Managing Criticism

[carlos marighela]

Oh fuck, let's not go near biz speak.

I let most of it wash over me these days and only rise to the bait when some brain dead c*** insists on using 'learnings' when they mean lessons. Typically it elicits the response that 'someone didn't pay enough attention in their English lessons'.

This sort of brain rot is equally readily found in the mee-jah. There it's less a conscious effort to obfuscate, which is the purpose of most biz-speak when you boil it all down and more a case of shit training and the almost total culling of sub-editors from newsrooms.

[ced1106]

I suppose there is criticism and there is feedback. Where criticism is of the level of ‘I don’t like this’ (expressed in many forms) with no explanation.

I’ve played tested a few sets of rules - and tried to feedback usefully. Sometimes as a player you just struggle to get a concept in a set of rules - and a fair bit of this is down to prior experience - but also how it is presented. Sometimes in rules there are just omissions - stuff the author and local play testers know so well, they haven’t even spotted it isn’t explicit in the rules (again likely due to prior experience).

Sometimes a set of rules just doesn't work for me - but if the author is happy with how they work - then that is fine - there are plenty of other sets out there to play. Though this can lead to local fragmentation as different people go off to do their own thing.

I’ve written quite a few mods to rules, but only one ruleset (that is only local rules still) and in writing these we attempted a write by committee option, but that rather failed due to too many voices and the difficulty of gathering and discussing areas of disagreement (which were  often quite minor).

Man, don't get my friend worked up on playtesting. (: He playtests rules for small "published" companies, and, even though he'll fill out the forms they want, they won't listen to him. I think he was even part of a KS production team, and the designer (the president of the company who hired him) didn't listen to some of his comments.

Hope the ruleset gets posted or published sometime. Whoever is the most motivated might as well publish it *their* way, with credit to the others, and a note that "While we didn't agree completely on the rules, we still wanted the rules published" or something?

[Cubs]

Good one. I trust the admiring crowd unhitched your horses and pulled your carriage home themselves while chanting your name?

I believe they named a half-holiday in May after me.

[fred]

Man, don't get my friend worked up on playtesting. (: He playtests rules for small "published" companies, and, even though he'll fill out the forms they want, they won't listen to him. I think he was even part of a KS production team, and the designer (the president of the company who hired him) didn't listen to some of his comments.

Hope the ruleset gets posted or published sometime. Whoever is the most motivated might as well publish it *their* way, with credit to the others, and a note that "While we didn't agree completely on the rules, we still wanted the rules published" or something?

I’ve had mixed results with play testing - on a couple of occasions no response what so ever to detail feedback. Including some where there was literal wrong pages / tables in the proof!

Other times good interaction with authors - who sometimes were happy with their own approaches.

I might pick up the home brew rules again - but I know they need a lot of work to expand from my pretty terse style to something that is more widely useable.

[Easy E]

They could be and I'm as prone as the next person to typos and the odd bit of missing punctuation but when someone repeatedly uses the term looser, when they mean loser it becomes apparent that they actually believe it to be the correct term.

My grandfather used to bemoan our cousins use of the term presently when he was in the RAF. The Tin Tanks would say 'I am presently over your location' but somehow meaning to say that they are approaching that location not currently above it.

Now how does a hoser differ from a hoosier? 

One is from Indiana.... Oh, I see what you did there!