Re: Silent Death minis [OT]

Ground spake thusly upon matters weighty: 
> I think there was a compliment in here somewhere, so thanks Tom!  :)

Deserved. 

> The only time we've been guilty of this  in any major way is that when
we
> acquired all the rights to the CMD ranges (ie: the Future Wars
vehicles) a
> couple of years ago, I made a decision to rename some of the FW
vehicles as
> we reissued them (a process that still sadly isn't finished, due to
too
> much other stuff to do!); this was purely personal/aesthetic, as I
just
> didn't like some of the old designations/names.

Sure, but at least you are not about to turn around and re-release 
something under the same name as the CMD guys did (as a different 
mini) I would imagine. If you didn't like the old names, they are 
likely dead. So that's not so bad. And I'll bet someone could easily 
say to you "I'm looking for the Cauliflower Class VTOL" and you'd say 
"aha! I know that name... that's the new Vicious Bloodsucker VTOL 
now!". There would not be the 'which version is it?' or 'what does 
the mini look like now?' questions....

> As to Copy Editors, the sad fact is that it almost always comes down
to
> time, or lack thereof. Everybody has deadlines, and everybody overruns
them
> (because Life, as someone once said, is what happens while you had
other
> plans...) - eventually you hit the deadline you CAN'T miss (like when
the
> printer says "either it's on press tomorrow, or you've missed the
window
> and it can't be done for two months"), and that is when you just don't
see
> the typos.

Everyone has deadlines. But copy-editing has to be figured into your 
development process just the same as QA has to be figured into 
software development (and yes, the parallels here are painful... 
crappy software gets out a lot because of deadlines). If you aren't 
planning for this time sufficiently, time to re-vamp your planning 
algorithms. My one HUGE complaint with MegaTraveller was about 20 
pages of errata (with the small caveat that they had more tables than 
most games I've ever seen and unless you were in vehicle design, 
you'd not encounter 90% of the errata). 

> That is from the "little guy's" perspective (ie: us) - the big names
will
> have to come up with their own excuses....  :)

You have a slower release schedule for printed works (I'd guess) but 
if you can put out books with less than a page of errata in a 
release, I'm not going to complain. That shows you at least have 
decent editors or have had some people who can be nitpicky read it 
over a few times anyways. Better than some of the large games 
conglomerates who've released some games that really should have been 
called ErrataRPG or ErrataWars! 
 
 
/************************************************
Thomas Barclay		     
Voice: (613) 831-2018 x 4009
Fax: (613) 831-8255

 "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot.  C++ makes
 it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg."
 -Bjarne Stroustrup
**************************************************/