[Ed4] Player's Guide Feedback

Discussion on the Earthdawn game line, errata, and feedback not related to playing or GMing.
shiinx
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[Ed4] Player's Guide Feedback

Postby shiinx » Tue Feb 24, 2015 5:47 am

Since the Player's Guide is now released and available in eBook form, I thought it would be appropriate to open a new thread with feedback to the final product.

First of all, congratulations to FASA for releasing their first of hopefully many new Earthdawn products under the Fourth Edition line and for successfully starting to roll out the advertized Kickstarter products. I hope that the book and the upcoming ones will sell well enough for you to carry on the line beyond the first couple of announced books (I am actually looking forward to the one that is the farthest off - the Questor's source book). Good luck to you on your subsequent releases.

In this first post, I don't have a lot to say, mainly some small feedback / question [after rereading what I typed, I realize that some of this might sound rather negative, but rest assured that it is definitely not meant to be, just think of everything not mentionede as being perfect :D ]:

1)
The PDF has the colored pages right at the beginning. Is this placement the same for the printed book or will they be in the middle as usually the case due to how the binding process works? If not, I'd rather have them at the end of the book together with the character sheet.

2)
This following is definitely a personal preference and I don't want to step on any artist's toes (after all any of them draws much better than I can ever hope to do), but some of the art looks really out of place from a style perspective in my opinion. Especially the art for the weaponsmith (and other images with the same styling) look strange, as if they were drafts waiting to be refined into the final piece of art.

3)
Layout. I realize that it is too late for the Player's Guide, but I really hope that you could revise some of your current layout deciscions. I think some of my issues could already be handled by a different DP system. To give you some context, I come from a TeX/LaTeX background where these issues are handled automatically, but I understand that this is likely not the best tool for creative writers. As for the smaller issues, they are uneven page endings and lots of one word lines. Sometimes the page is filled right to the bottom and sometimes there remains a fair amount of empty space. This is perfectly if a new section is statring, but otherwise there are techniques to slightly increase/decrease spacings between paragraphs even out the the page filling. The same goes for one word lines where the last word of a paragraph is moved to the next line, there are techniques to prevent this. This makes for a very interrupted reading experience due to the big first line indentions.
Another layout issue is with regards to spell descriptions. I would move success levels and extra threds up so that all of the defining data entries for each spell is in one place (and this also looks nicer as all of the indented entries would be on the top of the spell description - and you might want to consider retaining an extra indention for subsequent lines when e.g. the extra threads description requires more than one line). Moreover, why are spell names indented and in italics? Shouldn't they be in the same font and unindented just like talent and skill names?

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Mataxes
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Re: [Ed4] Player's Guide Feedback

Postby Mataxes » Tue Feb 24, 2015 10:29 pm

Thanks for the kind words! To address your particular questions/comments:

1) The color section is going to be in the front. The character sheet in the print book is not going to be in color, and in fact due to page limits on the print side of things, will have the two pages side by side on the same page. In the PDF we can go "over" the page count so we could give two separate pages for that.

2) You're clearly talking about the work by Larry MacDougall. He has a rather distinctive style (that can appear rather "sketchy"), but did work for many first edition Earthdawn supplements. I kind of like the variety it brings to the book -- a touch of humor in what could otherwise become a slog of potentially dreary darkness. I realize that art can be subjective, and some folks may not like an individual piece, or a particular artist. Still, Larry does have ties to Earthdawn, and I don't regret his being part of the project.

3) I'm not really the best to address layout. I get what you're saying with regards to spacing, and I'll pass your thoughts along to our layout guy. I know the work was done in InDesign, converted from what I gave him in terms of source files (I do my work in Scrivener and export to .rtf). In terms of the spells, I think that was a result of the header hierarchy I was using in the source; talent and skill names were one level down, spell names were down two. Some of the other aspects... I don't have an answer other than "that's what we decided to do."
Josh Harrison --
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jeremysbrain
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Re: [Ed4] Player's Guide Feedback

Postby jeremysbrain » Wed Feb 25, 2015 1:09 pm

I agree, the layout is functional but not very aesthetically pleasing or efficient.

On a positive note I am liking a lot of the rules tweaks in the game, they mirror many of the house rules I have used in the past.

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kosmit
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Re: [Ed4] Player's Guide Feedback

Postby kosmit » Wed Feb 25, 2015 2:47 pm

I can say a lot of good about changes you made in new edition but the book looks like it was 90s again.

The one thing I can't understand about changes is changing Durability from simple X/Y to "Y but add..." It is confusing.

But I am happy about changes and I think you did great job :)
Duvvelsheyss

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Panda
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Re: [Ed4] Player's Guide Feedback

Postby Panda » Wed Feb 25, 2015 3:12 pm

Earthdawn Developer and I have a gaming , though, let's face it, it is really an Earthdawn blog which also happens to have some reviews.

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kosmit
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Re: [Ed4] Player's Guide Feedback

Postby kosmit » Wed Feb 25, 2015 5:03 pm

Duvvelsheyss

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Sundahk
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Re: [Ed4] Player's Guide Feedback

Postby Sundahk » Wed Feb 25, 2015 7:12 pm


shiinx
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Re: [Ed4] Player's Guide Feedback

Postby shiinx » Thu Feb 26, 2015 6:34 am

Thank you for your explanations, Mataxas. I definitely need to go back to my 1st edition source books nad look at these illustrations again.

Regarding the discussion about durability, I am fine with both the old and the new way. However, I am rather surprised by the given explanation. I can see that Durability 7/6 could be confusing due to the reverse ordering compared to basically anywhere else UR and DR are mentioned. But then, why not simply switch both values and state 6/7? Old players will understand and for new players it will be a consistent order. The other reason has me sitting in front of my PC open-mouthed: Two multiplications are too complicated? We are not even taking about two-digit multiplications for the most part. This is what, 2nd-3rd year elementary school level? But okay,I could see this becoming tedious if it had to be calculated regularly, but you only have to do this once when generating a new character or when advancing a circle (and in that case you could imply add 6 and respectively 7 to your current UR / DR values). In my opinion the new explanation, while working, looks less elegant and in turn appears to be more complicated than the old one.

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kosmit
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Re: [Ed4] Player's Guide Feedback

Postby kosmit » Thu Feb 26, 2015 12:59 pm

I will drink to that!
Duvvelsheyss

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Re: [Ed4] Player's Guide Feedback

Postby gargaM0NK » Thu Feb 26, 2015 10:02 pm

Thanks for all of your hard work! My friends and I have been playing a former-edition game for a while now, and having only had a matter of hours after work to dig into it, we're really excited about what we've read so far in the 4th edition. Great job!

I was wondering, though, if it's too late in the process to assign the pre-numbered pages in the the Player's Guide pdf letters instead of numbers, so that the in-text page numbers align with the pdf pages.

Finally, I noticed that swift kick no longer mentions that it can be done with a tail as well, and I was curious as to the reasoning behind that.

Thanks again for the new edition, and for taking the time to share your thoughts with us here!

Cheers,
--
gargaM0NK


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