.
And that said, I think the fluff is really important. I'm a GM by trade, and Shadowrun is an insanely complex and narratively detailed world. With each edition, there's more and more to remember. The short stories may not help you with a specific rules application, or even with specific operations, but they help in evoking that feel of Shadowrun. A lot of us are veterans. We can shut our eyes and see SR in all its grim, chromed-out, spell-slinging glory. But not everyone has that. New players need the world evoked for them, and a description and a few tips are no replacement for a good piece of fiction. I got into Shadowrun through the fluff myself, back when SR 1/2/3 had a rich library of novels and shorts. SR5 is getting there, but the books are a little more niche, and the short fiction in core, chrome flesh, DT, and so on are good, general slice-of-life examples of the world as a whole, as well as ways of introducing new shadowtalkers to replace the old ones, and new enemies and places and capabilities in a way that we can all intuitively understand.
And then there's Wakshaani's point. Chrome flesh, for example, has *more* 'ware than its 4E equivalent did. Its hard to fault them for so much fluff when it still managed to hit all the high points. Were parts of it poorly implemented? Yeah. Redliner needs more explanation, modular cyberlimbs are a mess, customized drugs are a mess, and chemical gland RAW is literally useless. But that's editing, not a flaw of *construction.*
I enjoy the current way the books are built, and fully support the inclusion of fluff. Part of SR's draw is the detail of such a unique world, and the fluff is how that is furthered.
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Actually, it is partially a flaw of construction. All that space taken up by fiction could have been used to ensure things were crystal clear.
Again, I am not saying "no fluff, ever", but rather that it's best to keep it restricted only to what's absolutely necessary to go with the rules present in a core rules supplement and put the heavily detailed stuff (and most especially specific story line information) to other sources that players are less likely to be digging through.
This has the benefit of providing sources for those GMs who wish to use every last iota of published "fluff" in their games while leaving all that extra out of the core 'stuff' for those who just want to take the general framework of the setting and run with it for their own paths. Sure it would be more expensive for the former type of GM, but that is more money in the pocket of CGL that can be used to pay the writers more and/or create even more resources.
Edit: I do feel that full stories really should be in anthology texts or, even better, expanded to full-on novels or novel trilogies. Fiction on that level really deserves to be placed on its own.
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Well, alright, I will grant you that in a few places the problem is one of construction, e.g. modular limbs. That needed more space. The writer straight-up admitted this. But a lot of the smaller flaws (and some bigger ones coughcustomdrugscough) seem to be problems of phrasing rather than problems with space issues, and those would benefit from more careful editing or another bleeder group taking them through playtesting to see where the issues lie, but they don't need additional *space.* So I return to the flugg not actually costing a whole hell of a lot, when in a lot of cases- as Wakshaani pointed out- you're still getting as much content as before.
But seriously. Construction rules. Please god, construction rules. Spells, weapons, vehicles. Which, ironically, gets back to the fluff. You run across mages designing spells, armorers tinkering with their guns, riggers with bananas rigs in stories all the time, and zero support for creating those. Fluff, I like it, I love it, I want a lot of it, but (at the risk of undermining myself slightly), it does get weird when a story presents awesome mccoolthing and there's no way to actually do it in the rules. I'm really missing the cool little twenty pages supplements 4E had going at the end that filled in little holes like these.
EDIT: Re: Money. Yes, it would be more expensive and thus make more money to do it where the fluff was essentially purchased separately. But in some cases (I don't play deckers, for example), paying for a short story anthology and being able to avoid say, Data Trails, means that they're trading a $40.00 purchase for a $10.00 one. And if the fluff is helping to draw people into the game by having it present when they're otherwise scrawling the the crunch-heavy tables of numbers and statistics, every player that wins over because of the writing, as I and my entire group got into SR is hundreds of dollars of future purchases.
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But seriously. Construction rules. Please god, construction rules. Spells, weapons, vehicles. Which, ironically, gets back to the fluff. You run across mages designing spells, armorers tinkering with their guns, riggers with bananas rigs in stories all the time, and zero support for creating those. Fluff, I like it, I love it, I want a lot of it, but (at the risk of undermining myself slightly), it does get weird when a story presents awesome mccoolthing and there's no way to actually do it in the rules.
Ten thousand times this. The custom firearm and vehicle creation rules were among the best things in Cannon Companion and Rigger 3, and their removal never should have happened especially with the excuse given for it. That the characters may not necessarily have the resources to do it in-game should not prevent the inclusion of such rules so that the players can create something cool for their characters to acquire and run it by the GM so compromise can be reached.
Of course the weapon creation should be expanded for the creation of melee weaponry as well (not to mention non-firearm ranged weapons) so that both melee and ranged combat types can benefit from them.
And then there is another type of creation rules entirely that really should be included. We have always been lacking detailed and comprehensive construction rules for "strongholds" (for lack of a better term). I don't believe that 'group lifestyles' are sufficient for creating a base of operations.
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[Wakshaani, this is a good baseline to go by, only every "rule page" needs to be significantly rules rather than a sidebar or single line here and there.
A need to put more focus on actual rules and mechanics is the only weakness you have, man.
I wish! Getting my brain broken as a lil' kid left me with 95% of my left hand (And forced me to use my 'off hand' for everything since), took away the ability to say a few letters (Took away everything, but I got *most* of it back), I can't swim, my knees are shoddy, and I'm stuck with a tenor voice instead of a way-cool Barry White rumbly bass.
And that's just for starters. :D
But, yeah, I read teh feedback (And read *way* more than I comment on), and take it to heart. We're trying to make stuff better each and every time, and hopefully the stuff I have in (Future Product) will show that off. Nuthin' but love, brother! :D
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I wish! Getting my brain broken as a lil' kid left me with 95% of my left hand (And forced me to use my 'off hand' for everything since), took away the ability to say a few letters (Took away everything, but I got *most* of it back), I can't swim, my knees are shoddy, and I'm stuck with a tenor voice instead of a way-cool Barry White rumbly bass.
And that's just for starters. :D
"Answers to 'Lucky.'"
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I wish! Getting my brain broken as a lil' kid left me with 95% of my left hand (And forced me to use my 'off hand' for everything since), took away the ability to say a few letters (Took away everything, but I got *most* of it back), I can't swim, my knees are shoddy, and I'm stuck with a tenor voice instead of a way-cool Barry White rumbly bass.
Not quite what I was talking about, but from the rest, I think you got the gist going by the parts not quoted.
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Thanks Patrick you gave me a lol moment with that. as for your comment All4BigGuns I'll quite tell you to go to another game as soon as you quite demanding that the game must be written the way you want it no mater what anyone else thinks. I'm sure that if people were having that much problems with the book content they would not be running out of stock.
My wife who is also a long time gamer says it reminds her of the old WOD books were you would have a short story split in to chucks thru out a supplement.
Also pages counts does not mean anything
To quote Wakshaani " Cyber has almost double what Augmentation had for 4th edition.
Bio has almost double what Augmentation had in 4th edition.
I tried to include everything from both chapters that wasn't in the main book, minus a couple of things, then added about the same number of new things on top of that. You might want to do a parts count. (And, yes, there's also lots of fluff for each on top of that! I like writing, what can I say?)"
We have gotten more out of this book than you got in 4th edition.
If you don't like the fluff skip it or don't buy the next book.
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Okay, you won't stop putting words in people's mouth. So, why don't you stop saying that because the book is absolutely perfect for you that any complaint about it is completely invalid?
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I did not put any words in your month All4BigGuns I just read what you were saying and connected the dots. If you were only commenting once or twice I would consider that you were expressing your thoughts but I see you blowing things up over and over again on many threads. Your welcome to your thoughts but if you dismiss my thoughts than I'm going to rebuttal yours. That's how it works. Sorry if you find this process not to your liking.
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The very first response you made to me was the first instance of dismissal of ideas in that you immediately came out with "go play this game instead".
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tytalan you are conveniently ignoring the many other posters here (and elsewhere) who think there is way too much fluff in the crunch books.
So as you can see from the discussion here that a case can be made for either side you are 100% wrong in stating that all4bigGuns is in the minority.
Quite the opposite if anything judging from the statements of my gaming group and my totally unscientific, anecdotal review of the comments on the subject in various forums.
I will say that most people who say they like things as they are misquote the "less fluff" faction by inserting the straw man that "some fluff is needed".
This is not what the "less fluff" faction is saying, it's saying very simply, focus on creating quality rulesets and stop dumping more shovel-ready fan-fic into the crunch books.
It helps little and only serves to take aways the focus from a quality ruleset which Catalyst has demonstrated again and again they have a hard time pulling off, ostensibly due to horrific editing.
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Guys. Personal attacks are getting us nowhere.
As Adzlin pointed out, a case can be made for either side. I think he's oversimplifying the pro-fluff side slightly, but I've already done as complete a job as I can discuss my point of view. All I'll say now is that part of it is preference, part of it is immersion factor, and part of it may be a business model thing.
Also, while the editing is detestable in some cases, there is no guarantee that stripping out fluff for rules would make that better.
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You're absolutely right Kinkerbell, it's a hope borne of frustration at the poor quality of the rules editing process that results in unclearly worded, contradictory descriptions again and again.
It's like no one is paying attention to the editing of the rules and the hope is if they would just reduce the time spent on non-essential fluff (that lives happily in shadows-in-focus fluff type books and novels) they could actually spend more time and $$ on getting the rules right.
And heck mebbe issuing some errata within a couple of years of publishing a book riddled with inexcusably obvious errors.
but this may just be wishful thinking.
still a guy's gotta have something to hope for, right?
Also, while the editing is detestable in some cases, there is no guarantee that stripping out fluff for rules would make that better.
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I agree with you about the editing Kinkerbell and adzling my problem with Guns is this demand he's made more than once that we most have a 25 / 75 or less fluff vs. rules. I've play a lot of games in my day and I've seen bad fluff, no fluff, and good fluff and IHO this books and most of the others are closer to good fluff levels than not. The games I've played that had little or no fluff tend to louse player interest faster than the ones with a good amount of Fluff. If you want a true measure of how the people are responding to the Fluff level in the books look at the sales that the final test.
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I do think the below statement unfortunately is not correct.
I HATE the horrifically poor quality of the product Catalyst is churning out due to it's horrific editing (or lack thereof) for clarity and sense.
It feels like the content of the books are tossed into a blender and extruded without the intervention of a real person (horribly layout is a hallmark of Catalyst's Srun line).
And yet I keep buying their tripe, primarily because I love the setting and this is what our group plays.
I wish, at some point, someone in Catalyst realized they need a change in the management of the Shadowrun line.
Get it to a place where someone who actually cares about the rules more than the fluff can spend the energy to get it right.
that's all.
If you want a true measure of how the people are responding to the Fluff level in the books look at the sales that the final test.
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Yeah, I cant really argue with that one, Adz. The game is wonderful, but I am dog-tired of it seemingly getting hosed by Catalyst in favor of other stuff.
Wish I knew how to break into game design. I'd love to work on SR, just to be able to put my money where my mouth is.
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To ALL:
Just a friendly reminder...to keep it friendly. ;)
@adzling - appreciate that you're frustrated with the "current state", but comments suggesting the people don't "care" are just wrong. None of us are privy to the inner workings, though at times we get glimpses. Given how strongly you seem to feel, I suggest you contact CGL directly.
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I agree with you about the editing Kinkerbell and adzling my problem with Guns is this demand he's made more than once that we most have a 25 / 75 or less fluff vs. rules. I've play a lot of games in my day and I've seen bad fluff, no fluff, and good fluff and IHO this books and most of the others are closer to good fluff levels than not. The games I've played that had little or no fluff tend to louse player interest faster than the ones with a good amount of Fluff. If you want a true measure of how the people are responding to the Fluff level in the books look at the sales that the final test.
Again, never did I say "no fluff" and my example ratio is for rules supplement books that are primarily for players (yes GMs use them too, but the players are the primary users).
We really need to go back to the old days where the larger chunks are in separate sources. Things like Shadows of North America and stuff like that are very good to be primarily "fluff" since that is the purpose. Hell, at this point, I'd love to see a Shadows of the CAS, a Shadows of Africa or a Shadows of Australia. One of these has a bit of information from Shadows of North America but not much and not really anything since, and the other two don't seem to be touched on at all.
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The biggest write-ups of teh CAS are from, in order, the Neo-Anarchist's Guid eto North America, Shadows Across North America, and Dirty Tricks.
Australia's original write-up is in Target: Awakened Lands, but had been mentioned at least in passing a few times before and since.
Africa... *sigh* ... Africa is criminally underused. A few of us are working on that, but it's not a major source of attention at this time. (You can start to see hints in Chrome Flesh, however.)
In previous editions, Africa was either "Tribal warfare" in Nigeria, "Radioactive Wasteland" for Libya, "Elves" for South America, and "Deepest Darkest" for most of the rest. It's ... it's been treated really, really badly over the years. Absolute shame. I know it isn't exactly a gaming Mecca (Hah, because Mecca is in ... okay, nevermind...) but there should be a lil' love sent that-a-way, right?
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My point is that sources like those are really where most of this fluff should be going rather than cramming it into books that should be primarily for rules and mechanics information. Keep it coming, but in the right places.
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My main reasons for wanting the fluff minimized in Core books are:
- They're Core books, so rules should be emphasized. The short story at the beginning of a chapter is cool, but there shouldn't be 20-40 pages of fluff in any given location. Put that stuff in an e-book, not the ruleset.
- I may read the fluff once and then set it aside. I'll reference rules over and over again. So any fluff I have to carry around is dead weight at a convention...especially when the main book is heavy enough to have a damage code. If you're going electronic, every page of fluff makes the book slower to load and slower to turn pages and wastes precious seconds in an already-time-crunched convention slot. The part of me that hasn't spent hundreds of dollars on the Core book hardcopies wants to field strip every last one of them to (literally) cut out the fluff and rebind the collection in a master rules reference to make them easier to carry at conventions.
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My main reasons for wanting the fluff minimized in Core books are:
- They're Core books, so rules should be emphasized. The short story at the beginning of a chapter is cool, but there shouldn't be 20-40 pages of fluff in any given location. Put that stuff in an e-book, not the ruleset.
- I may read the fluff once and then set it aside. I'll reference rules over and over again. So any fluff I have to carry around is dead weight at a convention...especially when the main book is heavy enough to have a damage code. If you're going electronic, every page of fluff makes the book slower to load and slower to turn pages and wastes precious seconds in an already-time-crunched convention slot. The part of me that hasn't spent hundreds of dollars on the Core book hardcopies wants to field strip every last one of them to (literally) cut out the fluff and rebind the collection in a master rules reference to make them easier to carry at conventions.
Meatgrinder, you sir are awesome. :D
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Some fluff is important, no doubt.
For example product or item descriptions as you note Wak.
It's the endless reams of fan-fic and shovel-text that you have to wade through to find the actual content.
It's made 100% worse by not having a TOC that is helpful in the slightest.
My trick is to skip the next chapter and roll into the backend of the chapter I want the Rules for. Works pretty well at cutting through my aggravation of scrolling past 12 pages of Fluff per chapter.
@Wakshanni... why the short story about some kind of Semi-Cybermancy but then no Rules for it??? I wanna etch magic symbols on my bones and go negative Essence too!!!!!
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My personal objection is not fluff / crunch balance as much as it is with insufficient space to cover some crunch. For example, in Run Faster, alternate playable metatypes get around 1/2 page each, which feels incredibly rushed, and is all presented as possibly unreliable fluff, with some of the rule explanations missing. This in a book where space was found for 25+ pages of collected equipment groupings. I cannot understand how this was considered the correct balance.
I want both fluff and crunch, but if there isn't room to explain how something works to make it playable, either cut some fluff to make room or cut it entirely.
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What would be good to see is what they do for war gaming a lot now, sell the hard copy as two smaller books in a sleeve; one fluff, one crunch. Nice slim rulebook for gaming with and still retains fluff for those who enjoy it
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What would be good to see is what they do for war gaming a lot now, sell the hard copy as two smaller books in a sleeve; one fluff, one crunch. Nice slim rulebook for gaming with and still retains fluff for those who enjoy it
I was really happy when GW did that for 40K, for exactly the second reason I mentioned. The rules-only book takes a lot less space and weight in a minis bag than the previous edition's core book did.
And I made it a point to buy both the mini-rulebooks for Warmachine/Hordes when they came out.
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Meatgrinder, you sir are awesome. :D
Thanks!
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I'm kinda torn here...I love the fluff embedded in the books, but also appreciate the arguments for separating the two. In *my* perfect world, books would remain as they are, but we'd have a separate SRD the would compile all rules into s single location. To be honest, I'd even be willing to pay for this separately from the books.
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What would be good to see is what they do for war gaming a lot now, sell the hard copy as two smaller books in a sleeve; one fluff, one crunch. Nice slim rulebook for gaming with and still retains fluff for those who enjoy it
I was really happy when GW did that for 40K, for exactly the second reason I mentioned. The rules-only book takes a lot less space and weight in a minis bag than the previous edition's core book did.
And I made it a point to buy both the mini-rulebooks for Warmachine/Hordes when they came out.
Yeah, seems to be the standard now, Corvus Belli did it for the 3rd ed of Infinity too
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Definitely more and more common for TT miniature games (Privateer Press just did for Warmahordes), but not nearly as common for TTRPG, I don't think. Of course, that is likely the result of different business models where the miniatures are the main cash/revenue driver vs the books/rules.
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I'd pay money for a reference-style collection of the rules cleaned from all fiction, shadowtalk and stuff like that. Maybe even something like a rules database. I think the ratio of fluff to crunch in the books is mostly a matter of taste. More important for me is the way it's organized, and that leaves a lot to be desired.
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Hey AJ I may be wrong, it's just guesswork on my part by looking at the state of the product.
I would write a letter to them directly if I thought it would make any difference, but I know it won't as many, many people have said the same thing as myself far more eloquently over the past couple of years and yet little has changed.
Moreover the litmus test is how they treat their paying customers. Judging by their lack of response to people missing products they ordered directly from them months later that you helped resolved on these forums it's pretty clear that Catalyst is asleep at the wheel.
It's a shameful waste of the freelancer talent imho.
To ALL:
Just a friendly reminder...to keep it friendly. ;)
@adzling - appreciate that you're frustrated with the "current state", but comments suggesting the people don't "care" are just wrong. None of us are privy to the inner workings, though at times we get glimpses. Given how strongly you seem to feel, I suggest you contact CGL directly.
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Hey AJ I may be wrong, it's just guesswork on my part by looking at the state of the product.
I would write a letter to them directly if I thought it would make any difference, but I know it won't as many, many people have said the same thing as myself far more eloquently over the past couple of years and yet little has changed.
Moreover the litmus test is how they treat their paying customers. Judging by their lack of response to people missing products they ordered directly from them months later that you helped resolved on these forums it's pretty clear that Catalyst is asleep at the wheel.
It's a shameful waste of the freelancer talent imho.
I DO understand...have expressed similar sentiments and comments in the past. However, a lot of people out a lot of hard work and efforts into the products...to imply they don't care is unfair, IMHO. Perhaps it was simply the way I read them, but, at times, some of your comments seem to come across rather sharp.
The issues related to the online store...those drive me to distraction, There is only one issue still open, that I'm aware of, and if not already addressed, should be soon. When something goes wrong, it takes far too long to address. Loren mentioned this was an issue that CGL was aware of at GenCon and that they were looking to take steps to address it. Time will tell.
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With regards to an SRD I've been wondering why more companies haven't tried it. I've bought more pathfinder books to support Paizo for that reason alone.
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You're probably right about this, it's borne of frustration.
Srun 5e could be so much better if the editing of content and layout were the focus.
at times, some of your comments seem to come across rather sharp.
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With regards to an SRD I've been wondering why more companies haven't tried it. I've bought more pathfinder books to support Paizo for that reason alone.
Of course, the SRD isn't Paizo's ... it was WOTC's. Paizo just made Pathfinder off of it and wound up striking gold when D&D 4th failed.
So, you're giving financial support to the wrong people in this case. :) (Mind you, I like some of Paizo's stuff! Just like keeping teh record straight.)
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As someone completely new to Shadowrun and GMing a game to boot I actually really like all the fluff... helps me flesh out the world.
But Table of Contents... seriously just... fix that shit.
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Like I was saying the books need to be both player and GM friendly that means that there needs to be a good amount of Fluff. The two in one book ideal will not work because it is too costly. I play minie’s and there is a big different between one book a year and 6 to 12 a year. Privateer Press and the others make their money on the fig’s not the books so they can sell at cost or even at a lost and when you break a book like that in to 2 you almost double the cost before the case or folder most come in. Also there is a strong trend in the industry to move away from GM’s book because you at best only sell 1/6 the number of book and it discourage people from Gming because they have to buy extra books when the books average 40 buck a pop.
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The problem is that the fluff doesn't sell. Having the crunch subsidize the fluff, is something I'm 100% okay with.
With that said, Data Trails is terrible and I really hate that book. I don't think fluff and crunch need to always align, but it sure helps a lot when it does. DT has too many things in the fluff with no rules or clearly break the rules, and that's a core book and not a novel. I can sometimes handwave problematic stuff I read in novels like Frost and Fire or Dark Resonance where a host can fit in a box, which clearly breaks the rules and can't be done, but whatever. But it's really annoying with DT, the book ABOUT the Matrix breaks its own rules in the fluff.
The fraggin' Matrix... It's really annoying that it as a rule system still doesn't work and that people have no idea how it works.
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The problem as I see it is that the books go all over the place with the fluff and the rules.
For my sanity I wish for two thing's...
All the fluff up front followed by the rules- no intermixing.
And secondly, don't hide rules in fluff.
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Yeah I hear ya, the fluff is driving me crazy, especially when combined with the poor state of editing.
I wish they would just, for once, focus on the darned editing and getting that right and stuff the fluff.
But that won't happen as fluff is cheaper to write than rules (fluff is just shovelware fan-fic after all) and the line editor seems to fancy himself as a novel author and judging by the product that's where his focus lies.
I wish he would curb his bad fan-fic obsession and focus on writing clear rules well play-tested and edited.
But, considering they can't even get their customer service together that's pie-in-the-sky wishing.
The caveat to this is that their product have improved somewhat with the last few outings, however they continue to shovel so much fan-fic into their product that it's detracting from the useable content.
Plus the fan-fic is often contradictory and outdated by the next publication's fan-fic "continuing" the story....sigh.
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Adzling, would you please stop being derogatory and insulting to the people who make the game? Please? It's all you seem to do, and it is rude. If it weren't for the writers and editors, you wouldn't have anything to bitch about in the first place. Yes, there are flaws in their product, and it needs to be fixed. Saying they need to 'put down the crack pipe' is going to far.
P.S. Since it is officially published, the short fiction sections in the book aren't actually fan-fiction.
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Adzling, would you please stop being derogatory and insulting to the people who make the game? Please? It's all you seem to do, and it is rude. If it weren't for the writers and editors, you wouldn't have anything to bitch about in the first place. Yes, there are flaws in their product, and it needs to be fixed. Saying they need to 'put down the crack pipe' is going to far.
+1. I thought about posting the same general thing calling Adzling out on that egregiously bad behavior, but I decided it wasn't worth my time.
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Errata for their horrifically edited products after a year+ would go a long way towards showing the company cares about it's customers.
I have respect for the freelancers, which I have said repeatedly in the past.
It's the management that is doing a poor job.
Perhaps it would have been better if I had said they have to curb their addiction to cheap fan-fic?
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Cheap fan-fic?
You say you respect us then insult our work. That's not respect. Not sure what it is, but it's not respect. Stop lying to us.
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Perhaps it'd be better if you didn't mention addictions, insults or call the published material in the books, written by freelancers 'fan-fic.' Those are written by freelancers too, are they not? They have the writer's names on all of them...
State the problem without going into personal things.
Yes, errata would be wonderful; in the current state, I would not run a 5th Ed Shadowrun game without going through the books and making a comprehensive house-rules list that would range from vehicle movement to skills to character creation to 'ware to spell Drain to all sorts of things. I won't buy a hard-copy book until I can be sure it will be updated. That said, Catalyst is a company. While having them drop everything (how many product lines are they putting out again?) to fix up their previous errors would be nice, it isn't feasible. They need to continue bringing in a flow of cash, or they risk going out of business. And then there's no more Shadowrun for anybody, errata'd or not (at least until the rights are acquired by someone else). All we can do is ask these previous problems be addressed, and hope somebody has been working on it, possibly with help from scanning these forums to see what people picked up on. If we don't get our hopes, we're really limited to two things; either stop supporting the product and move on, or do what needs to be done rules-wise at our own tables.
At no point do you need to insult people over these problems.
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Personally, I love the fiction part of Shadowrun. I've been buying the novels since I was a kid and continue to do so to this day.
But I agree with adzling on the content of the actual game books. The rulebooks, while streamlined, are messy; rules for subjects that should be related (*cough* RIGGERS! *cough*) being spread across multiple chapters is no secret, and it doesn't help that the current strategy seems to be to write content in silos. That Rigger 5.0 was written without knowledge of what was in Hard Targets is a fact admitted by the writer himself, and while I like the book in general it annoys me that rules keep flip-flopping (I'm looking at you, repair costs).
I have to echo one thing mentioned before; the writers, in my opinion, do good work with the guidelines they are given. The problem, and Catalyst has admitted as much themselves, is the editing process. The rules are spread out, or vague to the point of being unintelligible, and having to cross reference not only a 450 page core rulebook but all of the supplements as well does not make this problem any less obvious.
In short, I really like the overall content of 5th (with the exception of the rigger rules, and don't even get me started on the vagueness of the Matrix in general and technomancers in particular), but we desperately need clear, more concise rules where fiction is kept separate, or failing that some errata documents and clarifications. My opinion only; the rest I'll houserule or make sense of on my own.
With all of that said, I'd like to extent a big thank you to all the freelancers in particular. I love the fiction you all put out, so keep writing those novels and I'll keep buying 'em :)
To Catalyst, warts and all, I would like to thank you for continuing to support a game I've loved since I was 12-13 years old. I may not play as much anymore (partly because I end up making a lot of house rules :) ), but the setting is still very much alive and for that, I'm grateful.
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When I want a novel I'll buy it (and i do, all the recent srun novels are in my collection).
When I want to play a game, I expect some modicum of effort to be spent on the rules and ensuring they are understandable and work well.
It's evident Catalyst places their effort on cramming as much fiction into their rulesbooks as possible, to the detriment of the reason the books are written in the first place, the quality of the rules.
I have the utmost respect for the freelancers who work for almost no $$ because they love doing it.
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A 200 page rules source should have one chapter of about 40 to 50 pages at the beginning containing all of the 'fluffy bits' for the source with the rest being rules information. Conversely, a 200 page 'fluffy bits' sourcebook should have 40 to 50 pages of rules information added in (probably at the end) based off of the 'fluff' contained in the source.
That said, it is inexcusable to claim respect for the freelancers and in the next breath insult them with accusations of addiction and calling their work 'fan-fic'.
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Personally, I love the fiction part of Shadowrun. I've been buying the novels since I was a kid and continue to do so to this day.
The story, world building and flavor of the 6th world (and the 4th) are what brought me into the shadowrun fold long ago. It's also what keeps me! :) It is always interesting to see where the story is headed as well as allowing our table to come up with theories along the way -- once in awhile we would predict something that came out in a sourcebook; we used to think they had a fly on the wall during our games - well, mini-drones now! Game mechanics will come and go through editions, but the story will live on. I am in the position to buy books now on a more regular basis than when I lived on ramen, so I often buy the pdf/book combo on release. While I may like one book over another one, in the big picture I'm supporting shadowrun. I've always felt that the writers of the Shadowrun world pursue their craft as a labor of love - I get the feeling many of them were players originally. If I had the talent to write, it would be an honor to take part.
To the OP, you can chalk me up for a +1
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My comment re: addiction was that Catalyst is addicted to fluff/ fiction/ whatever you want to call it.
To the detriment of their focus on creating usesable/ well-crafted/ easily understood rules.
That is in no way or shape a put-down towards the freelancers.
You can take umbrage of my use of the term fan-fic if you like, as I actually did say that.
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Adzling, here the Definition of fan-fic "Fan fiction or fanfiction (also abbreviated to fan fic, fanfic, or fic) is fiction about characters or settings from an original work of fiction, created by fans of that work rather than by its creator. It is a popular form of fan labor, particularly since the advent of the Internet." IT DOES NOT APPLY TO ANYTHING IN OFFICALE PUBLICATIONS.
That said All4Bigguns we all know about you magic page count set that you alone have determined is the only way to write a gamming book. And I do not want to go over this again so we will leave it at that.
I do think there is a real problem and I’ve seen examples of it on the forms. Catalyst is giving little or no oversite on what its freelancers are writing. Example someone is hired to wright a book on technomancers instead of being given some short of out line with a we want this and this they seem to told just write it and go to the forms to get their entire resources. This lack of oversight is why rules are conflicting and we get books like Data Trails that is supposed to be the Decker book but instead has less than 10 pages on Decker’s and Decks and the rest is about A.I.’s and new web types. I’m still waiting on the Decker’s book. Rigger’s has all the vehicle Mods and Drones but there is just about nothing about/for the Rigger’s themselves I would have loved 20-40 less pages on this vehicle and drone and instead being dedicated to Control Console’s, Rigger’s and Rigger’s cyber wear.
Most larger game companies have a line manager and a continuity team who are supposed to support and direct the freelance writers. This is what Shadowrun 5 seems to be missing. If Catalyst does have such a team they need to either do their jobs or be replace. Attacking the Freelancers is wrong and counterproductive.
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Personally, I love the fiction part of Shadowrun. I've been buying the novels since I was a kid and continue to do so to this day.
The story, world building and flavor of the 6th world (and the 4th) are what brought me into the shadowrun fold long ago. It's also what keeps me! :) It is always interesting to see where the story is headed as well as allowing our table to come up with theories along the way -- once in awhile we would predict something that came out in a sourcebook; we used to think they had a fly on the wall during our games - well, mini-drones now! Game mechanics will come and go through editions, but the story will live on. I am in the position to buy books now on a more regular basis than when I lived on ramen, so I often buy the pdf/book combo on release. While I may like one book over another one, in the big picture I'm supporting shadowrun. I've always felt that the writers of the Shadowrun world pursue their craft as a labor of love - I get the feeling many of them were players originally. If I had the talent to write, it would be an honor to take part.
To the OP, you can chalk me up for a +1
I have to agree with this. Since I started SR, I have enjoyed what has been put out. Sure the rules haven't always been the best written or there is something they introduce into the game that I don't particularly like, but overall I find 5th to be far better than fourth or third. I think it has done a good job of portraying the setting and making it go beyond the crunch. When I look at the sheer amount of rules, it isn't surprising that things aren't perfect. I've seen simpler systems with problems as well. SR2 had huge rule holes in it, but we had a blast and I believe that is true for 5th should I ever get a group together.
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If you respect us so damn much, Adzling, quit denigrating our work as "cheap" or "shovelwork fan-fic." That is, in fact, a major putdown of the freelancers. You can deny it until the stars all burn out, but it's an insult to our work and thus an insult to us. I put a lot into those words. Those words are time spent away from my kids after not seeing them all day because of my day job. Cheap? The hell they are.
And as an aside, fluff is no less than crunch. They both pay exactly the same.
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That said All4Bigguns we all know about you magic page count set that you alone have determined is the only way to write a gamming book. And I do not want to go over this again so we will leave it at that.
First off, the 200 pages that I mentioned was merely an example. That would basically be rules-texts being 75 to 80 percent rules (not an unfair expectation) with 20 to 25 fluff bits compiled into the opening chapter (again, not unfair expectation).
Separating most of the setting info like that into separate texts that only have a little bit of rules at the end keeps those sources valid across multiple editions. Heck, they could then reprint them as new editions come about only altering the rules section at the end (which being the smallest portion means minimal additional cost on their part).
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All4BigGuns did I not say I did not want to go over this again? So maybe you can read my post for a change and fine out my point. thank You
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+1 to Herr Brackhaus! Almost perfectly my grips with Catalyst and my almost sole experience with ShadowRun. Love the setting, but man, the rules. That said, I will done degraded the writers. They do fine work. While I personally would prefer the set up of fluff then rules (and always in that order, in every chapter, book, and even quality/skill/gear/spell/etc) I don't think it will happen. I personally think the best product overall has been Run Faster, fallowed by Rigger 5.0, Run and Gun, and the CRB. With Run and Gun the almost perfect level of fluff to crunch for me. This is not to say every book is not without issues, but some of that is due (in my opinion) to flawed editing and line direction. I will continue to support ShadowRun 5th, but only in PDF form (free updates, when they finally happen). My reasoning being my CRB starting falling apart a year after I bought it. But again, that is a grip with Catalyst not the free writers who help us formum goers try to understand what is going on in the rules and fluff of this amazing setting.
Again, thanks guys for all your hard work keeping the 6th world alive, both in fluff and rules.
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Hey Patrick, my beef is with Catalyst's poor line editing, not the freelancers.
I unreservedly and wholeheartedly apologize to you and the rest of the freelancers.
If you respect us so damn much, Adzling, quit denigrating our work as "cheap" or "shovelwork fan-fic." That is, in fact, a major putdown of the freelancers. You can deny it until the stars all burn out, but it's an insult to our work and thus an insult to us. I put a lot into those words. Those words are time spent away from my kids after not seeing them all day because of my day job. Cheap? The hell they are.
And as an aside, fluff is no less than crunch. They both pay exactly the same.
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And as an aside, fluff is no less than crunch. They both pay exactly the same.
Then, not to be a jerk, but can we have some more crunch?
...Yeah, okay, I admit, I come off as a jerk with that line. Let me be more specific. If I cover things others have already said in this thread, I apologize.
I like Shadowrun, and I like 5E a lot -- I think the Core Book for 5E features a very strong, streamlined set of rules that works consistently well for most uses. And I like a lot of the crunch provided after it -- Chrome Flesh has good crunchy bits within it, and Rigger 5.0 is great.
I also like a lot of Shadowrun fluff. The Sioux Nation book is neat (gotta say, I really like that you're adding national splatbooks, and I humbly request more of those -- and city splatbooks as well), Hard Targets had great stuff on Cuba, and several books have great short fiction written into them.
I think a lot of current complaints about the state of 5E stem more from disorganization than actual inherent problems. The problems with Errata are inherent for most RPG companies, and while they're an issue, they happen. Same with editing problems -- those are normal. They could use a round or two of fixup, but they aren't crippling. Same with the table of contents issues. However, disorganized, scattered rules heavily mixed with fluff make for hard to read sections that are difficult for GMs to page through mid-game, and can make keeping track of what's going on difficult for editors, GMs, and players alike. That's a bit of a problem, and leads to some of the issues with rules repetitions and confusing rulings for particularly character builds. The larger issue (in my opinion) is the mix of fluff and crunch within sourcebooks.
While the concept of the Dragon Civil War was hinted at repeatedly throughout 4E's sourcebooks (hinting is good), the only sections focusing on it were relegated to specific setting books that covered ongoing plots and only ongoing plots, with a smattering of extra crunch to go with it. This segregation is good -- the Dragon Civil War is a situation of larger interest to longer campaigns and higher-level runners than it is to lower-level runners and people who don't intend to use it in their campaign arcs. Separating it into its own zone allowed players and GMs to eject it without much issue, and meant that GMs who intended to use it could safely hand splatbooks to players without risking spoiler exposure.
Some of the current core splatbooks for 5E did not feature this separation. Chrome Flesh is an especially good example. With two large segments featuring CFD and rules surrounding it, many players felt like the book's core concept ('ware) had been skimped or ignored in favor of metaplot material. It also made it seem that CFD had been pushed to the forefront of this edition, taking priority over the primary goal of the game (Shadowrunning) rather than serving as a backdrop for it.
In addition... I'm going to be honest, I'm not super-enthusiastic about CFD. As much as I like AIs, I have trouble expressing sympathy for AI mind rapists (escaped test subjects or not), and feel like it is turning into a Crash 2.0 level of worldwide catastrophy that isn't easy for the players to impact or necessarily very visible in the technology, industry, and organizations that Shadowrun is built on. But that's fine -- I also never used the Dragon Civil War as anything more than a backdrop, but I still enjoyed 4E enough to buy the books that featured it.
What made this more palatable is that they were separated from the main splatbooks. My players were free to ignore Conspiracy Theory and buy just the core books while I enjoyed it (and prayed for a scene featuring Harlequin being converted into a fine red mist by an inattentive rigger in a school bus). I could, and do, treat CFD the same way. I just have to deal with my players complaining about a "thinner and less useful" core 'ware book at the same time.
I hope this helps. Not trying to rail against you guys here.
Can I also request some crunch on larger vehicle weapons? I know I hear people talking about how 4E's War wasn't very popular, but I would enjoy some rules on larger-scale military vehicles for 5E. And maybe something on 2070 military and security tactics. These aren't things your average Shadowrunner will run into all the time, but opening up new branches of play (mercenaries, metaplane explorers, "celebrity" runners, etc) has rarely hurt in the past, and opens up a lot of potential play.
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Honestly a lot of the issues would be resolved IF YOU WOULD JUST START RELEASING ERRATA AGAIN! I know I've gone through this over, and OVER, and OVER again... but that's because there STILL has been no errata since fragging Street Grimiore!
WHAT
THE
DRECK
IS
GOING
ON!?
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Read the battlecorps customer service thread in this forum sub-section and you will have a good idea how much the management at Catalyst care about their customers.
Now factor that into the lack of errata.
Hey a logical rational for why there is no errata!
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<censored>
Turn your speaker volume up to 11, then click this, and sing along :D
https://youtu.be/F9UKNwlhhpo?t=1m48s
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Whoa. People. Chill. This is not where you're going to get traction on the things you want. All you're going to do is tick off and burn out the freelancers and employees who pour blood, sweat and tears into the project and come here because they love Shadowrun and love what they do. This vitriol doesn't do crap.
If you want traction, you do three things:
- You write sane, legible letters to the company detailing what's wrong and what it makes you feel like as a consumer. Go wild. Make it 20 pages. Include comparisons to other RPG companies of a similar size.
- You don't buy a thing until you know it's worth your time.
- You fix what you do have and make a largely, widely accepted alternate set of rules that you then convert large parts of the market to using. Go unsupported Pathfinder, basically.
Swearing at the company on a forum isn't going to go anywhere. Writing letters to Jason, Mark, Jeff, Adam, Aaron, Scott, RJ, Malik, Thomas, Chuck, Bruce, Mason, Francis, David, Jeremy, Jackson, Jacob, Derek, Euegen, Joanna, Tim, Kendall, Richard, Matt, Leland, Peter and Matt that shows you care and what you want them to care about will make a hell of a lot more impact.
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Falar, trust me I'm not directing anything at the Freelancers here.
I'm just getting REALLY frustrated at the Cone of Silence regarding errata, and I get a bit erratic when frustrated.
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Falar, trust me I'm not directing anything at the Freelancers here.
You may not be intending to, but your vitriol can't hit anyone who can make a difference. The only people who can hear you here are just about as powerless as you are. If you want your voice to be heard, you need to apply it effectively.
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Second time I've had to post in this thread as a mod (though it has been a while)...going to ask one final time that everyone take a step back.
I have no issues with people providing critique or criticism...I do have issue when it is not done constructively or reasonably.
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On the issue of lack of errata, not sure how successfully I can do that so going to keep quiet about it.
Yes, yes, talk to the right people I know... just it frustrates me enough that I doubt my ability to write such a missive without degenerating into a frustration fueled rant.
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Just want to add one voice to the call for errata.
Not impressed with rigger 5.0. Lots of issues that need fixing.
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A serious sit down, rebuild, and groundwork layout would not go astray. Including a reprint with new cover art, as was done with 4e. Hoping for that day with some of the covers.
There's a notable amount that was done where the left hand and right hand lack apparent communication, and a number of other instances where assumptions were made on 4th edition rules that weren't included in 5th edition.
I can't imagine that would be a good thing to deal with, but the alternative is digging the hole deeper.
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Falar, trust me I'm not directing anything at the Freelancers here.
I'm just getting REALLY frustrated at the Cone of Silence regarding errata, and I get a bit erratic when frustrated.
I find it even more frustrating considering that in the same company they have been using a highly effective method for collecting and generating errata over on the Battletech forums for around a decade now and yet to this day the Shadowrun team has been unable and/or unwilling to implement anything approaching a similar solution.
And to be clear this is all on the editing staff IMHO. The quality of the writing as far as the fiction goes has been quite good throughout. But there are so many places where the rules are contradictory, incomplete and/or vague that the lack of virtually any official errata is petty maddening.
Also, a rules forum where questions can be asked and answered (but not cluttered with comments from the peanut gallery) would be awesome too. There are probably a lot of issues that don't even need written errata. Just a little clarification where a rule might be a little vague and open to more interpretation than was originally intended.
I'd also mention a Ask the Devs forum and a Ask the Writers forum but, you know, baby steps.... ;)
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It's pretty clear the line editing for Srun has never been up to the same quality as Battletech.
I'm coming around to the conclusion that Catalyst really doesn't want to design, market and sell Srun 5e rules.
Rather they want to author, market and sell endless buckets of Srun fiction.
Or at least the line editor for Srun does.
Heck he's even written a few Srun novels himself with all that spare time not spent editing/managing the rules of the game Srun.
I find it even more frustrating considering that in the same company they have been using a highly effective method for collecting and generating errata over on the Battletech forums for around a decade now and yet to this day the Shadowrun team has been unable and/or unwilling to implement anything approaching a similar solution.
And to be clear this is all on the editing staff IMHO. The quality of the writing as far as the fiction goes has been quite good throughout. But there are so many places where the rules are contradictory, incomplete and/or vague that the lack of virtually any official errata is petty maddening.
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Cheap fan-fic?
You say you respect us then insult our work. That's not respect. Not sure what it is, but it's not respect. Stop lying to us.
I can respect you as a human being and still think your work is not worth a penny to pay, those things have nothing to do with each other ("You" as in a non-specific way, i have no idea what you, as the Person "Patrick Goodman" wrote).
[editinsert]
You produce a piece of work, we pay for it. You'll have to live with us voicing our opinion on it, even if said opinion is harsh/brutal (ie: "This story is crap" "that rule is nonsensical and doesn't fit into the rest of the rules canon"). Thats the nature of work life. Though you don't need to put up with personal insults, thats very much true. Still, you != your work. If you write stuff, you must be able to deal with criticism, even when people judge it harshly. And while SR 5 is an enjoyable experience overall, there is much to criticise left, of which a few points actually warant very harsh criticism.
[/editinser]
On topic of the Question:
I enjoy SR5.
I bought every single SR5 Crunch book barring one that is out of print and ridiculously priced on the secondary market and also a lot wasted a lot of money of Books with premade Adventures / campaing books.
That being said, SR5s Editing has a lot to improve. There are no nice words to say about Data Trails, so I'll refrain from that. I'll note on the plus side though, that we now at least got ToC and chapters that make somewhat sense, so its improving but not good.
What i dislike quite a lot and this is directed at the Freelancers:
Please try to talk to each other a bit more, even if you are not working on the same book.
Its SUPER annoying to have contradicting rules/items in two different books, because two different Writers worked on stuff that was in different books but shared a common theme.
Newest Example: Drones.
A bit less "hate" (wrong word, i know, don't nail me on that i'm not a native speaker) on cyber would also be nice.
I'm not in the "Magerun!!!!!11111" boat, but there is really no need to add a "failsafe antipower" rule to every other nice piece of hardware you design that makes it basically useless.
You don't do this with Adept powers, there is really no need to go that route with Cyberware.
A few final shots at the fluff parts:
I am SO sick of all these super special snowflake type of characters (ie Red). Just my personal two cents, but increasing the numbers of Jackpointers that don't define themselves by being the biggest collection of special "unique" attributes in one person or by collecting the most "Gary Stue / Mary Sue" (1) points would do the fluff sections some good. Same goes with author-selfinserts.
Seriously, Clockwork is one of the least obnoxious Jackpointers at the moment in my opinion.
I mean, you guys have talent, its not like i'm talking to 15 year old girls writing their first Yaoi-Story on FF.net
I like quite a few of your short stories. Pacing works, topics are interesting and handled nicely in the context the corresponding crunch chapters provide.
Its just....
Less MartyMcSuperawesome, the hyperskilled Awesomemancer, more Dirk Montgomery :-\
(1)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue
[edit insert 2]
I actually forgot one of the most relevant points
Errata
Seriously, Errors do happen, thats alright.
But at least fix them (early ) and do it in a way a bit more official than the Missions FAQ or page long Forum Threads (though those are indeed better than nothing, but still....).
[/edit insert2]
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It's pretty clear the line editing for Srun has never been up to the same quality as Battletech.
I'm coming around to the conclusion that Catalyst really doesn't want to design, market and sell Srun 5e rules.
Rather they want to author, market and sell endless buckets of Srun fiction.
Or at least the line editor for Srun does.
Heck he's even written a few Srun novels himself with all that spare time not spent editing/managing the rules of the game Srun.
Now I can not say why there seems to be a disparity between the two lines like this, but the fiction alone probably isn't at fault
Otherwise there would be a ton more fiction out, because the people are hungry for it.
If we were given the option of chaining Patrick Goodman or Critias up to a desk to make them write around the clock non-stop, my good nature would probably set them free though I would be sorely tempted. :P
While I can agree there are more than a few issues that should have been caught at the editor level, and by all means call him on it, saying how he is just writing SR novels instead of doing his job is a bit of a disservice.
It's a minor point I realize and I have no problems with bitching someone out when they screw up, but the recipients of my wrath also know I only chew them out for what they have actually done/not done.
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And people wonder why the freelancers are becoming more and more rare here.
3 years ago, you couldn't open a single thread without a freelancer commenting on it. Be it funny, informative, sharing an idea, or just chewing the shit.
Now, you can't find a freelancer to save your life!
Well, after reading 9 pages of "YOU FUCKING SUCK!!!", I know why they are so rare here now.
And I have to admit, if I was a freelancer, i'd give many of you here the double finger salute, and not ever come back! Heck I'd be sorely tempted to NOT write anything again for SR as you're all just a bunch of whiny spoiled little crybabies and have no appreciation for time and effort I put in....
Be DAMN thankful that the freelancers have heart and soul for SR. If it wasn't for them, you'd have nothing at all.
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Agreed, Reaver. I love seeing the writers pop in and give their two cents.
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Well, after reading 9 pages of "YOU FUCKING SUCK!!!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRBoPveyETc
For comparison with people actually being personally insulted on the internet.
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And people wonder why the freelancers are becoming more and more rare here.
3 years ago, you couldn't open a single thread without a freelancer commenting on it. Be it funny, informative, sharing an idea, or just chewing the shit.
Now, you can't find a freelancer to save your life!
Well, after reading 9 pages of "YOU FUCKING SUCK!!!", I know why they are so rare here now.
And I have to admit, if I was a freelancer, i'd give many of you here the double finger salute, and not ever come back! Heck I'd be sorely tempted to NOT write anything again for SR as you're all just a bunch of whiny spoiled little crybabies and have no appreciation for time and effort I put in....
Be DAMN thankful that the freelancers have heart and soul for SR. If it wasn't for them, you'd have nothing at all.
Because you can't "like" things on forums. THIS. All of this.
@Reaver: The only time we've actually interacted on this board you attacked me personally, but even taking that into account I agree with >90% of what you say on these boards. Thanks for speaking up for folks as often as you do.
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And people wonder why the freelancers are becoming more and more rare here.
3 years ago, you couldn't open a single thread without a freelancer commenting on it. Be it funny, informative, sharing an idea, or just chewing the shit.
Now, you can't find a freelancer to save your life!
Well, after reading 9 pages of "YOU FUCKING SUCK!!!", I know why they are so rare here now.
And I have to admit, if I was a freelancer, i'd give many of you here the double finger salute, and not ever come back! Heck I'd be sorely tempted to NOT write anything again for SR as you're all just a bunch of whiny spoiled little crybabies and have no appreciation for time and effort I put in....
Be DAMN thankful that the freelancers have heart and soul for SR. If it wasn't for them, you'd have nothing at all.
Gamers pretty much are the people with the biggest sense of entitlement these days. All the way from PnP gamers to console video gamers to PC video gamers to MMO players specifically, there is only one trait in common, griping incessantly about pretty much every aspect of their chose type of game and system within that type.
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Oh please stop this "entitlement" and "whining" bull, it works both ways and is really a non-argument.
Customer <=> Producer relationships aren't one sided.
Sure, you can say "screw them, i got their money, they got their book, what do they want", but then you really shouldn't wonder if your sales go down.
Because a P&P product usually ISN'T A SINGLE PRODUCT BUT A WHOLE LINE.
You want to CONTINUE SELLING stuff.
You can't continue selling stuff if you piss off your customers to much, because, like the oh so wunderful "entitlement" argument tells you, YOU as a retailer aren't entitled to my money. I give it for a good product. You deliver, i pay.
You don't deliver, i don't pay.
Easy as that.
And with a little bit of common sense or economic thinking, one would come to the realization that generally, customers (paying ones, that is) that voice critique on a product don't do this because they hate it all and generally just want to troll, but rather because they LIKE the product and would actually like to spend MORE money on it.
Which is good, because when SR-license produces Money, Topps is happy. And when Topps is happy, Catalyst keeps the license, meaning they can let the freelancers create more books, which makes the customers (hopefully) happy, which leads to them spending money, which completes the circle. Everybody is happy, everybody wins.
Pissed-off customers on the other hand DON'T spend money on books which doesn't lead to new books being written which leads to no money for CGL which leads to no money for Topps generated via the license which leads to very unhappy persons in many places. Many people lose.
Now, Being happy and being pissed-off aren't black-and-white states. Its a big spectrum in which people move back and forth, with incentives and reasons on both sides. Its natural and you won't ever be able to put all people in one corner. But you can and should listen to what the people who are moving are saying and how many people are singing the same tune. Because there lies the key to tipping the scale to the benefical side for you.
Sure, there will be crap among it. and it needs to be filtered, but discarding it all as jibbering or whatever is only going to hurt your business in the long run.
You just don't want to be the Internet Explorer of 2007.
[/quote]appreciation for time and effort I put in....I appreciate your time by spending time of my own to write a comment on it.
Contrary to what some modern day political groups like to say, one isn't entitled to false positive praise as an adult.
"i spend a lot of time and effort on it" is really a non-excuse, especially not in an evnironment where money flows..
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Very true. Back in the day, forget things like errata or updated FAQs on a website. You had the book, and then the GM sat down and made house rules for things that didn't fit. The End.
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That might be true or not, all4bigguns, but in neither case would the issues be relevant for a discussion on the perceived quality of Shadowrun products.
[Redacted, because the post it was referring to isn't existing anymore.]
If you are happy with certain or all aspects of SR 5, feel free to voice it out loud, I'm sure the relevant people will appreciate that.
But don't try to deploy a silenc field on criticism by going the "people who criticise are just crybabies with to much time" route.
Thats insulting and not productive.
I want more quality SR 5 stuff and i'm happy to continue spending money on it. I don't want a second book with the editing quality of Data Trails and wouldN't buy such a book (i bought DT). Judging by the voices on this specific book in 4 different forums in two different languages, I think i'm really not the only one who was not happy with the way it was released. Being silent about the problems in the book and only praising its great cover would have helped nobody.
Catalyst wouldn't have known why it was poorly recieved and the customers would have gotten the same problems with the next book, probably resulting in reduced sales.
Thanks to a lot of pretty loud voices however, the more recent books DID have a usefull table of content and DID have Chapter names that actually gave you informations about what you can find there.
Tthere is still a lot that could and should be improved. But the overall quality DID go up and it maybe/probably/hopefully/most likely will continue to do so, if there is a continued exchange of information between the people who want to have a better game and those who are able to make this come true.
Something which a customer probably appreciates.
At least I do.
(My wallet certainly doesn't).
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@Duellist_D - do you think that people are welcome (or not) to voice their comments and/or criticism on this forum?
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I'd like to see Catalyst write something about why they can't get their Shadowrun act together.
How come their rules supplements are stuffed with more fluff than you can shake a stick at.?
What is the rational for that vs. putting it all in a coherent campaign sourcebook?
For example CFD would have been far better served as it's own campaign sourcebook rather than strewing it's fluff across multiple rulebooks.
Why can't they get their rules to work together without constant contradictions between books?
Why can't they focus on editing the rules in the rulebooks such that they are accurate and make sense (see Rigger 5.0's incomplete rules, contradictions on rules between the written description and tables)?
Why don't they have errata out by now for the older books?
Why does their customer service suck so terribly? (see posts in the forum here and elsewhere).
These are the basics of creating and managing a PnP RPG and Catalyst seems to be able to do ok with Battletech and yet they fail so miserably with Shadowrun.
Answering those questions would go a long way towards shedding some light on why their products are so poor for Srun.
It might even help them internally to make themselves into a better company by asking the hard questions and getting the right people in the right positions instead of continuing to pump out more sub-standard work riddled with rules errors and horrific editing.
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And people wonder why the freelancers are becoming more and more rare here.
3 years ago, you couldn't open a single thread without a freelancer commenting on it. Be it funny, informative, sharing an idea, or just chewing the shit.
Now, you can't find a freelancer to save your life!
Well, after reading 9 pages of "YOU FUCKING SUCK!!!", I know why they are so rare here now.
And I have to admit, if I was a freelancer, i'd give many of you here the double finger salute, and not ever come back! Heck I'd be sorely tempted to NOT write anything again for SR as you're all just a bunch of whiny spoiled little crybabies and have no appreciation for time and effort I put in....
Be DAMN thankful that the freelancers have heart and soul for SR. If it wasn't for them, you'd have nothing at all.
So, I think I'd like to elaborate a little here.
In general, this is basically absolutely true. At least for myself personally, and I would suspect for other freelancers in general. I'm going to speak in terms of "I" here, but I think this is porbably true for most of us freelancers.
The problem is that, for a reason I'm still trying to figure out and in ways I'm still trying to deal with, I am very emotionally attached to my writing work. I actually have in general very high EQ (it is necessary for my day job) and can keep my cool in many complicated situations. But when it comes to my writing work, I have trouble. I have said things I regret in defence of my work. Every time I lose my cool, I feel stupid and I believe it reflect badly on CGL.
Why do I lose my cool so much? Like I said I still need to explore this within myself, but basically it stems from the fact fans typically present opinions as facts. Further, no matter what you say, they rarely change opinions or factor new information. So, it's frustrating. We COULD explain things, but few are actually there to listen. They are there to vent. Further, most fans do not understand at all the reality of the writing process. I wouldn't expect them to know that, of course, but again, few are interested in knowing that. If we explain it, we're "making excuses".
When something we worked on is released, we get very excited. We're proud of what we created. We put thought into it and want to see if fans can feedback on what we perceive to be great ideas. We would love to see fans discuss how something is exciting and how they plan on using it - hopefully in ways we hadn't though of - thus creating an awesome creative circle. We feed something in, fans evolve it, we pick it back up and feed it back as new content, etc. That's kind of what we dream and keep hoping will happen.
And, it does sometimes, by the way. Often it does, even.
But the thing is, fans with "positive" things to say aren't typically going to be very vocal. After all, if you agree with something, there typically isn't much more ink to spill than that.
So what we get is far more vocalization about negative feedback. And so, circle back to my early comments about how people that present negative feedback do so very badly.
So at the end of the day, for me, it unfortunately comes down pretty simply: If I interact with the fans (specifically about my work, as a freelancer), I will invariably be confronted by vehement negative criticism. I am going to be powerless to address that criticism, because posters aren't looking for a rational conversation. That will frustrate me. I will say things I will wish I hadn't.
Conclusion: I must not post, because I don't trust myself to control myself sufficiently when the time comes.
Now, for those that aren't in the habit of posting negative feedback and are worried about this, some caveats:
1. No freelancer is under the impression that the vocal angry fans are the majority. The vocal angry fans ARE under the impression they are, but we're not. So don't think our lives and work are driven by that feedback and we're all going to quit
2. While it's hard for us to do so, and it's hard because the ones giving the feedback MAKE it hard, we do take note of (some of) the criticism. So it's not like we're not hearing some of the problems brought up. We just have a bigger picture and can put feedback into context and separate the wheat from the chaff as it were.
3. At a certain point, I understand human nature. I understand WHY some people act the way they do on the internet. To ask or expect anything else is kind of the same as wishing for world peace. You have to be realistic in your expectations.
Anyway, just my thoughts. Doesn't really change the current of conversation, but I saw some, err, concern for us freelancers, so just wanted to add some of my thoughts to the mix.
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How come their rules supplements are stuffed with more fluff than you can shake a stick at.?
What is the rational for that vs. putting it all in a coherent campaign sourcebook?
For example CFD would have been far better served as it's own campaign sourcebook rather than strewing it's fluff across multiple rulebooks.
I'd guess part of this is them trying stuff, which I like them doing, but with all experiments that means sometimes it won't end well.
For what it's worth, the editting doesn't bother me as much as most folks cause I'm not the greatest writer and therefore miss a lot of the minor stuff completely. I only really want errata to come out more often. I also, I really liked how Catalyst updated Rigger 5.0 within a few days with things folks noticed/wanted and how involved Wak (sp) was with getting updates/fixes at least taken down.
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Wak's awesome.
He's highly involved in trying to get things fixed.
Wak and AJ are credits to this forum and Catalyst.
I've seen other freelancers post on here with interesting insights and clarifications (Critias & Patrick Goodman are good examples imho but there are plenty others too).
I want to know, how can Catalyst have released Rigger 5.0 with so many errors that would have been obvious if an editor had just skimmed the book (specifically, although not limited to, the variances between stats in tables and stats in descriptions)?
This points to a broken process and/ or lack of editing oversight.
How does something like this happen?
Answering this question (without excuses) would go a long way towards Catalyst devising a solution to fix their problem.
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I want to know, how can Catalyst have released Rigger 5.0 with so many errors that would have been obvious if an editor had just skimmed the book (specifically, although not limited to, the variances between stats in tables and stats in descriptions)?
Having compared lots of charts and numbers to try and double check stuff, I know that it's really easy to miss things like this. The charts just being off rows should be easier to catch, but things happen. What % of correctness are you looking for? 100% is impossible. 95% is really hard to do, but should be doable imo and I think they do about that. As long as they correct these misses quickly (on forums) and update them officially (in errata or actually editting the pdf) I have no issues with mistakes.
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I don't expect 100%, no one does.
But just take a minute to read the Rigger 5.0 thread, or the Data Trails thread, or any other errata thread frankly and you'll discover these books are plagued with easily spottable editing fails.
Just checking the text in the fluff descriptions vs. the tables would take like an hour or two and immediately expose those errors, so did no one proof the rules?
Quickly edited PDFs would completely resolve this.
Unfortunately Catalyst seems unable to do this for reasons.
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How come their rules supplements are stuffed with more fluff than you can shake a stick at.?
What is the rational for that vs. putting it all in a coherent campaign sourcebook?
They've given rationale that they won't do the separate "fluff" books because they're worried they won't sell. So, unfortunately, it seems like we're going to have to continue dealing with "fluff" overload, since the general atmosphere of vocal complainers reinforces any 'won't sell' viewpoint.
Why does their customer service suck so terribly? (see posts in the forum here and elsewhere).
Honestly, when someone comes in voicing complaints about 'poor customer service', my first thought is generally thinking "What the heck did you say to them?" about the one complaining. Customer service people are human beings as well, but many customers consider them to be machines there only to be a sounding board for their vitriol.
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I'd like to see Catalyst write something about why they can't get their Shadowrun act together.
How come their rules supplements are stuffed with more fluff than you can shake a stick at.?
What is the rational for that vs. putting it all in a coherent campaign sourcebook?
For example CFD would have been far better served as it's own campaign sourcebook rather than strewing it's fluff across multiple rulebooks.
Why can't they get their rules to work together without constant contradictions between books?
Why can't they focus on editing the rules in the rulebooks such that they are accurate and make sense (see Rigger 5.0's incomplete rules, contradictions on rules between the written description and tables)?
Why don't they have errata out by now for the older books?
Why does their customer service suck so terribly? (see posts in the forum here and elsewhere).
These are the basics of creating and managing a PnP RPG and Catalyst seems to be able to do ok with Battletech and yet they fail so miserably with Shadowrun.
Answering those questions would go a long way towards shedding some light on why their products are so poor for Srun.
It might even help them internally to make themselves into a better company by asking the hard questions and getting the right people in the right positions instead of continuing to pump out more sub-standard work riddled with rules errors and horrific editing.
Since I happen to be in this thread and feeling slightly calm right now, I'll take a stab here. I'm warning you now though, you will in no way feel better after this. But you asked for it:
>How come their rules supplements are stuffed with more fluff than you can shake a stick at.?
It is YOUR OPINION that there is too much fluff. That is not a fact. Your opinion is not universally shared. You need to accept this fact.
>What is the rational for that vs. putting it all in a coherent campaign sourcebook?
>For example CFD would have been far better served as it's own campaign sourcebook rather than strewing it's fluff across multiple rulebooks.
That is YOUR OPINION and is not a fact. Further than that, it is an editorial dictum that we writers do it that way. Jason believed this was the best way to push this metaplot and so instructed us to write that way. That was the mechanical process. I repeat that it is YOUR OPINION that you disliked this. It does not make it a fact.
>Why can't they get their rules to work together without constant contradictions between books?
Different freelancers work on different things. So you know that story how Star Trek has this "bible" and everyone who works on anything gets fact checked so the unniverse is always ensured to be coherent? Yeah, we don't have that. We have a few fallible human beings that, with very little tools, try to make it all work. It pinches us all when we make a mistake like that. We hate it. We also do our best to make sure it doesn't happen. But it does. It doesn't happen super often though. I do not believe there are any means whatsoever that will see a reduction of that error rate, as the options are not affordable to CGL.
>Why can't they focus on editing the rules in the rulebooks such that they are accurate and make sense (see Rigger 5.0's incomplete rules, contradictions on rules between the written description and tables)?
Different sections of each book are written by different authors, who do their best. Editors review the work, but only to a certain extent. Basically, there isn't the type of super in-depth cross-checking necessary to ensure super smooth books. Back in the old days, one author would write one book. It was easier for them to ensure super smooth consistency. But books aren't written like that anymore and that isn't going to change. So, you get more books faster with more diversity, but the downside is it's harder to be flawless in conherence.
> Why don't they have errata out by now for the older books?
Quite frankly, that is a mystery. All I know is that it is not in the freelancer's hands. I know nothing more.
>Why does their customer service suck so terribly? (see posts in the forum here and elsewhere).
Don't know. Speculation extrapolated from what I know: because they do not have the qualitifed staff to properly service customers. That is unlikely to change due to the very profit-poor nature of the industry.
>These are the basics of creating and managing a PnP RPG and Catalyst seems to be able to do ok with Battletech and yet they fail so miserably with Shadowrun.
IN YOUR UNQUALIFIED OPINION THAT HAS NEXT TO NO VISIBILITY IN THE PROCESSES AND IN THE NATURE OF RUNNING SUCH A BUSINESS. Just pointing that out again. Opinion, not fact.
>Answering those questions would go a long way towards shedding some light on why their products are so poor for Srun.
Well, hope this helped.
>It might even help them internally to make themselves into a better company by asking the hard questions and getting the right people in the right positions instead of continuing to pump out more sub-standard work riddled with rules errors and horrific editing.
This is a good closing point. IRL, while I wear many hats, one of the things you could say I am is a business analyst. Optimizing businesses and their business processes is something I do, and do exceedingly well. So big disclaimer: I have NEVER discussed the intricacies of CGL business operation with anyone at CGL. This is PURE observation, from a very narrow window. That being said. what I observe is pretty simple: CGL, as a business, does not have the resources to change and improve. The people that are in place are mostly capped in their abilities, due to both raw knowledge and time available. To change, CGL needs to hire more people in more places. These people cost money. Money CGL does not have. And the return on investment WOULD NOT BE THERE. That is the most important point. CGL would likely go out of business if they attempted to significantly improve their processes.
So, improvements do happen. As I said in my previous post, some feedback is taken in. Some feedback HAS been taken in. But overall, you need to understand the business of publishing RPG books is a piss-poor business that operates with pennies. There isn't much room to make big changes we can all see are needed. There just isn't the money to do so.
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If that is true ALL4bg that's mightily strange, the fluff wont sell cause no-one wants it so we'll make it take over the rulebooks?!?!
How does that make sense?
Regarding your second point, read the forum here dedicated to Catalyst customer service, these people are nicely asking repeatedly in many ways over many months can they please get their products they paid for and no response from Catalyst until finally AJ is able to make contact after repeated attempts and then, sometimes, they get around to sending out the product.
That's a miserable fail.
How come their rules supplements are stuffed with more fluff than you can shake a stick at.?
What is the rational for that vs. putting it all in a coherent campaign sourcebook?
They've given rationale that they won't do the separate "fluff" books because they're worried they won't sell. So, unfortunately, it seems like we're going to have to continue dealing with "fluff" overload, since the general atmosphere of vocal complainers reinforces any 'won't sell' viewpoint.
Why does their customer service suck so terribly? (see posts in the forum here and elsewhere).
Honestly, when someone comes in voicing complaints about 'poor customer service', my first thought is generally thinking "What the heck did you say to them?" about the one complaining. Customer service people are human beings as well, but many customers consider them to be machines there only to be a sounding board for their vitriol.
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If that is true ALL4bg that's mightily strange, the fluff wont sell cause no-one wants it so we'll make it take over the rulebooks?!?!
How does that make sense?
Honestly, IMO, it doesn't, and I miss having the primarily rules books only having the "fluff" absolutely necessary to explain the stuff therein while the rest of the "fluff" is in books like Shadows of North America and stuff. I honestly can't understand the point here.
This is actually my main beef along with the lack of actual creation rules for weapons and vehicles (could be interesting to see them for cyberdecks, RCCs and armor, but we've never quite had that for those). I know that I can't be the only one that wants to see those make a comeback; unfortunately like most things and most people, I can't prove this :( .
Regarding your second point, read the forum here dedicated to Catalyst customer service, these people are nicely asking repeatedly in many ways over many months can they please get their products they paid for and no response from Catalyst until finally AJ is able to make contact after repeated attempts and then, sometimes, they get around to sending out the product.
That's a miserable fail.
They seem to once they come here, but that's why that thought enters my head. Along with that thought comes doubt that they were all that polite in their initial contact. This doubt comes from seeing bad attitude customers in action.
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Thanks for taking a risk by posting this Backgammon, it's the most coherent explanation I have heard to date.
For what it's worth I'll respond inline.
I hope I can get the quote tags working properly.
Since I happen to be in this thread and feeling slightly calm right now, I'll take a stab here. I'm warning you now though, you will in no way feel better after this. But you asked for it:
>How come their rules supplements are stuffed with more fluff than you can shake a stick at.?
It is YOUR OPINION that there is too much fluff. That is not a fact. Your opinion is not universally shared. You need to accept this fact.
No doubt, it's my opinion.
Not a universal one, but a common one.
I feel (and this could be wrong) if they spent less time authoring, editing and putting in fluff they could spend more time to get the rules right.
If you have a finite, constricted resource (editor time) then spend it where it matters most, getting the rules right.
This seems like basic logic when writing a RULE SYSTEM.
Perhaps its not so obvious from the other side of the table.
I'd like to see Catalyst change their mind about this.
Get the rules right, then add in fluff with whatever left over resources they have.
>What is the rational for that vs. putting it all in a coherent campaign sourcebook?
>For example CFD would have been far better served as it's own campaign sourcebook rather than strewing it's fluff across multiple rulebooks.
That is YOUR OPINION and is not a fact. Further than that, it is an editorial dictum that we writers do it that way. Jason believed this was the best way to push this metaplot and so instructed us to write that way. That was the mechanical process. I repeat that it is YOUR OPINION that you disliked this. It does not make it a fact.
True, my opinion no doubt.
However if a book's focus is, for example, Extractions (see Stolen Souls) then why spend so much of the book talking about something entirely different (CFD)?
See Hard Targets et al.
It seems to make no sense, their not CFD books.
But, in the end, it's my opinion, no doubt.
>Why can't they get their rules to work together without constant contradictions between books?
Different freelancers work on different things. So you know that story how Star Trek has this "bible" and everyone who works on anything gets fact checked so the unniverse is always ensured to be coherent? Yeah, we don't have that. We have a few fallible human beings that, with very little tools, try to make it all work. It pinches us all when we make a mistake like that. We hate it. We also do our best to make sure it doesn't happen. But it does. It doesn't happen super often though. I do not believe there are any means whatsoever that will see a reduction of that error rate, as the options are not affordable to CGL.
Why not employ a few freelancers to work as a "round table" that ensure rulebooks are coherently edited and work together rather than against each other?
Take the hours from the fluff, it's overwhelming (my opinion).
It would help the rules greatly.
>Why can't they focus on editing the rules in the rulebooks such that they are accurate and make sense (see Rigger 5.0's incomplete rules, contradictions on rules between the written description and tables)?
Different sections of each book are written by different authors, who do their best. Editors review the work, but only to a certain extent. Basically, there isn't the type of super in-depth cross-checking necessary to ensure super smooth books. Back in the old days, one author would write one book. It was easier for them to ensure super smooth consistency. But books aren't written like that anymore and that isn't going to change. So, you get more books faster with more diversity, but the downside is it's harder to be flawless in conherence.
Right.
So my response would be to focus my limited resources on getting stuff right, rather than making the problem worse.
See my recommendation above for pruning the hours spent on fluff and dedicating those hours to turning out accurate, well authored rules.
Produce fluff with left over man hours.
That approach could produce well written and edited rulebooks that have still have plenty of fluff.
See Battletech.
> Why don't they have errata out by now for the older books?
Quite frankly, that is a mystery. All I know is that it is not in the freelancer's hands. I know nothing more.
Fair nuff.
I have to respect you just for taking a risk and posting this.
But again, see battletech's well managed errata updates.
Clearly they know how to get this right, so why can't they spend some time to replicate this for shadowrun rather than paying for more fluff?
>Why does their customer service suck so terribly? (see posts in the forum here and elsewhere).
Don't know. Speculation extrapolated from what I know: because they do not have the qualitifed staff to properly service customers. That is unlikely to change due to the very profit-poor nature of the industry.
This is understandable to some extent (no one expects a person to answer a phone) but it does not explain why a customer service email address cannot answer and resolve missing items very quickly and easily.
>These are the basics of creating and managing a PnP RPG and Catalyst seems to be able to do ok with Battletech and yet they fail so miserably with Shadowrun.
IN YOUR UNQUALIFIED OPINION THAT HAS NEXT TO NO VISIBILITY IN THE PROCESSES AND IN THE NATURE OF RUNNING SUCH A BUSINESS. Just pointing that out again. Opinion, not fact.
Sure, it's my opinion.
However it is fact that they have focussed on fluff over accurate rules, customer service, errata, updated PDFs etc.
Personally I'd like to see them cut back fluff and spend the man hours where it counts, on getting rules right.
The fact that they are not makes me draw the conclusion (could be wrong) that fluff is very cheap to author and edit compared to making sure rules work, that books do not contradict each other and that rules are authored properly.
>Answering those questions would go a long way towards shedding some light on why their products are so poor for Srun.
Well, hope this helped.
Sure, it's great to see you engaged and providing some insight.
It would be nice if Catalyst themselves could do so.
>It might even help them internally to make themselves into a better company by asking the hard questions and getting the right people in the right positions instead of continuing to pump out more sub-standard work riddled with rules errors and horrific editing.
This is a good closing point. IRL, while I wear many hats, one of the things you could say I am is a business analyst. Optimizing businesses and their business processes is something I do, and do exceedingly well. So big disclaimer: I have NEVER discussed the intricacies of CGL business operation with anyone at CGL. This is PURE observation, from a very narrow window. That being said. what I observe is pretty simple: CGL, as a business, does not have the resources to change and improve. The people that are in place are mostly capped in their abilities, due to both raw knowledge and time available. To change, CGL needs to hire more people in more places. These people cost money. Money CGL does not have. And the return on investment WOULD NOT BE THERE. That is the most important point. CGL would likely go out of business if they attempted to significantly improve their processes.
So, improvements do happen. As I said in my previous post, some feedback is taken in. Some feedback HAS been taken in. But overall, you need to understand the business of publishing RPG books is a piss-poor business that operates with pennies. There isn't much room to make big changes we can all see are needed. There just isn't the money to do so.
Yeah I understand we play a game that is tiny compared to the revenue generated by video games.
But if battletech can get it mostly right how come Shadowrun can't?
How come they focus so much on fluff and not on getting things right?
Those are questions worth answering.
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How come they focus so much on fluff and not on getting things right?
This could be somewhat resulting from the growth of the 'roleplay don't rollplay' crowd in recent years. Caring about rules seems to be 'BadWrongFun' these days.
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Well i'm firmly in the "roleplay don't rollplay" camp (at least when we're talking about RPGs, tactical wargames are fun in their own right) but I still want my rules to work and be consistent.
Everything flows from there.
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Well i'm firmly in the "roleplay don't rollplay" camp (at least when we're talking about RPGs, tactical wargames are fun in their own right) but I still want my rules to work and be consistent.
Everything flows from there.
Well, a lot of that camp seems to go so far as to think that wanting to roll the dice for anything other than combat is bad. At least that's the impression I get from them.
You appear to be an anomaly from that camp on the matter.
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I don't normally reply to threads like this since ultimately it rarely does much good, but I have to chime in at least a little bit.
Changes have been made, and are continuing to be made ... it boils down to what much of Backgammon said, CGL only has so many resources and therefore relies on freelancers and volunteers who love the game and continue to want to see it exist and evolve.
one change I can personally talk about as a volunteer there is more rules review by committee happening now ... I got to work on portions of Rigger 5.0 and will continue to work on more as things develop and it is my personal goal to eliminate as much of the contradicting rules as I can.
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That's encouraging to hear but is particularly odd when you consider all the contradictions in Rigger 5.0, both internally between the tables and the descriptions and externally between Rigger 5.0 and Core.
one change I can personally talk about as a volunteer there is more rules review by committee happening now ... I got to work on portions of Rigger 5.0 and will continue to work on more as things develop and it is my personal goal to eliminate as much of the contradicting rules as I can.
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yeah I knew someone would point that out, that's why I emphasized "portions" ... I never got to see the drones or the modification rules until after it was published. :-\
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Why not employ a few freelancers to work as a "round table" that ensure rulebooks are coherently edited and work together rather than against each other?
Money.
Freelancers are generally paid in a very simple way - 1 to 5 cents per word. They get their stuff done, they turn it in, they get paid on some schedule. This is how freelancing mostly works.
What you're proposing is not a freelancer position, but an hourly editorial position shared by a bunch of people. So this means that instead of the normal cents/word contract, we have to have a new contract. Not only that, we have to have a contract that is hourly, builds in the need for different levels of work ...
Oh, that's an employee position and therefore not something a freelancer would do. And we don't have the money for a couple more employees (because employees are much more expensive than freelancers), so we don't have the money to do that.
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While it's been over a year since I offered, I'd still do some volunteer editing and quality control if given the opportunity. I have some professional editing experience (which is part of why the flaws gall me so much).
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So for Rigger 5.0 back of napkin math shows between 500 and 1000 words per page at@185 pages = 92,500 words x 5 cents per word = $4625 dollars to sub out Rigger 5.
Assuming $20 per hour to pay a freelancer to edit a book for rules clarity and consistency (just the basic so stuff is actually you know written so that it makes sense and does not contradict itself) and assuming said persons spend about 10 hours on the book (plenty of time to capture the obvious errors such as borked tables or equipment description not matching tables) then we're talking $200 bucks
You would sacrifice about $200/ $0.05 = 4000 words of fluff or about 8 pages of an 185 page book.
I would call that incredible value.
There is another way to approach this (actually probably make sense to employ this in addition to above):
EDIT THE PDFs for accuracy after first publishing!
Have the community point out all the editing errors you missed then spend 30 or 40 hours to revise the PDF to fix the errors and republish.
At $50 an hour (let's pay their layout person a bit more) that would be about $2,000.
Well worth the money to keep your playerbase happy and produce good quality product.
I'm sure the above grossly over simplifies things but the point is the fluff is killing Shadowrun.
The focus on it above the most important thing, getting the rules right, is killing this game and making it unplayable.
Another way to look at is this:
Battletech process works for the most part, copy that into the Shadowrun process.
Why not employ a few freelancers to work as a "round table" that ensure rulebooks are coherently edited and work together rather than against each other?
Money.
Freelancers are generally paid in a very simple way - 1 to 5 cents per word. They get their stuff done, they turn it in, they get paid on some schedule. This is how freelancing mostly works.
What you're proposing is not a freelancer position, but an hourly editorial position shared by a bunch of people. So this means that instead of the normal cents/word contract, we have to have a new contract. Not only that, we have to have a contract that is hourly, builds in the need for different levels of work ...
Oh, that's an employee position and therefore not something a freelancer would do. And we don't have the money for a couple more employees (because employees are much more expensive than freelancers), so we don't have the money to do that.
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Thanks for the clarification, Backgammon. Most of this seems to stem from issues fairly common to PnP game companies, and to be honest, I can't really blame you guys for most of those. I think CGL's marketshare is still fairly small compared to WotC's or Paizo's, and probably Fantasy Flight's too. I'm not saying that to pick on you guys, I'm just pointing out that I think most of the companies with really good editing practices (FF excluded, their editing varies a lot) have a lot more money to swing around.
Jason believed this was the best way to push this metaplot and so instructed us to write that way.
If that is editorial mandate, well... I don't particularly agree with it, but that's the way that goes. Any ideas as to why? Was it because of issues selling metaplot splats in 4E?
Also, awkward question time: anything we can do to help out? I'd rather contribute than complain, and a lot of the complaints have been focused on manpower issues (i.e. having enough people and enough time to edit everything).
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Not sure if it's a viable idea but:
1). crowd-sourcing the errata/ corrections to the playerbase (frankly history has shown we are far better editors/ error catchers than Catalyst)
2). paying a layout/editor to fix the PDFs (take the money out of the fluff word count ffs)
3). then republishing them before gong to hardcopy print seems like a potential route to leverage the community engagement without increasing spending on production
It could result in far better product imho.
Also, awkward question time: anything we can do to help out? I'd rather contribute than complain, and a lot of the complaints have been focused on manpower issues (i.e. having enough people and enough time to edit everything).
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In general, most of a game's player base is not qualified for much more than catching minor errors like spelling or minor grammar. As much as modern players seem to think they know how to design a good game, that isn't true except in a very niche case where they're specifically crafting something for their particular group.
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I think this is true in general.
However have a look at the Rigger 5.0 errata thread as an example of what a community can flag as editing errors/ contradictions.
This is quite separate from game design/ rule design.
It's a lot of free eyes who care deeply about whatever aspect of the game they are interested in.
This can be an asset to Catalyst if managed appropriately.
I would say take some of the fluff $$ and spend it on harnessing the community's engagement and paying for more editing.
The fluff is killing Shadowrun imho.
In general, most of a game's player base is not qualified for much more than catching minor errors like spelling or minor grammar. As much as modern players seem to think they know how to design a good game, that isn't true except in a very niche case where they're specifically crafting something for their particular group.
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The fluff is killing Shadowrun imho.
Your opinion is not widely shared. Of the three-four groups I've run with, none of them had this as a complaint.
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>It might even help them internally to make themselves into a better company by asking the hard questions and getting the right people in the right positions instead of continuing to pump out more sub-standard work riddled with rules errors and horrific editing.
This is a good closing point. IRL, while I wear many hats, one of the things you could say I am is a business analyst. Optimizing businesses and their business processes is something I do, and do exceedingly well. So big disclaimer: I have NEVER discussed the intricacies of CGL business operation with anyone at CGL. This is PURE observation, from a very narrow window. That being said. what I observe is pretty simple: CGL, as a business, does not have the resources to change and improve. The people that are in place are mostly capped in their abilities, due to both raw knowledge and time available. To change, CGL needs to hire more people in more places. These people cost money. Money CGL does not have. And the return on investment WOULD NOT BE THERE. That is the most important point. CGL would likely go out of business if they attempted to significantly improve their processes.
So, improvements do happen. As I said in my previous post, some feedback is taken in. Some feedback HAS been taken in. But overall, you need to understand the business of publishing RPG books is a piss-poor business that operates with pennies. There isn't much room to make big changes we can all see are needed. There just isn't the money to do so.
Sorry, given the excellent example set by the Battletech team over the last decade or so since the release of Total Warfare I just can't accept that the Shadowrun team is incapable of setting up the same kind of infrastructure to support and improve the Shadowrun product line. This isn't about spending more money.
AFAIK the Battletech team accomplishes a lot of what they do through the recruitment of volunteers to basically fill the roll secretaries to keep the incoming flow of data from the public organized and to collate and organize the outgoing errata, clarifications, changes, etc. generated by the Battletech staff. By my conservative count this has resulted in the release of more than 400 pages of documentation containing errata, clarifications and rule changes for the Battletech product line since the release of Total Warfare in 2006.
The only reasons I can fathom that the Shadowrun team has not copied this success is either the Shadowrun team leaders have been unable to recruit volunteers for these tasks or they are unwilling to do so.
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The fluff is killing Shadowrun imho.
Your opinion is not widely shared. Of the three-four groups I've run with, none of them had this as a complaint.
I'm with Falar. I love the fluff in shadowrun. sure maybe the amount of fluffy could be cut down in the more rules orientated books like limiting it to short stories at the start of every chapter and maybe jackpoint comments. But to say its killing the game might be a bit extreme .
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While it's been over a year since I offered, I'd still do some volunteer editing and quality control if given the opportunity. I have some professional editing experience (which is part of why the flaws gall me so much).
I'd second this; while English isn't my first language, part of my job is to write and proof read technical documentation. Not speaking the language natively also gives me a different perspective that might indicate where more concise statements might be more prudent than elaborate language, and I'd be more than happy to pitch in for free if only to help with grammar, layout, and general QA.
I know crowd-sourcing has been mentioned as being too resource intensive in the past, but maybe it's time to revisit this? I can't imagine that it would be more work to go through QA feedback from 5-10 people than having to QA a whole manuscript by yourself, for example. We do Formal Technical Reviews at my work place all the time, and having a list of major and minor issues as well as simple grammatical errors to go through certainly is an effective approval-by-committee process for us.
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In general, most of a game's player base is not qualified for much more than catching minor errors like spelling or minor grammar. As much as modern players seem to think they know how to design a good game, that isn't true except in a very niche case where they're specifically crafting something for their particular group.
I'm not sure I agree with that. While there are plenty of examples where that is the case (overpowered and erratic homebrew designs are common in every tabletop RPG), I think most of a game's more experienced player base is capable of identifying game-breaking flaws and rule mismatches after exposure and playtesting. For that matter, a lot of companies make use of exposure and playtesting in order to identify problem areas or oddities that would not necessarily have been caught in the editing process -- Paizo, for example, has made great use of player input and PFS playtesting in creating their new class books. Maybe we could try something similar for new crunch sourcebooks? That might allow us to fix editing on tables as well.
Moreover, the player base is great in one area that game designers always have trouble with: overall fluff libraries. Player-managed wiki sources are popular for a lot of fictional universes because crowdsourcing all available details off of OCD game fans is way easier and cheaper than spending time doing it yourself.
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If you could improve the rules greatly by cutting 10-20% of the fluff wouldn't that be worth it?
That's a totally different argument than "cut all fluff/ don't put fluff in rulebooks".
One that I think we could all live with, happily.
The fluff is killing Shadowrun imho.
Your opinion is not widely shared. Of the three-four groups I've run with, none of them had this as a complaint.
I'm with Falar. I love the fluff in shadowrun. sure maybe the amount of fluffy could be cut down in the more rules orientated books like limiting it to short stories at the start of every chapter and maybe jackpoint comments. But to say its killing the game might be a bit extreme .
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I find it interesting that you think "Fluff" is killing the game when one out of seven posts here is a request for MORE fluff!
(What sports teams are there)
(What is happening in this country)
(What is going on with this person)
(What are the laws of this country)
(What is this faction up to)
And those are just the first few that come to mind....
If people are asking questions like these and others, then there must be some demand for fluff.... don't you think?
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The fluff is killing Shadowrun imho.
Your opinion is not widely shared. Of the three-four groups I've run with, none of them had this as a complaint.
Really? It pretty much killed our Shadowrun campaign. To be fair though it isn't the fluff to crunch ratio that was the problem. The problem that frustrated us until we just gave up on it was that the crunch part of the books themselves were written in a fluffy way that often made the rules vague, confusing and/or incomplete. There are still some pieces of equipment from Chrome Flesh that while I know exactly what their purpose is in game the writer failed to get around to actually describing the game mechanics! Our GM just got tired of trying to figure out what the authors intended with this rule or that and decided it wasn't worth the effort and I really couldn't blame him.
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I find it interesting that you think "Fluff" is killing the game when one out of seven posts here is a request for MORE fluff!
(What sports teams are there)
(What is happening in this country)
(What is going on with this person)
(What are the laws of this country)
(What is this faction up to)
And those are just the first few that come to mind....
If people are asking questions like these and others, then there must be some demand for fluff.... don't you think?
This just proves that there needs to be a return of those primarily-fluff sources so that that stuff can be included. That doesn't change that the general over-emphasis of the fluff in rules supplements is damaging to a game.
The rules are far more important since beyond the stuff in a core rulebook, fluff can vary from table to table but the rules need to be comprehensive and stable no matter where you go.
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Some fluff is critical, no doubt.
My point, to clarify, is spending limited $$ on shoveling fluff into every book is a poor substitute for better authored rules.
So I am 100% NOT saying, cut all fluff!
I'm not even saying "make more rules than fluff in a book".
What I AM SAYING is spend some of those fluff $$ on making sure your dang rules work and the editing is better, far better.
See my back of napkin $$ analysis earlier in this thread (its probably wrong but the general gist, spend more money on better rules and cut back the fluff 10 or 20% is valid imho).
I hope that clarifies my position so folks don't keep putting words into my mouth.
I find it interesting that you think "Fluff" is killing the game when one out of seven posts here is a request for MORE fluff!
(What sports teams are there)
(What is happening in this country)
(What is going on with this person)
(What are the laws of this country)
(What is this faction up to)
And those are just the first few that come to mind....
If people are asking questions like these and others, then there must be some demand for fluff.... don't you think?
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I think the balance of Fluff and Crunch is less important than rules that work.
I would love some of the outstanding repeated questions that come up time and again in the rules forums to be answered clearly.
I certainly appreciate that it is time consuming and expensive to do this well, certainly more expensive than doing fluff well.
However, a process to do it effectively would be very valuable in the long term, I suspect (but cannot prove).
Would love to not hear "we should have used 4th" almost every session.
As a GM what I would really love is one place to go to for information, whether Fluff or Crunch.
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On the topic of freelancer input and how likely we are to post in any given thread, and speaking only for myself, I don't "avoid" this place because my precious fee-fees would be hurt, I avoid this place because, generally speaking, there's no point in my posting. The problems that people drag up again and again and again are problems that are above my pay grade, as a freelancer and a writer, are often problems that the complainer doesn't understand in the first place, or both.
It's like someone ranting in line at a gas station about the price of gas, insisting the gas station has raised the price of crude oil to cover for the cost of selling cigarettes, expecting the store employee to do anything about it. Sure, maybe there's a legit complaint there, but it's multiple different topics that are related (but not in the way the ranter thinks), but also it's multiple different complaints that are so far above the pay-grade of the register-jockey working at the gas station that the complaints themselves are laughable (and it would be unprofessional for someone working at that gas station to bad mouth that gas station, anyways, even if they agreed). So why bother responding, and trying to explain any of that for the Nth time?
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I kinda got tired and skipped past the last page or so of posts due to the back and forth, but did want to say a couple of things.
Re: Fluff in crunch, particularly 3 books of CFD.
The problem with this is that it wasn't 3 books going over and over the same thing... it was 3 books following the continued unfolding of the CFD crisis, each book is set further along the metaplot timeline. And well, there's a rather simple solution, don't read the fluff? I'll admit that being more focused on running pre-generated content as this is my first time GMing I've been skimming most of the fluff.
Re: The fluff is just fan-fic.
As a writer, Fuck You.
Re: Editing issues, bad tables/conflicts/etc.
It does suck, but remember that editing is just as difficult and time consuming, if not more so, than the actual writing itself. I've been working on a Twine interactive fiction project and an update changes the way a system works. I had to basically completely re-do an entire segment to work with the new system and damn near lost half of it in the process.
Re: Finding solutions.
It does sound like CGL is in between a bit of a rock and a hard place here... so what can we do to help? For a start, by helping, be constructive. Constructive feedback of what's wrong instead of screaming to fix it can help. Constructive feedback of what works well can give writers and editors valuable feedback on what to aim for in the future.
As someone with a bit of a writing background, and also someone moving into their final stage of a Bachelor's in Game Design, is there anyone to talk to about seeing how and where I could possibly help out?
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And -- because a few of you have expressed interest in becoming part of a potential solution, working as a proofer/editor/whatever -- I think the management-approved method for getting ahold of Jason is via his "JM_Hardy" account, right here on the forums. There are long-time fans who, in the past, worked as proofers (for store credit, IIRC), so it's a transition that people can make. If you want to reach out to Jason, reach out to Jason, and see if he feels the proofer pool needs a few more warm bodies in it.
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@Duellist_D - do you think that people are welcome (or not) to voice their comments and/or criticism on this forum?
Hello AJCarrington.
I'm not sure what lead to this question, but to answer it:
Barring a few rare occurances where i think "insiders" acted in way that a normal user couldn't have without getting a warning for their tone(*), this forum is imho pretty open.
I'm relatively new to /this/ board, so other opinions may and will differ, be it from experience or point-of-view. Having said this, i think this forum (or the staff here) is a rather fair and honest judge on criticism and allows for a broad spectrum of opinioins on the products, which is IMHO a major plus.
I won't lie and say that all outgoing communications from Catalyst is good. Imho its actually bad overall. But the Freelancers that are communicating here on the Forum and via other channels (reddit, /tg/, etc) are doing a pretty darn fine Job in fixing stuff that they aren't technically obliged (and paid) to do.
Several thumbs up for that.
Also thumbs up for not closing this thread.
It might have been heated on times, but IMHO went into a productive/informative direction.
(*)NOT talking about this thread
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After reading the Posts after AJCarringtons:
I don't think cutting back on the fluff would be a viable solution to improve the editing quality.
Sure, in a perfect world the freed-up ressourced would be allocated to QC and the product would be better, but this isn't a economics lecture for first semester students.
Employing communitymembers to look over the books before they get published, might be a viable solution.
Paying these would open up the old bag of problems of course, but we are talking about a fandom with a huge emotional attachement to the product.
Offer a few "proofreader" slots per book, send a workbook-PDF out to those volunteers (black/white, editing and commenting enabled), give them a week and incorporate the reported errors.
Offer a PDF of the final book and a "thank you [name]" inside as compensation for the voluntees and be done with it.
I doubt you won't be able to fill these slots in a short amount of time if you announce an offer like this here or on reddit/facebook/tg.
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Offer a few "proofreader" slots per book, send a workbook-PDF out to those volunteers (black/white, editing and commenting enabled), give them a week and incorporate the reported errors.
Offer a PDF of the final book and a "thank you [name]" inside as compensation for the voluntees and be done with it.
Yes.
I would do a run-through for a copy of the PDF. Heck, I wouldn't even need credit (although it'd be nice). I'd mainly do it for the PDF. I did it for Kerberos and I never used that PDF. I'd use these.
Of course, beastly NDAs notwithstanding.
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Man I would be so happy if Catalyst did this, Falar would be a great candidate imho along with some of the other folks on this forum.
And imagine if Catalyst could get that work for the cost of a PDF supplement here and there.
What a bargain.
Go on Catalyst, take a chance on improving your products, please. I'm begging you.
The rules farkups are screwing this game.
Rigger 5.0 is unusable.
Offer a few "proofreader" slots per book, send a workbook-PDF out to those volunteers (black/white, editing and commenting enabled), give them a week and incorporate the reported errors.
Offer a PDF of the final book and a "thank you [name]" inside as compensation for the voluntees and be done with it.
Yes.
I would do a run-through for a copy of the PDF. Heck, I wouldn't even need credit (although it'd be nice). I'd mainly do it for the PDF. I did it for Kerberos and I never used that PDF. I'd use these.
Of course, beastly NDAs notwithstanding.
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Rigger 5.0 is unusable.
I actually found Rigger 5.0 to be one of the top-five usable splats. There's a couple of places that need a little curbing (Noizquitos, Swarm autosoft) but nothing that jumped out at me and invalidated the whole book. To me, it's about the equivalent of Gun H(e)aven 3 - out of 20-25 guns, one of them was wrong. About a 4-5% rate of doof and most of the doof wasn't central to the book.
Other than drone mount costs. That's right up there with no price for autosofts in Core.
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My problem is I can't figure out what the stats are for the drones as the conflict or are missing, no idea how to use weapon mounts and how fast drones move.
Those are pretty core features of a Rigger 5.0.
All of which should have been caught with even a cursory review of the book before publishing,
Wak has been great in trying to triage in the rigger 5.0 errata thread but there are conflicting answers in there,
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Rigger 5.0 is unusable.
I actually found Rigger 5.0 to be one of the top-five usable splats. There's a couple of places that need a little curbing (Noizquitos, Swarm autosoft) but nothing that jumped out at me and invalidated the whole book. To me, it's about the equivalent of Gun H(e)aven 3 - out of 20-25 guns, one of them was wrong. About a 4-5% rate of doof and most of the doof wasn't central to the book.
Other than drone mount costs. That's right up there with no price for autosofts in Core.
Seconded, but I ended up houseruling the majority of the actual rules because I don't agree with the direction the writers are taking with vehicles and drones. That's my personal beef, though, and not a reflection on the rules not technically working, I just don't like 'em.
I agree that noizquitos and swarm are horribly, horribly broken but they are also easy enough to houserule, and the lack of costs for drone weapon mounts were addressed by Wakshaani in the errata thread. The table issues irked me but with the exception of micro drone racks (which were cut entirely) they were easy enough to adjust mentally. The inconsistency of how to combine vehicle and drone mods seem to be under review by the Missions guys (and incidentally, they're doing it just like I suggested it seems).
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Hello AJCarrington.
I'm not sure what lead to this question, but to answer it:
Barring a few rare occurances where i think "insiders" acted in way that a normal user couldn't have without getting a warning for their tone(*), this forum is imho pretty open.
I'm relatively new to /this/ board, so other opinions may and will differ, be it from experience or point-of-view. Having said this, i think this forum (or the staff here) is a rather fair and honest judge on criticism and allows for a broad spectrum of opinioins on the products, which is IMHO a major plus.
I won't lie and say that all outgoing communications from Catalyst is good. Imho its actually bad overall. But the Freelancers that are communicating here on the Forum and via other channels (reddit, /tg/, etc) are doing a pretty darn fine Job in fixing stuff that they aren't technically obliged (and paid) to do.
Several thumbs up for that.
Also thumbs up for not closing this thread.
It might have been heated on times, but IMHO went into a productive/informative direction.
(*)NOT talking about this thread
Thanks Duellist_D, appreciate your comments and clarification...I had misunderstood one of your posts.
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Offer a few "proofreader" slots per book, send a workbook-PDF out to those volunteers (black/white, editing and commenting enabled), give them a week and incorporate the reported errors.
Offer a PDF of the final book and a "thank you [name]" inside as compensation for the voluntees and be done with it.
Yes.
I would do a run-through for a copy of the PDF. Heck, I wouldn't even need credit (although it'd be nice). I'd mainly do it for the PDF. I did it for Kerberos and I never used that PDF. I'd use these.
Of course, beastly NDAs notwithstanding.
I think this is a great idea. Key is getting the volunteers into the NDAs which can be non-trivial. That said, I'm sure they could get a decent number of volunteers, and if they made the NDAs reasonable on-boarding shouldn't be that bad. I think this could make a huge improvement to the product all for the cost of 5-10 pdf sales? Seems like a win-win solution for Catalyst. Here's hoping they can make something along these lines work for the business.
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I'd like more fluff books and I'll probably buy all of them if they have an interesting angle. Crunch is great but having too much of it can really slow down character creation and it can be tricky finding things in 15 or 20 different books. Personally I'd like more books like Attitude. I want to learn more about things like brand names at stuffer shack, interesting things you could do or find at a megacorp shopping mall, explanation on what artifacts do and how they can be added to games without just being an object of interest. I just eat that stuff up because it broadens my understanding of the game world and helps me create a more accurate and vivid experience as the GM, it also helps me roleplay my characters better. That said I'll buy all the crunch too because I just have to lol.
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Guys, please listen, proofreaders from within the community isn't some groundbreaking new thing. That's where proofreaders come from, since you all know full well that's where most of the writers come from, too. This isn't some pie in the sky revolutionary dream, it's how things already get done. This is not a "I wonder if" thing, or a "Catalyst, be daring and take a chance" thing, it's an "already being done" thing.
So contact Jason. Get on the list, if we need extra eyes he'll hook you up.
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Guys, please listen, proofreaders from within the community isn't some groundbreaking new thing. That's where proofreaders come from, since you all know full well that's where most of the writers come from, too. This isn't some pie in the sky revolutionary dream, it's how things already get done. This is not a "I wonder if" thing, or a "Catalyst, be daring and take a chance" thing, it's an "already being done" thing.
So contact Jason. Get on the list, if we need extra eyes he'll hook you up.
This.
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Done. :)
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They clearly need more eyes as they continue to make simple to spot editing errors.
I mean does Catalyst even think they have a problem or do they think everything is peachy and they can just carry on as is?
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They clearly need more eyes as they continue to make simple to spot editing errors.
I mean does Catalyst even think they have a problem or do they think everything is peachy and they can just carry on as is?
Sometimes, the problem isn't the number of eyes on product, it's the speed and clarity with which proofreaders report stuff, it's whether or not the editor agrees with the issues they report, it's whether he gets conflicting complaints from different proofers (and has to decide which way to go with an edit), it's lots of things. It's even some things I can't get into, due to NDAs limiting my capacity to share backstage discussions and issues that've cropped up in the past.
The thing to understand is that more eyes isn't always the answer, and you also need to understand that "Catalyst" isn't one person with one opinion, and that proofreading isn't the end-all, be-all, of putting out quality product. Plenty of folks are concerned with quality control, but there's lots of other stuff going on, too, that we freelancers -- as the schmucks working in the gas station, manning the register and interacting with the public -- just can't, won't, or shouldn't, address.
That said? It's feeling like no answer anyone here is capable of providing you will satisfy you, though you keep on not letting that stop you from demanding answers from us. You've shifted the conversational goalposts several times, backpedaled frantically from some stuff you've said, doubled down on some other stuff you've said, ignored some of the answers you've received, made wild demands and dared Catalyst to do something bold and innovative, hemmed and hawed when it turns out your wild demands were already being met and your bold innovation was something that's been happening for years, and just doubled down and shifted the goalposts again.
So I think I'm circling back around, pretty soundly, into "why bother responding" territory, again. Sorry.
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Yeah at this point I'd settle for text that matches the table contents and rules that are not contradictory.
Which shows just how far my expectations have fallen.
I totally get that the freelancers shouldn't/ can't respond to this type of stuff.
These are clearly management issues that catalyst seems unable/ unwilling to address.
I keep going back to battletech and how much better catalyst manages that franchise.
The only conclusion I can draw is that the owner loves battletech so he wants to get it right and makes sure, with community support, it's is fixed if it's not right.
Instead the shadowrun franchise is stuck with management that appears (who knows what's in their head) to care little about getting things right and doesn't care to fix them when they go wrong.
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I totally get that the freelancers shouldn't/ can't respond to this type of stuff.
And yet, here we are.
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quick question I have heard Cot many times lately on this form but I can not find a product that would be CoT so my question is what is Cot standing for
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quick question I have heard Cot many times lately on this form but I can not find a product that would be CoT so my question is what is Cot standing for
I am assuming it means Table of Contents.
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Get on the list, if we need extra eyes he'll hook you up.
But thats not an if.
CGL's proofreading Quality is subpar, especially in many cases that are rather easy to spot. I don't think there are many customers that debate that.
If it was as easy as you put it, the problem wouldn't exist in the first place.
Plenty of stuff in the complaining-threads that doesn't fall into this (" it's whether or not the editor agrees with the issues they report, it's whether he gets conflicting complaints from different proofers (and has to decide which way to go with an edit), it's lots of things") catgory.
There is really no point in debating whether "blank entries" or "missaligned lines in a sheet" are intentional or an error yet you'll find numerous of errors like this, in several of the recent books. And this type is both the most easy to spot and most irritating error for a customer, because it has a huge influx on playability of the provided Information.
If the guys "you" (abstract, not you critias in Person, except if you would happen to be the HR-Guy of CGL) work with and that are under you don't do their job in a sastisfying way, its "your" (again, whoever is responding for hiring persons for this task) job to fix this problem and actively look out / ask for replacements. If you aren't doing this, then sorry i have to say, you are doing a non-sufficient job at what you should do.
And before any Freelancer feels wrongly insulted/attacked or w/e:
Please keep in mind the title of the thread is asking for opinions on SR5E products.
Not on freelancers in specific. I'm fully aware that most likely non of you have the right to hire externals by yourself.
Still, if any of you could raise this issue in /internal/ communications (again?), especially the part with the "People would do without CGL having to spend actual Money on them", this might help the case a bit.
Hearing something from a co-worker has usually a different weight in a discussion than ramblings of some random internetperson.
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Get on the list, if we need extra eyes he'll hook you up.
But thats not an if.
CGL's proofreading Quality is subpar, especially in many cases that are rather easy to spot. I don't think there are many customers that debate that.
If it was as easy as you put it, the problem wouldn't exist in the first place.
Personally, I'd say that the cases that actually pose a real problem are less than the complaining would suggest. Certainly there are some, but almost all of the 'errata threads' here have a lot of things that are just nitpicks like spelling or minor grammar errors. Heck, the tables on Rigger 5.0 aren't that bad--still easy enough to tell what's what, just off kilter slightly.
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Heck, the tables on Rigger 5.0 aren't that bad--still easy enough to tell what's what, just off kilter slightly.
Except in the cases where entries are just plain missing, like drone weapon mount costs (clarified by Wakshaani, fortunately), the micro drone rack, and drone speeds in tactical combat (and what speed P is, since that's not mentioned anywhere), just to name a few example.
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Get on the list, if we need extra eyes he'll hook you up.
But thats not an if.
It really, really, is. The problem isn't always spotting the errors in the first place. I'd love to say more, but NDAs don't let me, so I'll just repeat, "the problem isn't always spotting the errors in the first place."
If the guys "you" (abstract, not you critias in Person, except if you would happen to be the HR-Guy of CGL) work with and that are under you don't do their job in a sastisfying way, its "your" (again, whoever is responding for hiring persons for this task) job to fix this problem and actively look out / ask for replacements. If you aren't doing this, then sorry i have to say, you are doing a non-sufficient job at what you should do.
The fact you think there's an HR person shows me that you've got some mistaken assumptions about not only this process in particular, but CGL (and likely the gaming industry) as a whole. Things in the RPG industry don't work the way you seem to think they work.
Still, if any of you could raise this issue in /internal/ communications (again?), especially the part with the "People would do without CGL having to spend actual Money on them", this might help the case a bit.
Again, this is already the case. There are already people doing this "without CGL having to spend actual money on them," and there have been for a very long time. I cannot imagine how to be any clearer about this; it is a thing that is already happening, and it has been the way it's been done for years now.
But, yes, the quality control issue has been raised internally. It's been raised internally before, and I'm sure it will be raised internally again. There've been formal announcements about it, in fact. We know it's an issue. Everyone knows it's an issue. There is nobody that doesn't know it's an issue, I promise. I'm not trying to be an asshole here, guys (or gals), I just want to make sure y'all understand that there is a proofing process in place, that proofing process does already heavily rely on the community, and we are aware of the problem -- and also, if you want to joint that proofing community, the door's open -- but that most of us can't do anything about it, even though we're just as frustrated by it as you are (hell, our names are on these products).
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Heck, the tables on Rigger 5.0 aren't that bad--still easy enough to tell what's what, just off kilter slightly.
Except in the cases where entries are just plain missing, like drone weapon mount costs (clarified by Wakshaani, fortunately), the micro drone rack, and drone speeds in tactical combat (and what speed P is, since that's not mentioned anywhere), just to name a few example.
Or at least one vehicle (the Mil/Sec Rhino) that has stats that don't match at all (chapter stats vrs table at end of book).
Personally (and my opinion) don't care for the way fluff and crunch is mix in the SR books, I prefer something more like Pathfinder's fluff then hard crunch (example feats). That said, I overall enjoy Rigger 5.0 (issues aside) and level of crunch to fluff is closer to what I wanted. Just would like more concise rules and not contradictory.
Again (really trying to emphasize this) love the set up of Rigger 5.0. It is more like the last two good crunch books (Run and Gun and Run Faster). Right amount of crunch to fluff.
I personally could care less about the metaplot, so any chapter that is dealing with that is wasted on me and my group (using 60's-ish timeline with 5th rules).
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And -- because a few of you have expressed interest in becoming part of a potential solution, working as a proofer/editor/whatever -- I think the management-approved method for getting ahold of Jason is via his "JM_Hardy" account, right here on the forums. There are long-time fans who, in the past, worked as proofers (for store credit, IIRC), so it's a transition that people can make. If you want to reach out to Jason, reach out to Jason, and see if he feels the proofer pool needs a few more warm bodies in it.
Just re-quoting the above.
We have proofers. We probably need more. There's the guy to talk to about getting in there.
Don't forget, every freelancer started as a fan (And we still *are* fans!), as did the staffers, on up the chain, and want to see the best things possible. We want this stuff to be all sorts of kicking hindquarters, so if you want to help, give it a spin!
You might be surprised. :)
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The only conclusion I can draw is that the owner loves battletech so he wants to get it right and makes sure, with community support, it's is fixed if it's not right.
100% wrong.
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I totally get that the freelancers shouldn't/ can't respond to this type of stuff.
And yet, here we are.
Und das ist auch gut & richtig so !
with a german Dance
Medicineman
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I totally get that the freelancers shouldn't/ can't respond to this type of stuff.
And yet, here we are.
Und das ist auch gut & richtig so !
with a german Dance
Medicineman
And this would mean what?
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I totally get that the freelancers shouldn't/ can't respond to this type of stuff.
And yet, here we are.
Und das ist auch gut & richtig so !
with a german Dance
Medicineman
And this would mean what?
This is a good thing.
(And this is also good and right so!)
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at first I wanted to write it in English, but Alas my English isn't good enough(ImO) to translate that sentence properly without twisting the Meaning.
If I would've written :
and that's a good & right thing
It would've deemed wrong in the Meaning to me,
(see , Zweiblumen tried and didn't get the true Meaning right....sometimes there simply is a Gap that you can hardly cross :) )
with an unassured dance
Medicineman
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The only conclusion I can draw is that the owner loves battletech so he wants to get it right and makes sure, with community support, it's is fixed if it's not right.
100% wrong.
I agree that there is waaaaay to much hyperbole there. Speculating on motivation is less than helpful. However, the fact does remain that the Battletech team has developed an effective infrastructure for collecting, evaluating and disseminating errata to the players that the Shadowrun team COULD, as far as I can tell, avail themselves of if they chose to do so. There are also the rules forums where players can ask for clarifications on rules and/or game mechanics in the various core books not to mention the Ask the Devs and Ask the Writers forums where players can ask questions and the appropriate powers that be can answer (or not) at their leisure. The latter forums are all restricted so that the only ones that can post to a thread is the person who created the thread (e.g. the player) and those designated to answer the questions (generally devs and/or writers.)
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I agree that there is waaaaay to much hyperbole there. Speculating on motivation is less than helpful.
Yup.
However, the fact does remain that the Battletech team has developed an effective infrastructure for collecting, evaluating and disseminating errata to the players that the Shadowrun team COULD, as far as I can tell, avail themselves of if they chose to do so. There are also the rules forums where players can ask for clarifications on rules and/or game mechanics in the various core books not to mention the Ask the Devs and Ask the Writers forums where players can ask questions and the appropriate powers that be can answer (or not) at their leisure. The latter forums are all restricted so that the only ones that can post to a thread is the person who created the thread (e.g. the player) and those designated to answer the questions (generally devs and/or writers.)
While I won't speculate as to why the SR forums are not nearly as structured as the BT forums, I do feel the need to remind people of something very important:
BattleTech, both from a gameplay standpoint and an organizational standpoint, have the advantage of a significant amount of continuity. Going back to when FanPro got the license to produce both BattleTech and Shadowrun BattleTech has changed Line Developers twice, from Randall Bills to Herb Beas and back to Randall. Shadowrun? To be frank I can't name all of the LDs (almost all of my time was on the BattleTech side of the house). I know Rob Boyle was the first, Jason is the latest, and there were a number between the two. That lack of continuity will have an impact in building up the support structure for Shadowrun. Gameplay? In the time that BattleTech's Total Warfare rulebook was released (2006) Shadowrun went from 4th Edition to SR20A to 5th Edition. Two major editions plus what I consider a half edition overhaul. BattleTech released a half edition overhaul and has been running with it for ten years now. Plenty of time for people to play enough to be experts at it.
Can the BattleTech system be adopted for use by Shadowrun? Sure. Should it? Maybe. It would require a time investment to get everything set up, which is time taken away from product development.
My personal opinion? Sure, I would love to see some of BattleTech's approaches carried over to Shadowrun. Specifically the errata section of this forum patterned after the BattleTech forum, with the exception of an errata team being the ones to post in the errata forum. Build a development team interaction sub-forum for the players to ask questions/clear up inconsistencies. Once answered the information gets posted to the errata forum, with the information compiled into an errata document on a regular basis (quarterly, semi-annually, annually, etc...). Also, for crunch heavy books release the PDF as a beta. Set a hard date for submissions, roll fixes back into the book, then ship it to the printers. People who bought the beta would get the updated PFD through the usual upgrade mechanism.
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Now I have not played BT in ages, but from my time there part of the stability I saw with BT is that its a bit more straight forward in many ways.
You don't try stealthing in an Atlas the same way your runners do, so things like Perception are handled a bit different.
You can use terrain for cover and jumping over hills, but you still had a pretty good idea where everyone was.
You have a lot more skills in SR the devs have to track of and keep balanced.
And how the skills can be applied is a bit different, SR tends to find very creative uses for these skills where again it is a lot more straight forward in BT.
Compare a called limb shot on a mech (is it still pretty much a penalty to hit anywhere with no head shots allowed?) to the plethora of called shots/special effects you get from Run & Gun.
BT has pretty much one plane of battle going on at any given time, the physical field with environment though you can spice it up with some air support, but it's still one plane.
SR has things going on in three possible planes: Astral, Physical, Matrix each constituting their own 'battlefield' with some overlap.
And while most GMs handle it one at a time, as we said there will be overlaps and again keeping this balanced is the trick.
See also the ongoing wireless ON debate and hacking/defending your gear.
In BT the fluff was nice background, but it's impact was not as great outside of who you might be allying with because Mechs can just ride through a lot of it if you didn't want to pay attention to small details. Or when the fluff did tie in, it was fairly easy to define in the rules if needed.
In SR the fluff seemed to me to tie in a lot more with the players because well you darn well had to slog through that setting, so of course they ask more about rules covering those effects.
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This would be fantastic if it was viable/ possible.
My personal opinion? Sure, I would love to see some of BattleTech's approaches carried over to Shadowrun. Specifically the errata section of this forum patterned after the BattleTech forum, with the exception of an errata team being the ones to post in the errata forum. Build a development team interaction sub-forum for the players to ask questions/clear up inconsistencies. Once answered the information gets posted to the errata forum, with the information compiled into an errata document on a regular basis (quarterly, semi-annually, annually, etc...). Also, for crunch heavy books release the PDF as a beta. Set a hard date for submissions, roll fixes back into the book, then ship it to the printers. People who bought the beta would get the updated PFD through the usual upgrade mechanism.
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Now I have not played BT in ages, but from my time there part of the stability I saw with BT is that its a bit more straight forward in many ways.
Sorry I'm going to have to disagree with you there pretty strongly.
First, Battletech has multiple layers of rules that have to remain compatible (at least in theory) with each other. There are the standard tournament rules, construction rules, advanced optional rules that cover areas in the previous rule sets plus campaign rule sets at both the tactical and strategic levels. The exceptions being Alpha Strike and A Time of War the former being a "fast playing" version of the tactical game and the latter being the Battletech RPG game. They are based on the core game but they don't have to remain tightly compatible.
Second, while Battletech proper does only have approximately two skills it does maintain literally hundreds of cannon units most with multiple variants. All of which have to be checked for legality anytime a rule change is proposed. Producing new sets of units of any stripe that are verifiable of legal construction is a very time consuming process. Also, as a design decision made long ago, Battletech does not have the luxury of completely reinventing itself every ten years or so. Imagine if Shadowrun had to maintain its rules so that characters made in 1st edition could be played in 5th edition with no conversion? Granted it's not really an apples to apples comparison but that doesn't negate the complexity of trying maintain rules without invalidating units built almost 30 years ago.
I will grant that Shadowrun has multiple "battlefields" if you will though I will challenge the fact that makes the Battletech "battlefield" less complicated or easier to balance. When you start taking into account Battlemechs, vehicles, infantry, fighters, artillery and (God help me) warships has been an ongoing process for as long as I can remember. And don't even get me started on Inner Sphere tech vs. Clan tech, ack!
I knew you would bring up the fluff thing and I will admit from a personal standpoint that when I started playing back in the 80's I didn't give a lick about Great Houses or ComStar or any of that crap. But the fact is fluff is just as important to a lot of Battletech players as it is to any Shadowrun player. There is also a whole lot more of it to keep track of. Imagine if Shadowrun were currently in the year 2275 and they had more than 250 years of history to keep track of rather than the 70 or so they do now. Let's also not forget the number of players out there who would just plain freak if you so much as suggested that they use a unit that doesn't belong to the chosen faction. Which is yet another layer of complexity managed by volunteers. All those hundreds of units and someone has to go through all that material and figure out what faction has access to what and during what eras spanning hundreds of years.
So while I would be the first to admit that there are different challenges to design, edit and maintain between Shadowrun and Battletech I wholeheartedly disagree that either is easier than the other.
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Sorry I'm going to have to disagree with you there pretty strongly.
*bows* I concede as you have raised some very good points.
Like I said it has been ages since I touched BT and it seems it has grown quite a bit since my day, the Clans were just making their appearance at that time.
I followed the novels since then, but never had the opportunity to get into the game side of BT due to lack of players as most including myself had migrated to SR and other, though may be worth going back and have a look at it now.
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This pretty much exemplifies the state of Srun 5e:
Another random thread on the internets told me that a drone can now run up to a number of Autosoft's equal to it's Pilot Rating.
See here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/comments/40q7dn/rigger_5_pg127_massive_stealth_nerf/cyxycjp
That should have been in Rigger 5.0.
It feels as though 5e is being held together with duct tape and bailing wire and sheer willpower of the freelancers.
I wish that Catalyst would spend less money on fluff and more money on getting the rules straight so I don't have to spend so much time on the internets divining the rules intent.
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This pretty much exemplifies the state of Srun 5e:
Another random thread on the internets told me that a drone can now run up to a number of Autosoft's equal to it's Pilot Rating.
See here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/comments/40q7dn/rigger_5_pg127_massive_stealth_nerf/cyxycjp
That should have been in Rigger 5.0.
It feels as though 5e is being held together with duct tape and bailing wire and sheer willpower of the freelancers.
I wish that Catalyst would spend less money on fluff and more money on getting the rules straight so I don't have to spend so much time on the internets divining the rules intent.
I still don't think fluff is the problem but yeah that needs to be fixed before the book goes to print. also do the new rules in Rigger 5 or any other book officially override rules from the core book or are they all considered optional?
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I still don't think fluff is the problem but yeah that needs to be fixed before the book goes to print. also do the new rules in Rigger 5 or any other book officially override rules from the core book or are they all considered optional?
Later rules in core rulebooks always overrule unless they are specifically labeled optional. So Rigger 5.0 rigging is the correct rules at this point (or 30 days after the book comes out in print for Missions games).
That said, I'm a little amused by people whining and complaining about needing to google-fu through five different places to get information. That's not constructive. Constructive is creating a wiki that pulls that all together and is properly maintained. Don't waste time complaining - be the change you want to see.
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We've been told that Catalyst has no money to improve process/ hire more people.
So in a resource constrained development process you have to choose where you focus your energies/ resources.
My position, right or wrong, is that the focus should be on well written and crafted rules and the fluff can be trimmed to provide resources for this.
We know that Catalyst can author some good fiction (I particularly enjoyed the recent Technomancer novel and Critias' two novellas), however the same cannot be said for their Srun RPG rules.
Which is odd considering this is an RPG game they are selling.
This pretty much exemplifies the state of Srun 5e:
Another random thread on the internets told me that a drone can now run up to a number of Autosoft's equal to it's Pilot Rating.
See here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/comments/40q7dn/rigger_5_pg127_massive_stealth_nerf/cyxycjp
That should have been in Rigger 5.0.
It feels as though 5e is being held together with duct tape and bailing wire and sheer willpower of the freelancers.
I wish that Catalyst would spend less money on fluff and more money on getting the rules straight so I don't have to spend so much time on the internets divining the rules intent.
I still don't think fluff is the problem but yeah that needs to be fixed before the book goes to print. also do the new rules in Rigger 5 or any other book officially override rules from the core book or are they all considered optional?
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My personal opinion? Sure, I would love to see some of BattleTech's approaches carried over to Shadowrun. Specifically the errata section of this forum patterned after the BattleTech forum, with the exception of an errata team being the ones to post in the errata forum. Build a development team interaction sub-forum for the players to ask questions/clear up inconsistencies. Once answered the information gets posted to the errata forum, with the information compiled into an errata document on a regular basis (quarterly, semi-annually, annually, etc...). Also, for crunch heavy books release the PDF as a beta. Set a hard date for submissions, roll fixes back into the book, then ship it to the printers. People who bought the beta would get the updated PFD through the usual upgrade mechanism.
That sounds great!
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I still don't think fluff is the problem but yeah that needs to be fixed before the book goes to print. also do the new rules in Rigger 5 or any other book officially override rules from the core book or are they all considered optional?
Later rules in core rulebooks always overrule unless they are specifically labeled optional. So Rigger 5.0 rigging is the correct rules at this point (or 30 days after the book comes out in print for Missions games).
That said, I'm a little amused by people whining and complaining about needing to google-fu through five different places to get information. That's not constructive. Constructive is creating a wiki that pulls that all together and is properly maintained. Don't waste time complaining - be the change you want to see.
Uh, no. It would be nice if someone wants to do that but if I'm going to pay $50 for a book (or even 425 for a PDF) I certainly don't consider it whining to ask that the publishes the book to fix their mistakes in a timely manner. Granted it is more helpful to avoid insults when saying so but you obviously don't know how to do that so maybe you prefer to do it yourself. And if you think this is whining I really just don't give a shit.
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Adzling I am afraid you are not understanding the process the cost for a line of written material is the same weather it is fluff or rules and it is a different cost from hiring a team to help the Line developer manage the game. They could cut product fluff or crunch it's all the same in order to have the money to create such a team but that would lower product which would mean less income so they would have to either produce even less product or get ride of the team they hired. Catch 22.
I would be more concern with the state CGL finances if it so tight that they can not edit and direct the game line this would suggest that they are one misshape away from closing shop. If it is just a mater for budge priority's than the argument that Shadowrun is secondary to battle tech would seem right. Either way I believe CGL needs to address our needs by explaining to us why they can not produce a quality game like so many other companies can.
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This may be true (costs are different for freelance writing vs. editing/ management).
However it does not change the fact that if they pruned the fluff and directed those resources towards rules that actually work and are accurately written we might end up with better product.
For example by spending the savings on fluff on freelancers to edit and review stuff for accuracy before it goes to print/ PDF publishing.
This seems like a no-brainer.
There are other good recommendations in this thread as well (that I and others have quoted).
All we can do is continue to express our displeasure at their repeated and ongoing failures to turn out even remotely acceptable RULES product.
In the end Catalyst will have to decide what they do, or even IF they do anything.
Adzling I am afraid you are not understanding the process the cost for a line of written material is the same weather it is fluff or rules and it is a different cost from hiring a team to help the Line developer manage the game. They could cut product fluff or crunch it's all the same in order to have the money to create such a team but that would lower product which would mean less income so they would have to either produce even less product or get ride of the team they hired. Catch 22.
I would be more concern with the state CGL finances if it so tight that they can not edit and direct the game line this would suggest that they are one misshape away from closing shop. If it is just a mater for budge priority's than the argument that Shadowrun is secondary to battle tech would seem right. Either way I believe CGL needs to address our needs by explaining to us why they can not produce a quality game like so many other companies can.
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FFS adzling give it a rest, your not achieving anything by carrying on like this.
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FFS adzling give it a rest, your not achieving anything by carrying on like this.
He can't.
The Soapbox he climbed on to is so high, coming down off of it would require an 80foot manlift.
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Also, text is probably the cheapest part of the development project, as far as I've been able to tell from tracking a few RPG products. There's a lot more than text. There's:
- Art - this is generally one of the largest parts of a particular book's development budget
- Layout - this is a huge area for the development budget. A good layout person is worth their weight in gold.
- Editing - generally, this is harder to budget exactly because editors are usually on staff.
- Technical Editing - a solid chunk of money gets spent here on development budget.
- Management/Running - usually on staff, but also a significant chunk of development and production
- Printer costs - this is probably the biggest solid chunk of production budget
- Fulfillment costs - this is all about liasing with different distributors. More upfront in a company, but less for an established name (unless they're changing distributors).
Text is generally far from the hardest thing to get or the most expensive thing to get. What you're actually saying is more akin to saying you want no more art in Shadowrun and instead all are plain, black covers with no pictures.
Think about that.
Nobody wants that.
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Also, text is probably the cheapest part of the development project, as far as I've been able to tell from tracking a few RPG products. There's a lot more than text. There's:
- Art - this is generally one of the largest parts of a particular book's development budget
- Layout - this is a huge area for the development budget. A good layout person is worth their weight in gold.
- Editing - generally, this is harder to budget exactly because editors are usually on staff.
- Technical Editing - a solid chunk of money gets spent here on development budget.
- Management/Running - usually on staff, but also a significant chunk of development and production
- Printer costs - this is probably the biggest solid chunk of production budget
- Fulfillment costs - this is all about liasing with different distributors. More upfront in a company, but less for an established name (unless they're changing distributors).
Text is generally far from the hardest thing to get or the most expensive thing to get. What you're actually saying is more akin to saying you want no more art in Shadowrun and instead all are plain, black covers with no pictures.
Think about that.
Nobody wants that.
All definitely true, but after reading your post, I find myself wondering how much money would be saved if instead of full color artwork (it's nice and all, but not really necessary) they went back to most art being the black and white art found in the SR3 core book. I'm especially fond of the one that I believe is an elven street sam with a tattoo of a rose.
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Adzling I've been following this thread just like you and I am more than sure it is not a fluff vs crunch issue! It is a direction issue many times the freelancers are writing with little or no direction from the Line Developer good example is Data Trails which is describe as the Decker Book and has nothing for Deckers in it in fact it guts Decks and make Comm's a good choice for Decker's instead of Deck's. The LD should have a team of 2-5 people that whole job is directing the writers when it comes to new rule and rule changes they should be there to help the writers with any questions as to what is needed to fix the rule set. Developing a books should be something like this.
Virtual Soul "Decker/Rigger/Technomancer core Book"
This is what we the LD Team want from the writer
20Pg's this is our Matrix Fix "Please keep this in mind for rules"
50Pg's Deckers
A) Deck design / Use rule "Should always trump Comm's and other devices in the Matrix"
B) Program Design rules
C) Advance Agents
D) Positive / Negative Qualities
F) Cyber/Bio/Nano
50 Rigger
A) RCC Deck design
B) Rigger software
C) Building Rigging
D) Cyber/Bio/Nano
125 Technomancers
A) Matrix Mancers "Attach some Ideal and suggestions"
B) Rigger Mancers "Attach Some Ideals and Suggestions"
325 to 350 pages total the Rest fluff
Please give us a rough outline on the rules sections as early a possible so our rules team can work with you on fitting these rules in to the current rule set.
Once edited and ready the book should be released in PDF format for open play test with a from thread to report any problem and possible fixes this thread should be reviewed every month with the PDF being updated with corrections than after 2-4 months a final PDF should be made and sent to the printer for hard copy
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Fair nuff, that's a cogent and well reasoned post.
Adzling I've been following this thread just like you and I am more than sure it is not a fluff vs crunch issue! It is a direction issue many times the freelancers are writing with little or no direction from the Line Developer good example is Data Trails which is describe as the Decker Book and has nothing for Deckers in it in fact it guts Decks and make Comm's a good choice for Decker's instead of Deck's. The LD should have a team of 2-5 people that whole job is directing the writers when it comes to new rule and rule changes they should be there to help the writers with any questions as to what is needed to fix the rule set. Developing a books should be something like this.
Virtual Soul "Decker/Rigger/Technomancer core Book"
This is what we the LD Team want from the writer
20Pg's this is our Matrix Fix "Please keep this in mind for rules"
50Pg's Deckers
A) Deck design / Use rule "Should always trump Comm's and other devices in the Matrix"
B) Program Design rules
C) Advance Agents
D) Positive / Negative Qualities
F) Cyber/Bio/Nano
50 Rigger
A) RCC Deck design
B) Rigger software
C) Building Rigging
D) Cyber/Bio/Nano
125 Technomancers
A) Matrix Mancers "Attach some Ideal and suggestions"
B) Rigger Mancers "Attach Some Ideals and Suggestions"
325 to 350 pages total the Rest fluff
Please give us a rough outline on the rules sections as early a possible so our rules team can work with you on fitting these rules in to the current rule set.
Once edited and ready the book should be released in PDF format for open play test with a from thread to report any problem and possible fixes this thread should be reviewed every month with the PDF being updated with corrections than after 2-4 months a final PDF should be made and sent to the printer for hard copy
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All definitely true, but after reading your post, I find myself wondering how much money would be saved if instead of full color artwork (it's nice and all, but not really necessary) they went back to most art being the black and white art found in the SR3 core book. I'm especially fond of the one that I believe is an elven street sam with a tattoo of a rose.
Honestly, I find Shadowrun's layout to be pretty basic and uninspiring. I'd love them to get a talented layout professional at the level of Daniel Solis or Fred Hicks. The beauty of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple and the Firefly RPG or the clean, fresh layout of Fate Core would be awesome.
At the same time, I realize that those are much smaller works and have a very tight lead who has been working on them for many years.
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I'd be happy with anything that resulted in better rules; including sacrificing full color imagery inside the book.
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I'd be happy with anything that resulted in better rules
You've made this point numerous times now. There has been some reasonable (and some not so reasonable) discussion with multiple points of view. Perhaps it is time to move on?
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I'd be happy with anything that resulted in better rules
You've made this point numerous times now. There has been some reasonable (and some not so reasonable) discussion with multiple points of view. Perhaps it is time to move on?
Agreed. This thing is going round and round in circles. Perhaps it's time to lock it?
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I have a friend who is a professional illustrator, and I know he's done some work for Catalyst; I don't know what his rates were with them, but he currently charges about 100 dollars for half-page piece. Less for spot-pieces, more for page pieces and two-page spreads. Count up the pieces in a single book and see what you get?
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Good point, im putting down the crack pipe.
I'd be happy with anything that resulted in better rules
You've made this point numerous times now. There has been some reasonable (and some not so reasonable) discussion with multiple points of view. Perhaps it is time to move on?
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Jesus...this thread is still here?
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Jesus...this thread is still here?
Yeah, I don't understand why either...
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Containment.
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Jesus...this thread is still here?
Unfortunately yes.
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This tumblr post by Randall perfectly illustrates why the line editor for Battletech is able to get things right while the line editor for Srun 5e fails so miserably.
http://catalystgamelabs.tumblr.com/post/137291063026/the-oddballs-of-game-design
You would think they are two completely different companies.
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Now I kinda want to do something with BT, just to name a campaign 'Like LAMs To The Slaughter'.
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Haha that's quite punny!
Now I kinda want to do something with BT, just to name a campaign 'Like LAMs To The Slaughter'.