From the outside it's obviously hard to tell, but Paizo often doesn't look like it's run as a business, but rather a collection of friends who write fanfic and house rules together. But sometimes don't feel like walking over to the next office and telling anyone else what they're writing.Mord wrote:It depends what other hats the writer and editor in question are wearing. If the writer is also the line developer, then the editor doesn't really get an opinion. If the writer is some freelancer, then the editor might have some power, assuming that the freelancer in question wasn't brought in because he's butt buddies with the line developer. It's nepotism and handjobs all the way down.violence in the media wrote:How much authority do editors typically have to send stuff back for rewrites?
Starfinder's big bugbear (aside from recycling bad ideas because half the design team worked on Star Wars d20, Saga or Alternity), is it looks like they ran into their deadline and just stuck chapter drafts together. There's a reference to Dex to damage buried on one page, but nothing else refers to it (and, officially, no way to get it). There are abilities that cause divide by zero errors all over the place, DCs scale to unachievable levels, there are items that are worse than the standard way of achieving something (like the Efficient Bandolier, which makes you draw ammo as a swift action, when it is part of the reload action normally. So instead of a move action, reloading with the (in)Efficient Bandolier requires a swift + a move).
The operative trick attack doesn't work the way the specific developer thinks it does, so the Ghost operative gets a +4 bonus it shouldn't, radiation is a poison, a disease and a couple stand alone abilities that don't function like either (and it isn't clear if the environmental protections of every armor protect against all of them).
It's just a hot mess for a game that's just houseruled pathfinder. Some of the issues are exactly the same. But of course they announced that it wasn't actually backwards compatible with pathfinder a few months before release (because reasons), despite being largely the same.