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That's incredibly stupid poo poo in general, but what makes it extra special stupid for Texas is just last year they had a shooting in Dallas with a lot of "open carry advocates" around. Who did absolutely loving nothing to stop the shooter, and in fact made things worse by making it unclear who was whom when the bullets started firing. But of course, if guys with actual military weapons couldn't stop a mass shooter, surely someone with a pistol in a concealed holster will save them! Desiden fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Nov 6, 2017 |
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Nov 6, 2017 02:33
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Comrade Gorbash posted:How come all of these assholes feel they need 50,000 words to show how much a tool they are. Well this is an industry where we’re used to getting paid $0.02 a word for artless garbage.
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Nov 6, 2017 04:48
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I live in Texas and I can confidently state that I do not want to go to that con.
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Nov 6, 2017 05:41
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Desiden posted:That's incredibly stupid poo poo in general, but what makes it extra special stupid for Texas is just last year they had a shooting in Dallas with a lot of "open carry advocates" around. Who did absolutely loving nothing to stop the shooter, and in fact made things worse by making it unclear who was whom when the bullets started firing.
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Nov 6, 2017 07:33
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Peas and Rice posted:Well this is an industry where we’re used to getting paid $0.02 a word for artless garbage. This is severely underpaying someone for professional writing, incidentally. $0.03/word is considered the absolute floor in the writing industry.
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Nov 6, 2017 08:29
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That Old Tree posted:I feel safer already. Pendejo.
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Nov 6, 2017 08:37
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LatwPIAT posted:This is severely underpaying someone for professional writing, incidentally. $0.03/word is considered the absolute floor in the writing industry. lol in RPGs there is rampant free work going on, and there are pits like Pathfinder third-party that pay ½¢ per word.
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Nov 6, 2017 09:58
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LatwPIAT posted:This is severely underpaying someone for professional writing, incidentally. $0.03/word is considered the absolute floor in the writing industry. Welcome to tabletop games industry, which, incidentally, probably isn't considered "professional writing" outside of the tabletop games industry. That Old Tree posted:lol in RPGs there is rampant free work going on, and there are pits like Pathfinder third-party that pay ½¢ per word. The joys of "working with your passion."
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Nov 6, 2017 10:03
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ProfessorCirno posted:Welcome to tabletop games industry, which, incidentally, probably isn't considered "professional writing" outside of the tabletop games industry. I knew there was huge problems underpaying. I was pointing out that it's below the floor on the industry standard, as a point of reference.
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Nov 6, 2017 10:50
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It also means there has been no increase in the 2 cents a word in the 20 years I have been gaming and known about that stuff. Inflation obviously doesn't happen in gaming and big hardback books are still sold for a tenner.
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Nov 6, 2017 12:25
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Thundercloud posted:It also means there has been no increase in the 2 cents a word in the 20 years I have been gaming and known about that stuff. To be """fair""" 2-3 cents per word appears to be pretty standard for your typical mid-tier freelance author. If you're a regular, reliable worker for slightly bigger companies you can get a bit more, but even someplace like WotC you probably won't see anything much more than 5-7 cents. (Do they even directly employ freelancers anymore, or is all that "actually employing writers" nonsense completely off-loaded to third-party licensees and grifting fans with DM's Guild now?) But the churn in places like 3PP for Pathfinder is definitely a bunch of "for the love" horseshit that pays 2-3 cents per word at best. On the other hand, it has been a slow, acrimonious struggle to get gamers to shell out $60 for absolutely enormous, materially high-quality books overflowing with art (which is also underpaid). I remember when people were flipping out because D&D3's or 3.5's corebooks MSRP were going from like $30 to $35. Plenty of people will still point at Kevin Simbieda and be all "He can still sell his books for like $20, you greedy bastards" as if an entire industry sticking to barely-fanzine levels of production values wouldn't lose tons of interest. So it's not just "the industry's" fault.
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Nov 6, 2017 13:08
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That Old Tree posted:Hey, who wants to go to a gaming convention in Texas!? quote:I have been asked by a Special Guest that has attended our Con for many years to take the time to post a policy about the expected behavior for Attendee's. I don't know if this person will make a determination on attending the Con based on the policy or not. "Well, since someone I actually give a poo poo about asked, I guess I'll squat out a half-assed behavior policy. PS You're all loving babies." A+ would deffo be a Nice Guy™ (with a gun) at this con PS I wanna say the vice president is…Mark Price?
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Nov 6, 2017 13:26
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Nuns with Guns posted:Well this fills me with complete confidence in our Department of Defense. I'm not sure how anyone paying attention would have any confidence in the DoD regarding sexual harassment and assault. It's endemic to the armed forces and historically under-reported due to complaints having drastic career consequences for the person complaining.
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Nov 6, 2017 14:05
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Liquid Communism posted:I'm not sure how anyone paying attention would have any confidence in the DoD regarding sexual harassment and assault. It's endemic to the armed forces and historically under-reported due to complaints having drastic career consequences for the person complaining. Wasn't it something like 2/3 of active deployment female personnel will be raped and as a woman you are more likely to be killed by your own comrades than the enemy? And since this an open carry con I take it this guy is fine with someone ventilating metzer for taking a step towards them funny under Stand Your Ground?
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Nov 6, 2017 14:42
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LatwPIAT posted:This is severely underpaying someone for professional writing, incidentally. $0.03/word is considered the absolute floor in the writing industry. Louis Porter of LPJDesign has bragged of paying .5 cents (1/2 a cent) a word before. But then he's also a lovely company/creator who epitomises the 3.x era supplement churn
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Nov 6, 2017 17:04
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I love doing the math on that. I figure I can, at best, pull 1k readable words per hour if I don't stop to think about it too hard. At those prices, assuming zero time spent in editing or formatting, you'd be making 5 bucks an hour. Christ. You'd have to sell just under 60k words a week to make minimum wage. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Nov 6, 2017 |
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Nov 6, 2017 17:09
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Measuring gaming supplements in words is garbage anyway. The design effort goes into mechanics, encounters, rules, story, etc - not the means of conveying them to the players.
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Nov 6, 2017 17:18
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Yes but nobody is going to track your hours and pay you a living wage. Paying by the word lets you get away with paying peanuts for serious work that takes months.
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Nov 6, 2017 17:20
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moths posted:Measuring gaming supplements in words is garbage anyway. The design effort goes into mechanics, encounters, rules, story, etc - not the means of conveying them to the players. Forget statblocks, say it like "this monster has two hundred forty-six points of health" and so on
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Nov 6, 2017 17:20
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Kwyndig posted:Yes but nobody is going to track your hours and pay you a living wage. Paying by the word lets you get away with paying peanuts for serious work that takes months. A more fair model would be to pay the author a percentage of gross. So word count becomes irrelevant if what's being said is good. (This will never, ever happen and I realize that. )
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Nov 6, 2017 17:24
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moths posted:A more fair model would be to pay the author a percentage of gross. So word count becomes irrelevant if what's being said is good. I mean, for my most recent kickstarter I offered my stretch goal authors either a share of the profits of their book and an advance, or a flat fee that came out at ~$0.07/word. 3 authors took shared ownership, 2 took the flat fee, so I think it was a good deal either way. But I guess a lot of creators aren't budgeting for a fair wage for their writers in this sucky industry.
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Nov 6, 2017 17:41
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Ultimately you need some way to measure what work's being done. Offering that choice seems very fair. A better way to describe what I mean is that you'd never pay by the word for poetry, you're dealing with ideas. Games are much less art than poetry, but your buying someone's ideas and concepts.
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Nov 6, 2017 17:48
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Liquid Communism posted:I love doing the math on that. I figure I can, at best, pull 1k readable words per hour if I don't stop to think about it too hard. At those prices, assuming zero time spent in editing or formatting, you'd be making 5 bucks an hour. Christ. Your maths is wrong. 1000 words at $0.05 per word is $50
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Nov 6, 2017 18:25
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LatwPIAT posted:This is severely underpaying someone for professional writing, incidentally. $0.03/word is considered the absolute floor in the writing industry. That doesn't stop game companies from offering lower.  Liquid Communism posted:I love doing the math on that. I figure I can, at best, pull 1k readable words per hour if I don't stop to think about it too hard. At those prices, assuming zero time spent in editing or formatting, you'd be making 5 bucks an hour. Christ. Yeah, there's a reason I go to a 9-5 as a creative director at an ad agency every day and poo poo out dumb ads convincing businesses to buy dumb business software. I may not love it, but there's no way I'm keeping the lights on as an RPG writer ever. Even people like Matt Forbeck, who are the closest to full time writers in this industry, still do non-RPG work (Halo novels, marketing contracts, etc.) for extra scratch. moths posted:Measuring gaming supplements in words is garbage anyway. The design effort goes into mechanics, encounters, rules, story, etc - not the means of conveying them to the players. I'd argue that the best game design in the world is worthless garbage if you can't find a way to convey it to the reader, but hey, I'm biased. Flavivirus posted:I mean, for my most recent kickstarter I offered my stretch goal authors either a share of the profits of their book and an advance, or a flat fee that came out at ~$0.07/word. 3 authors took shared ownership, 2 took the flat fee, so I think it was a good deal either way. But I guess a lot of creators aren't budgeting for a fair wage for their writers in this sucky industry. That's fantastic and good for you for doing that. I think the old, more exploitive pay-per-word model is going to get some serious competition as more and more companies do that kind of thing. I will say this: I've done thousands and thousands of words for things that have never seen the light of day, and the thing that got me paid was a per-word contract that paid out in full upon completion of the writing (rather than the publication of the work). So while the whole meritocracy-thing sounds great in principle (and I would totally back in in some circumstances), if I had ANY question AT ALL about whether the product would come out, I'd still probably go flat-rate, or at least put a kill fee or a line in my contract that got me paid a minimum amount of the book didn't come out.
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Nov 6, 2017 18:30
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Angrymog posted:Your maths is wrong. 1000 words at $0.05 per word is $50 They're talking about half cent rates, bro, not five cents.
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Nov 6, 2017 18:31
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Angrymog posted:Your maths is wrong. 1000 words at $0.05 per word is $50 They’re talking about $0.005/word, not $0.05/word.
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Nov 6, 2017 18:32
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Angrymog posted:Your maths is wrong. 1000 words at $0.05 per word is $50 My math Is fine, friend, we're talking about half-cent rates.
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Nov 6, 2017 18:32
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moths posted:Ultimately you need some way to measure what work's being done. Offering that choice seems very fair. Contract technical writers typically go with contracts that specify the job to be done, estimate a time needed to compete the job (in weeks, usually), and then specify a fee for the job. So there is a third option. It'd be like, "You write the third and fourth chapters of this sourcebook, which are about A, B, and C: here's a two-paragraph description of the deliverable. We are expecting between X and Y words, not including tables or charts, but that's somewhat flexible. You'll send us a draft in three weeks, which we'll evaluate and request changes on, and you'll do changes and send us the final draft for approvals after one more week. We'll pay you N dollars for this job; you'll get 25% up front as an advance, 25% after we receive and accept the first draft, and the remaining 50% at the end of the contract when we approve your final draft." Then go ahead and include nonperformance clauses as needed. No per-word requirement, no hard fee-per-hour (the writer can work 50 hour weeks or 10 hour weeks, whatever, it's up to the writer to negotiate enough time to get the job done to spec, and a fee that adequately compensates them for their efforts), but the contract does not ignore that there are production deadlines to be hit because that's how product development works. Another aspect of this is that the publisher is not offering a contract like this to someone unless they have a reputation for completing spec work on time and to-spec without massive changes needed. For a brand new writer, you might build in more time into the schedule to reject the first or final drafts or demand changes, etc. e. I should add that contract technical writers are never "brand new" - you work a normal non-contract-based job for a few years, establish a portfolio, and then seek contract work based on the strength of your portfolio and/or reputation and contacts. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Nov 6, 2017 |
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Nov 6, 2017 18:45
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I used to do freelance work for White Wolf back in the early aughts, and the starting rate for writers there was 3.5 cents a word. It's ridiculous that rates are basically at the same point today, almost two decades later.
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Nov 6, 2017 18:49
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Did your contracts also specify a total number of words? Per-word pay for technical language would seem to perversely reward wordiness over brevity.
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Nov 6, 2017 18:54
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Just charge over profits you american chumps
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Nov 6, 2017 19:02
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Leperflesh posted:Did your contracts also specify a total number of words? Per-word pay for technical language would seem to perversely reward wordiness over brevity. I’d have to go back and look at how the contracts are specifically worded, but the companies I write for always give me a planned word count that I have to come very close to meeting. They do this because they plot out how much it would cost to print a book of a certain size and then how many words, stay blocks, side bars, and so forth will fill that book, and they expect their writers to hit that mark because otherwise they either need to fill the extra space, or need to drastically edit what you’ve done. As a writer you want to try to make your editors life as easy as possible, so it behooves you to write the word count assigned and if you have a brilliant idea for something else, pitch it separately. That’s how you keep getting new contracts.
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Nov 6, 2017 19:03
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So in those cases, while you're being "paid by the word" you're really being paid a specified contract size, to within a couple of dollars, because the word count is pre-determined.
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Nov 6, 2017 19:09
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Liquid Communism posted:My math Is fine, friend, we're talking about half-cent rates. You're right, sorry. Yeah, that's obscene.
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Nov 6, 2017 19:12
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Leperflesh posted:So in those cases, while you're being "paid by the word" you're really being paid a specified contract size, to within a couple of dollars, because the word count is pre-determined. Yes, that's correct.
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Nov 6, 2017 19:15
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Leperflesh posted:Did your contracts also specify a total number of words? Per-word pay for technical language would seem to perversely reward wordiness over brevity. Yeah, the contract always stipulated a target number of words (I assume because they wanted to hit a target number of pages assuming X illustrations, though you would have had to ask my editor about that.) If I went over that number, I was only paid for the first 50,000 - or whatever the target number was for the project.
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Nov 6, 2017 19:38
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Peas and Rice posted:I’d have to go back and look at how the contracts are specifically worded, but the companies I write for always give me a planned word count that I have to come very close to meeting. They do this because they plot out how much it would cost to print a book of a certain size and then how many words, stay blocks, side bars, and so forth will fill that book, and they expect their writers to hit that mark because otherwise they either need to fill the extra space, or need to drastically edit what you’ve done. This is how Catalyst does it as well today. The line developers plot out books, figure out the size of the project, and only then assign chunks of it to writers. Those chunks are both limited conceptually (e.g. if a chapter, you're writing on that chapter and the events it covers and nothing more) and in word count (each chapter and the book overall has a specified wordcount). Only the line dev gets to decide to waive that, and I've only seen it for books they themselves were writing (perks of running the show). So I always know roughly how much I'm going to make if I get assigned something, unless it's game-mechanical in nature (for example, if I construct some random tables for Battletech, I'm not getting paid by the word there because it wouldn't work; they instead use some custom formula instead or just make it up for all I know). The smallest RPG work cheque I've ever received (my first) was 10 dollars. I never cashed it. Xotl fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Nov 6, 2017 |
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Nov 6, 2017 19:57
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Xotl posted:The smallest RPG work cheque I've ever received (my first) was 10 dollars. I never cashed it. As a handy-dandy reference, I also do freelance copywriting and creative direction on the side too. I'm doing a job right now (in another window) that's paying me by the hour, with no hour cap, to write 50 descriptions for a large cellular phone company's online company store. I'm getting paid $70 an hour and could probably have charged my rush rate of $100 an hour, but my schedule is super-open this week so I didn't want to push it because the people I contract with are really good at sending me jobs. When all is said and done, it will probably have taken me ~10-15 hours to do this work. And the check I get from this will be larger than nearly any RPG writing I've ever done (there are exceptions), and certainly will have taken less time. Even in freelancing RPG writing is something I do because I love it, not because I want to make any money from it.
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Nov 6, 2017 20:07
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gradenko_2000 posted:Forget statblocks, say it like "this monster has two hundred forty-six points of health" and so on Orc statblock, D20 SRD version posted:Orc, 1st-Level Warrior 197 words. Seriously? Let's take this to the next level. Orc statblock, freelance writer version posted:The Orc is a fearsome opponent, most often being the equal in size to a Medium-sized humanoid creature (like a human). The hit dice of this monster is equal to one single eight-sided die plus one, with an average hit point roll of 5. Its initiative modifier is a lowly zero. However, its ground speed is actually a respectable 30 feet per round, which is equal to six squares if you and your players decide to use that specific unit of measurement. There, 745 words. 
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Nov 6, 2017 20:42
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You can add two sidebars, one with fiction detailing the life of an orc, one with verbose tables describing 30 kinds of orc encounters. Welcome to 1000-word-monster-land. 
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Nov 6, 2017 20:46
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