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How long has this loving taken? I'm working today and then once I finish I have a game, but I'm pretty sure that I could still manually fix all the Page XX in my rulebook by tomorrow. Even without million dollars worth of cutting edge 90s technology to reference stuff, CTRL + F exists. Hell, skim the book with a physical notepad and jot down all the changes you need to make and it wouldn't take this long. Is this being done exclusively while Holden is waiting in line at the pharmacy for his brain medicine?
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Oct 13, 2015 13:50
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Enough! Let's throw bottles at CCP until they finish the game!
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Oct 13, 2015 14:32
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I think we need an  equivalent for :op:
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Oct 13, 2015 14:36
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:Enough! Let's throw bottles at CCP until they finish the game! They probably would work faster then those bozos at this point, yes.
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Oct 13, 2015 14:36
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Not that I expect to get it soon, but... Is there a way to change the destination address? It's been so long that I no longer have the same address as when I backed this thing.
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Oct 13, 2015 14:42
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LatwPIAT posted:I don't know what would horrify me more; that standard book layout software can't do dynamically updated page-references, or that it can, and OPP doesn't use it. LaTeX can do this. Microsoft Word 97 can do this.
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Oct 13, 2015 14:54
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Prism posted:Not that I expect to get it soon, but... I'm guessing when the books are finally ready to be sent out by Drones that will also GM for you, they'll send a survey so you can update your shipping info. Of course this is Ex3 we're talking about, so i wouldn't be surprised if they sent books to 2-year-old adresses without a warning.
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Oct 13, 2015 14:55
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That is an excellent point, by the time they actually ship anything physical I will probably be on my fourth address since the kickstarter launched.
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Oct 13, 2015 14:55
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Thankfully you can just change your shipping address on Kickstarter - click on it in your Backed Projects list, go to the Surveys tab, and you should be able to change your address.
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Oct 13, 2015 15:08
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Flavivirus posted:Thankfully you can just change your shipping address on Kickstarter - click on it in your Backed Projects list, go to the Surveys tab, and you should be able to change your address. Yeah, KS added this desperately-needed functionality a few months back.
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Oct 13, 2015 15:37
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I'm intensely grateful for Far West lowering the bar for everyone.
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Oct 13, 2015 17:15
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On a different note, I've been inspired by goings-on in the World of Darkness thread to talk a bit about setting adjustments from the campaigns I run. Specifically, I want to talk about my take on running Exalted in our Earth. I'm a history grad student, I know enough about a lot of different historical eras and locales that I can rough out most any given time and place in history with a little research. I've run one multi-month Solar game set in New Mexico that covered an in-game period from 1876 to 1878, as well as several shorter games. Lunars in the 7th century Mayan Yucatan, Dragon-blooded in the Russian imperial army at the outbreak of WWI, even a brief cyberpunk Solars game set in the 2020s or so. All but the last share the same setting conceit: that the span of human history, from the end of the last ice age to the 'present' of whatever campaign we're talking about, comprises the Fourth Age of humanity. The idea is that the Second Age ended in a spiral of cataclysms that forced the surviving Incarnae, Yozis and unbound Primordials to sign a second pact to prevent reality from imploding entirely. Their collaboration generated the Third Age. Creation was was rebooted into the cosmos as we recognize it, with a round Earth orbiting the sun in a solar system &etc. Spiritual forces function more or less as they did in the 2nd and 1st Ages, with a few exceptions. Elementals become naturally immaterial in the reformed Creation while shadowlands grow more treacherous: the ability to control which dimension you want to step out into when leaving a shadowland that beings with essence pools possessed in previous eras is gone. When night falls stepping outside the border leads only to the Underworld, while doing the same during the day leads only to Creation. Gods, demons, ghosts and other spirits are active from the start in this Creation; mortals start Exalting under the right conditions as soon as they're differentiated enough from other primates to count as 'human' by the somewhat esoteric criteria of previous ages. This does mean that branches of the human tree like neanderthalensis that are extinct in the modern age get a few glowing superheroes of their own. The Third Age is designed to be a sort of Atlantean/Hyborian period of mythic prehistory. Green Sun Princes and their hell-blooded dynasties rule terrible Eurasian empires drawn straight from the Shahnameh. Lunars, Solars and Dragon-blooded arise to shape nascent mortal civilizations. Sidereals still come and go through the (far less numerous) gates between Heaven and Creation permitted by the pact with the Primordials. The most desolate and uninhabited lands burgeon with Wyld energies and sometimes form into bordermarches that offer access to the Deep Wyld for the very brave or puissant. Every so often the terrible lords and ladies of the Labyrinth lead hosts of Second Age specters out of the dark to harry the living and the sane dead. All in all the Third Age is a lot like the Second, except that rather than plunder the wreckage of the past the players will generally be building the ruins of the future. It all ends in tragedy of course, another spiral of cataclysms that sunders the great Exalted-led empires and nearly threatens to force the Incarnae and Primordials into another hard reboot of the cosmos. Instead, they and the Exalted manage to draw up just shy of the brink this time. They forge a new compact, with more stringent rules of engagement. The Elemental Dragons agree to slumber unless they're needed again. The dragon lines dull and weaken as a result, such that demesnes no longer appear naturally and must be shaped into existence by careful geomancy. The powers agree to a cold war doctrine of mutual escalation. Their new compact allows each side to sense the other's direct manipulation of Creation outside of the processes necessary to keep reality functioning. Exaltation is withdrawn from the world, while gods and demons were barred from initiating direct contact with mortals. Since the powers can sense each others' movements in a general sense, any commitment of power or forces to the mortal world sees a matching commitment from the other side. The exception to the powers' withdrawal from Creation was the hundred Sidereals, whose role in combing out snarls in the Tapestry was conceded by both sides as one of those processes essential to Creation's continued survival. The price of that concession was the grounding of the Sidereals. All the gates to Heaven were shut but the Calibration Gate, with Arcane Fate still very much intact. The Sidereals, as the last truly mystically aware human society, get to give this period its Old Realm epithet, and they call it the Still Pond Era from the way any infusion of supernatural power sends obvious warning disturbances through the otherwise placid Tapestry. Campaigns in the Fourth Age can start at any point after the last Ice Age. Sidereal campaigns are about the quiet, unseen war waged between them and Primordial influence on the ignorant world. There's still enough Essence and mystical fuckery in the world to make it more like the World of Darkness than our own, but like the World of Darkness human history proceeds pretty much as it does in real life with the magic happening in the shadows. Campaigns focused on any of the other Exalt types tend to represent the beginning of the end of the Fourth Age. The player characters' exaltation arrives in conjunction with a quickening of the dragon lines and the arrival of appropriate opposition from the Primordial Camp to match. To use an example, that 1870s Solars game began with the players, still mortals, riding out with Wyatt Earp's posse to investigate what appeared to be Commanche attacks on travelers and outlying settlements, only to wind up exalting in a horseback gunfight with the pitch-painted cult warriors of a circle of Abyssals gathering in a New Mexico shadowland ripped open by frontier massacres. Between then and the end of the campaign those players trained and led the Mexican army of Porfirio Diaz against the Abyssal-infiltrated sitting Mexican government, built manses on the banks of the Colorado River, allied with the Solar Circle to their north led by the recently exalted Crazy Horse, gunned down the Abyssal Jesse James, and were just about to throw down with an Infernal-led American army equipped with new Edison-brand helltech weaponry when the campaign ended. Well, that all turned out rather longer than I expected. All of the above was played using 2E rules over the last few years. I've never run a Third Age game, just several Fourth Age ones with RL friends. Having run a dozen or so sessions of conventional 3E I think I can say with some confidence that the new rules are even more conducive to making and running games outside the usual setting. Thoughts? Anyone else have homebrew settings?
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Oct 13, 2015 17:39
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Stallion Cabana posted:That can inform the way the weapon reacts to you and what Evocations you get, but it still needs an actual history. What makes it special? What was it made of? What has it been used to do? stuff like that. Certainly the weapon might respond to being literally stolen off someone by your Evocations being focused around thievery or distracting opponents, but otherwise the other stuff about it matters. Well, read through the old Exalted 2e setting books to find out what gods got ganked in the Usurpation that would make a nice hunk of starmetal, and I think I found one: Darunla, former war wolf-goddess of the East and big fan of the Solar Exalted (much to her detriment). The Sidereals made her fallen star into a very nice spear for one of their Chosen of Battles who landed the final blow on her and it went to his next incarnation once he kicked the bucket. And then my character stole it because it was there and it looked nice. So I figure its evocations could be evocative (forgive the pun) of a wolf stalking its prey, as my character specialized in combat stealth.
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Oct 13, 2015 18:09
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cybertier posted:I think we need an Redundant - the latter is a subsidiary of the former. E: Or, more accurately, Onyx Path is the imprint formed to license and develop old WW properties after CCP bought it up for the IP rights. Thesaurasaurus fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Oct 13, 2015 |
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Oct 13, 2015 19:24
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Prison Warden posted:I seem to recall celtic mythology has a couple of magic spears that are awesome to read about. Aside from the famous Gae Bolg, (which when it hit someone, it went through every nook and cranny of the body and had to be carved out the victim) there's one that I cannot for the life of me remember the name of that had to be quenched in a cauldron of venom to stop the tip from igniting and, lets see "it's thrust would kill a man, even if it did not strike him. And if the spear was thrown it will kill nine men, and there will be a king, or prince or plundering chieftain among their number". I made a Gae Bold artifact to a character of mine but it was a moonsilver spear made by Raksha that brutally wounds enemies that it hits
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Oct 13, 2015 19:57
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:I made a Gae Bold artifact to a character of mine but it was a moonsilver spear made by Raksha that brutally wounds enemies that it hits The thing with Gae Bolg is that, once thrown, it's very immobile. If you cast it, but then have to run from the battlefield, you basically gave it away to your enemy.
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Oct 13, 2015 20:21
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bartkusa posted:The thing with Gae Bolg is that, once thrown, it's very immobile. If you cast it, but then have to run from the battlefield, you basically gave it away to your enemy. What if the enemy used Rho Aias
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Oct 13, 2015 20:33
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SunAndSpring posted:Well, read through the old Exalted 2e setting books to find out what gods got ganked in the Usurpation that would make a nice hunk of starmetal, and I think I found one: Darunla, former war wolf-goddess of the East and big fan of the Solar Exalted (much to her detriment). The Sidereals made her fallen star into a very nice spear for one of their Chosen of Battles who landed the final blow on her and it went to his next incarnation once he kicked the bucket. And then my character stole it because it was there and it looked nice. So I figure its evocations could be evocative (forgive the pun) of a wolf stalking its prey, as my character specialized in combat stealth. Perfect, this gives you something to work with. I also personally like Darunla; I used her in my Shogunate game. I love the idea of a stalking wolf kind of Spear; to really get into the focus of wolf pack tactics, and maybe to incentivize playing with your buddies, you can give it Evocations for stuff like 'While I'm hiding, if one of my allies inflicts withering Damage, I gain a point of Initiative per 10 that is lost if I leave stealth without a decisive attack'. Play on stuff like being able to hide behind your friends; you're obscuring how many people are there because everyone's running around crazy and you just happen to be shadowing one of your friends. Then we can start tying in the Starmetal benefits Starmetal is good at things like binding spirits, revealing truths, and striking or harnessing concepts. Plus it can duplicate some spirit charms. The Spirit Charm Duplication could be really cool for a flavorful power that might not fit perfectly into your actual concept; say a Spirit Charm learned like an Evocation that lets you summon a pack of wolves from nearby that follow your orders for a fight before dispersing; representative of Darunla's twin existence as a War Goddess and a Wolf Goddess. Similarly, Wolves are often considered either destroyers or protesters in culture; stuff like the destroyer wolves of Norse Mythology versus the protective aspect of First Nations and Japanese cultures, including the First Nation story about the two wolves fighting in each individual's soul. Considering Starmetal pulls upon 'concepts', this dual nature might be even more apparent with mastering the spear. Maybe it takes this Duality Concept and turns it into a real thing; your character literally splits into a 'good' and an 'evil' half with a high level Evocation. The uses of this in non-combat, excluding the obvious benefits of just straight up being two people during combat, could be limitless. Obviously it's easier to go pie in the sky then starting at the bottom, so I'll refocus on that and suggest just a couple of rough ideas you can probably turn into some base Evocations; >A stealth booster based around the amount of allies you have >Gaining Initiative for your Allies having good Initiative damage rolls >A damage booster that works based on one of your allies already hitting someone earlier in the turn >A benefit to disarming, unhorsing, or other gambits designed to put someone on the back foot. Maybe even the ability to inflict a minor amount of damage, 1 or 2 levels, when successfully using one as a Supplemental effect.
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Oct 13, 2015 20:59
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bartkusa posted:The thing with Gae Bolg is that, once thrown, it's very immobile. If you cast it, but then have to run from the battlefield, you basically gave it away to your enemy. Call the Blade, Summoning the Loyal Steel It'll stay the gently caress in place until the wielder decides to take it with him. Evocation: instilling horrified terror in enemies who witness its retrieval
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Oct 13, 2015 21:00
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team overhead smash posted:Monday Meeting Notes: Ex 3 core book – From RichT: Maria still inputting revised Pg XXs after we discovered a page number shift in the book mid-way through due to Maria actually reducing the page count by two pages. Once she’s done we send to CCP for approval of changes- one of their required changes was having all the Pg XXs filled in before they’d give final approval, which is why we’ve been fixated on the XXs. After their OK, backer PDFs will be sent out. Holden also mentioned that his OCD has slowed down his end of things as he has had to restart the process repeatedly to confirm his already assigned XX page numbers. If this were any other publishing industry I think these people's heads would be on spikes as examples by now.
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Oct 13, 2015 21:15
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Echo Cian posted:Call the Blade, Summoning the Loyal Steel  Holy poo poo.
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Oct 13, 2015 21:16
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Daeren posted:If this were any other publishing industry I think these people's heads would be on spikes as examples by now. I'm intensely grateful for Far West lowering the bar for everyone. :iamafag: quote:He mentioned on OPP that he doesn't actually have OCD, he's just being cautious and Rich decided to take some poetic license when he described it. Fuckin... Bedlamdan fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Oct 13, 2015 |
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Oct 13, 2015 21:35
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I look forward to the second round of clarification in which they say people should "stop being PC babies" about throwing that kind of poo poo around, which, to be fair, probably would boost their later sales among a certain market segment.
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Oct 13, 2015 21:57
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Nessus posted:I look forward to the second round of clarification in which they say people should "stop being PC babies" about throwing that kind of poo poo around, which, to be fair, probably would boost their later sales among a certain market segment. I think the people writing Beast should have some stern words with Mr. Rich Thomas 
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Oct 13, 2015 22:06
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The fact that simply changing (See Page XX) can push back release makes me think that Exalted 3rd Edition is actually going to be a choose your own adventure book. If you nod respectfully to the Wyld Hunt leader turn to Page 32 If you draw your sword turn to Page 83 If you kickstarted this book you have already lost.
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Oct 13, 2015 22:39
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Daeren posted:If this were any other publishing industry I think these people's heads would be on spikes as examples by now. If this were any other industry they would have been fired for incompetence and replaced without comment or fanfare long, long ago.
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Oct 13, 2015 23:30
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Fans posted:The fact that simply changing (See Page XX) can push back release makes me think that Exalted 3rd Edition is actually going to be a choose your own adventure book.
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Oct 13, 2015 23:55
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:My favorite part is that this is something they also Insist must be done before they release even a "hey guys we're otherwise good, but just ignore the page refs, maybe" PDF. Or, god forbid they release it to backers and ask them to crowdsource the right page refs (because you know people would do it). CCP insisted.
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Oct 14, 2015 00:00
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Have they said why they don't use Find and Replace in whatever program they're using?
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Oct 14, 2015 00:00
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SunAndSpring posted:Have they said why they don't use Find and Replace in whatever program they're using? ...because that wouldn't actually tell you whether the reference was correct or not?
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Oct 14, 2015 00:01
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Rand Brittain posted:CCP insisted. Rand Brittain posted:...because that wouldn't actually tell you whether the reference was correct or not? If they are using Adobe InDesign, as every White Wolf/CCP product has since the days of Eddy Webb having a full time job (and thus a podcast where he said as much), then every chapter of a book has its own file, which lists page counts within it. At a glance this narrows it down. Then you open the file, find exactly where things changed (if you didn't know), and there you go. This is not actually difficult. It can be done. I have seen very, very stupid people do it very, very easily, on actual deadlines for adults, on much larger books, with many more moving parts. There is no good reason they haven't. This is supposedly no one's first rodeo here.
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Oct 14, 2015 00:09
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Yeah, if this was a fly-by-night Kickstarter by some dude who'd never so much as opened a layout file before, I can at least understand "oh god what am I doing  " delays.There's people on staff who have been doing this for over a decade. I've seen people, professional and amateur, post at least four or five ways to have set this up to make the process take less than an hour, or speed it up if they're deadset on doing it the current way. If I tried to pull the poo poo they're doing in my temp job, I'd be thrown out on my rear end hard enough to shatter my pelvis. To reiterate, "Oops, page references are hard and time consuming" is an excuse so bad that it's either actively covering up for some sort of behind the scenes reason, or the people in charge of the process are so staggeringly incompetent that, absent of context, the only reason I could use to explain the fact they still have jobs is Christlike mercy from their superiors. That or pictures of a CCP executive having sex in/with a pile of EVE money.
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Oct 14, 2015 00:36
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Possibilities occured to me that include "the firm that does their books can't do them in time, so these delays provide an explanation" or "basically that but with some kind of money-related issue."
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Oct 14, 2015 00:47
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Echo Cian posted:Call the Blade, Summoning the Loyal Steel Call the Blade works to short range. If somebody's running away it won't do zilch unless you can actually keep them where they are in the first place.
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Oct 14, 2015 01:03
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So again, as a mostly outside to Exalted but not totally to White Wolf, Onyx Path: Let's pretend I'm a total amateur writing a 300-page fantasy heartbreaker (which Onyx Path is not, being experienced in professionally writing and producing RPGs). I open my Microsoft Word document which I'll eventually just save as a clean PDF (which Onyx Path is not doing, because they're using a professional layouting program with additional tools). I do a Ctrl-F for something like 'see page' or 'page xx' because when I was writing this I knew I'd have page references, and I do a count. This gives me a list of all such items. I start from the one at the end of the list, which would be closest to the end of the book. If I have an index I might have hundreds of these but for now let's just go with standard text stuff. I look at the first item at the end, manually, because I'm a totally amateur. It says something like "big longswords (see page XX)". I do a Ctrl F on "big longswords" and find that part in the book. I note down the page number I manually update the "see page XX" to be the page number I noted down. I move onto the next item in the list. If I intend on having an index, then I either plan this ahead of time or figure it out on proofreading pass. I somehow tag each word/heading I want in my index (if we're using barebones crappy Word, I just put them in bold each time they're mentioned in the text). I write some basic crappy program that finds all words in bold, and puts them in an indexed list for me. For an entire 300-page book, this is probably a day of work... but I'm using basic Microsoft Word. Is OP saying their current procedure is less efficient than this?
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Oct 14, 2015 01:20
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bewilderment posted:So again, as a mostly outside to Exalted but not totally to White Wolf, Onyx Path: For gently caress's sake, you wouldn't even have to go this far. There exists automatic indexing software in TYooL 2015 that lets you just link pagerefs to elements in the finished work, like sidebars or headers or poo poo. Change the pagecount, and the software will automatically shift the pagerefs in the text to compensate. If you wind up tossing an element entirely, you do so from the master index (this book DOES have a master index, right?), and it's nice and easy to see if everything points to what it's supposed to reference. Christ, within 48 hours of the alpha leak, some random 4chan anon had released a version with accurate and comprehensive bookmarks, down to the last sub-header. This is not a difficult task.
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Oct 14, 2015 02:08
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Thesaurasaurus posted:For gently caress's sake, you wouldn't even have to go this far. There exists automatic indexing software in TYooL 2015 that lets you just link pagerefs to elements in the finished work, like sidebars or headers or poo poo. Change the pagecount, and the software will automatically shift the pagerefs in the text to compensate. If you wind up tossing an element entirely, you do so from the master index (this book DOES have a master index, right?), and it's nice and easy to see if everything points to what it's supposed to reference. From what I gather, part of OP's excuse is that they've had to put together work from freelancers, that may not be pretagged elements. But I suppose you're right that by the time you've actually laid out sidebars and proofread so on, this is already done. My argument was only from the point of "If I had absolutely no tools available but the most basic, what would I do", and pointing out that unless I'm missing something, even the absolute basics seem to provide enough tools to do this in a reasonable amount of time. I'm partially sympathetic to OP because I'm aware that for many of them this is mostly a labor of love that they do in addition to their day jobs. But I feel like even the ridiculous bare-bones process I described is doable with an afternoon/evening and caffeine of the editor's choice.
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Oct 14, 2015 04:25
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Thesaurasaurus posted:For gently caress's sake, you wouldn't even have to go this far. There exists automatic indexing software in TYooL 2015 that lets you just link pagerefs to elements in the finished work, like sidebars or headers or poo poo. Change the pagecount, and the software will automatically shift the pagerefs in the text to compensate. If you wind up tossing an element entirely, you do so from the master index (this book DOES have a master index, right?), and it's nice and easy to see if everything points to what it's supposed to reference. This talk would get you banned on RPG.net Onyx is the master of inefficacy.
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Oct 14, 2015 06:05
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bewilderment posted:From what I gather, part of OP's excuse is that they've had to put together work from freelancers, that may not be pretagged elements. But I suppose you're right that by the time you've actually laid out sidebars and proofread so on, this is already done. This is why I don't blame Holden, Maria, or any of the grunts in the slightest. The game developers and writers are being paid by wordcount, after the product is released. That one of them is being gang-pressed into doing page references is an absolute embarrassment, one even worse than the fact that this product is two years late and hasn't paid any of its actual workers a dime. Internet opinions time, Richard Thomas should be ashamed of himself. There's obviously a lot of talent and love invested in this project, but he's managed it absolutely horribly. Maybe consider paying someone a few hundred bucks to use layout software to take the pagerefs out of Holden's hands? You've got two years worth of interest from the writers' share of that $684,755 kickstarter. That should cover it. (Also, to go back in time a bit, the really fun bit about an onslaught Solar isn't beating up Ahlat in a single turn. Any creative ST can stunt some way around that, even if they can't figure out how to use his charms properly. It's that the same general strategy absolutely wrecks battle groups, so you can throw down twenty motes to wade through any army of a thousand men and send them scattering. That's worth keeping in the game, in my opinion.)
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Oct 14, 2015 06:19
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Ketrus posted:This is why I don't blame Holden, Maria, or any of the grunts in the slightest. The game developers and writers are being paid by wordcount, after the product is released. I don't think that was ever actually more than one way to read something that could just as easily be read as "they get paid when they're done doing what they've been paid to do." Which was also the more likely way to read it.
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Oct 14, 2015 06:28
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