The Shadowrun Situation

[Neurosis]

For Bobby, it was much much harder. It's not my story to tell of course, but he was quite an invested fanboy, and walking away from it required CGL management to quite thoroughly burn their bridges with him through a long series of betrayals to him personally and to people he considered friends.

My experience was much closer to Ancient History's.

But Ancient, you quit, right? I got fired. So you get dignity points for that.

OOPS, DOUBLE POST.

Thank you, Frank.
Don't. Do. That.

If you want childish dick moves it is hard to do worse than trying to get a stranger fired via lies.

While I strongly empathize with people who get fired due to bullshit lies, I cannot fault firing of an employee who is posting on social media that the company and product is shit. What do you expect? If I did that at any previous job ever then I would expect to be canned. If I felt that way then I should either address it internally or leave. It ain't the same as whistleblowing.

Strongly agree.

[Neurosis]

Soooooo they fire people for expressing personal opinions, on a board not associated with their brand, under a pseudonym that has been, until now, unconnected to their professional life within that company?

Not surprised at all, considering AH got banned off the freelancer boards for expressing an opinion in a private chat. Still, seems a tad... childish, to me. And a bit unprofessional.

Also, Hardy, if you're reading this: Fuck you, the horse you rode in on, and the absolute garbage fire you've turned the brand into with 5E. Not a single decision made in regards to the direction 5E is going has been a good idea. Anarchy is going to be a total shitfest of terrible, because your people can't write workable rules for the fucking Matrix, which is one-third of the playspace between Meat, Matrix, and Magic, so why should we believe they can write parseable narrative-driven rules? The system has had FIVE EDITIONS now to get it right, and it's failed miserably through, what, seven iterations at least? At least earlier edition deckers/otaku could be abstracted, which is not something your attempts can even try to claim because you want hackers to be in the party but won't give them rules for operating appropriately in the same playspace.

Oh, and good job completely destroying certain concepts that were practically iconic for Shadowrun. Trog Street Sams, for one, because ork and troll are too fucking high in prioritygen and starting cash is too low even at A priority. Did nobody fucking bring this up with you? Nobody at all? And nevermind if you want to do something like playing against type with the shit you piled out in prioritygen, like play a Troll or Ork Mage.

Saying that you put out Kamagen and Sum-To-Ten doesn't fix it, because priority is in the core book and is people's first association with the new edition. New players are going to find this and quickly discover being a Charisma-based Elf Mystic Adept is the win button under the rules you allowed to be produced, printed, and published.

In short, suck a whole barrel of cocks. Sell the license, give it to people who are competent and not just good at marketing and covering up shady as fuck activities.

First off, and I know it's stupid,

I literally tried to kill myself last night (don't worry, I rolled a natural 1 and I'm mostly fine, except for the 7"x2"x2" gash in my left arm

so I want you to know what a crit success you rolled with how much this made me laugh and smile.

Oh, and good job completely destroying certain concepts that were practically iconic for Shadowrun. Trog Street Sams, for one, because ork and troll are too fucking high in prioritygen and starting cash is too low even at A priority. Did nobody fucking bring this up with you? Nobody at all? And nevermind if you want to do something like playing against type with the shit you piled out in prioritygen, like play a Troll or Ork Mage.

We pointed this out to him repeatedly. He said lalalala I can't hear you, I'm getting transmissions from the angel Moronai (sorry for the LDS low blow JMH, if you're STILL stalking me on the Den).

[Ancient History]

For Bobby, it was much much harder. It's not my story to tell of course, but he was quite an invested fanboy, and walking away from it required CGL management to quite thoroughly burn their bridges with him through a long series of betrayals to him personally and to people he considered friends.

My experience was much closer to Ancient History's.

But Ancient, you quit, right? I got fired. So you get dignity points for that.

I had drafts submitted for four books scheduled for print; that was somewhere just north of two thousand dollars accounts payable from CGL to me. So when Jason Hardy banned me from the freelancer forums, banned me from Basecamp, and basically kicked me out of the freelancer pool, he still wanted to use my work and promised I'd get paid for it.

Which is the exact point where I politely told him to go fuck himself.

[sendaz]

First off, and I know it's stupid,

I literally tried to kill myself last night (don't worry, I rolled a natural 1 and I'm mostly fine, except for the 7"x2"x2" gash in my left arm

so I want you to know what a crit success you rolled with how much this made me laugh and smile.

I think you need to grab a friend or other confidante asap and talk with them. While you're laughing it off now, you should really check this out.

[Neurosis]

I empathize with you hard, Bobby. FWIW

The email I wrote Jason telling him politely to go fuck himself--which was actually polite and didn't include the words "go fuck yourself"--in response to his notice of termination left me in literal tears. I'm obviously embarrassed of this, but pathologically honest.

Ancient:
If you ever feel like writing pro again, I'll give you $0.05 a word, payment half on final draft, half on print pub.

Just email me and say you want in. No writing samples necessary: I read a lotta Farcast.

[Neurosis]

First off, and I know it's stupid,

I literally tried to kill myself last night (don't worry, I rolled a natural 1 and I'm mostly fine, except for the 7"x2"x2" gash in my left arm

so I want you to know what a crit success you rolled with how much this made me laugh and smile.

I think you need to grab a friend or other confidante asap and talk with them. While you're laughing it off now, you should really check this out.

Thanks for your concern. If it makes you feel any better: my best friend is an RN and is running over with his Rating 6 Medkit right now.

[Stahlseele]

Somebody did not do his quotes correctly in here.

[Rawbeard]

thought it was me, wasn't. now even the reply I quoted is gone, so I assume they felt guilty too ;D

[RelentlessImp]

save us fbmf the world's gone mad

Partial fix in place, everything after this should be fine-ish. As a question, though, why do open quote tags even do this?

[Longes]

Because the forum doesn't automatically close quote tags at the end of the message. As such everything below Schwarzkopf's message is laid out as part of his quote (look at the signature in his last post), which causes formatting of everything else to move to fit the quote formatting.

[Rawbeard]

All that weird ass shit about vampires creating essence holes you couldn't do shit about was some sort of last minute editing change to try to errata out an exploit Peter thought he saw but actually wasn't real. The way I wrote it, you simply had your current Essence and the total Essence Cost of all your implants. If your current Essence plus the Essence Cost was more than 6, your current Essence fell until it wasn't. The end.

-Username17

This is literally how we handled it since SR2, because we did not care enough to track every single essence "hole" left by any implant. like... seriously. I am too busy counting my ADPS and ExEx bullets to care about you ripping out your datajack and implanting eyes instead.

[Smirnoffico]

Don't do that. But probably a significant amount. During the period when I was getting fed insider information from a number of angry freelancers and company investors, Hardy and co spent a good deal of effort trying to find the traitors. I don't recall much effort to allow people who had been accused of treason to argue their case before having reprisals targeted at them. It was basically like a game of Mafia. I doubt that they've gotten any more forgiving or any less paranoid in the interim.

Yup, won't do it (and I thought that posting about it was enough evidence that I won't. otherwise, I wouldn't have posted), the moment I realised someone might actually get fired, it became a rather not very funny joke.

In the time it took for FanPro to finally getting around to publishing the chapters I wrote for Augmentation (and let's be honest: deeply fucking up the cyberware upgrade rules I wrote in "editing" for no reason), I could have started and completed primary writing on two entire books the length and scope of Augmentation.

Did they do a lot of editing like this?

[Ancient History]

Editing in SR was a bit of a madhouse - in large part because we had so many line developers coming and going, that books like Runner's Companion were ultimately edited only very lightly, the chapters written mostly independent of one another, and proofread mostly by the freelancers themselves. Even then, a lot of the proofreading the freelancers did mysteriously never made it into the final product. Now, I can sort of understand that for books already in layout, but final drafts? Well, CGL quality control was never exactly high, unfortunately.

[Username17]

Did they do a lot of editing like this?

Yes. Even before the complete clusterfuckery that was the CGL cadre taking over, the FanPro process was... not good.

So first off, they'd have everyone write drafts and also chat in group emails. Fine. Obviously there'd be disagreements on fluff and mechanics, and different people would make cases for why various shit in other chapters should conform to their personal vision (this is the part of the process where, for example, I asked Bobby if Houngans had killed his dog for what he was proposing for enchanting homunculus rules). This part is very frustrating, because a lot of people have really shit ideas. But it's also necessary, because a lot of people have really shit ideas. You shoulda seen the earlier versions of the Background Count rules.

Then we all turn in drafts, except some people turn theirs in super late or not at all and someone has to write a chapter in a crazy hurry or whatever the fuck. Then we all have the ability to look at the drafts for proofreading and/or suggestions. Some people do, other people don't give no fucks and just walk away at this point because the only part that pays is already over.

Anyway, changes are either made or not, then things go through layout and then there's a last chance to proof things. Obviously, a lot more people read their own chapters looking for errors that have crept in at some point in the process than read anyone else's work. Whatever suggestions are made go into the void and the project leader and layout guy go through and implement whatever suggestions they decide/remember to implement plus whatever last minute changes they feel like making.

Then it goes off to the printers and if any major changes to what you wrote happened in the final pass (or any of the passes after you stopped reading and rereading some section you thought was good enough), then you get to find out about it when your author copies come in the mail.

-Username17

[Smirnoffico]

Then we all turn in drafts, except some people turn theirs in super late or not at all and someone has to write a chapter in a crazy hurry or whatever the fuck. Then we all have the ability to look at the drafts for proofreading and/or suggestions. Some people do, other people don't give no fucks and just walk away at this point because the only part that pays is already over.

That's.. strange. From what i read I came to believe that the whole thing is a cautionary tale that warns against making fanboy-ism your profession - as you will probably get burned and it doesn't pay well. Still, there were a significant number of people who were in it specifically for the money?

[Username17]

A lot of writing for RPGs is extremely nepotistic. There aren't a lot of jobs compared to the number of people who want to fill them, and so the decision of who gets those jobs is very much a matter of who you know and what's on your CV.

Think about it for a second: why as Mr. "Sock Fetish" Hill get work? He got work writing Shadowrun shit, he got work writing WoD shit, and it was all shit. Genuinely creepy shit, but he kept getting work when there were literally a hundred thousand fanboys that wanted to do his job. He got work for the tautological reason that he got work. Which is to say, if a developer wants to hire some freelancers to write some chapters for a book, the first place they look is people who already have writing credits.

There are people who write Shadowrun chapters that don't play and don't even like Shadowrun. They might be fans of Vampire, or D&D, or some Fantasy Flight licensed product. It's not important, because writing for Shadowrun pays at all, and gets them closer to being able to put their mark on a game line that they actually like.

-Username17

[Smirnoffico]

Sooo that's pretty much like video game development worked here ten years ago. Then this whole fund yourself thing happened. Why the same didn't happen with rpgs? Everyone can write a game. You did it, i did it, my friend does it for a living right now (well, mostly translating other games, but still)

[Fucks]

There's money in the video game business, but not in rpgs.

[Nath]

Sooo that's pretty much like video game development worked here ten years ago. Then this whole fund yourself thing happened. Why the same didn't happen with rpgs? Everyone can write a game. You did it, i did it, my friend does it for a living right now (well, mostly translating other games, but still)

I guess the first difference is a matter of scale. Indie games will rarely if ever make as much money as established franchises. That applies to RPG franchise such as Shadowrun or D&D and to video games franchises like Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty.
So a major video game may make enough money for one thousand people to live, while an indie game will barely do one thousandth of that to allow only person to live from it. A major RPG may allow maybe a ten people to actually live from it. If an indie game make one thousandth or even one hundredth of that, no one can afford to make its development more than a hobby.

Also, video games are competing for a slice of 20 to 50 hours of personal time for a solo mode, significantly more for online multiplayer mode. An "average" video game players may consume as much as 4 or 5 games a year, with a significant numbers who consume much more. I doubt there are many roleplayers who purchase new sourcebooks and modules from 4 or 5 different lines.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Sooo that's pretty much like video game development worked here ten years ago. Then this whole fund yourself thing happened. Why the same didn't happen with rpgs? Everyone can write a game. You did it, i did it, my friend does it for a living right now (well, mostly translating other games, but still)

People do kickstart tabletop RPG games. Some of them are finished and perhaps even good, depending on who you ask. But yeah, much less money in it than video game projects.

[DSMatticus]

GTAV made hundreds of millions of dollars on Steam alone - and that's after Steam had taken its cut. Terraria is considerably more difficult to estimate, what with it having been on sale for 10% of its listed price at various times, but it's somewhere in the tens of millions - only question is whether it's at the high end or the low end. Crea, which you've probably never heard of, has made... well, the less popular a game is the less accurate estimates of its total ownership are, but it's likely somewhere in the low hundreds of thousands. Crea had a team of something like four people and was in development for about four years. It's difficult to imagine Crea made enough money to be called a success. And you'll note that we've gone from hundreds of millions to hundreds of thousands - that's Nath's one-thousandth estimate, and it can honestly get much worse than that. Do you think making one-thousandth as much money as D&D or Shadowrun is a viable business strategy? TTRPG's are a pretty damn small industry, and genuinely can't support the level of indie development you see in videogames.

Indie success really seems to be mostly about small teams and quick development. If it can't be done fast on a skeleton crew, you're taking a big gamble and it won't pay off (except when it does, because that's what gamble means, but I stand by "blowing a bunch of money at the casino" not being a good business strategy). And then in the end development probably just paid for itself, so you do it again. Or you stop being a sucker and get a real job.

[Rawbeard]

so... this might be coming right out of fucking nowhere, but I think this thread is the most appropriate to aknowledge my google fu shame and ask the question I could not answer

I remember very vagualy that one of the people in charge of SR did some money shenanigans and build himself a house or something with money that belonged to the company and then went "oops, my bad, I really thought that was my personal account"

am I imagining this? misremembering details? I sure as fuck don't remember the name after all these fun years, but maybe someone here can actually give me an answer so I don't feel like I am going insane.

[Stahlseele]

Randal Bills or Loren Coleman.
Not the Crypto-Zoologist.
One of those two did it.
The other helped.

[Rawbeard]

Loren Coleman! that was the name! fuck, thank you, I was beginning to think I imagined the entire thing.

[Trill]

That's the whole topic of this thread, Rawbeard