Another freelancer speaking out against Catalyst Game Labs

Libertad · Post by **Libertad** » Mon Dec 23, 2019 7:28 am

It was last week on Twitter, but instead of about freelance writing it involved artists short-shifted.

Also giving a time frame of when such incidents occurred.

Chances are this has been covered on this site before, but figured it was worth sharing.

Catalyst Game Labs (tabletop publisher of Shadowrun and Battletech) systematically swindled new artists coming into the field. I know of at least 6 who've been burned. I'm not one of them, and I'll let them speak up only if comfortable. Steer. Clear.

Most of the artists whose experiences I'm distilling in terms of this warning worked with Catalyst over the past two to four years. Person after person saying that they are losing/have lost hope of being paid after much nagging and promises that never materialized.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Dec 23, 2019 8:22 am

That's disappointing but not surprising.

One thing I will say is that the firewall between the freelance writers and the freelance artists was always fairly severe. The art ideas I submitted for Street Magic (for example) wasn't submitted to the artists. It was submitted to the developer, who in turn passed on whatever he wanted to the artists with whatever changes he wanted and never showed me the revised criteria. There are art pieces in that book that look inspired by my ideas, but they are in fact inspired by someone else copypasting or restating some of my ideas, not anything I said or wrote to any of the artists directly.

That the Catalyst crew would screw artists in the recent past is very congruent with the way they screwed writing staff ten years ago. It's the same slimy chucklefucks making those choices to steal work from creatives after all. But the writers and authors have always been kept very separate. I legitimately don't know if the artists on late era SR4 materials ere screwed over when the writers were. We never talked.

-Username17

Libertad · Post by **Libertad** » Mon Dec 23, 2019 8:26 am

Given how much negative reception the new 6th Edition has had among fans in comparison even to 5th* I have to wonder if this is some kind of karmic justice. You can only get a rep for screwing over talent to the point that you drive away the competent designers/artists/etc who know their worth.

*at least to my knowledge

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Dec 23, 2019 9:09 am

Libertad wrote:Given how much negative reception the new 6th Edition has had among fans in comparison even to 5th* I have to wonder if this is some kind of karmic justice. You can only get a rep for screwing over talent to the point that you drive away the competent designers/artists/etc who know their worth.

*at least to my knowledge

The writing definitely got worse after the big exodus at the end of 4th edition and never recovered. 5th edition is a tire fire from a writing standpoint, and from what I gather 6th edition is even worse.

Some of that is likely the result of 'random walk' mechanics. That is, if you have a pretty decent system such as SR4 making random changes to it are likely to be bad on the balance. A concerted design and a frank assessment of the flaws of the edition could obviously improve things, but if you have random fanboys write random suggestions into the rules, things will get worse (see: SR4A or D&D 3.5). Thus it's not really surprising that SR5 is worse than SR4 or that SR6 is worse than SR5.

That being said, the caliber of author they've had since the big exodus has meant that the rules changes that have been proposed have been significantly worse than random chance. I honestly feel like just popping a mic into the face of random GMs and having them shout out house rules off the top of their heads would have produced better results than what Catalyst actually went to print with.

Art has always been all over the map. And I haven't looked through enough SR6 material to tell you whether it on the whole looks better or worse on average. It still burns me that literally the worst cover on an SR4 book is Augmentation, a book I wrote significant amounts of. I had no control over that and it makes me a lot less happy to share a book I wrote for with other people than if it had even a black cover with the title on it. But at the same time, some of the internal art on that book is pretty good, it's just always been inconsistent.

So it would be pretty hard for me to even identify whether Catalyst has been paying a price in submission quality for screwing artists. In a just world obviously they would, but I don't think we live in a just world.

-Username17

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Tue Dec 24, 2019 4:14 am

I didn't even know there was a 6E already.

Can't someone just take the IP already from Catalyst's hands so I can care for Shadowrun again?

Trill · Post by **Trill** » Tue Dec 24, 2019 5:57 pm

Dogbert wrote:I didn't even know there was a 6E already.

Can't someone just take the IP already from Catalyst's hands so I can care for Shadowrun again?

It's shit.
no really, it's absolute dogshit.
It's the edition that managed to unify the fans of all other editions against it.

What they did was to take the advantage/disadvantage style system 5e sports and hastily copy it.
So now edge points are a replenishing resource inside confrontations. Whenever you have an advantage over your enemy you get a point of edge, which you can then spend on various effects.
But they included Armor and Weapons in it. So weapons now have a Damage Value, Attack Ratings, Availability, Cost, and for Ranged weapons the Modes and Ammo. Armor has a Defense Value.
What do Attack Value and Defense Value do? They give you or the enemy a point of edge if your either is 4+ points higher than the other.
"But wait", I hear you say, "How much damage resistance does Armor give?"
None.
Armor doesn't help you resist at all. You soak with BOD alone.
A human in Red Samurai Armor and a human standing in his undies will take the same amount of damage from a gun.
To counter it they also reduced the Attack values. so a pistol is now 2P for a light pistol or 3P for a heavy one. Shotguns do 4P. Rifles 5P and Assault Cannons do 6P, with the Panther XXL doing 7P.
Yes, you read that right. The strongest Ranged weapon does 7P, in a system where your CM is calculated as 8+(BOD/2).
Yes, you can shoot an unarmored Baby with a Panther, hit, and have it possibly survive. Not even dying.
Melee Weapons were also reduced. They now do a fixed amount of damage. A troll with a katana does the same damage as a pixie with a Katana.
Unarmed Combat however is still STR based.

And remember, all this? It's a tiny bit of the book. I haven't mentioned the indestructible Sharks, the fact that Sammies are practically unhealable (but unaugmented people get an extra hit), the fact that two snipers in a snowstorm in the dark have the same chance of hitting each other as they would on a sunny summer day at windchill or the new rules for Spirits

phlapjackage · Post by **phlapjackage** » Wed Dec 25, 2019 1:29 am

Trill wrote: It's shit.
no really, it's absolute dogshit.
It's the edition that managed to unify the fans of all other editions against it.

It's funny to see the daily threads on reddit where people ask "should I play 6th?" and every single time the thread is mostly nothing but responses of "no, it's shit".

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Wed Dec 25, 2019 4:37 am

makes me want to go read Asymmetric Threat

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed Dec 25, 2019 4:39 pm

Was it 4 or 5 where they did the preview beta of stuff that they had already sent to the printers?

With 6 they did not even dare to do that because they must have known the reactions that would have gotten pre sales . .

4 and 5 were at least semi salvageable, and that is me saying it and i still prefer 3ish . .

Trill · Post by **Trill** » Wed Dec 25, 2019 5:44 pm

I think you're thinking of PF, Stahlseele.
Not that 6e is better. They sold the 6e CRB on GenCon. It had so many errors that immediately afterwards they released a 10+ pages errata.
Which was apparently so full of errors that the errata had its own errata.
Their error corrections needed error corrections.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed Dec 25, 2019 11:41 pm

No no, they released preview files for one of the shadowrun versions as well.
Stupidly, they did so AFTER HAVING SENT THAT SHIT TO THE PRINTERS ALREADY!
They COULD have used it for FREE CROWD BASED ERRATA STUFF!
Buut noo . . that would have been the SMART thing to do!
And Catalyst DOES NOT DO smart shit!

phlapjackage · Post by **phlapjackage** » Thu Dec 26, 2019 2:55 am

Stahlseele wrote:Was it 4 or 5 where they did the preview beta of stuff that they had already sent to the printers?

IIRC that was 5th, because I remember so many people finding shit that needed fixing or errata and CGL just shrugged and said "sorry, can't do anything about it"

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Thu Dec 26, 2019 4:27 am

My... God...

Sounds like Shadowrun is now the Fallout of the hobby. It's sad, and a full reflection of the hobby in its current, pitiful status.

Trill · Post by **Trill** » Thu Dec 26, 2019 12:32 pm

Dogbert wrote:Sounds like Shadowrun is now the Fallout of the hobby.

Yeah. That's pretty fitting.
To elaborate on the things I mentioned in my last big post:

Sharks get Hardened Armor, to represent that they are tough. How much?
6.
To do damage to a shark in 6e you need minimum DV of 6 to even try to do damage, and even then it gets 6 automatic hits on the soak test.
Healing (Mundane through medkits or First Aid or Magical through spells) now has a Threshold.
5-Essence
yes, it means that being a 0.1 Essence sammy makes healing fucking hard, while awakened (who rarely buy ware) get an extra hit on their test.
The major math guy for 6e, Volbrecht, thinks that adding and subtracting dice from modifiers is too hard. Which is why All* dice pool modifiers have been changed into edge gains!
But what it also means is that if both of you are affected then neither is affected. Snowstorm in the himalayas at night? No dice pool penalties at all.
*Yes, but not really. There still are dice pool modifiers occasionally
Spirits can't be bound anymore. In exchange you get to summon Spirits up to a Force Total of MAGx3.
A MAG 4 summoner thus can now have Spirits in all combinations of that amount. 12 F1, 4 F3, 1 F12, 6 F1 and one F6, etc.
And the summoned spirits stay for one Sunset AND Sunrise.
Problems with this are: Facility spirits now have to be summoned EVERY DAY. 12 F1 spirits are usually FAR MORE POWERFUL than one F12. Increases fight durations incredibly.

It's sad, and a full reflection of the hobby in its current, pitiful status.

Eh, it's mostly CGL that sucks. General consensus is that in an ideal world CGL loses the license and Pegasus gets it.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Dec 26, 2019 3:59 pm

Are F6 Spirits still capable of leveling entire metroplexes?

Trill · Post by **Trill** » Thu Dec 26, 2019 7:38 pm

You probably mean Quake? (which is not capable of leveling any metroplex. Metroplexes are HUGE)
Not in the CRB.

but let's take an example: A F6 Air Spirit.
I should probably elaborate something beforehand: Initiative passes are gone. Instead you go from high to low Init and then roll again. Instead you get 1 Major action (Attack, Manifest, Observe in Detail, Cast Spell, Reload, Use Skill, etc.) and 1 Minor Action (Stuff like Dropping things, change device mode, Move 10 Meters, Take aim, etc.) plus 1 minor action for each initiative die you have. You can swap one Major for one Minor or 4 Minor for one Major actions. You also can't have more than 5 Minor actions.


B	A	R	S	W	L	I	C	M	ESS	Actions	CM	Move
4	9	10	3	6	6	6	6	6	6	1 Major, 3 Minor	11	5/10/+5

Initiative: 16 + 2d6
Astral Initiative: 12+ 3d6
Defense Rating: 4
Skills (all Rating 6 of 9, i.e. Local Legend): Astral, Athletics, Close Combat, Exotic Ranged Weapon, Perception
Powers: Accident, Astral Form, Concealment, Confusion, Engulf (Air), Materialization, Movement, Sapience, Search
Optional Powers: Elemental Attack (Cold), Elemental Attack (Electricity), Energy Aura, Fear, Guard, Noxious Breath, Psychokinesis
Attacks:

Elemental Attack [DV 6P, Attack Ratings 12/10/4/2/—]
Engulf [(DV 8S + Fatigue I, Attack Ratings 13/—/—/—/—]

So, what do we notice?

It's resilient as fuck. Not only do you need a DV of 6 before it even rolls a Soak test, but it also reduces the damage by 6 AND rolls 4 dice for an average of 1 soak. You need 8P to stand a chance of doing any damage at all.
It's fast as fuck. 16 + 2d6 is the highest a person could be (Highest REA is 6. +4 gives you 10. Add INT 6 and you have 16)
It still only gets one Major action. Them's the breaks
Its skills are pretty high
Its attacks hit like an Assault Cannon. And given those attack ratings it might also get an point of Edge
Its powers are bullshit.

Accident makes you roll REA+CHA against 12 dice. Fail and you glitch. Fail by 4 or more and you Crit. Glitch. And the designers of 6e thought to themselves: "Let's give the GMs some examples". And they did. Things like "Muscle spasm (–1 on all tests for the remainder of combat)." or (Crit glitch) "You suffer a minor seizure and immediately fall unconscious (fill Stun Condition Monitor)."
Concealment forces everyone to make a Threshold MAG (in this case 6) test to see you.
Confusion makes you Dazed (INI -4 and you can't gain or spend Edge. You essentially can't participate in the main system) and Confused (dice pool penalty on all actions) equal to the net hits. What test you ask? No fucking clue
Engulf (Air) lets you make a Close Combat attack (Close Combat +Agility vs. REA+INT) with DV of (MAG)P for the main attack and (MAG+2)S Once engulfed. It also makes the victim take a -2 dice pool mod on almost all tests (except damage resistance). Good luck trying to soak 6P. And then 8S until the spirit decides to stop.
Materialization gives it Hardened Armor 6, as said above
Movement speeds up or slows down stuff. This includes Vehicles and the vehicle rules make me want to claw my eyes out.
Search is still broken.
Elemental Attack is still fucking powerful, as above. Also gives you either -4 INI and -1 on almost all tests (Cold) or -2 INI, being unable to sprint and -1 on almost all tests.
Fear is still OP (WIL+LOG against 12 dice?)
Guard is... nice?
Noxious Breath is still powerful
But the big shitter is Energy Aura. Not only does it gain (MAG/2)P on attacks, but anyone attacking it has to soak (MAG)P and gets a status effect.

To summon one you have to roll MAG+Conjuring against 12 dice and soak Drain equal to the hits of the spirit.
Which with MAG 6, Conjuring 6 and a F6 Spirit Focus (Available at Chargen since its not Illegal and it only costs 12 Karma and 24000nY) is really not that hard. And remember: With MAG 6 you can have three of them at once.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Dec 27, 2019 1:13 pm

It's possibly important to note that releasing teasers where the works have already gone to print is totally standard practice across the industry. For example: Wizards of the Coast is starting their Theros: Beyond Death spoilers now, but the cards have already been printed and indeed a small number of TBD booster packs got accidentally put on sale in Walmart two months ago, long before spoiler season started for it.

This is normal, but normally you spoiler parts you've actually edited in-house. Like, Wizards wouldn't spoil a card that accidentally referred to 'Damage on the Stack' or some other long-deprecated game mechanic. Nor would they spoil a card whose rules text just kinda

The weird thing isn't that they released spoiler images after it was too late to go back and fix obvious flaws. The weird thing is that they released spoiler images that were full of obvious flaws. The samplers are supposed to be sections you are getting people hyped for, you're supposed to have read through them dozens of times before selecting them for release in that form. There shouldn't be obvious flaws at that point.

-Username17

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Dec 27, 2019 5:02 pm

Even if it is normal industry standard, it is a patently STUPID industry standard especially if you already have hordes of rabid fans wiling to basically do free crowdsourced errata for you . .

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Dec 27, 2019 6:00 pm

Stahlseele wrote:Even if it is normal industry standard, it is a patently STUPID industry standard especially if you already have hordes of rabid fans wiling to basically do free crowdsourced errata for you . .

Well no. Free labor is too expensive. Getting a work professionally edited costs pennies per word. Getting an entire RPG book professionally edited costs a few thousand dollars, and they should do that!

Proof reading, which is to say the reading of galley proofs looking for last minute errors introduced by typesetting or the use of multiple drafts is also a thing that should be done. But it should be done in a rigorous fashion within a constrained time period.

You could submit galleys to the wilderness of the internet and get someone on staff to comb through those suggestions to decide which should be incorporated into the manuscript and which should be disregarded as redundant, wrong, stylistic choices, or regional dialects. Or you could submit galleys to the same staff members and have them make that call themselves. Getting more eyes on it isn't inherently an advantage, you're trying to make a cohesive written work. And the "free" aspect of the proofreaders isn't actually free because eventually those suggestions have to go to an actual paid staff member and their work isn't free.

If you submit a work to the internet for criticism you are going to get some straight up bad faith suggestions. Some will be rude like "Should say Dwarfs have giant penises. Like 50 cm of penis." but you'll also have deliberate trollings like suggestions to fix sentences that don't exist or suggestions to change things to how they are already written. People find that shit funny, and the person you have reading the suggestions and modifying the document is going to have to weed through that shit.

But you also will have completely good faith suggestions that you aren't going to accommodate. People will try to correct your math with math that is itself wrong. People will tell you to change "in line" to "on line" when that's just a different English dialect and not actually a question of being correct or incorrect. People will think they know how to spell things that they are wrong about (for example: the house style to use "Dwarfs" rather than "Dwarves").

Yes, the RPG industry is so debased that you can get fans to work for free. But you shouldn't do that, because it literally costs more money to hack something workable out of "free" labor than it does to just hire moderately competent freelancers to produce it at scale.

-Username17

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Fri Dec 27, 2019 11:07 pm

FrankTrollman wrote: But you also will have completely good faith suggestions that you aren't going to accommodate.

-Username17

Note how this isn't even covering fits of pique. Imagine if they made the terribly bad decision of handing the project off to me for free proofing. The following things would happen:

1. I would miss a startling number of syntax and math errors because those areas are outside of my expertise and aren't very entertaining.

2. I would see all the dumb shit they are doing and start ranting about things that they didn't ask me to address.

Remember: free help sticks around as long as your product interests them and not a second longer.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Dec 28, 2019 9:27 am

Remember also that randos from the internet don't have the context to tell whether rules changes are mistakes or not. Let's say that you're looking at a chapter and it says that the threshold for an action is six. That seems very high, but if the rest of the book gives out enough dice to player characters or sets the base target number to something other than 5, it might be totally normal for player characters to be able to get that number of hits in the context of the rest of the edition that the internet readers aren't familiar with.

So let's consider an actual error: In SR4A someone wrote in that direct damage combat spell drain should increase by 1 for every damage box they inflict for net hits. This is terrible. It encourages players to overcast combat spells because it's 2 damage boxes per drain for just casting at a higher force, it's actually a divide by zero error because area of effect combat spells have different numbers of net hits on different targets, it doesn't actually stop people from one-shotting enemies with combat spells because overcasting is still a thing, and taking out enemies with one shot using spells isn't even a big deal because taking people out with two shots from a gun is trivial in that edition and gun users get two shots because of the Complex/Simple action divide. That rule is 100% bad, to the point that not only has it been errataed away, but to this day not one person has ever admitted that they wrote it into the rules in the first place. No one admits to have been part of a rules discussion where that was proposed or debated, no one admits to having it snuck into the rules without approval, fucking nothing. It's a bad enough idea that whichever person or group of people decided to sneak that shit in never publicly copped to the error. It's very possible that it was slipped in during galley proof stage after the editor had already looked over it.

So let's consider crowd sourced proof reading. First of all, this kind of poorly considered house rule is exactly the kind of thing that motivated internet readers are going to be suggesting. Ideas exactly that bad will be suggested by a lot of people. Secondly, without reading the entirety of the edition it's hard to know for certain that this idea is in fact extremely awful. Drain and damage might work differently in a way you don't know about, and just reading the section on combat spells doesn't give you the context to know how those rules interact with the rest of combat. As an unpaid internet proofreader being shown the section, you can suspect that rule is bullshit flavored bullshit, but you can't know for certain. But also, if the number of people claiming to have not known it was in the final draft are even mostly telling the truth, it's entirely possible that this particular error was introduced by one of the people collating proofs after proofreaders had looked it over and made suggestions. That sounds petty and unprofessional, but that kind of last minute, unannounced change happens all the time. And sometimes it's really bad, like when Peter fucked up my Essence hole rules in Augmentation because he had a last minute idea that turned out to be bad and didn't talk it over with me before writing it in and sending it to print.

-Username17

Libertad · Post by **Libertad** » Sat Dec 28, 2019 9:47 am

This was posted in an official Shadowrun Facebook group, where they were asking for freelancers to write up Shadowrun Missions adventures at rates which would be around Depression-era Pulp Novel pay:

Thaluikhain · Post by **Thaluikhain** » Sat Dec 28, 2019 10:24 am

Is there a good reason to get randoms on the net to check your work like that? Cause while getting input from fans is useful, if you're going to announce that your quality control was done by anonymous online types, a few implications about the quality and professionalism of your product come immediately to mind.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Sat Dec 28, 2019 4:36 pm

Thaluikhain wrote:Is there a good reason to get randoms on the net to check your work like that? Cause while getting input from fans is useful, if you're going to announce that your quality control was done by anonymous online types, a few implications about the quality and professionalism of your product come immediately to mind.

Randoms? No. But hiring a starving editor on Fivr for a single project is a lot cheaper than having an in-house editor.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Dec 28, 2019 5:04 pm

hyzmarca wrote:
Thaluikhain wrote:Is there a good reason to get randoms on the net to check your work like that? Cause while getting input from fans is useful, if you're going to announce that your quality control was done by anonymous online types, a few implications about the quality and professionalism of your product come immediately to mind.
Randoms? No. But hiring a starving editor on Fivr for a single project is a lot cheaper than having an in-house editor.

Sure, but Monte Cook's World of Darkness was edited by Scribendi.com and literally every single instance of the word "Inconnu" is misspelled as "Iconnu" across the entire book because the single project editors have literally no idea what setting terminology is or means and don't care.

The broader issue of course is that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

-Username17