Thread: Quality and Errata

Okay, it should be obvious that I've been spending a lot of time lately
revisiting my past on-line.

One of the comments I have seen repeatedly is the old meme, "GDW had a
reputation for lots of errata."

Now, I don't know if it's really true that GDW had any more or any less
errata than the average game company, but certainly I know I've heard that
remark before. It may just be one of those remarks that gets parroted over
and over like Marc's remark about TNE being the most
controversial version of Traveller (a minefield that I may venture into
another day), or maybe it is said about EVERY game company--"SPI had a
reputation for lots of errata," "TSR had a reputation for lots of
errata"--but let's assume for a moment that it is true that GDW did have
more errata than most.

The first thing, which I was very much aware of at the time, is that you
have to admit that there is errata. There were cases where folks would
simply not publish errata, because as soon as you publish an errata sheet,
people jump up and go, "Ha! Errata!" So publishing errata makes you look
bad. So there is the issue that you first have to admit to errata, which
makes you look bad. My position was that having errata, but not wanting to
go to the embarrassment of admitting to it, is worse than admitting to it.
The point is to keep faith with your players, which means that if you find
a problem, you must report it, even if that means you have to admit to
screwing up. I know that GDW when I was there went above and beyond in
admitting to errata, which certainly made us look like we had a lot,
because we were proactive in publishing a lot, and we would even publish
clarifications of things that were not exactly wrong, but could have been
explained better. And Loren always correctly pointed out that it was not an
"Errata Sheet," as "errata" is the errors, not the corrections. Actually it
was a "Corrigenda Sheet."

The second, and this is the thing that I've been thinking about lately, is
that I would imagine that errata is more likely when you are a small
company that must publish to survive. If we didn't have new product
shipping, we didn't get income. And if we missed deadlines, that is money
that we would never get back. This was because of the comic/game
distribution system, which ran on pre-solicitations where they would send
out monthly catalogs for upcoming products, and local stores would sign up
for a set number of things to be released on that date. If they came out on
that date, the distributors would buy the planned amount. But if they
slipped, the distributors would not save that money for when it eventually
came out, they would spend it on something else. And when the product did
finally come out later, it would be competing with something else, so you
would never get the same numbers as if you got it out on time. At our
weekly production meetings, Frank would always say one of two
diametrically-opposed things:

1. "They'll never remember if it was on time or not, they'll just remember
if it was good."
2. "They'll never remember if it was good or not, they'll just remember if
it was on time."

The ironic thing is that both were true: 1 was true of the end users, the
gamers, and 2 was true of the distributors, and you had to try very hard to
not damage your on-time reputation with the distributors, because if you
had a reputation for not being on time, they wouldn't bother to order as
much from you, as they didn't think they'd get it anyway. But if you
damaged your reputation with the players, your products would get a bad
name and no end-users would want them.

So, back to getting stuff out. If we didn't get stuff out on time, and on
a regular basis, once a week, once every two weeks, we didn't get income to
make payroll, and towards the end this was very obvious, as we started
slipping payroll. So, if it is true that a smaller company is more
dependent on that weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly shipment of new products to
cover its bottom line, it is under more pressure to get stuff out and could
generate more errata. But, did we ever ship anything out the door knowing
that it was broken, or not good enough? Never. I remember standing out on
the back porch in tears one time because we weren't going to be able to
send the Brilliant Lances book to the printer because there were some
broken ships in it, and I was going to have to work all weekend and cancel
a long-awaited, "really, I mean it this time," two-day trip with my wife,
AGAIN. (Susan Schug saved my soul, and renegotiated with the printer.) But
the requirement to get stuff out could have truncated the QA process, not
allowing enough time to catch everything that could have otherwise been
caught.

So maybe we did have more errata than companies that did have a bigger
bankroll, like a West End. I don't know. But I think about these things.

Anyway, I'm going to bed. I'll talk to you all tomorrow. Unless you're
tired of my introspection, then I'll stop. Seriously, any of you who ever
thought, "why doesn't that Dave Nilsen guy talk to us?" have got to be
thinking now, "be careful what you ask for."

You go to bed now, knowingly you have a friendly crowd here.
I don’t think you need to justify things in any way. You did what you had to do for good and bad to keep the wheels turning.
With TNE I never felt cheated, I think most of us knew that errors was bound to creep in no matter what. TNE was never close to MT in the way of errata, which had the horrendous Shattered ship of the fighting Imperium.

FF&S had a few short comings, but nothing really gamebreaking unless someone went out of their way to min/max the designs like meson rifles, huge death star like lasers and so on. For most part designs worked as intended within their reference framework. The fun thing with FF&S was the versatility of the system. I have never seen anything like it since.

Good Night

--
Roger Malmstein
www.travellerfreeport.com

From:
Sent: Sunday, June 10, 2012 11:09 AM
To:
Subject: [Traveller_TNE] Quality and Errata

Anyway, I'm going to bed. I'll talk to you all tomorrow. Unless you're
tired of my introspection, then I'll stop. Seriously, any of you who ever
thought, "why doesn't that Dave Nilsen guy talk to us?" have got to be
thinking now, "be careful what you ask for."

On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 3:02 AM, Roger Malmstein <
> wrote:

>
>
> You go to bed now, knowingly you have a friendly crowd here.
> I don�t think you need to justify things in any way. You did what you had
> to do for good and bad to keep the wheels turning.
> With TNE I never felt cheated, I think most of us knew that errors was
> bound to creep in no matter what. TNE was never close to MT in the way of
> errata, which had the horrendous Shattered ship of the fighting Imperium.
>

Yah, What he said.

> FF&S had a few short comings, but nothing really gamebreaking unless
> someone went out of their way to min/max the designs like meson rifles,
> huge death star like lasers and so on. For most part designs worked as
> intended within their reference framework. The fun thing with FF&S was the
> versatility of the system. I have never seen anything like it since.
>

I would say Gurps:Vehicles (2nd Edition) came close, but Dave
Pulver admitted that FF&S was a major inspiration. For years now I keep
Both on my shelf, just to have good examples of reducing engineering terms
into Game Design.

Having just watched my Son graduate from High School this week, I have been
looking back through the years, Has it been over twenty years since the
playtest files for TNE where on Genie? Seems like just yesterday.
--
Evyn

My only thoughts on this is 'times change'.

Back when TNE was being published there was a greater sense of the consumer
expecting when they paid for something or a book it was 'complete'.

Your points about payroll, the wear and tear on employees to make deadlines
are spot on. I been in this place several times in my own career.

Today the situation for consumers is much different I think. If for no
other reason than for the advent of video game patches.

Consumers are much more tolerant because they have been trained to be by
the industry to be. This doesn't mean they will tolerate
it indefinitely but there are bounds of reason now for content creators to
fix issues they can't fit in to the publishing cycles for their genres.

On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 2:09 AM, <> wrote:

> **
>
>
> Okay, it should be obvious that I've been spending a lot of time lately
> revisiting my past on-line.
>
> One of the comments I have seen repeatedly is the old meme, "GDW had a
> reputation for lots of errata."
>
> Now, I don't know if it's really true that GDW had any more or any less
> errata than the average game company, but certainly I know I've heard that
> remark before. It may just be one of those remarks that gets parroted over
> and over like Marc's remark about TNE being the most
> controversial version of Traveller (a minefield that I may venture into
> another day), or maybe it is said about EVERY game company--"SPI had a
> reputation for lots of errata," "TSR had a reputation for lots of
> errata"--but let's assume for a moment that it is true that GDW did have
> more errata than most.
>
> The first thing, which I was very much aware of at the time, is that you
> have to admit that there is errata. There were cases where folks would
> simply not publish errata, because as soon as you publish an errata sheet,
> people jump up and go, "Ha! Errata!" So publishing errata makes you look
> bad. So there is the issue that you first have to admit to errata, which
> makes you look bad. My position was that having errata, but not wanting to
> go to the embarrassment of admitting to it, is worse than admitting to it.
> The point is to keep faith with your players, which means that if you find
> a problem, you must report it, even if that means you have to admit to
> screwing up. I know that GDW when I was there went above and beyond in
> admitting to errata, which certainly made us look like we had a lot,
> because we were proactive in publishing a lot, and we would even publish
> clarifications of things that were not exactly wrong, but could have been
> explained better. And Loren always correctly pointed out that it was not an
> "Errata Sheet," as "errata" is the errors, not the corrections. Actually it
> was a "Corrigenda Sheet."
>
> The second, and this is the thing that I've been thinking about lately, is
> that I would imagine that errata is more likely when you are a small
> company that must publish to survive. If we didn't have new product
> shipping, we didn't get income. And if we missed deadlines, that is money
> that we would never get back. This was because of the comic/game
> distribution system, which ran on pre-solicitations where they would send
> out monthly catalogs for upcoming products, and local stores would sign up
> for a set number of things to be released on that date. If they came out on
> that date, the distributors would buy the planned amount. But if they
> slipped, the distributors would not save that money for when it eventually
> came out, they would spend it on something else. And when the product did
> finally come out later, it would be competing with something else, so you
> would never get the same numbers as if you got it out on time. At our
> weekly production meetings, Frank would always say one of two
> diametrically-opposed things:
>
> 1. "They'll never remember if it was on time or not, they'll just remember
> if it was good."
> 2. "They'll never remember if it was good or not, they'll just remember if
> it was on time."
>
> The ironic thing is that both were true: 1 was true of the end users, the
> gamers, and 2 was true of the distributors, and you had to try very hard to
> not damage your on-time reputation with the distributors, because if you
> had a reputation for not being on time, they wouldn't bother to order as
> much from you, as they didn't think they'd get it anyway. But if you
> damaged your reputation with the players, your products would get a bad
> name and no end-users would want them.
>
> So, back to getting stuff out. If we didn't get stuff out on time, and on
> a regular basis, once a week, once every two weeks, we didn't get income to
> make payroll, and towards the end this was very obvious, as we started
> slipping payroll. So, if it is true that a smaller company is more
> dependent on that weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly shipment of new products to
> cover its bottom line, it is under more pressure to get stuff out and could
> generate more errata. But, did we ever ship anything out the door knowing
> that it was broken, or not good enough? Never. I remember standing out on
> the back porch in tears one time because we weren't going to be able to
> send the Brilliant Lances book to the printer because there were some
> broken ships in it, and I was going to have to work all weekend and cancel
> a long-awaited, "really, I mean it this time," two-day trip with my wife,
> AGAIN. (Susan Schug saved my soul, and renegotiated with the printer.) But
> the requirement to get stuff out could have truncated the QA process, not
> allowing enough time to catch everything that could have otherwise been
> caught.
>
> So maybe we did have more errata than companies that did have a bigger
> bankroll, like a West End. I don't know. But I think about these things.
>
> Anyway, I'm going to bed. I'll talk to you all tomorrow. Unless you're
> tired of my introspection, then I'll stop. Seriously, any of you who ever
> thought, "why doesn't that Dave Nilsen guy talk to us?" have got to be
> thinking now, "be careful what you ask for."
>
>
>

--
If the world was fair then every bad thing that has ever happened to you
would have been deserved.

Thanks. I'm not trying to justify anything, but I just sometimes try to
think about things that have been said, compare it to my experiences, and
figure out how they relate. And clearly my brain is wanting to go through a
big TNE/GDW review.

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 12:02:27 +0200, "Roger Malmstein"
<> wrote:
> You go to bed now, knowingly you have a friendly crowd here. I
> don’t think you need to justify things in any way. You did what you had
> to do for good and bad to keep the wheels turning. With TNE I never felt
> cheated, I think most of us knew that errors was bound to creep in no
> matter what. TNE was never close to MT in the way of errata, which had
> the horrendous Shattered ship of the fighting Imperium. FF&S had a few
> short comings, but nothing really gamebreaking unless someone went out
of
> their way to min/max the designs like meson rifles, huge death star like
> lasers and so on. For most part designs worked as intended within their
> reference framework. The fun thing with FFFONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri';COLOR:
> #000000;FONT-

FF&S was such a great example of gearhead craziness. On the one hand, it
always seemed like the Traveller players wanted more gearhead stuff than we
could do, but at the same time, we at GDW wanted to do all of that gearhead
stuff just as badly as they did, so off we went, united in gearhead
craziness.

It did make the job a lot harder, though, because we were always designing
stuff all the time, but it was so easy to make mistakes in the complex
systems that we had to do a LOT of work doing internal checks. Frank made
mistakes, Loren made mistakes, and it was my job to check them all. It was
a system where it was definitely easier to make a mistake than it was to
check them and fix them all.

Although having a sounder system to work on was good. I was all the time
having to respond to errata questions about "Shattered Fighting Ships," I
finally got to the point where I had to say, "they're all broken, no one
knows how that system works to even fix them, please just let us get out
the new rules so we can move on."

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 03:44:53 -0700, Evyn MacDude <>
wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 3:02 AM, Roger Malmstein wrote:
>
> You go to bed now, knowingly you have a friendly crowd here. I
> don’t think you need to justify things in any way. You did what you had
> to do for good and bad to keep the wheels turning. With TNE I never felt
> cheated, I think most of us knew that errors was bound to creep in no
> matter what. TNE was never close to MT in the way of errata, which had
> the horrendous Shattered ship of the fighting Imperium.
> Yah, What he said.   FF&S had a few short comings, but nothing really
> gamebreaking unless someone went out of their way to min/max the designs
> like meson rifles, huge death star like lasers and so on. For most part
> designs worked as intended within their reference framework. The fun
> thing with FF&S was the versatility of the system. I have never seen
> anything like it since.
> I would say Gurps:Vehicles (2nd Edition) came close, but Dave
> Pulver admitted 

John--

"Consumers are much more tolerant because they have been trained to be by
the industry to be. "

That is an excellent point, and crystallizes thoughts that have been
wandering around in my mind. At a certain point games that attempt to be
all things to all people all the time obviously can't do it 100% right away
(ever, actually), but several years of learning this themselves have made
the audience realize that this is an art of the possible that is always
advancing. As a guy who's been doing software development since I left GDW,
I see that every day, but didn't necessarily connect it back to the
evolution of RPGs, but I think you're spot-on.

Thank you very much for that insight.

Dave

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 08:17:52 -0700, John Potter <>
wrote:
> My only thoughts on this is 'times change'.
> Back when TNE was being published there was a greater sense of the
> consumer expecting when they paid for something or a book it was
> 'complete'. 
> Your points about payroll, the wear and tear on employees to make
> deadlines are spot on. I been in this place several times in my own
> career. 
> Today the situation for consumers is much different I think. If for no
> other reason than for the advent of video game patches. 
> Consumers are much more tolerant because they have been trained to be by
> the industry to be. This doesn't mean they will tolerate
> it indefinitely but there are bounds of reason now for content creators
> to fix issues they can't fit in to the publishing cycles for their
> genres. 
> On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 2:09 AM, wrote:
>  
>
> Okay, it should be obvious that I've been spending a lot of time lately
> revisiting my past on-line.
>
> One of the comments I have seen repeatedly is the old meme, "GDW had a
> reputation for lots of errata."
>
> Now, I don't know if it's really true that GDW had any more or any less
> errata than the average game company, but certainly I know I've heard
> that
> remark before. It may just be one of those remarks that gets parroted
> over
> and over like Marc's remark about TNE being the most
> controversial version of Traveller (a minefield that I may venture into
> another day), or maybe it is said about EVERY game company--"SPI had a
> reputation for lots of errata," "TSR had a reputation for lots of
> errata"--but let's assume for a moment that it is true that GDW did
> have
> more errata than most.
>
> The first thing, which I was very much aware of at the time, is that
> you
> have to admit that there is errata. There were cases where folks would
> simply not publish errata, because as soon as you publish an errata
> sheet,
> people jump up and go, "Ha! Errata!" So publishing errata makes you
> look
> bad. So there is the issue that you first have to admit to errata,
> which
> makes you look bad. My position was that having errata, but not wanting
> to
> go to the embarrassment of admitting to it, is worse than admitting to
> it.
> The point is to keep faith with your players, which means that if you
> find
> a problem, you must report it, even if that means you have to admit to
> screwing up. I know that GDW when I was there went above and beyond in
> admitting to errata, which certainly made us look like we had a lot,
> because we were proactive in publishing a lot, and we would even
> publish
> clarifications of things that were not exactly wrong, but could have
> been
> explained better. And Loren always correctly pointed out that it was
> not an
> "Errata Sheet," as "errata" is the errors, not the corrections.
> Actually it
> was a "Corrigenda Sheet."
>
> The second, and this is the thing that I've been thinking about lately,
> is
> that I would imagine that errata is more likely when you are a small
> company that must publish to survive. If we didn't have new product
> shipping, we didn't get income. And if we missed deadlines, that is
> money
> that we would never get back. This was because of the comic/game
> distribution system, which ran on pre-solicitations where they would
> send
> out monthly catalogs for upcoming products, and local stores would sign
> up
> for a set number of things to be released on that date. If they came
> out on
> that date, the distributors would buy the planned amount. But if they
> slipped, the distributors would not save that money for when it
> eventually
> came out, they would spend it on something else. And when the product
> did
> finally come out later, it would be competing with something else, so
> you
> would never get the same numbers as if you got it out on time. At our
> weekly production meetings, Frank would always say one of two
> diametrically-opposed things:
>
> 1. "They'll never remember if it was on time or not, they'll just
> remember
> if it was good."
> 2. "They'll never remember if it was good or not, they'll just remember
> if
> it was on time."
>
> The ironic thing is that both were true: 1 was true of the end users,
> the
> gamers, and 2 was true of the distributors, and you had to try very
> hard to
> not damage your on-time reputation with the distributors, because if
> you
> had a reputation for not being on time, they wouldn't bother to order
> as
> much from you, as they didn't think they'd get it anyway. But if you
> damaged your reputation with the players, your products would get a bad
> name and no end-users would want them.
>
> So, back to getting stuff out. If we didn't get stuff out on time, and
> on
> a regular basis, once a week, once every two weeks, we didn't get
> income to
> make payroll, and towards the end this was very obvious, as we started
> slipping payroll. So, if it is true that a smaller company is more
> dependent on that weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly shipment of new
> products to
> cover its bottom line, it is under more pressure to get stuff out and
> could
> generate more errata. But, did we ever ship anything out the door
> knowing
> that it was broken, or not good enough? Never. I remember standing out
> on
> the back porch in tears one time because we weren't going to be able to
> send the Brilliant Lances book to the printer because there were some
> broken ships in it, and I was going to have to work all weekend and
> cancel
> a long-awaited, "really, I mean it this time," two-day trip with my
> wife,
> AGAIN. (Susan Schug saved my soul, and renegotiated with the printer.)
> But
> the requirement to get stuff out could have truncated the QA process,
> not
> allowing enough time to catch everything that could have otherwise been
> caught.
>
> So maybe we did have more errata than companies that did have a bigger
> bankroll, like a West End. I don't know. But I think about these
> things.
>
> Anyway, I'm going to bed. I'll talk to you all tomorrow. Unless you're
> tired of my introspection, then I'll stop. Seriously, any of you who
> ever
> thought, "why doesn't that Dave Nilsen guy talk to us?" have got to be
> thinking now, "be careful what you ask for."