| cosmicnut |
cosmicnut wrote:If you want to be that nit pickey then you are barring people with lower education, learning difficulties, issues like dyslexia. Not to mention people who's first language isn't English. This is supposed to be an "Open call" not a "Call to everyone with a degree in English"
What is being looked for here is creativity.
How many errata are there for the Pathfinder Core Rulebook? How many times have you seen a rule that needed more information or a quick check online to see how others apply it?
I respectfully disagree with this comment.
While RPG superstar is a 'Open Call' contest, it is competition that is primarily designed to find new freelance talent for Paizo (who happens to be a publisher). Its not a creativity contest per se. Yeah, we should be enjoying the creative process and be able to offer something creative as designers. Why else would we be here and why else would Paizo want to hire us, but you need to have a strong command of the English language if you want to get your work published.
A child might be able to come up with a cool and creative idea but he would not possess the necessary language to communicate it properly. That is our job as designers and it is expected of us.
That's not to say you shouldn't enter the completion if you have learning difficulties or a poor grasp of grammar. You just need to understand if you are doing it more for yourself, to grow as a designer or to have fun, or if you are aiming for the big prize.
By your own logic, a child could come up with an average idea, get their parents to trim the English and still win, do you think they would be up to the task if they won? Should we all start hiring professional editors to check our work?
I agree that you need a certain standard of English but we are not talking about creating sentences that make sense here, we are talking the odd missing full stop, capital letter type of errors that any editor worth their salt would pick up and correct. We are talking the odd misuse of a word by someone not use to writing in English, we are talking a spelling error due to someone unfamiliar with typing (rarer these days though).
Your saying that we should ban the best writer in the world from the competition because they write 1000 not 1,000
Do you think that the likes of Agatha Christie made no mistakes on the first draft of a novel?
At the end of the day its up to Paizo to tell us how good our English has to be. We should be helping each other to create great works not knocking someone with a typo.