Originally shared by Jason Pitre
Hey folks;
I know we are in they dying days of google plus, but I am trying to spread the word about a survey to collect publishing cost information on tabletop RPGs. I would love to get plenty on info from across the hobby, and particularly hear from a variety of indie & traditional publishers. If you have a few minutes, please fill out the survey and spread the word! https://goo.gl/forms/hs3WhNgYFhJMAjZE2
11 mars 2019
5 mars 2019
Le site de Radio Rôliste est réparé
Le site de Radio Rôliste est réparé ! (Merci Kobal !) Et pendant la fermeture forcée, nous avons enregistré le no 88 « Exploitation pétrolière et encyclopédies sans affordance », pour lequel nous avons patiemment gravé les bits à la main avec des aimants dans un cave froide pendant le blackout.
Y'en a un peu plus, je vous le met ?
Nous vous y parlons :
- de la fermeture de G+ et de http://wheretofind.me
- de The Witcher ‑le‑jdr (Steve J)
- de Dallas The Television Role-Playing Game (Loris)
- de Kult: Divinity Lost (Gherhartd)
et de nos lectures :
- Dream Apart et Dream Askew (Steve)
- The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde et Archipelago III (Gherhartd)
Bonne écoute !
https://www.radio-roliste.net/?p=1686
Y'en a un peu plus, je vous le met ?
Nous vous y parlons :
- de la fermeture de G+ et de http://wheretofind.me
- de The Witcher ‑le‑jdr (Steve J)
- de Dallas The Television Role-Playing Game (Loris)
- de Kult: Divinity Lost (Gherhartd)
et de nos lectures :
- Dream Apart et Dream Askew (Steve)
- The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde et Archipelago III (Gherhartd)
Bonne écoute !
https://www.radio-roliste.net/?p=1686
25 février 2019
Why are you still standing there? Go!
Why are you still standing there? Go!
Originally shared by Paolo Greco
Eric Nieudan's Macchiato Monsters is finally out. :)
Oh it looks so good. Twelve artists, years of playtesting, rivers of coffee, and huge traits of lasagne made this possible. And YOU! Yes, YOU and your invaluable feedback! Without YOU this would have never happened. <3
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/264169/Macchiato-Monsters
Originally shared by Paolo Greco
Eric Nieudan's Macchiato Monsters is finally out. :)
Oh it looks so good. Twelve artists, years of playtesting, rivers of coffee, and huge traits of lasagne made this possible. And YOU! Yes, YOU and your invaluable feedback! Without YOU this would have never happened. <3
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/264169/Macchiato-Monsters
22 février 2019
Before G+ disappears, here is some thing I’d like to say to the English-speaking games designers and authors in my...
Before G+ disappears, here is some thing I’d like to say to the English-speaking games designers and authors in my circles : beware of French translations.
I am not happy at all with the state of games translated in my mother language and I’d like to explain some things you might want to look into before signing with a publisher for a French translation of your game(s).
(If you want to keep this after G+ disapearing act, you can find it here also : http://bit.ly/2IwsDnU )
The French-speaking market for TTRPG is much smaller than the English-speaking one, it is ridiculously tiny and specific in its culture. While it explains certains publishers’ habits, it doesn’t make them alright or inescapable. Choose your publisher wisely. Don’t automatically sign with the first to ask. Here are some things to watch out for, and some context :
1. Unpaid translators. We are passionate about games, it is easy to find someone who is ready to translate your game for free. This isn’t a good idea, for different reasons.
1.a. Being passionate is different from being competent. Or from understanding your game correctly. Don’t underestimate the magnitude of mistranslation a passionate but incompetent translator can make. The last one I saw was something like translating “edge” as “vigor” throughout the game. And that’s not talking about more subtle translation errors like translating “the monster is hanging from the ceiling” as “(...) from the roof”.
1.b. It’s difficult to hold someone working for free accountable.
1.c. If the publisher is making any money on this, it’s unethical.
1.d. It promotes and maintains a system where translators (and authors) can’t live from their work, preventing the hobby from ever professionalising and keeping quality standards rather low.
1.e. It’s not a good sign about the seriousness of the publisher.
2. Unpaid editing and proofreading - this is even more common than the unpaid translator, and poses the sames problems.
3. Unpaid layout artist. Ditto.
4. Underpaid (more frequently) or unpaid (“for the exposure” bullshit) illustrators. Need I say any more?
5. Lack of proofreading. Sometimes, proofreading is made by the gaming community, either during the production process, which is quite common in crowdfundings. A number of publishers choose to rely on this community proofreading alone. In the worse cases, proofreading is done between the first and second printing. With an unusable first print and no published errata. (Ununderstandable and unsolvable enigmas, anyone?) Nah, what am I writing? In the worse cases, sufficient proofreading isn’t done at all. Period.
6. No digital edition. Many French publisher dislike digital editions, for a variety of bullshit reasons. So you get no digital edition at all, or it is often restricted to crowdfunding backers as a bonus to buying the mandatory paper print and not sold at all afterwards. Sometimes you don’t even get the gamind aids to print. This totally sucks. They usually don’t update pdf either.
7. Product inflation. Many French publishers don’t like small games. Combined with the above, this is what transform a $10 game (pdf) plus a $6 accompanying product (pdf) in a €85 ($96) bundle (paper, pdf for the crowdfunding backers but nobody else afterwards, with more local-produced content, but no way of getting only the translations at a reasonable price).
8. Royalties. I won’t say Chaosium’s trouble with Sans Détour reflects something usual, I simply don’t know. But think about how you will check the amount you should get.
9. Using the publisher’s usual authors team, or known names that sell, rather than people that like or at least know your game. Those freelancer are often used to writing without taking time to understand the game. (see unpaid / underpaid above) And the publisher often doesn’t care. This produces things like scripted-scenes scenarios for an “play to see what happens” game, complete with advice on how to push the players in the “right direction”.
Now, there are also some mistakes that English creators and publishers sometime make when asking things from French publisher. The most grievous one I know of :
* Too tight translation and printing schedule. French publishers are small, talented or skillful people are relatively few in the rpg industry, so things take time. Or are botched. Speed is good, but only if a minimal translation quality is reached. Botched translations help no one. For bigger publishers, it is usual for the French publisher to be unable to translate the whole range of a game, and even then, translations usually lag farther and farther away from the originals’ publication dates. Talk about which ones to translate.
* Local production. Allow it. This can be really good. Think about it.
* Title translation is difficult. Some English-speaking authors or publisher want to keep the English title. It’s not, per se, a problem at least for France, Swiss and Belgium. Translating the title is a trade-off between product identity and translation integrity. French-speaking people, especially in France, are usually very proud of their language (there are even songs about it https://youtu.be/joUeMoDDcYM ), want to defend it against “invading” english loanwords, but still value English names because they are in English. So there is no way to please everybody. Two things to consider, however : firstly, while gamers will probably know your game by its English name before it is translated (even if many are unable to or simply refuse to play with untranslated material), keeping it for the translation will cause some really confusion, people having to clarify all the time which version they are talking about, in shops, etc. (People wanting to play the game, committing, then withdrawing because you are using the English material you bought before a translation was announced, things like that). Secondly, subtitles should be translated. All in all, many ttrpgs have English titles, even games originally written in French.
* French is simply and unavoidably longer than English. Don’t ask to keep exactly the original English layout. You’ll get nothing good out of that. (Also, alphabetic order is different for translated items, keeping things in inherited-from-the-English-words order is a total nonsense, although not an unseen one.)
* This also means that, especially combined with much lower sales projections due to the small size of the market, French translation cost more to produce. (Reducing font size and/or layout density are usually bad ideas, but not untried ones either.)
I hope this will help your games to be much better when they are translated.
https://youtu.be/joUeMoDDcYM
I am not happy at all with the state of games translated in my mother language and I’d like to explain some things you might want to look into before signing with a publisher for a French translation of your game(s).
(If you want to keep this after G+ disapearing act, you can find it here also : http://bit.ly/2IwsDnU )
The French-speaking market for TTRPG is much smaller than the English-speaking one, it is ridiculously tiny and specific in its culture. While it explains certains publishers’ habits, it doesn’t make them alright or inescapable. Choose your publisher wisely. Don’t automatically sign with the first to ask. Here are some things to watch out for, and some context :
1. Unpaid translators. We are passionate about games, it is easy to find someone who is ready to translate your game for free. This isn’t a good idea, for different reasons.
1.a. Being passionate is different from being competent. Or from understanding your game correctly. Don’t underestimate the magnitude of mistranslation a passionate but incompetent translator can make. The last one I saw was something like translating “edge” as “vigor” throughout the game. And that’s not talking about more subtle translation errors like translating “the monster is hanging from the ceiling” as “(...) from the roof”.
1.b. It’s difficult to hold someone working for free accountable.
1.c. If the publisher is making any money on this, it’s unethical.
1.d. It promotes and maintains a system where translators (and authors) can’t live from their work, preventing the hobby from ever professionalising and keeping quality standards rather low.
1.e. It’s not a good sign about the seriousness of the publisher.
2. Unpaid editing and proofreading - this is even more common than the unpaid translator, and poses the sames problems.
3. Unpaid layout artist. Ditto.
4. Underpaid (more frequently) or unpaid (“for the exposure” bullshit) illustrators. Need I say any more?
5. Lack of proofreading. Sometimes, proofreading is made by the gaming community, either during the production process, which is quite common in crowdfundings. A number of publishers choose to rely on this community proofreading alone. In the worse cases, proofreading is done between the first and second printing. With an unusable first print and no published errata. (Ununderstandable and unsolvable enigmas, anyone?) Nah, what am I writing? In the worse cases, sufficient proofreading isn’t done at all. Period.
6. No digital edition. Many French publisher dislike digital editions, for a variety of bullshit reasons. So you get no digital edition at all, or it is often restricted to crowdfunding backers as a bonus to buying the mandatory paper print and not sold at all afterwards. Sometimes you don’t even get the gamind aids to print. This totally sucks. They usually don’t update pdf either.
7. Product inflation. Many French publishers don’t like small games. Combined with the above, this is what transform a $10 game (pdf) plus a $6 accompanying product (pdf) in a €85 ($96) bundle (paper, pdf for the crowdfunding backers but nobody else afterwards, with more local-produced content, but no way of getting only the translations at a reasonable price).
8. Royalties. I won’t say Chaosium’s trouble with Sans Détour reflects something usual, I simply don’t know. But think about how you will check the amount you should get.
9. Using the publisher’s usual authors team, or known names that sell, rather than people that like or at least know your game. Those freelancer are often used to writing without taking time to understand the game. (see unpaid / underpaid above) And the publisher often doesn’t care. This produces things like scripted-scenes scenarios for an “play to see what happens” game, complete with advice on how to push the players in the “right direction”.
Now, there are also some mistakes that English creators and publishers sometime make when asking things from French publisher. The most grievous one I know of :
* Too tight translation and printing schedule. French publishers are small, talented or skillful people are relatively few in the rpg industry, so things take time. Or are botched. Speed is good, but only if a minimal translation quality is reached. Botched translations help no one. For bigger publishers, it is usual for the French publisher to be unable to translate the whole range of a game, and even then, translations usually lag farther and farther away from the originals’ publication dates. Talk about which ones to translate.
* Local production. Allow it. This can be really good. Think about it.
* Title translation is difficult. Some English-speaking authors or publisher want to keep the English title. It’s not, per se, a problem at least for France, Swiss and Belgium. Translating the title is a trade-off between product identity and translation integrity. French-speaking people, especially in France, are usually very proud of their language (there are even songs about it https://youtu.be/joUeMoDDcYM ), want to defend it against “invading” english loanwords, but still value English names because they are in English. So there is no way to please everybody. Two things to consider, however : firstly, while gamers will probably know your game by its English name before it is translated (even if many are unable to or simply refuse to play with untranslated material), keeping it for the translation will cause some really confusion, people having to clarify all the time which version they are talking about, in shops, etc. (People wanting to play the game, committing, then withdrawing because you are using the English material you bought before a translation was announced, things like that). Secondly, subtitles should be translated. All in all, many ttrpgs have English titles, even games originally written in French.
* French is simply and unavoidably longer than English. Don’t ask to keep exactly the original English layout. You’ll get nothing good out of that. (Also, alphabetic order is different for translated items, keeping things in inherited-from-the-English-words order is a total nonsense, although not an unseen one.)
* This also means that, especially combined with much lower sales projections due to the small size of the market, French translation cost more to produce. (Reducing font size and/or layout density are usually bad ideas, but not untried ones either.)
I hope this will help your games to be much better when they are translated.
https://youtu.be/joUeMoDDcYM
21 février 2019
Chères toutes, chers tous
Originally shared by Gherhartd Sildoenfein
Chères toutes, chers tous,
Il est temps de commencer l’évacuation de l’Auberge. Vous avez certainement remarqué les étincelles qui commencent à parcourir les panneaux de contrôle, les fumées opaques et nauséabondes qui s’en échappent, sans parler des gyrophares rouges et oranges sortis d’on ne sait où. Avant que tout ne s’effondre, embarquez dans nos vaisseaux de transport qui nous mèneront vers un lieu bien meilleur.
C’est par ici : https://goo.gl/forms/R0RYfTvILPf8ypjd2
(Comme les notifications ne fonctionnent plus fiablement, nous allons un peu vous spammer avec ce message, ce n’est pas de notre faute, c’est la faute à Google.)
20 février 2019
I love Google. No more.
I love Google. No more.
Originally shared by Filip H.F. “FiXato” Slagter
Hangouts Classic will lose per-conversation notification sound settings
Well, that sucks... Per-conversation notification settings were one of the main standout features that I liked about Hangouts.
While adoption of the Android O+ notification channels is great, so far I've not seen such granularity there that I can set a separate sound per conversation... Hopefully that will be added too, but it doesn't look promising.
Currently I have notification sounds off by default, and only set a sound for just a couple of important contacts.
Filing this under the #GooglePlusExodus Collection as #Hangouts originally grew out of G+, AFAIK, and as such has a large userbase among GPlus users.
#Google #GSuite #GoogleAnnouncement
Originally shared by Filip H.F. “FiXato” Slagter
Hangouts Classic will lose per-conversation notification sound settings
Well, that sucks... Per-conversation notification settings were one of the main standout features that I liked about Hangouts.
While adoption of the Android O+ notification channels is great, so far I've not seen such granularity there that I can set a separate sound per conversation... Hopefully that will be added too, but it doesn't look promising.
Currently I have notification sounds off by default, and only set a sound for just a couple of important contacts.
Filing this under the #GooglePlusExodus Collection as #Hangouts originally grew out of G+, AFAIK, and as such has a large userbase among GPlus users.
#Google #GSuite #GoogleAnnouncement
19 février 2019
Chères toutes, chers tous
Chères toutes, chers tous,
Il est temps de commencer l’évacuation de l’Auberge. Vous avez certainement remarqué les étincelles qui commencent à parcourir les panneaux de contrôle, les fumées opaques et nauséabondes qui s’en échappent, sans parler des gyrophares rouges et oranges sortis d’on ne sait où. Avant que tout ne s’effondre, embarquez dans nos vaisseaux de transport qui nous mèneront vers un lieu bien meilleur.
C’est par ici : https://goo.gl/forms/R0RYfTvILPf8ypjd2
(Comme les notifications ne fonctionnent plus fiablement, nous allons un peu vous spammer avec ce message, ce n’est pas de notre faute, c’est la faute à Google.)
Inscription à :
Articles (Atom)