The other writers are assigned certain fields by the lead writer and are instructed what to do with them.
You don’t need other writers.
If you want to deliver an AA game within a reasonable timeframe, you do. And anything Obsidian does is AA. They're not a small indie studio that can afford longer development times or shorter content, because they have certain expectations to fulfill and their production costs are higher. It is what it is. They could fire half their staff and downgrade from AA to a higher-profile indie, but they won't do that because their current model works for them. If you have 6 major locations and each location should have a dozen quests, you need more than one writer.
A good lead writer will give them appropriate jobs and appropriate direction.
Expressions such as “lead writer” and “narrative designer” are the signs of the times. The cRPG apocalypse is near. Pure decadence.
The lead writer is the guy who is the boss of the other writers. He should also be expected to know some shit about quest and game design if he is worth his pay. It's not decadence and not some kind of fuzzy term like "narrative designer". It has a clear job description: guy who does most of the writing and instructs the other writers on what to do. It is a necessary position within a team with more than one writer.
You, Mary, are going to write quests for this town. Try to keep the general atmosphere desperate, make quests that reflect the destitute situation of the people.
And since Mary is a completely different person, the resulting location will leave a lot to be desired.
Nice selective quoting here. You missed this part:
I chose you to write the quests for this town because I know tragic stories and quests with harsh choices are your forte.
A good lead writer assigns the writers that work with him to jobs he knows they can do. A good lead writer knows the writing style of the writers who work for him, knows their strengths and weaknesses, and therefore knows what they can do best and what they can't do.
This way, the writers know what they're supposed to do, they're assigned to regions where their writing style is the most fitting, and they have enough wiggle room to let their creativity shine while still having enough direction to stay consistent within the central vision.
Their styles and competence will still be different.
You are just repeating the bad practices that are prevalent today in the cRPG industry as if they were solid advices.
Their competence should be on at least a semi-professional level else the problem isn't the game having more than one writer, the problem is that some writers just aren't good at their jobs. When hiring writers, you hire those that are good fit to your game.
Let's say you're making a new game and need to hire a couple of new people for it. You know the plan calls for having a lot of quests in the game. That requires writers (who are also quest designers by the way; RPG writers should be able to design non-linear quests, that's part of the job qualification). You publish a job offer for 3 new writers. You get 10 applications. You interview the applicants. You choose the 3 people whose skills and writing styles fit the best to your game. Simple as that.
You're acting as if the leads of a game don't know what the people who work for them are like. That's not how a well-organized team works. In a well-organized team the leads know what the guys working under them are like, and can give them tasks that play to their strengths.
The problems you mention only happen when the team is being mismanaged.
Which was exactly the case in, say, Torment: Numenera.
