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Here's a "Jeebus, I'm old," story.
I can remember when Steve Jackson Games was a small, nimble, and customer oriented company.
They've become TSR.
Dammit.
I have complained, more than once, that the errata reporting system has been broken for a long time.
Got the sole full time employee to show up in the thread to basically say that he doesn't have time to check everything that we find wrong and would ask the person who'd fucked it up in the first place; and defer to them because they write books.
GURPS books. Gaming supplements.
Not an actual, accredited expert but a gamer who shoots and can adhere to the style guide at SJ Games.
In other words, except for being a freelance employee of the company, no more of an expert than I am.
Well, great and mighty Kromm, it wasn't the "expert" that you were deferring to that spotted the fucking inconsistency, was it?
Neither of you were interested in fixing it.
It was the customer/hobbyist who spotted it.
I could have fixed it myself for my personal use and not bothered to try to bring it to anyone else's attention. Hans admits the mistake in his reply, so...
Now that I know that GURPS is abandonware, I don't need bother checking SJ Games site for things to spend money on anymore.
Tschuß mother fuckers!
Back in the mists of time, I ended up participating in SJG forums at Illuminati Online, and eventually got playtest credits in a few books because of comments in said forums.
ReplyDeleteOnce because I pointed out that "Southron" was an authentic term in use at the time in question - think it was one of the earlier alternate-history sourcebooks.
One post. And I seem to recall there were well under a hundred posts in that group before the book went to print.
Oh well, free book! And in a genre I was interested in, too!
Ah. Ha. Ahahahaha...
ReplyDeleteI got into an argument with Gygax and Erol Otis over using bones as improvised weapons while playtesting A4 - In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords. I played, I think, the Paladin. The naked paladin. Who is wandering around in a sandy pit full of bones.
Gary and Erol said bones won't do any damage. I kind of pointed out all the weapons one can fashion out of bones, from famous examples like Sampson and American Natives and such. The Lord of TSR had to actually accept that some peon was right.
After that, the group really got into it. "How much damage does a goblin's arm, hacked or pulled off, do?" Things like that. The thief character wanted to make a sling out of some dead thing's skin and toss teeth out of it.
So, yeah, SJG has become TSR. Sad, very sad. But that's the way things go.
SJG has lasted a looooooong time. I'm surprised they're still around.
I remember when FASA (Fredonian Air and Space Administration, yes, the actual original name of FASA) was, well, the Fredonian Air and Space Administration... then just FASA and putting out some really interesting Traveller stuff. Then the Star Trek role-playing game... And right before they were to publish the next Mechwarrior video game they died, bigly.
And Avalon Hill. Oh, so much money spent on their games, then they committed suicide with Advanced Squad Leader, screwing over their core followers bigly.
And, of course, the rise and fall and rise and fall and rise and fall of Marc Miller's various game publishers/companies.
SJG, too big to fail.
"GURPS is abandonware..." Sad but true. I think Munchkin is their bread and butter now. Though I haven't looked at the reports lately. I did buy into TFT for historical purposes and to have a slightly less technical RPG on hand if I ever get back to playing.
ReplyDeleteSmartphones replace many things.
I am tempted to get TFT. My very first RPG experience was with Melee. That took me to Standing Bear (PBUH) in the '39 Room of the ISU Memorial Union for his home-brewed version of AD&D.
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