If you think the Trolls have editing issues...

[Treebore]

just realize they are not the only ones. For example, it seems like Mongoose is sending me a new and updated version of the new Traveller core book about every 4 days, on average. Thankfully it hasn't gone to print yet, so they are catching a LOT of mistakes now rather than later. Others are doing their books differently. They are waiting until a certain amount of corrections get turned in by their fan base, and then issuing a new PDF with a dozen or so corrections in it.

[Omote]

Ah, the joys of the modern RPG publishing world.

~O

[serleran]

If I were a publisher, I would never go with group edit. Even seeing what people consider "errata" is enough to make that sort of source control difficult if not impossible.

[SmokestackJones]

Pff! That's nothing. I spent a good decade playing Champions and boy did Hero Games have editing problems!

-SJ

[Jyrdan Fairblade]

I do editing as a part of my job, and getting to zero defects, even on relatively small documents, isn't always easy. Throw in a bunch of jargon and made-up words, and it gets even harder.

[Treebore]

No kidding! Like I have spend HOURS trying to help get Victorious edited. I went through it once, and didn't spot a thing wrong. Then I started a second pass through, and found an error that I am thinking, "Man! I should have caught that my first time through, how did I miss it?" Its a sentence where they talk about "heroes and Heros", where the second should have been heroines. So editing is not as easy as people, some people, seem to think. They find these problems and react, "This was so easy to see, how did you miss it?!?" Darn good question, why don't you try editing a 150 pages or so and see how much you miss, then figure out why you missed what you miss, then let us know if you figure out why you missed everything.

Editing, even today with all the word checkers and grammar checkers, is still not easy.

[Traveller]

Editing a RPG book is not easy. With a regular book it's just a matter of making sure the text makes sense and is readable. With a RPG you have all that, RPG-specific terms, and game mechanics to deal with. That said, didn't Mongoose do things ass backwards? Meaning they had the public do the editing via the beta then had an editor provide final polish?

In editing, I run up against deadlines all the time, which unfortunately means some things get missed. I just hope I don't miss too many.

[Treebore]

That said, didn't Mongoose do things ass backwards? Meaning they had the public do the editing via the beta then had an editor provide final polish?

No, they did play testing for a few months, then sold us the book/PDF, and have been fixing issues we the fans have found since the release of the "final" PDF. Thankfully they don't go to printing it for another month or so, so a lot of mistakes have been caught prior to printing. Not that the first version was bad. Its was, and is, very usable. I don't think any actual rules mistakes have been found, etc.. I believe its all been simple spelling errors, and I think one or two rules descriptions got rewrote for better clarity. Then again, I am not aware of a errata list, just what I have caught being different from one updated down load to the next.