WellMoustachioed

This post is much clearer than your previous post, and much less dismissive, so thank you for the effort that you put in. Chaosium is smart. You are smart. This community is smart. If this was something that Chaosium was interested in doing, they can work out the financing. If you want some back of the napkin math, $200 per person plus a prerelease pdf ($0) multiplied by 4-6 people is $800 to $1200. That feels reasonable to me. Would that meaningfully affect their bottom line? I have no idea, but I doubt it. I wouldn't put up such a fuss, but it's not a spot correction here and there. It's pages of hard work. I'm going to stop here. I think we've come as close to agreeing as we're going to.

I'm glad you understand a straw man argument, even if you don't recognize one. You can be exploited without knowing you're being exploited. We've all had jobs where we were pushed beyond our limits because "we're a family." If I drew a cool picture and gave it to you, and then you published my cool drawing, that's probably legal, but unethical. I'm still planning on buying the new BRP book. This isn't a deal breaker. If you want to work for free, I can't stop you. But I think Chaosium can do better.

Thank you. I'm a passionate fan too (my CoC shelf spans all of the editions)! Dialogue is what I'm after, and we all want the best product at the end. That's a lovely straw man you've built! Chaosium's finances are their own business and I refuse to speculate speciously (say that 3 times fast) on what it would or wouldn't cost them. Chaosium is a mid to high tier company in the RPG space, and they have the budget for lovely art and layout. I specifically said that any changes couldn't be retroactive. I also said that they would take some thought as to what was appropriate and affordable. Please don't mischaracterize what I said. Doing the right thing is rarely simple, and almost never free.

I appreciate all of your feedback. Whether this is how everyone does it or this is how it's always been done is immaterial: we should push to make sure that people are being treated fairly. I'm not saying that Chaosium is evil, bad, or even unique. We're at a point where ordinary isn't good enough. Chaosium has made tremendous strides in many aspects of equity and representation, but there's always room to improve. Wouldn't it be lovely for Chaosium to give back to these passionate fans? That's all I'm suggesting. The user SaintMeerkat has done SO much for this new version of BRP, all in the matter of a few days. Think if they had gotten it early, and knocked out 80% of the errors? Isn't that worth a few bucks, or a free copy of the game? This can't be accomplished retroactively, and it will take some consideration. I think Chaosium is open to change. If we can't criticize the things we care about, they won't improve. Thank you all for engaging with me, even if you don't agree. Edit: I miscredited SaintMeerkat as St Germain

Thank you for your response. I'm still a new member, so I only get one post a day, so this dialogue might be slow. If someone sets up a corrections thread, no one asked for that work. They're just doing it out of passion. If Chaosium sets it up, it's tacitly asking for help with corrections. At this point it becomes labor. You can see that in the amount of work that has been done. I understand that there isn't a good solution to this. We all want a high quality product and no one wants a print product riddled with errors. $25 is a reasonable price for a PDF, but that pricetag should include everyone who worked on it getting paid. It might be worth passing the manuscript through a paid committee of passionate fans first, and then as a final step, pass it through the larger community.

Having found this forum looking for information on the new version of BRP, I immediately found something that dismayed me: Does Chaosium crowd-edit all of their new releases? Editing and proofreading are paid work, and by having the community do it, they are reaping the benefits of free labor. I understand having the community look over a pdf before the book goes to print, but the folks in the corrections thread are doing a lot of unpaid work. If this is the standard for Chaosium, they are exploiting the passion of the community. Much smaller companies pay for this service before their products are for sale.