Embezzlement in Catalyst

[CatharzGodfoot]

Here are the threads in the subforum that contain his "contributions":

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=30601
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=30391
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=30661
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=30632

Ugh, why did I look at those? I'll never get those minutes of my life back.

[Wesley Street]

I've dealt with teenage girls less catty than Funkenstein. When he isn't pulling a passive-aggressive bitch fest he's in full-on petty-rage mode, of which I've been the brunt of in the past. How some get permabanned from boards but this loser and others don't baffles my mind.

So I've been grinding through a thought on the whole embezzlement thing...

Frank mentioned that Topps has been screwed out of royalties. Is the licensing agreement between CGL and Topps based on percentages or is it flat rate? It seems to me that Topps would (or should) be aware of what CGL owed the corporation based on units sold (of which I would think Topps would have information on). Do license-holders typically rely on the licensee to determine how much is owed on a license fee? Does Topps not independently audit those who create products with its brands to make certain it's getting its cut... rather than simply relying on the licensee's bookkeeping? Obviously I'm not a forensic accountant but all of this just strikes me as a little weird and overly trusting for a business arrangement.

And that means splitting the labor up and specializing. Artists make art, writers write, editors edit, layout does whatever it is that you call being the guy who does layout, and yes... administrators administrate. You simply can't self publish the 5-8 books per year that an RPG line seems to want to have produced for it. You need to incorporate.

The layout guy's typically referred to as the graphic designer. Unless he's straight out of art school he also handles a book's overall look and feel which he develops in conjunction with an editor.

I agree there needs to be specialization of responsibility in an RPG company. A writer is in no position to accurately keep the books. If a publisher can't afford in-house HR and accounting specialists there are plenty of third party business solutions vendors around who can handle accounting, payroll, etc. and let your company focus on what it does.

If there's a silver lining to CGL collapsing and Shadowrun going on hiatus until it finds a new home its that it would allow a new license holder to revamp how SR products are created. Even with all of the accusations of non-payment by creators and people sticking around for "the love of the game" when sanity and reason would determine they should quit, the process of creation by committee itself is pretty jacked. I don't know if it started with FanPro but I don't remember FASA assigning 8-10 writers on a single book. I understand the thought process that leads one to believe that more writers on a project would mean a project gets completed faster... but it sure hasn't held much water over the past six years as new releases have been so incredibly infrequent. First and second edition SR, there were, what, two to three credited writers on a production? Nigel Findley wrote Aztlan on his own. But after third edition SR turned into a collaborative nightmare. Speaking as someone who has had to work with committees in his paying job, they're impossible.

If you have 8-10 genuinely good writers, put them on 6-8 different projects and get that much more product through the pipeline. I have a hard time believing a professional writer couldn't handle a 100+ page sourcebook given that at least 1/3rd of that space is taken up by graphics, illustrations, maps and other design pieces. A rules book shouldn't require any more than four professional creative people with good heads for statistics and probability.

I guess the keyword is "professional" writer. People who walk away from a project because they aren't "feeling it" anymore don't fit that definition.

[Wesley Street]

Damn. Sorry for the double post.

[DMReckless]

My favorite part of the Fuckastein thing is where he rants about "find me a post where I attack a new poster" and then in the 4th link he's attacking a new poster.

[Crissa]

Publishing sales information increases the likelihood of getting investors interested, and has a side-effect of increasing sales, as customers rather like knowing they're not buying into a black hole.

That was the reason behind mmogchart.com, anyhow. (as an example)

-Crissa

[Kaelik]

My favorite part of the Fuckastein thing is where he rants about "find me a post where I attack a new poster" and then in the 4th link he's attacking a new poster.

My Favorite part about Fuckastein is that his posts are all of the: I'm not an X, I'm an X" type.

See: Attacking new poster.

See: "I wasn't accusing you of being the banned poster. I was accusing you of being the banned poster."

See: "I get riled up, but I stick to facts, like the fact that I hate people, and the fact that I get upset when other people bring facts into it."

Also, what was hilarious was concern troll number 12 that thought Fucktard shouldn't be infracted because he explained why he was insulting frank, but presumably thinks Frank should get an infraction, despite that he clearly explained why he was upset.

Also, how Fucktard got riled up at Frank for personally attacking the mod guy... With such cutting comments as "We are not friends." and "Your email was sent from a no-reply account."

[Orca]

What is there that someone could take as stock from a gaming company? Free copies of the books I guess, but that surely couldn't come to much compared to the amounts being talked about here. Maybe a computer or two and a printer?

[Lokathor]

layout does whatever it is that you call being the guy who does layout

Typesetting.

And of course, a willingness on the part of the administrators to allow some portion of the profits to slip through their fingers and go back to the creative staff.

Insanity!

You continue to be a madman. The money goes to the old white men on top until they have too much to hold and it trickles down to the workers. Obviously.

[Zinegata]

Moral of the story: Get a wad of cash and self-publish.

Well... not exactly. Here's the deal: if you personally get together and write a book... then what? First off, it probably took you like a year to write and assemble it on your own. Secondly, are you going to do all the art yourself? Even if this all magically comes together, you're still basically looking at a pile of money that is not that big for a year's work.

No, what you want is high production values and a reasonable release schedule. And that means splitting the labor up and specializing. Artists make art, writers write, editors edit, layout does whatever it is that you call being the guy who does layout, and yes... administrators administrate. You simply can't self publish the 5-8 books per year that an RPG line seems to want to have produced for it. You need to incorporate.

And that means that you need to figure out some profit sharing mechanism by which everyone playing their part in the grand machine is financially incentivized to do their job in a timely and professional manner. And that requires transparency. And of course, a willingness on the part of the administrators to allow some portion of the profits to slip through their fingers and go back to the creative staff.

-Username17

Ok. Revised moral of the story: Get a bigger wad of cash, setup a company, hire people/create a profit-sharing model, ensure good production values, in order to self-publish.

[Username17]

First of all: I'm sorry that my postings got you attacked by management when they thought you were the leak somehow. I kind of thought they would be smarter than that about figuring out how the leaking worked, but counter-intel is apparently not something they are good at.

Frank mentioned that Topps has been screwed out of royalties. Is the licensing agreement between CGL and Topps based on percentages or is it flat rate? It seems to me that Topps would (or should) be aware of what CGL owed the corporation based on units sold (of which I would think Topps would have information on). Do license-holders typically rely on the licensee to determine how much is owed on a license fee? Does Topps not independently audit those who create products with its brands to make certain it's getting its cut... rather than simply relying on the licensee's bookkeeping? Obviously I'm not a forensic accountant but all of this just strikes me as a little weird and overly trusting for a business arrangement.

Well first of all: you self report your income to the IRS, why wouldn't you self report your income to Topps? The whole point of subcontracting is so that you don't have to micromanage the individual sales in the property. Topps can request to see the books and such, and they can do some basic digging to see that books exist in translated form that they haven't seen a dime for - but they don't have a representative counting books as they go out. Why would they? How could they?

Secondly, the initial licensing fee is actually a set of "pre-royalties". Literally a pile of money that you hand over in anticipation of selling materials and owing a piece of change on each one. So if you get the license and it's all vaporware and you never succeed in getting a book out the door - Topps has still made money. If you do really well and sell a lot of product, then you start having to pay more money to Topps. And that's the part that CGL has not been doing.

So for example, when a foreign language translation book is sold by Pegasus in German or by any of the other corporations that do French or Japanese translations, there are royalties due. There are royalties due to Catalyst, and there are royalties due to Topps. But Pegasus just sends a check to Catalyst and trusts that it will all work out. And then Catalyst is supposed to send a check for half that money up the chain to Topps. But... they don't. This behavior is unfortunately not new. FASA used to pocket all the foreign royalties, Michael Stackpole complained bitterly about having copies of foreign translations of books that he had written that he had never seen a dime in royalties for back when he quit writing Battletech books. And that behavior, criminal as it is, hasn't changed with the new management. Evidently it was seen as a form of stealing you could get away with, and deliberately extended.

If there's a silver lining to CGL collapsing and Shadowrun going on hiatus until it finds a new home its that it would allow a new license holder to revamp how SR products are created. Even with all of the accusations of non-payment by creators and people sticking around for "the love of the game" when sanity and reason would determine they should quit, the process of creation by committee itself is pretty jacked. I don't know if it started with FanPro but I don't remember FASA assigning 8-10 writers on a single book. I understand the thought process that leads one to believe that more writers on a project would mean a project gets completed faster... but it sure hasn't held much water over the past six years as new releases have been so incredibly infrequent. First and second edition SR, there were, what, two to three credited writers on a production? Nigel Findley wrote Aztlan on his own. But after third edition SR turned into a collaborative nightmare. Speaking as someone who has had to work with committees in his paying job, they're impossible.

8-10 authors is probably a bad idea. I think the ideal number is five. First of all, because 5 is the span of control that people are allowed in the chain of command during an emergency. There is very good data that a single commander can herd 5 cats and not 6. But secondly because parallel writing has advantages that are not completely negated by the too many cooks problem.

A Freelance Writer generally produces 10k words a week. They can produce twice that, but you can't count on it. And that means that if you give one person a whole 150k word book, they'll be back to you in 4 months. That's great and all, but it means that you aren't going to be looking at a whole until deep in next quarter. If you split it five ways, you can have something to look at and fight about in a month. And that's what you want. The fact is that you want something to sell every month or two. You don't want five things to print all at once half a year from now.

The other thing of course is that the writers would rather get a paycheck every month than a bigger paycheck twice a year. They have like, rent and shit. If you're paying 5 cents a word (and you should be), that 150k book is going to be worth $7,500(before royalties, which you should also be providing). That's really not very much, but the important thing is that if you're asking your writer to hold out for half a year before they see it, there is a very good chance that they'll have to bail on the project before it's done - and then everyone gets nothing. Much better to dangle $1,500 each in front of five different writers for the month and get things done.

Basically, you should never ask anyone in your organization to attempt to organize more than they are physically capable of doing. You shouldn't ask one person to control more than five resources, because they can't. You shouldn't ask for any writer or artist to make predictions more than a month in advance, because they can't do that.

This means that if your book can't be finished by five people working for a month on writing it, that you shouldn't write it. I know that sounds harsh, but remember that you can jolly well write two books. You can bring out another book next month, and you will. The upper limit, therefore, is 200,000 words. This means that the SR4 core book or the 4th edition Player's Handbook is an acceptable book to write, but Geist: The Sineating is a book that should be split up or abandoned.

If you want to bring out more books than that, you're welcome to. You just have a B-Team. A B-Team that is also 5 writers and also does a book a month. You can put part-timers on the B-Team and have them crank out smaller books.

But yeah, one of the reasons that Runner's Companion is so shitty and took so long to make is because it seriously has ten authors. That's ridiculous. For goodness sakes, the damn thing is only 135,000 words, it could have had five writers and a single developer and been written in a month and been higher quality. But remember: Synibarr has one author and took like 12 years to write, that's not really a valid direction either.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

Ok. Revised moral of the story: Get a bigger wad of cash, setup a company, hire people/create a profit-sharing model, ensure good production values, in order to self-publish.

How to make a small fortune in RPG publishing:

- Step 1: start with a large fortune.

[Maxus]

First of all: I'm sorry that my postings got you attacked by management when they thought you were the leak somehow. I kind of thought they would be smarter than that about figuring out how the leaking worked, but counter-intel is apparently not something they are good at.
-Username17

Given the circumstances, I wouldn't complain too much.

So I have to wonder...

Are the updates on this only found on the Den now, since you've been banned from dumpshock?

In any case, this has been interesting reading.

Keep the news coming, Frank.

[Surgo]

Screw Topps, they closed my FLGS (that's friendly local grocery store).

Okay, I know they aren't the same company. I just thought it was a funny coincidence.

[Zinegata]

Ok. Revised moral of the story: Get a bigger wad of cash, setup a company, hire people/create a profit-sharing model, ensure good production values, in order to self-publish.

How to make a small fortune in RPG publishing:

- Step 1: start with a large fortune.

What was that comment about the RPG industry again? Was it this- "How do you end up with a small fortune by setting up an RPG company? Spend a large fortune to set up an RPG company"

[Draco_Argentum]

I'd like to get back the the Frank banning thing for a second.

Why is it that people ban Frank for pissweak stuff? Its not like he doesn't get outright rude regularly enough to find something ban worthy. WotC did the same thing.

[Murtak]

Because many people get rude enough to an them on that basis. If you want to keep those people, but ban Frank, you have to find something else than just rudeness, insults and flaming.

[Username17]

I'd like to get back the the Frank banning thing for a second.

Why is it that people ban Frank for pissweak stuff? Its not like he doesn't get outright rude regularly enough to find something ban worthy. WotC did the same thing.

This is actually a somewhat complicated question. As anyone who looks back in the records can plainly see, my last five warnings on Dumpshock were all for bullshit that no one but me would get a warning or even a raised eyebrow for. Let's consider them in order:

• Telling someone that Bull's character concept was thematically appropriate for D&D 4th edition, but not supported in the 4th edition Player's Handbook. (Warning + Tempban: unexplained)
• Having a discussion about the contents of a book published by FanPro with one of the other authors (Warning: "possible NDA breaking" despite the fact that the company in question no longer existed)
• Saying that Randall Bills was dangerously irrational (Permaban: Unexplained, rescinded, followed by Warning: "Religious Intolerance").
• Saying that Randall Bills had said that he had received a "message from god" after he described himself as "The Messiah of Battletech" (Warning: "Religious Intolerance")
• Saying that I did in fact remember the flamewar between ketjak and myself from seven years ago (Permaban: "Being Mean to a New Poster")

So yeah, every single one of those is obvious bullshit. The simple transparency of each and every single warning on that list is so in-your-face as to be actually laughable. So yeah, it's very clear that the reason I got warnings is not because I violated the terms of service. The terms of service are pretty vague, I have a suspicion that I have honestly never violated them.

I got warnings and banning because they did not want me there. Plain and simple. And why is that? Because I am "threatening."

Now I know I didn't literally threaten anyone or offer to threaten anyone or suggest a course of action that would be violent or overthrow anything. But I am threatening nonetheless. Because I have fans. Not "people like things I wrote," not "people subscribe to my blog" but straight up fans of me. People ask me on a regular basis when I am going to take over this thing or that thing. Other people take actual time out of their day to plan ways to stop me from taking various things over with the help of my minions. Do you know how many letters I've gotten asking me about my plan to take over the entire Shadowrun license? A lot.

When I got my first set of warnings that I was about to get banned from the WotC board, it was for starting an anti-Skip Williams revolution in the form of making a series of "Skip vs. Frank" threads in which people sounded off on whether they thought my answers were better to listen to than the ones printed in Sage Advice. I pointed out that I hadn't started any of those threads (which I had not), and thus couldn't stop them either. So they found something bullshit to ban me for.

The fact is that I actually am capable of towing the "no personal attacks" line if people actually demand that I do so. It's really not difficult to attack someone's argument in such a way that they feel like they have been urinated upon. So when moderators feel that they have to get rid of me to protect their own positions (which happens with shocking regularity), then they find trivial bullshit to write me up for and throw down th banhammer. It happens quite frequently.

Yes, there was a period when I was a wild eyed anti-authority anarchist who threw insults and petulance in the face of The Man. But seriously, that was years ago, and the reality is that moderators do not feel less threatened by me when I just lay out positions and accumulate followers. Quite the opposite.

I have a strong personality. And there are people who gravitate towards that sort of thing. And there are people who will be threatened by that sort of thing. Seriously, how long of posting on Paizo did it take before I had my own fan club and a vocal group of people clamoring for my head? That's everywhere. In every social situation I am ever in, there are a number of people who think that I am gunning for the alpha position and want to fight or join.

-Username17

[CatharzGodfoot]

What ever happened to that 'Frank Trollman's Little Flock of Sheep' T-shirt?

[Centurion13]

I have a strong personality. And there are people who gravitate towards that sort of thing. And there are people who will be threatened by that sort of thing.
-Username17

Heh. There are some of us who are both. And not because your personality is strong, either.

There is more to this than the simple 'join or fight' response. Some folks are threatened by you, sure. I understand that. They think you're playing on their ground by their rules, and you're not.

Some folks see a self-confidence in you that borders at times on arrogance, and it's attractive. All power corrupts, but there is no disputing that it gets the chicks (and groupies of either sex).

Be careful, Frank. You've blown the gaffe and caused real-world misery for SOBs who have themselves caused real-world misery for others without a qualm. Words on the internet are one thing; just make sure they can't screw you up with frivolous (and expensive) lawsuits. Or worse.

Cent13

[Stahlseele]

*sigh* i hated it when you vanished from dumbshock years ago allready Frank, but i can understand you not wanting to post there with this kinda treatment.
I got several warnings and bannings over on rpg.net for similar dumb reasons . . mainly the folks over there seemingly being sissies that can't appreciate this kind of posting style <.<

As for your strong personality:
Dude, that thing could take on a great western dragon, if there were enough room for both the dragon and your personality on this planet ^^

[Mask_De_H]

Oh lawd, it's following you Frank. You're like some internet revolutionary, a Che Guevara for the P&P nerd set

[Lokathor]

Do you know how many letters I've gotten asking me about my plan to take over the entire Shadowrun license? A lot.

"Shadowrun 6: FrankTrollman Edition"!! After the Corporate Court Embezzlement incident of '72 and the mysterious mana spikes of '78, the Sixth World of 2082 is back with a vengeance!! Including a Matrix that finally does what you want it to, vehicle rules that are actually sane, spirits that can't just eliminate the need for other runners on the team, and an advancement system that makes sense!! Order now!!

Yeah I'd buy that.

[Stahlseele]

Fuck yes, i would buy THAT for up to 50€ per Book . . .

[A Man In Black]

Be careful, Frank. You've blown the gaffe and caused real-world misery for SOBs who have themselves caused real-world misery for others without a qualm. Words on the internet are one thing; just make sure they can't screw you up with frivolous (and expensive) lawsuits. Or worse.

Why is it that a forum account and an internet connection turns everyone into an amateur lawyer?

[Zinegata]

What ever happened to that 'Frank Trollman's Little Flock of Sheep' T-shirt?

Something like this exists? Why wasn't I told?

Or is this a potential money-making opportunity for someone who has contacts with t-shirt printers?