Quote:
Originally Posted by Jason Weiser
It's cool. But you've had the luxury of working for White Wolf for a long time, and to be honest, small companies like AAG (Osprey doesn't exercise day to day control) do their best on the writing front. We're a lot better than we used to be.
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I'm surprised to hear that about Osprey. The impression I'd formed, based on their involvement as both publisher and art provider, was that they were heavily involved in production.
I'll admit that part of my copyediting gripe stems from the fact that I'm a writer who tends toward mentally rewriting everything he reads. With all due respect to AAG, though, if you're gonna play in the professional publishing field, you need to be publishing professional-grade English. I'm sorry, but the "small company" excuse doesn't sit well with me when I look at what companies like Posthuman Studios (three guys doing
Eclipse Phase) are putting out.
Also, yeah, I wrote for the Wolf for a while, but don't forget the more recent gig I had with a much smaller firm.
The Wolf has had its share of copyediting failures, too. I've thrown books across the room when I found grammatical errors in final product that weren't in the manuscripts I turned in, and I grit my teeth every time I see frickin' Scribendi given "editing" credits.
Having said all that, none of it breaks the game for me, and I suspect I'm in the tiny, tiny minority of readers who'd ever lose focus upon encountering inconsistent capitalization.
Quote:
As for the system and the "rules creep", name a rules set that has not happened to? I can't.  It's the story of gaming, we come up with a nifty new set of rules, and then like a darn Christmas tree, you end up hanging everything and it's mom off of it. But I am glad that you agree that the core works. And ultimately, that's what matters. Shawn and co have a great idea that works very well in a variety of applications. There are colonials and Civil War games with house rules using the system. It's not common, but people are doing it.
What do you tell people? It's not my baby, I have some investment, but it's ultimately Shawn's. And since he and his wife are OOC at the moment, I'll just say what I think he'd say: "It's your game ultimately, and once you plunk the money down, it's yours to use and abuse."
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I'm getting the impression I wasn't very clear on the "house rules" criticism, so I'll try to re-state my issue here. I don't have a problem with the large number of special-case rules, and I don't see a lot of bad rules creep. As a designer, I tend toward excessive complexity myself, and it takes partners and playtesters smacking me upside the head to get me to recognize and pull out of my own textual box canyons. Almost all the breakages and unnecessary fiddly bits in Reflex are my fault. I
like systems that give me verisimilitude without requiring an accounting degree, and I think the Carpenters did an amazing job of distilling a lot of things that are very complex in the real world and abstracting them into a game engine that
simulates rather than
models. As I said above, I wish I'd seen this stuff before I wrote Reflex, because they elegantly solved several problems I never was able to fix myself.
My "house rules" headache with AAG is directly tied to the Shawn quote that I bolded above. He's unerringly polite and professional in his interactions with his customers, but he just doesn't seem to get that we don't all live in his head or have his particular level of experience. My prime example for this is several threads I've seen on the AAG forums regarding SAWs versus LMGs versus MMGs/GPMGs and how they do or do not interact with the weapon team rules. Shawn's answer invariably has been some variation of that quote, which doesn't really answer the questions. As a designer, he probably had some specific set of rules for determining which support weapons fall into which classifications, and from there deciding which can and can't be the main weapon of a weapon team. But he seems incapable of articulating those criteria. I can't speak for anyone else in those threads, but the reason
I look for "official" answers from a developer is because I want to follow the game's internal design logic but I can't deconstruct it myself. "Do what you want" does not help me attain my desired solution.
- C.