You keeping saying you're making efforts to review your products, yet you persistently fall short.
But do we?
There is not a short answer to this one, so please bear with me.
From the outset, let me first say that we chase perfection but do not expect to reach it - putting RPG books together is not a simple process as there are a lot of moving parts, limited hands to work on them, and it is a very human process. Of course we won't have perfection, we are only human.
That said, we are constantly adjusting what we do and how we do it. I'll give you an example...
The World Builder's Handbook is coming out this week. We have spent quite some time on this one, and it has gone through several stages:
- We chose a well-known Traveller writer with a reputation for getting into the weeds and with the right background knowledge to write the original manuscript.
- The manuscript is completed and handed in. An editor goes through it with a fine toothcomb, using both their own skills and computer-based aids.
- The book is laid out and, once all the text is in and art decided upon, it gets sent back to the writer. This may happen several times as, once laid out, any errors and mistakes tend to be easier to spot and it allows the writer to ask themselves 'wait, did I really mean that?'
- After this, the book gets sent to one or more dedicated stat-checkers/rules-breakers. If the book is more 'background/lore' based, it will also be going to the Traveller Inner Circle, a hand-picked group that serve as Mr Miller's court of what should and should not be in Traveller.
- The book then gets sent to a qualified outside proofreader.
As you can see, things are quite thorough. Does this mean I expect the World Builder's Handbook to be perfect upon release? I would be amazed if
some issues did not surface, as it is a big and complex book (seriously, this one is a heavyweight), but there are limits to what our team can do and it is in the nature of RPGs to constantly push against those limits.
Now, we
have in the past gathered books from several other games publishers, and assessed their error rates. We know who the big offenders in the RPG space are, and we are not even in the running
It is also worth pointing out that there are games companies with much, much larger teams who are able to generate some impressive error lists of their own - ask a group of 40k players what they think of their rules set on any given edition (not ragging on GW, I personally love what they do, but I think they are big enough and tough enough that they aren't going to care much what I say...).
Part of the issue, I believe, is that gaming books (especially RPGs) are extremely diverse - the average RPG book has elements of descriptive prose, technical writing and fiction, often all on the same page. In the ideal world, we would get specialists to focus on each of those areas with someone co-ordinating all three. The reality is that one person needs to be able to handle them together. Just ramming text through Grammarly is not the solution, though we are keeping a very close eye on AI-based editing tools and their development.
What is clearly important is how things are handled when issues do arise, and I would hope that people can see we have improved vastly on that front over the years. The recent alterations on the Core Rulebook would be an example of that, as would Trailing Frontier.
I hope this makes the process a bit clearer and demonstrates that we are not sitting on our laurels. We are forever making little tweaks to the system.
