Talk:F.A.T.A.L./GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Premeditated Chaos (talk · contribs) 07:21, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

DIBS.

Suggestions are discussable; I'm not going to die on a hill insisting on most of them.


 * Can we either briefly explain dice markup for any poor sucker who stumbles into this article who doesn't happen to have a background in TTRPGs, or remove the d100 detail?
 * I had the piped link in on 'd100' to Dice notation, but I totally see what you mean. Added a (hell of a deadpan) footnote.
 * Footnote is perfect, both as a practical explanation and from the perspective of showing "isn't this game just stupid"


 * 4th paragraph of the system section seems like it should be first, since it sort of sets up the premise of the game.
 * I tested a bit with moving around system sections and wasn't sure it actually flowed better. I do see what you mean, but it just seemed to lose something. (Also, I feel like half the people reading this are just coming for the 'anal circumference' line, so may as well have that high up.)
 * half the people reading this are just coming for the 'anal circumference' line - Okay, you got me there.


 * On that topic, second sentence of para 4 doesn't quite make sense, grammatically. "The game master...is encouraged to be adversarial rather than collaborative, with difficult combat and frequent character death." I think it's the "with" that's problematic, as it reads like the game master has difficult combat, which of course he doesn't; the game does, if that makes sense? I'm honestly not sure how to reword it without wonking up your whole sentence, so I'll leave it up to you.
 * Yep, get what you mean -- reworded that sentence. (It's a bit long, but I write sentences long.)
 * Long sentences gang represent. Looks good to me.


 * Do we really not have a better source for serf than Britannica? (I know, it's not not allowed, it just sucks).
 * Surprisingly hard thing to find a non-sucky source for! I went to Serfdom and pulled out this. It looks a bit odd, but the About Us seems consistent with a legitimate educational resource (with the WP:CHILDRENSLIT caveats), and Cite Unseen doesn't pull up anything like it does for Britannica.
 * If it works for the serf article it works for me.


 * (This is minor nitpicking at worst) The placement of the FATAL logo feels weird. It's just sort of jammed in there in the system section. Same with the audio sample, which is set a paragraph down from where it's actually mentioned.
 * Might depend a bit on one's individual browser, screen size, desktop vs mobile, etc for how it renders, but I think the audio sample at least fits pretty well -- it's as close to the mention as you can get without the paragraph looking ugly. I do see what you mean about the logo -- it's a bit randomly placed, but not really anywhere better to put it. I was mainly using the consideration of "don't put it too close to the infobox and throw off the image/sidebar balance".
 * Fair enough. Like I said, minor nitpicking :)


 * The Reception section is really tight and well-organized. I have very little to suggest here except that I might re-order the paragraphs in the Reception section slightly, so as to put para 2 at the end. That would put it sort of in order of response - immediate reception to creator response to eventual chilling effect on the, er, sex RPG subgenre.
 * Concur here, I switched them around to see how it looks and agree this is better.


 * Alternately, maybe that paragraph could be relocated to Legacy, since it basically addresses the legacy of the game?


 * I am fairly dubious about that last paragraph. I'm willing to let a Blogspot interview slide, generally, on the grounds that it's treated as a primary source. I am not listening to it, on the grounds of it's four hours long, so I'm taking it on good faith that you have. I also couldn't find the promised transcript on the RPGnet thread, but may have missed it. Broadly speaking these bullet points are one hill I will make a stand on.


 * Is there any citation for "Not long after the release of the second edition, Hall, the game's primary creator, left the tabletop gaming world and sank into obscurity. Little would be heard from the creators of the game until 2014"? I recognize that it's the kind of thing that's more often self-evident and hard to cite, but I can't let it slide in a GA without a proper reference or a rewrite.
 * Quick note on this while I run around fixing the other interview-related problems -- this specifically is from the interview, and will be marked to the exact section when I sort those out (pretty sure it's an early one). (The "move to Connecticut to restore muscle cars" line in this totally unrelated essay is actually a surreptitious reference.)


 * Following that, you have a bunch of quotes, but no timestamps. At the very least you're gonna need to be specific about which segment of the interview each one come from.
 * Oh boy is it a long, many-part interview. I'll...see what I can do...but I think at best it'll wind up as "what segment of the interview" rather than "exact timestamp". Might take a bit to get them, but I should be able to at least trace everything to the right segment.
 * That works for me, no rush.
 * All the interview quotes are now cited to sections. I reworded the last bit a little to seem less, uh, BLPVIO-y. There's still a degree of "copyright issues out of a primary source" going on, and the actual rulebooks themselves are ambiguous as to what the case is (they're registered to "Fatal Games", it's unclear if this company is only Hall, but he seems to define himself as the game's auteur and the co-creators as side notes). Will see at some point if I can fish up a confirmation that Fatal Games = Byron Hall alone, though I have to say that if it wasn't we'd probably have FATAL 3e by now. (On that FATAL 3e note, it apparently exists. I may end up expanding a little before we're done. Your call on if that paragraph is getting a bit long, and where to break it up if it is.)
 * I appreciate the revision on the "skipped town" thing. Can we revise the wording of "would not return Hausler's calls" a little to make it super explicit that it's Hausler claiming that, not an objective fact? Even if we just say "Hausler told the interviewer that...XYZ". I know, BLP of people involved in FATAL, but one never knows - maybe Mr. Hall will read the article one day. I think for the references you can probably simplify from "event occurs at" to just "Part 1" or whatever.
 * You can't imagine how amused I am by the image of Byron Hall reading this. As for "event occurs at", that's as far as I can tell hardcoded into Template:Cite AV media. Will be making minor fixes and possible expansions as I go.
 * Oh, I didn't realize that, no problem. I think...assuming you're done with the interview citations, we're pretty much good to roll? &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 07:35, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Sure should be.  Vaticidal prophet  07:57, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
 * In the words of noted scholar Matthew McConaughey, alright alright alright! &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 01:25, 19 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Is there any more detail about this copyright thing? It's bordering on a BLP issue, since it's basically an unsubstantiated accusation from a primary source.

Broadly speaking though, this article is damn fine. It's professional-sounding content on a subject that's tremendously puerile, which is not easy to write without lapsing into silliness. The sourcing is generally fairly good; I'm willing to accept the Blogspot and Something Awful sources on the basis of being primary and being cited for identified opinions rather than facts. Looking forward to seeing your thoughts on my comments. &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 08:42, 14 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Comments from non-reviewer - apologies for butting in, but I noticed two issues that the reviewer did not bring up.
 * Currently, the article does not cite sources for the game's release date or genres - needed to satisfy GA criterion 2.
 * Additionally, it is confusing (criterion 1) to say "first published in 2002" in the lead and then only mention the alpha's 2000 release in the infobox. I would suggest altering the text in the lead (I can see the footnote, but the lead is short enough and this information key enough that I don't think it should be a problem to mention the three dates here), and mentioning all the dates in the infobox --AlexandraIDV 15:25, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Question, you now have the original books as references for the publication dates, which I'm fine with, but the 1st ed book shows a date of 2003 in the ref. Is that a typo? &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 00:35, 17 March 2021 (UTC)