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Project Direction and Writing in RPGs - Do RPGs actually benefit from having more than one writer?

JarlFrank

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In fact, I'd argue that having only one writer is actually detrimental to a project. You need at least a second guy to take on the role of editor for the first writer, else we'll end up with overwritten stuff like Numenera which would have benefitted from having its texts trimmed quite a bit.
 

Strange Fellow

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
No, I'm suggesting that it's better than Age of Decadence despite being developed within a reasonable timeframe by a bigger team.
Let this record show that Strange Fellow thinks that KOTOR2 and Divinity: Original Sin are better cRPGs than Age of Decadence.
Yes, and they're on opposite extremes of this writing/gameplay axis of yours: KOTOR 2 has better writing and worse gameplay, while D:OS has better gameplay and worse writing. I realise the Codex aggregate holds D:OS in lower esteem than I, and probably agrees with you on this, but there you go.
 

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In fact, I'd argue that having only one writer is actually detrimental to a project. You need at least a second guy to take on the role of editor for the first writer, else we'll end up with overwritten stuff like Numenera which would have benefitted from having its texts trimmed quite a bit.

Editors are, in general, badly needed in video game writing. Are there even any studios employing honest to God editors in that capacity, or is it, at best, someone on the writing team given an additional task? Because if you just hand editing duties to a writer who would produce Numenera-esque purple prose ad nauseam, how likely are they to clamp down on that sort of thing?
 

JarlFrank

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In fact, I'd argue that having only one writer is actually detrimental to a project. You need at least a second guy to take on the role of editor for the first writer, else we'll end up with overwritten stuff like Numenera which would have benefitted from having its texts trimmed quite a bit.

Editors are, in general, badly needed in video game writing. Are there even any studios employing honest to God editors in that capacity, or is it, at best, someone on the writing team given an additional task? Because if you just hand editing duties to a writer who would produce Numenera-esque purple prose ad nauseam, how likely are they to clamp down on that sort of thing?

It's not usual to have a full-fledged editor on the team. Good editors aren't cheap, and all they do is go through already existing content to improve it. An additional writer can contribute new content, and also edit existing content on the side, so you get more bang for your buck.

Considering how often game development goes into crunch, some of the content is delivered last minute, and most games always end up with some cut content, it means that usually there isn't much time to give it a proper editing pass.

Whenever you hear Obsidian guys talk about the editing process, they mention the writer himself or another writer on the team dealing with it. Durance and Grieving Mother were cut down by Avellone himself, who wrote them. In PoE2 writers edited each other's stuff.

Which kinda makes sense. Hiring an editor for a 100k words fantasy novel is expensive. RPGs these days have more words than that. It's often not considered to be worth it.
Also, apparently devs love to brag with wordcounts (remember how inXile bragged about the wordcount of Numenera) so why would you hire a guy who reduces that wordcount :M
 
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Sacred82

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In fact, I'd argue that having only one writer is actually detrimental to a project. You need at least a second guy to take on the role of editor for the first writer, else we'll end up with overwritten stuff like Numenera which would have benefitted from having its texts trimmed quite a bit.

it's a problem to put a writer as editor for another writer.

Either they're not on par; so the worse one is "correcting" shit he doesn't understand, or it begs the question why you didn't put the better guy in charge of writing instead of editing.

I have a feeling that writers tend to be shut-ins who disappear for a long time and then come back with a whole load of stuff. You can't really explain the MCA/ Pillars disaster any other way short of sabotage. If anything they should be continually supervised by some kind of lead designer or project lead to hammer home the point of the writing they're doing at the moment and to funnel their energies into writing that is more productive to the game.
 

Kyl Von Kull

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it's a problem to put a writer as editor for another writer.

most professional editors are also writers!

Either they're not on par; so the worse one is "correcting" shit he doesn't understand, or it begs the question why you didn't put the better guy in charge of writing instead of editing.

it's a somewhat different skill set! But from what I understand, the lead writer is in charge of both writing and editing. Nevertheless, someone needs to edit the lead guy's output. Everyone's work benefits from an editor. The editor would need to be unbelievably bad for their input to make the end product worse.
 
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Sacred82

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it's a problem to put a writer as editor for another writer.

most professional editors are also writers!

people can write shit, edit shit, and publish shit in written form all day erry day for all I care. Shit in magazines, you can just skip. Shit in literature, welp, it's still a different medium. Prose in video games serves a different purpose.

Either they're not on par; so the worse one is "correcting" shit he doesn't understand, or it begs the question why you didn't put the better guy in charge of writing instead of editing.

it's a somewhat different skill set! But from what I understand, the lead writer is in charge of both writing and editing.

which just serves to create a stronger bubble (the writers are watching over the writers) which would explain why so much writing in video games stands out like a sore thumb or beside the other elements.

Nevertheless, someone needs to edit the lead guy's output.

yeah, someone has to trim that verbose stream down and make it fit into the game. Who has a better idea of the game, lead designer or lead writer?

Everyone's work benefits from an editor. The editor would need to be unbelievably bad for their input to make the end product worse.

"I'm here to not make anything worse", worst job description ever.
 

Cross

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Everyone's work benefits from an editor. The editor would need to be unbelievably bad for their input to make the end product worse.
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In fact, I'd argue that having only one writer is actually detrimental to a project. You need at least a second guy to take on the role of editor for the first writer, else we'll end up with overwritten stuff like Numenera which would have benefitted from having its texts trimmed quite a bit.

Editors are, in general, badly needed in video game writing. Are there even any studios employing honest to God editors in that capacity, or is it, at best, someone on the writing team given an additional task? Because if you just hand editing duties to a writer who would produce Numenera-esque purple prose ad nauseam, how likely are they to clamp down on that sort of thing?

It's not usual to have a full-fledged editor on the team. Good editors aren't cheap, and all they do is go through already existing content to improve it. An additional writer can contribute new content, and also edit existing content on the side, so you get more bang for your buck.

Considering how often game development goes into crunch, some of the content is delivered last minute, and most games always end up with some cut content, it means that usually there isn't much time to give it a proper editing pass.

Whenever you hear Obsidian guys talk about the editing process, they mention the writer himself or another writer on the team dealing with it. Durance and Grieving Mother were cut down by Avellone himself, who wrote them. In PoE2 writers edited each other's stuff.

Which kinda makes sense. Hiring an editor for a 100k words fantasy novel is expensive. RPGs these days have more words than that. It's often not considered to be worth it.
Also, apparently devs love to brag with wordcounts (remember how inXile bragged about the wordcount of Numenera) so why would you hire a guy who reduces that wordcount :M

Sure, I get that. I suppose I just wish polishing writing was more of a focus and that wordcount brag would die the miserable death it deserves. In the end it all comes down to how messed up video game development is, doesn't it? Hey, maybe if Sawyer can organize that union he's been dreaming about we can have less miserable dev cycles and better content. Long live the devletariat!
 

IHaveHugeNick

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it's a problem to put a writer as editor for another writer.

Either they're not on par; so the worse one is "correcting" shit he doesn't understand, or it begs the question why you didn't put the better guy in charge of writing instead of editing.

Stop posting.
 

Kyl Von Kull

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It's not usual to have a full-fledged editor on the team. Good editors aren't cheap, and all they do is go through already existing content to improve it. An additional writer can contribute new content, and also edit existing content on the side, so you get more bang for your buck.

Considering how often game development goes into crunch, some of the content is delivered last minute, and most games always end up with some cut content, it means that usually there isn't much time to give it a proper editing pass.

MRY made some very good points on this front in his big Roxor rebuttal:
The Production Cycle Does Not Allow for Major Revisions

The tl;dr crowd can breathe a sigh of relief; my fingers and mind grow weary.

The problem with writing the now-standard kind of RPG dialogue is that it takes so long that it is seldom finished far in advance of whatever the final hard cut-off date is (localization, vocalization, shipping, whatever). Only in journalism, I think, is there the same compression of writing and publication. In other media -- in my experience, in legal writing, in fiction writing, and in academic writing -- revision is critical, and often takes as long as the writing itself, if not longer.

One major aspect of revision in other media is that it happens at the end. To be sure, writers revise on the fly. But when the piece is done, editors (including the author) read it from start to finish and make considerable changes. Another draft is produced, and the process begins again. Then you have polishing drafts -- your tool slowly goes from a hacksaw to fine-grained sandpaper. For important pieces of writing, I've had more than 20 or even 50 rounds of revision.

This is simply impossible with RPGs.

There is too much text, it is finished too late, and it cannot simply be "read" because often how it works is not apparent without playing it, and playing it in context. Of course, individual conversations are reviewed as they come in. And sometimes they are reworked quite a bit. There are conversations in TTON that had 40+ versions in Perforce. But I am skeptical that it is possible to undertake major revisions, let alone multiple major revisions, once the whole game is written.

In essence, the nature of the beast is that by the time the writing is done, there is no time to edit it. It would be like tearing down a house after it was built because it turned out to be not quite what the builder wanted.


To some degree this could be dealt with by reducing the amount of text, but I doubt the text could be reduced enough (in the kind of RPG we're talking about) to make such revisions feasible. Thus, I think that an inherent feature of narrative, dialogue-heavy RPGs is that they are immune to the rewrites and structural changes that you would tend to see in other written works, despite the fact that editing and iteration are critical to good writing.

I think there are some people whose response would be that this is an argument to return to the much slimmer text of RPGs before the mid-90s and to focus on other means of story-telling than dialogue. That is a whole other debate, and one that's a little hard for me to wrap my head around because it is at least a little bit like saying, "If you find fantasy novels too long-winded, you should just watch fantasy movies." There obviously is a huge swath of players who like dialogue-tree-based RPGs, and so I think trying to abandon the form altogether is probably not a great idea.

which just serves to create a stronger bubble (the writers are watching over the writers) which would explain why so much writing in video games stands out like a sore thumb or beside the other elements.

yeah, someone has to trim that verbose stream down and make it fit into the game. Who has a better idea of the game, lead designer or lead writer?

I swear to Lenin's embalmed corpse, it's like some of you guys are incapable of having more than one thought at a time. We get it! You've read Roxor's essay and you agree with him. I'm very happy for you. But "RPGs are overwritten and RPG writers should take a more subordinate role relative to game designers" is not the answer to every question about RPG writing. In many cases (like now), it's not even relevant.

What should the writers on this game watch/read/play for inspiration?

"RPG writers are shit and should take their cue from real game designers." Oooookay.

Would our dialogue benefit from an editor?

"RPG writers are shit and should take their cue from real game designers."

How many writers do we need on this project?

"RPG writers are shit and should take their cue from real game designers."

Truly, a genius take.

"Hey, I know this one thing about RPG writing and it's not really related to this question at all, but I'm going to try to shoehorn it into every fucking conversation where someone uses the word writing."
 
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Sacred82

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which just serves to create a stronger bubble (the writers are watching over the writers) which would explain why so much writing in video games stands out like a sore thumb or beside the other elements.

yeah, someone has to trim that verbose stream down and make it fit into the game. Who has a better idea of the game, lead designer or lead writer?

I swear to Lenin's embalmed corpse, it's like some of you guys are incapable of having more than one thought at a time. We get it! You've read Roxor's essay and you agree with him. I'm very happy for you. But "RPGs are overwritten and RPG writers should take a more subordinate role relative to game designers" is not the answer to every question about RPG writing.

I haven't and my point flew over your head, apparently. I didn't speak of "a more subordinate role" because

1.) I hope writers already realize they their contribution only constitutes part of the design, not different from that of other artists

and

2.) it's about someone with the clearest/ highest priority vision of what the game is supposed to be being in direct control of the writers, regularly. As in, don't let them go unchecked. Not everyone working on some tidbit of the mechanics needs to supervise the writers, but the guy who has the best picture of how those puzzle pieces are going to fit together.

:slamdunkride:

Look who's at the steering wheel. I rest my case.


In many cases (like now), it's not even relevant.

What should the writers on this game watch/read/play for inspiration?

whow, now without supervision and feedback by the lead designer, that shit sounds like a recipe for disaster. You never know what someone else is going to take away from whatever you made them read/ watch/ play. Might as well just minutely explain to them what you're looking for and just show them some snippets of works that qualify (while explaining how your game is going to differ)
 

sser

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Somewhat related to this topic, but virtually all of Battle Brothers' writing is first-draft material because there's not enough resources (read: time) to go back and look things over. I would change a lot if given the time. But, you know. I have other interests. I have to work. I have to exercise. I have to chase skirt. And fundamentally, I'd rather write three new events with the occasional typo or overwritten shit than focus in on a single one. And the writing process is almost ridiculously fast because I'm given great leeway to do things as I want. Having near autonomous control has allowed us to greatly expand just how much content we have. As a company grows larger and expands into more roles, a lot of that is going to be delegated. It's hard to say how much one could be 'autocratic' at an Obsidian level unless you had an absolute workhorse at the wheel when it came to content creation.
 

SausageInYourFace

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I complained about the virtually non-existent story in Dungeon Rats once and VD said there wasn't enough time for one, also stating that its not so much the writing itself as it is the scripting of the events that takes the time. Interesting that scripting should take that long when you have a working editor, you'd think its just connecting some nodes in a program.
 
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Harry Easter

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They do, because writing is not only the Quests and dialogues, but little stuff like item descriptions, editing (LOTS of editing), testing and rewriting. You can share the workload and writers do more work than ever, because the demands for writing got higher (and the writing did get better), but you won't see that most of the time, because we got used to it. Doing a dozen reactions to one dialogue choice is more work than you get shown, if you haven't read the document.

Video games just got to big, to rely only on one person doing all the texts, maybe except in little indy-productions and then it takes you even more time.

So yes, more writers are a good thing and most writers work their asses off, but even they can't do a thing, if the designers or programmers don't coordinate good (that's what a producer is for). You see that for example with the first game of the Tomb Raider Reboot: heartfelt story about young woman finding herself, contrasting with gameplay which makes her look deranged.
 

MRY

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In fact, I'd argue that having only one writer is actually detrimental to a project. You need at least a second guy to take on the role of editor for the first writer, else we'll end up with overwritten stuff like Numenera which would have benefitted from having its texts trimmed quite a bit.
This strikes me as exactly backward for several reasons:

(1) As a factual matter, TTON had many writers, not one, and thus would seem to be prima facie evidence against your point, not in support of it.
(2) The more writers you have, the more text you can have; the more text you have, the less likely it is to get edited.
(3) The more writers you have, the more inconsistencies you introduce, and thus the greater the editorial load gets shifted toward, e.g., having a uniform "voice" or making sure that the separate pieces connect properly.
(4) A single writer working with a single editor is more likely to achieve a rapport than multiple writers working with a single editor or, worse, multiple writers and multiple editors.

I've said many times that I think a single writer is best (e.g., here). It's no surprise that two of my favorite RPGs -- PS:T and AOD -- are dominated by a single author (though, to be clear, there were additional writers helping out at the margins).
 

Urthor

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I've said many times that I think a single writer is best (e.g., here). It's no surprise that two of my favorite RPGs -- PS:T and AOD -- are dominated by a single author (though, to be clear, there were additional writers helping out at the margins).
Honestly this makes it sound like the exact opposite. In that the key isn't the number of writers but that the lead writer has to have absolutely ironclad domination of the vision and the ratio of editing time (not necessarily number of editors since writers can edit) to writers has to be really high in larger projects.

It's not about the process "single writers make tight controlled narratives therefore all games should have single writers," it's about the outcome "we want tight controlled visions and they better damn well be tight, controlled, and done well."

To me the number of writers has to be >0 at some stage because *if* you want there to be choices in consequences, there has to be a branching narrative, and at some point having a single writer write a branching narrative of large enough proportions in a large enough game you need to have more than one person.
 

Vault Dweller

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I complained about the virtually non-existent story in Dungeon Rats once and VD said there wasn't enough time for one, also stating that its not so much the writing itself as it is the scripting of the events that takes the time. Interesting that scripting should take that long when you have a working editor, you'd think its just connecting some nodes in a program.
Connecting nodes is very easy and doesn't take much time. Setting up quest variables, stages, scripting consequences, scripting NPCs involved in several quests, testing, fixing, testing again can take a very long time, no matter how experienced you are (we were inexperienced when we started but by the time we hit Ganezzar we had years of experience and knew the engine and the tools inside out; the city still took a year to implement, not just the scripting of course but level design, setting up fights, etc).
 

MRY

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Honestly this makes it sound like the exact opposite. In that the key isn't the number of writers but that the lead writer has to have absolutely ironclad domination of the vision and the ratio of editing time (not necessarily number of editors since writers can edit) to writers has to be really high in larger projects.

It's not about the process "single writers make tight controlled narratives therefore all games should have single writers," it's about the outcome "we want tight controlled visions and they better damn well be tight, controlled, and done well."

To me the number of writers has to be >0 at some stage because *if* you want there to be choices in consequences, there has to be a branching narrative, and at some point having a single writer write a branching narrative of large enough proportions in a large enough game you need to have more than one person.
I was responding to the assertion that sprawling messes are more likely to come from a single writer than a group of writers, which I don't think is true (among other things, for the reason you state at the end: one writer can't really produce a sprawling mess on his own).

You're of course right that a sufficiently charismatic (to get the other writers to perform), autocratic (to have the will to make them perform), and talented (to have the judgment as to what he should make them perform) leader, equipped with a cadre of talented editors, could wrangle plural authorship into a fine state. I'm not sure that such a messianic figure exists, however, and thus I am left thinking that since a single writer (perhaps with some marginal help) can pull off the same thing with only one of those three traits (talent), singular authorship is preferable.

You're also right that it is very hard to have a sprawling non-mess of branching dialogues with a single writer. AOD is probably the outer limits of what you are likely to get, and many people (including myself) thought it felt underwritten in parts. But generally I would take an underwritten RPG a la AOD to an overwritten RPG a la POE, which wore me out before the first scene was over. There's room in the world for all of them, of course.

Finally, I still stand by what I said, quoted above, regarding editing. I think it's naive to hope that sprawling branching dialogue RPGs will ever be carefully edited as a complete work. Dialogues can be edited piecemeal as they roll in, but that's something different. You're never gonna have enough time at the back end to give the dialogue a thorough overhaul. It's just not how the process works because a lot of the writing is behind a bottleneck of level design, encounter design, system design, etc. I suspect that it would be hard to hold the project up for that kind of editing.
 

zaper

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I can't speak for big projects because I don't know shit about the gaming industry, but my first published piece of Interactive Fiction was a project which I co-authored with a friend and I think it was for the best for the following reasons:

1: He had a better vocabulary and was very good at setting the mood and doing creepy descriptions. It was a lovecraftian investigative tale so this was a very important thing, and without him I think the narration would be very bland.
2: I was better at structuring the plot, providing reactivity to the player's choices and coming up with branches. Without me I think the game would be too railroaded.
3: We would bounce ideas to one another and revise each other's texts constantly. This led to a LOT of problems as some nuances and references would be removed because one of us wasn't perceiving the intentions behind certain word usages or descriptions, but after much struggle we eventually synched by brute forcing explanations to one another.
4: It helps a lot to work with someone who is as invested as you are in something. Its a type of healthy competition and it got me to finally finish a project.

That being said, I don't think I would ever work again with someone in the same context. I would prefer to either work under someone or as a narrative lead with an absolute final say on things.

EDIT: Oh, or by myself, of course. After that I embarked on a solo project wich took way more time than it should, but not because I wasn't producing. Without the pressure of working under someone or with someone, I simply didn't know where to stop. There was always more stuff to do, more ideas to explore, more feedback to consider.

What was supposed to take me six months has now taken two years, with around six times the content I originally intended for it to have.
 
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HarveyBirdman

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For fuck's sake, where do you think D&D came from, if not Tolkien?
Tolkien wasn't one of the main influences:
I don't believe that for a second. If you're writing something fantasy-related and you don't list Tolkein as an influence, you're either trying (and failing) to make yourself appear hyper-literate, or you have taste so poor that Guinea Bissau looks bourgeois.
 

MRY

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For fuck's sake, where do you think D&D came from, if not Tolkien?
Tolkien wasn't one of the main influences:
I don't believe that for a second. If you're writing something fantasy-related and you don't list Tolkein as an influence, you're either trying (and failing) to make yourself appear hyper-literate, or you have taste so poor that Guinea Bissau looks bourgeois.
By that point, they had already been sued by Tolkien's estate. The best effort to defend Gygax from his copying of Tolkien is probably this: http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2010/01/gygax-on-tolkien-again.html It notes a pre-lawsuit article where Gygax was already disclaiming his copying. But, please. The bestiary is lifted directly from Tolkien, the whole concept of an adventuring party is very Tolkien, the notion of "dungeons" to explore is Tolkien (and clearly modeled on Moria). And near his death, Gygax admitted that Tolkien "had a strong impact" on D&D (http://archives.theonering.net/features/interviews/gary_gygax.html).

That's not to say that the other sources didn't also have an influence, and it may be that the use of Tolkien elements was basically an enticement to players (which is what Gygax suggests in his various statements) rather than Gygax's own desire to copy Tolkien, but there's basically no chance that AD&D would be part of mass culture if it had stuck to non-Tolkien stuff like gnolls and beholders.

Also, note that when the D&D precursor, Chainmail, added a fantasy setting, it was specifically marketed as being set up to let the player “refight the epic struggles related by J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and other fantasy writers." (Note the order.) Obviously, Chainmail was a larger scale wargame, so perhaps Tolkien was more relevant there, but...

One last edit! This quote from Gygax seems downright Darth Roxor-ian: "Take several of Tolkien’s heroic figures for example. Would a participant in a fantasy game more readily identify with Bard of Dale? Aragorn? Frodo Baggins? or would he rather relate to Conan, Fafhrd, the Grey Mouser, or Elric of Melnibone? The answer seems all too obvious." If Gygax only knew the deep lore, and int/wis-laden builds, that would dominate today's RPGs, he might have never left wargaming!
 
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