So this process needs rethinking if after all this effort FAQ is like it is. It is leagues better than no FAQ, but i do think it can be leagues better by using power of web technologies rather than XIX century printed document that changes rarely. I don't think that much work was put to it, considering legacy CCG mechanics still in the FAQ and not having logic order in rules explanation section. Or the work focused on stuff that doesn't really matter. (like all the art in current main FAQ, WTF it is to explain rules, simple txt is better as you don't need a specialist in typesetting documents to change it)

Srsly you think that answering online so ppl don't ask the same question over and over is more expensive than answering by mail… this is simply madness. And you do all this work preparing set, play testing all cards, it needs to take many hours for each card, how much more is posting a description of your design? 5 min? 10 min? 30 min?

And about quality of published answers. If you make a community site with discussions and disclaimer that those rulings are not 100% official and may change it will still help a ton and lesser editing requirements. You're posting rulings not business decisions… only ppl who care about rules will care, and those ppl are much better off having database of what was already ruled and good way of searching for rulings.

I agree that if you post wrong ruling fans might not be happy, but its a matter of creating right community where all are aware that rulings get posted fast so there might be slight errors that will be corrected. Just note that you correct so ppl are not confused and i think its fine, much better than what's now.

Just see what I'm uploading to cardgameDB - its not that hard and helps a ton.

Fan collaboration, just send an AP/mat/domains/other cool stuff to fan who writes best rulings or sth, a little contest or gamification elements - it designed right you'll get fans working for you for free and enjoying it as they improve the game they love… there are reward-like things that don't cost much but are cool like access to some unpublished content or forum badges etc.

It definitely needs much thinking through, but you can apply this not only for CoC but also for all other games to build engagement and community around your games that uses your site regularly, so its easier to advertise new products and can improve sales of your other games.

[this forum engine needs much work btw… popup for ctrl+v, links look like crap so its better to paste url as text, quotes are not visible in editor, no option to turn WYSIWYG off and have simple text box, edit button goes inactive so you cant correct typing etc in older posts…]

What do you do for a living Zephyr?

I'm not sure i should answer such personal questions, but it might explain my actions.

I'm just graduating from CS course. I'm currently writing my masters thesis so it makes everything that is not my masters thesis seem much more interesting, like solving the riddle of how the cards i bought actually work. I don't have much work experience yet, so I still think IT magically changes the world. Reading much about gamification and thinking about education makes me more frustrated by comparing reality to my image of perfect world. I have my last holiday break before getting to do actual work so I have much free time to do stuff like clearing up FAQ and writing entries on cardgameDB. Frustration also helps as its quite strong emotion and i can be quite stubborn.

I really love CoC but I really hate any ruling problems. I believe game starts when players know the rules and have experience of the game. And i believe if players can't get the rules the one who wrote them is to blame. Those ruling problems hurt my play experience considerably, as even if they didn't change much i felt like i don't know what are those cards supposed to do. Turns out I was right, as many things work completely different than i initially thought. Including series of story cards that are not a comeback mechanism that can make 2:0 into 1:1.

That makes a lot more sense now.

You have no real understanding of how a business operates yet and what man-hours are worth. All of the reasons why they don't do what you suggest will make a lot more sense to you in about 5 years of working or 6 months of owning your own business. I know this is going to come off condecending, not much I can do about that, because without that level of experience you won't get how much time is invested per dollar earned in prophet make something a reasonable investment versus an outrageous request.

Think about it this way. In the pursuit of your degree lets say you have a choice of classes in underwater basket weaving or physical education. These classes do not contribute to your chosen skill set but there are minimum credits in electives that you must have to graduate. Each hour outside of these classes that is required for you to pass that class is an hour you cannot spend on the classes that contribute to your skill set which is necessary to gaining said degree. The choice then becomes one of taking the class that requires the least amount of time to pass the class so you can spend the maximum amount of time working on the harder and more important classes.

Because there is only 24 hours in a day and you require a certain amount of time to sleep, eat, and excrete, and even some hours of "down time" to socialize to prevent burn out, you can choose a class like basket weaving that will end up eating +3 hours a week outside of the class or can do the physical education class which takes +0 hours outside of class (assuming both classes have the same amount of in-class time). The reasonable choice is the class with the smallest footprint in your schedule.

This is what I mean that adding extra paragraphs to the rules every month for 20 cards (and remember they have hundreds of card that will need this also) and then additional paragraphs to address how the cards interact with older cards and adjustments to older cards entries because of how they interact with new cards. Then you have someone who is going to need to have all of that verified, edited and uploaded. We are looking at dozens of manhours minimum each month. Then remember this is one of two games Damon does so we are looking at nearly a work week devoted only to explaining existing cards and interactions.

Until Cthulhu start sbringing in siginificantly more money so they can afford to hire an additional person or pay him enough to make up for the increased hours of work it is just unreasonable to expect this, and untennable for them to do without that additional income.

"Then you have someone who is going to need to have all of that verified, edited and uploaded."

Let me expand on this point too. Until you've done it, maintaining a set of rulings and updating special ability text may appear to be a few simple cut & pastes. In reality it doesn't work like that. It's staggering how many rounds of checking, reverifying, and so forth it can take to try to end up with a clean and correct final product. I wouldn't have believed it until I helped edit a new edition of a game rulebook and dealt with complex rules questions myself.

And my example, and breakdown for this is all VERY simplified.

By your line of thought if i make a crappy product i should not give additional man hours of work to make it a better product becouse i cant afford it.

And if i make a good product i have money to throw into a trash can on stuff that takes long time???

The argument about taking easy classes also sems to not make much sense here - its universities mistake to force you to do stuff you dont need, or you need it and should be taking it seriously. If you really dont want to improve your product but only get paid yeah, why wase time? But i dont think this is the case.

What I claim is: doing per card FAQ does take some time, but not that much as you need to make all those decisions when designing cards anyway and now you need to write them down to explain what the card does to playes. It will make the game better so it will be worth it.

I may be wrong, I dont know actual cost and how much better would game be and how much rule problems affect actual sale etc.

This "it costs much more than cut and paste" i really dont understand - becouse the rules are checked but not communicated to players now. Damon already answers those problems and spends much time designing cards, i really believe he doesnt write random text but thinks about complex interactions. Better comunication with players via card comments is litteraly cut and paste compared to writing a FAQ entry or answering a mail, and concerning cards that dont end up in FAQ it is not much work, as those cards need only short simple comment… unless they need some more and would end up in FAQ anyway - nad with those cards you just make the same work a bit sooner and dont confuse players.

Revisiting older cards would make this process much worse, but its not what im suggesting - Im suggesting you communicate what you already designed better. If old cards break players will tell you about it and you can update comment as you update FAQ.

The only real problem is if you change completely previous rulings changing old cards, but this is something you dont want to do anyway as it will really confuse players - and i thin if you do it noting it in per card comments is not a bad way to go. If you dont want to check all old cards at once just mark them as "to be corrected" and so it later in longer time span.

And this time is not wasted, as writing good comments makes you think about interactions with other cards - so it can be incorporated into a design process to improve said design process.

Also it is a problem of many FFG games, i didnt buy Invasion solely because I didnt understand core set cards and saw no support for players who want to know the rules. CoC has better wording and CCG experience to learn how to word cards and make timing structure. Also I had friends who seemed to know it. Even though i really like deckbuilding and LCG model, rule barier is something that does discourage new players. Even one shot games like Chaos in the old world still have some card interpretation problems. And its not that those problems are ignored - FAQ gets updated, it just can be improved so much by having an orginised card library with rule comments with FFG rulings and an ability to easly poll what is actually problematic to players.

well, thats just FFG for you and it has a poor reputation for this in australia. you either learn to live with it or change companies.

FFG produces high amounts of glitzy, rules unpolished and colourful games for the Gollums out there. i enjoy a few of them but prefer other companies for my complex boardgames.

But they have such great ideas. If its short development cycle and not enough testing than so be it - clearing up would require redesigning the game.

But when rules are designed and communications is at fault it can be fixed with relatively small cost - thats my idea.

I'm amused that within a handful of years Zephyr you are going to have an ah-ha moment. Until then you are doomed to be disappointed. I'm pretty much done with sympathy for you. Myopic points of view and entitled players have destroyed more playgroups I've been involved with than games whose after market support is less than some players want. No other industry is expected to do this and most companies in this industry don't do it at all. Yet people complain.

Its just a simple cost vs profit question.

I love how you not even consider me being actually right, see Dominion rulebook… didnt go that bad to explain cards for them.

But I know i can be wrong.

Still if its too expensive for FFG i dont understnad no fan project, I did upload FAQ and some rule comments on CardDB in like a month or so, with more ppl interested in actually making this game accesible over longer period of time it would be done much more already. Considering efficency discussing on this forum is a waste of time compared to posting an entry under card on a site (and you made this economic arguments). Here one person will learn the rules and maybe 10 will read and also learn something, on site it stays for all who will have problems in the future in an easy to find fasion…

Of course I haven't considered you to be right because you can't make a coherent argument that incorporates the fact of the matter.

Is doing a fan-based list really that terrible of an idea? It seems like it would be helpful and doable with a few volunteers

GrahamM said:

Penfold , you seams have good judgment because you understand very well rules and how mechanics rules.

So what about make a "rules group" to make a proper online faq ?

Zephir right about the problem for newcomers and the time spend to understand all case/mistake on the cards.

With an online faq classed by name, members and players just search for the card when a rules clarification is needed and found :

- Name card

- Original text

- faq text (with faq version number)

- exemple to use this card.

So we can use the current faq AND a wiki (for exemple) for players wanting to find QUICKLY an answer (with example to have a clear understanding of how the card effect rules).

All players can participate so the time spend will be split and it's free cost !

We need to create group with players with free time and others to check the wiki and remove any mistake

As long as you have dedicated volunteers to type up the initial drafts, I don't think accuracy would be a huge deal. Plenty of experienced players read through all the rules discussions in this thread--I think if there was a list of card explanations those experienced players would probably read through and correct it too. As far as finding people who actually want to do it--Zephyr seems like he is willing to try, I know I would gladly chip in some, and I'm sure other people would as well. Also for people who post frequently in the rules forum, like Penfold, it doesn't seem like it would be too much extra work to just type up a brief explanation of the card being discussed and add it to the list. Maybe I'm making the same mistake that Penfold thinks Zephyr made about extra work, but all of this seems pretty reasonable, especially because there are so many dedicated players on these forums.

Yes Graham, count me as volunter, so if Zephir could make a new topic to discuss it.

My issues is that Zephyr can't seem to get it past his head that FFG doesn't have the time, inclination, or money to do this. At no point have I ever argued that it couldn't be done by other people, and have on multiple occasions suggested that it be player driven, but he keeps insisting that FFG become involved. And that is just a ridiculous inability to understand economics and a myopic self-entitled and hopelessly unrealistic expectation.

I don't have time or the desire to right a paragraph on every card that exists and every interaction with every other card that exists.

I'll happily answer rules questions as they are posted on the forum. If I find something wrong in the wiki if I happen to be using it for something I'll correct it or add my two cents in. I might find time to do the occasional review. But I'm not going to be a main contributor, at least not directly.

And I agree 100% incorrect information is worse than too little information. If you aren't positive about how a card works or interacts, don't say anything on the wiki. Ask here or ask Damon. Otherwise we'll end up withy Expendable Muscle becoming an attachment before the effect that would would him even resolves (an logical impossibility and one which the rules don't allow for but was argued strongly for days by a world champion) or Kaleidoscope of Calyptra causing terror or willpower characters to be wounded for losing a terror struggle.

What would actually be really cool/much easier to do is just have a more easily navigable archive of FAQs and summaries/best posts in each of the rules discussion topics. I have no idea how someone would go about doing this, but I don't know anything about computers--does anyone know more?

Ok, I am actualy doing it already using fan site

http://www.cardgamedb.com/index.php/index.html

The advantage over wiki is that site has a really good card database with search function and has comments that are not used, so i used them for ruling discussion. And site has great cross card links with preview that make card references much better, especially for new players.

Downside is no support for ruling info, but maybe admin could be persuaded to add some tools it if enough ppl care; i think that having first post editable by all involved in ruling project would be enough.

After discusion i tend to upload results under card entry and i do add some entries on my own. I try to provide source to everything i upload and when im not sure i write im not sure.

http://www.cardgamedb.com/index.php/CoC/call-of-cthulhu-portal

has recent comments list so it can be used when ther are not that much new stuff to see whats new, i think a better and longer list could be added if admin is persuaded that it will actually help us.

I also reworked the fragment of FAQ i didnt like (numbers are not updated after recent FAQ change):

http://students.mimuw.edu.pl/~ls262570/faqPlaintext.htm

The problem is new players need to know about those resources in order for this to actually help them.

I still think that even if not giving rulings FFG would be great to advertise that such ruling is available to new players and if it does generate big traffic maybe some support for fan site in maintaining servers that give them nice service would be nice.

If you aren't sure you shouldn't write anythiing. Leave that to whoever is or contact Damon and get the official clarification.

This would make me write nothing, mailing everything to Damon doesnt make much sense - i have too many wierd problems and it would waste too much of his time to answer all of my doubts. Im writing forum posts when i ask stuff from time to time and get to know the game better in the process.

Also I want those comments to be a place where ppl can ask questions and answer is then moved to the top.

And I encourage you to write claryfications if there is anything wrong.

Just adjust your attitude a little while writing claryfications - this 'its all obvious just read FAQ' is just not good when someone is confused and doesn't understand rules. Explanations as simple as possible are the key - the more obvious they seem the better. You understand those rules really well, but explaining needs to be as simple and basic as possible with as little ambiguity as possible. Especialy "its obvious, why would you do it that differently" is completely missed approach. Just ignore other version and explain the problem as detailed as possible so its clear. And mechanic list of activities is simpler to understand than complex rule reference.

This is a forum. If you ask a question and I ask why you think it would be any other way it is to get to the root of the problem.

And this just got me to understand why you don't get the FAQ. It isn't just about giving concise answers to questions. It is about explaining the answers so you can get the mechanics of the game. So you get charts which detail where a thing can happen. Then it is up to you to apply that knowledge.

But you seem to not want to apply it. You seem to want the answers written out explicitly for every card for every possible circumstance. It is like the insanity question how the rules specifically state what has changed when a card goes insane and then you complaining for three or four posts that it doesn't say that the things not mentioned remain the same.

Can you imagine trying to write directions to your house that way? Now when you get to 3rd Avenue, not 3rd ST, or 3rd Blvd. and not 2nd Avenue or 4th Avenue, go right. Not left, not straight, not a u-turn, but right.

That doesn't help, that confuses the issue.

Instead it should be "When you get to 3rd Ave go right."

I rarely read the card comments or reviews, when I need to refer to a card I use the search feature and move on. If I come across something wrong or questionable I'll say something, but don't expect to see it.

One thing remains the same with insanity - name, and its not obvious. When all other things are gone not that hard to miss that.

Insane has no printed is also not obvious. They are printed on the other side but it doesn't count - also easy to get confused.

Most cards are ok and need no additional explanation. Some cards are more difficult to grasp but have similar pattern, its enough to see one of them explained, but with per card form you knever know witch one, so the best way is to get all (link to the explained one can be enough for others) or at least enough for player to eventually see one explained.

And there are some cards with unique or really rarely used with wording like Alyssa that almost never happens, those really benefit from explaining them in detail. Even if they can be deduced from general rules (in some cases its either really hard or close to impossible).

With your example. You say take 3td Avenue right, guy takes some random street, you explain "the street with 3td avenue written on it, not 3td street you see", he goes left, you explain "left is where you feel your heart, right is the opposite, go right", he eventually gets it. Even with this stupid example there are things that can go wrong and a way to clear them up as easy as possible.

Things can only go wrong if the guy cannot follow directions…

Rather telling isn't it?