Quote:
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Too many writers - amateurs and professional alike - are insufficiently critical of their work, and in many cases lack the skills to present a polished piece.
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Being a user/reader in a far more smaller niche than F/SF (RPGaming) I support this.
the RPG tech term for a slushpile candidate rulebook is (since they re mostly "it's a lot like D&D,
but") "fantasy-heartbreaker". Things written by people who are bot content, with specific aspects of the ruleset in their fav. games and think they can do it better. Unfortunately in most cases they cannot.
Since RPG is really a small niche in writing as such, the outcomes are very often publicly shown to the community during (a good development decision) or after creation, since most of them 'll end up indie (the most producers already HAVE main lines of a specific topics, so getting commercially published by an established company is not really probable.)
So there is somethimg what could be called "public acceptancy-driven slushpile"
Because of its nature i.e. usually containing gamesystem rules (referred to as crunch) as well as world/culture descriptions (fluff) a roleplaying corebook could be seen as a genere mix of a tech manual combined with an F/SF book
They just apply some changes wirh glue rewrite some pieces/rules without being aware of how far some (can) changes go (what do you mean with game theory/probability of dice-rolls?) A lot of these people go indy since even if you are successfull, you'll never make a living from RPG (as even pros admit)
Some of them offer really good stuff where "good" means "well made and playable" w/o even touching the aspect how many players d' be interested in playing such a setup.
the bad examples are as taken out from an "Idol"-episode and given them dice and a keyboard to type. It isn't about typos and things proofreading and peer-review copyedit couldn't repair (altough i even experienced pointing somebody to
lexical errors being thanked with "so what"
Writing inconsistent settings; illogical and/or mathematically screwed rules, these people
actively block:- a worldfact needs changes or the setting d' become unplayable due to exponentially growing inconsistency
- every explanation WHY a certain rule lacks logic.
- why the math behind a rule is simply wrong to achieve the outcome the author intends by said rule
- etc.
they block it as picking on their magnum opus.
my fav still is a rule (here math converted to explanation):
when both a pro and a layman bear the same injure making the task in question harder to fulfill the layman does better because he's more used to encounter obstacles, whereas the pro is "spoiled" by his routine.
now imagine (yeah picture them in your mind) a pro freeclimber vs. J. Average both with wounded shoulder hanging on a damn high piece of rock.
(the guy who wrote that sells the rules POD via Lulu)
I'm every day tempted to place a 1-line review on Amazon saying:
Please don't judge indie RPG's by this here as example"
Similarly to that, things become funny when said RPGeniuses feel some ingame used skills need more elaboration,
withtout ever wasting time on the slightest research about that skill in reality. I'm not speaking about achieving 100% realism in a RPG - this is IMPOSSSIBLE. but I think a gamedesigner needs at least some basic info from which can be decided
what and
how to simplify the data to fit in the ruleset.
In comparison to that introducing /magic/kewlpowers/psi/whatever to the setting without further thinking
how far and in which way it would change ALL normal life is a forgivable flaw. (that's what JKR
actually did in Potter, but Eddings (all materials); LeGuin (Earthsea); and Canavan (guild saga) masterfully avoided. (and about what Heinleins SiASW is a the best long example followed by Asimovs robotics short stories).
There are some gems in the pile. Some of them unpublished, but given avay for free only because the creators know the hassle with it could cost more than it pays back. as an example for (with a special pointout for a great work on the bestiary) see "Legendary Quest"
But there is a such big amount of awul stuff in gaming that I'm really more than willing to believe that the crapometer in an average slushpile is in very high 9x% values.
More unfortunately, the niche is so small, that a such extensive level of editing and copy-editing, as common in book producing* is luxurious in RPG.
*)exceptions left away, you wouldn't want to take a look on 4 specific passages of the (new/original german edition of Heinleins SiASW I have here.