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Editorial RPG Codex Editorial: Without Map, Compass, or Destination - MRY on RPG Writing

Kasparov

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I had, or still have an idea for a game and thats how i would design it from the get go.
The race is on!

Also: you’re preaching to the choir. Your points are good and I agree with the gist of it: less encounters, better design, more (story) impact.

Basically turn the currently solely quantity focused combat systems toward combat systems that focus on quality (in a smaller quantity).

The first time I played PS:T I remember being pleasantly surprised when I could end the game by dying outside of combat. That’s one example of what I consider an alternative conflict resolution. You die - game ends. But you could have more options to end the game. Options that do not necessarily involve someone dying. People make choices. Imagine a Tyranny where you could walk into the wastes after the first in-game battle and leave that super-magic-overlord nonsense behind.

Anyway. Let’s take your non lethal combat example and try and steer this conversation back toward writing: If it’s just a mechanic that makes deadly encounters more impactful, then eventually that becomes rote as well and loses its emotional impact. This is where that “less (encounters) is more” comes in. Branching solutions and outcomes would be akin to branching choices and outcomes in a dialogue. A bitch to design and code, I’m sure.

EDIT:
And “less is more” works on many levels (it should include the lenght of my comments in this thread as well...). Open world games could try to gain scope by going into depth rather than width. Not every game has to be about a literal farmboy with a background tag “Ran away with the circus” fighting literal dragons in the third kingdom over (counting from the starting tutorial location).
 

Crescent Hawk

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I think my favourite will always be the one where you village gets burned down because its the usual expulsion from paradise\end of childhood, you can have some heart wrenching moments in the beginning if done well. And it can have many variations.
I don't know I like it, I love that Dune has almost half a book where that sword hangs over you head. And later you can have sweet revenge as main plot for either good or bad ends.
 

Kasparov

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I think my favourite will always be the one where you village gets burned down because its the usual expulsion from paradise\end of childhood, you can have some heart wrenching moments in the beginning if done well. And it can have many variations.
I don't know I like it, I love that Dune has almost half a book where that sword hangs over you head. And later you can have sweet revenge as main plot for either good or bad ends.
Hey, how about NO revenge on the menu? Dishonored might have a story to match the stellar art direction.
 

Deleted Member 22431

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PSt combat suffered the most from the wrong idea of how "real time" will make it sell better. If anything the game would have benefited from less combat encounters. But making those that remain better. Same thing with Arcanum and its attempt to fuse the two different combat systems, or similar attempt in van Buren. Less is more.

If anything, T:ToN proved the opposite. PS:T, it turned out, was a better game also because it gave more emphasis to combat: more encounters add pacing, make character progression more rewarding and the itemization more interesting. Now that I look back, I can’t think in a single cRPG that was any good without loads of combat. Even Kings of Dragon Pass, bona fide C&C game, had tons of combat. Of course that doesn’t mean that trash mobs is a good idea, but the solution to trash mobs is not less combat, but better encounter design. Less is not always more.

That was often mentioned during the kickstarter of TtoN as one of the weaknesses of PST which should be corrected but the execution failed as the rest.
Maybe the execution failed in that regard because it was an impossible task.

I think the problem is two fold. First - the combat became everything and majority of content in every RPG (and most other games) because its a seemingly easy way to emotionally hook the players and increase or pad the overall amount of content.
Or maybe because it contains an important truth about the genre and throwing out of the window as obsolete concept is pretentious and misguided. It is easy to be original by making mistakes and denying important truths.

Second - because all of that combat is lethal. It may seem like a good idea at first as something to increase the emotional investment in players but that quickly wears off.
Wears off to whom, exactly? You?
 
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grotsnik

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MRY, I get that you don't want to get into a debate about the merits of Tides of Numenara, but I do find it strange that so much of what you've written about RPG dialogue structure and style not coming with a roadmap...specifically does not apply to the game that kicked off this article in the first place.

Tides explicitly set out to follow the roadmap of its predecessor, and PS:T was an RPG with very clear and fully replicable ideas about what RPG writing should be, down to the smallest detail: about how moral choices should be arranged in the dialogue box, about how many dialogue options there should be, about where the prose descriptions should ramp up and where it should ease back, about how the mystery of the plot should be seeded through the gameplay, and how much should be concealed from the player, and for how long...

All of this was pre-determined. There was a perfect model in place to be studied and dissected. There could be none of the uncertainty you mention about which rules should apply, and which inspirations should be followed.

And yet, Tides.

That doesn't mean that the lack of clear models and inspiration for RPG writers isn't a genuine issue.

But when a game can come with such clear, bow-wrapped guidelines for its writers, and still fail so thoroughly in the implementation, can we honestly say that it's the main issue? Isn't that fixed by having a project manager who's willing to firmly set the guidelines, tone and themes, make sure they're mapped to the rest of the game, and stop the bosses from interfering in the plot while stopping the writers from drifting away up their own collective arse?
 

ScrotumBroth

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In
I was just thinking about node writing, well if it feels forced and uninspired, if you can't enter your fugue state, it's clearly forced and unnecessary. So, why not branch out only when it feels natural, have less nodes but each will carry more meaning? Reading the OP, it feels like writer(s) were given predetermined, blank node tree and forced to fill it with text. If that's how creative process went down, no wonder it turned to custard.

If there's one thing every cRPG writer should know (without doing research) it's that players hate fake, meaningless dialogue options that carry no weight and make no difference.

In either case, it feels completely wrong to search for some sort of magic formula for a successful conveyor line RPG production. The approach is wrong. Understand your audience, be inspired, have an actual vision, and let your creativity forge a (new) path.
 

Mr. Hiver

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grotsnik
Yeah, but then the project lead gets fired and the game is rewritten into... that.
Despite there being PST to directly learn from what to do and when, with what specific rhythm and so on.

Politician Lurker King
Im fairly tired trying to talk to people who think in binary extremes. Not to worry though, youll have plenty of cRPGs with a lot of combat to play. Including endless random encounters and trash mobs.
Its not like the whole industry is going to change because of what i say - and i only meant this different style would fit some of the CRPGs, not all. Use more neurons then two, pls.

The race is on!

Also: you’re preaching to the choir. Your points are good and I agree with the gist of it: less encounters, better design, more (story) impact.

Basically turn the currently solely quantity focused combat systems toward combat systems that focus on quality (in a smaller quantity).

The first time I played PS:T I remember being pleasantly surprised when I could end the game by dying outside of combat. That’s one example of what I consider an alternative conflict resolution. You die - game ends. But you could have more options to end the game. Options that do not necessarily involve someone dying. People make choices. Imagine a Tyranny where you could walk into the wastes after the first in-game battle and leave that super-magic-overlord nonsense behind.

Anyway. Let’s take your non lethal combat example and try and steer this conversation back toward writing: If it’s just a mechanic that makes deadly encounters more impactful, then eventually that becomes rote as well and loses its emotional impact. This is where that “less (encounters) is more” comes in. Branching solutions and outcomes would be akin to branching choices and outcomes in a dialogue. A bitch to design and code, I’m sure.

EDIT:
And “less is more” works on many levels (it should include the lenght of my comments in this thread as well...). Open world games could try to gain scope by going into depth rather than width. Not every game has to be about a literal farmboy with a background tag “Ran away with the circus” fighting literal dragons in the third kingdom over (counting from the starting tutorial location).


Youll win that race.
I still have plan A to finish, which will allow me to do plan B and then maybe C or D would be the game.

Its not that i suggested non lethal combat as just another simple outcome of combat alone. Or to make deaths in the game - feel heavier.
I see it as a starting point that would enable much more options to become possible in a naturally logical and understandable manner. Options in the narrative, quest solutions and consequences and the whole story and the setting.
Its not just about combat - but how that extends into other parts of the game.
For one thing, if you dont kill an NPC and so remove him from the game - that means he can continue to serve as a character later on. With reactions on what you did and how. That transforms just another grunt the like you usually eradicate by thousands into a more or less full fledged NPC character. And then there are many variations possible on what you do and how any specific character will react to it.
You can beat someone and just leave it at that. You can beat someone and humiliate them after, or beat someone and terrorize them after, or offer a less aggressive or amicable reaction and so on and each different character personality will react differently to each of those variations - which also should have consequences for your reputation in any specific settlement, place or faction if there are any. And nobody needs to be telepathic because those people would be alive and able to tell others about it.

Alternatively some of them can beat you - and that is not the end of the game and instant reload. Then you get to choose how to react to that and cause further C&C.

Depending on how much resources, money and time you have to develop the game you can develop a whole spectrum of characters and reactions leading into further C&C and story/main plot consequences and options.
It also makes any murder a much more serious issue, which can be dealt with in various ways with heavier importance and deeper impact on the character and the player in terms of the quest/story and C&C and players own personal reactions.

As i said, this would be very fitting for the RPG game i have in mind because the usual bloodbath wouldnt make any sense. The setting, the story and main themes i would explore dont allow such an approach at all.
It cannot be a combat focused game at all, really. Although it could and should have some.

The whole combat system would be adapted to such options, naturally. TB but with a dash of spice... of interesting and cool stuff.
And that kind of TB could very nicely lend itself even to a more combat focused cRPG (but with non lethal options and combat resolutions) and enable decisions inside the combat to have deeper impact on the flow of the narrative.
For example i would love to see a fantasy based cRPG where wizards actually do magic instead of act as just another ranged fighter and kill stuff, and so enable different solutions to quests by affecting the environment and physical conditions.
That kind of magic would be fully integrated into the setting and less fantastic and "epic" then usual but more important and effective then any overblown meteor swarm could ever be.
While Bards serve to handle the diplomatic side of things inside of cities and towns, handle the lore, keep the journal and so on.

You lose all of that if you force the game to be combat focused because that forces all different character types to be focused on combat most of all.
And if you dont have to spend all the resources and time on so much combat... maybe you can create enough of those other options instead?

On the other hand i wouldnt mind making a combat centric cRPG some other time, with a setting like Malazan Book of the Fallen where a crew of a few Bridgeburners go around eradicating hundreds and thousand of all kinds of mooks, showing cusser up every fools bunghole, unleashing warrens and wasting whole armies.
But thats a game with different sensibilities. If i had a few hundred millions to throw at it i would probably do that one in some sort of Real time with---- pauuuuse, only pausing would be dependent on attributes and skills. Not free.
And with far more attention on the real time action part then on pausing.


But anyway, i think the combat design should be adapted to each specific kind of cRPGs, just like writing and anything else should be.
Instead of trying to hammer in one single style and wandering why it doesnt quite work or cant quite gel with some other features and intentions.
 

Freddie

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The whole article is good at one thing. Pointing out that there are people who don't really understand that line between an RPG and cRPG is limitation, not the desired outcome and about people who think they want to make an RPG, when they should be doing adventure games of films.

This is all fine and good in a world where those transcendent RPGs don't exist, some of which were noted in the post. But they do exist.
It is possible to get beyond many of these limitations. It's just really really rare.

What may not be possible within the current state of the industry is to set out to do it. Every example we end up with may always be lightning in a bottle.
Certain limitations will always exist but that's not actually the problem. cRPG's could do something p'n'p systems are just too much work. Practical example from back in the day. It happens as players get older that demands for what kind of game they want to play chance (our group wasn't the only one where this happened). Dungeons happened but they weren't main focus. What players wanted more from how they interacted with the NPC's and the world. Magic and god's and all that was around but there were different sort of expectations. So where I hit the wall as DM was that the answer for those demands was actually quite simple. Make the world more reactive but there came also the issue, I wasn't a computer.

I mean we were doing lot of AD&D's Forgotten Realms back in the day and we had years of experience. I don't even recall what my scenario was but the problem was that you simply can't make really big things without it having actually quite huge consequences. Say King Azoun of Cormyr loses 60 knights, there are lot of places where this could be seen as opportunity. Scenario could be used to interject players in some high level game including politics and sort of tactical things. I think scenarios like that could had made interesting games for this particular group at least. The problem was, that it was too much work. It was also sort of point where you couldn't bullshit your way out, nor even have a skirmish scenario and have NPC's die without rolling the dice and I personally didn't want to. That was early 90's, we were teens at the time. I'm still waiting for cRPG's where choices and impact player (and party if applicable) also have huge consequences on political and strategic level. Fucking something up would have some quite big consequences, or say working for 'evil' party, you needed to plan to get on top, because otherwise you are food. I don't say it can't also involve dragons, or killer robots, whatever.

Today you can flowchart helluva lot of things easily, have way better tools like Wiki's than we had. And cRPG's don't need to support everything imaginable like player becoming big on importing coconuts and building a huge business empire on that. Even in PnP, there were limits. Or wanted to do that, went to find a group who liked to play kind of scenario.

What comes to writing or creating for an RPG, there comes this realisation, that all these rules, learning the tables, they are not obstacle, they make things possible. You can make adventure like: go to cave, roll dice to kill X, get the trinket, okay, now you are back, but not many find that few seconds adventure that entertaining. So you look what's on encounter table (mentally cross over dragons) and pick something that actually makes sense in setting. Tell story how they were villagers found dead, eaten by wolves (or wild dogs if post-apo) and that encounter may or may not happen but now player(s) have something to work with their imagination. So even the journey to the cave isn't a task like gathering berries from the forest, but this is starting to look like adventure. That's something for the first level characters who gets also introduced to setting etc. There isn't anything here that cRPG can't do. I think for modern games the first Mass Effect, Fallout: New Vegas, Shadowrun (series) and Wasteland 2 are good examples.

The differences are that there are things quite detailed from the start in comparison for P'n'P (no reload, makes no sense to write bible about character that may not survive first session) but I can't hold it against cRPG's. Ultimately in PnP it's about completing the main quest and often in the process hoarding ridiculous amount of gold (credits).

It's understandable that new things are tried, but not every experiment is a success. Say Hambuger Helper, on surface what she said good, but gamers didn't buy it and I see her approach problematic, because it's the setting and rules which should be starting to click something in DM's mind. At least in established series. Back in the day there were things quite telling when people tried creating their own adventures about who would really become good at it. Those whom had their vision that they really wanted to share, but which didn't really worked with the setting usually quit, those who misjudged players goals usually quit because their players left.

I think for the current games ME: Andromeda is very good example of forced narrative and issues that creates. This also happened in ME3 (certain encounter with Kai Leng being among worst offenders). More visual and cinematic games get, more and more we get things that couldn't happened in PnP. You can't pull shit like, 'you can't kill him because you just can't' and expect your players to stick around. ME: Andromeda is even worse. Shamus is doing very good documented playthrough Infiltron is linking to the Codex BW forum. Basically it comes to adult people with better tools failing to solve problems we had to solve when we were just kids. It's not about meeting my personal niche, I never played the game, but empirically failing, creating an entertainment product that fails to entertain, which then in turn turned out to be economical failure. What a surprise.

Spoon feeding doesn't help people who don't really want to learn or sometimes for some reason perhaps even can't.

Thats another general delusion. That misunderstanding that cRPGs should emulate PnP in exact same way or as close as possible.

The truth is the two are completely different mediums which use too many different basic tools in their "language" with which they create the gameplay-story-experience.
The video games and especially cRPGs dont have limitations in that sense at all - because they cannot ever fully become PnP games. What is so wrongly considered limitations by many should be seen and understood as specific possibilities, options and style that PnP games cannot have, use or emulate.

Kinda like TB combat was considered a result of computer limitations, but is actually a whole world onto itself with possibilities other types of combat just cannot provide.
Kinda like limitations in gameplay options achieved through character abilities is what differentiates RPGs from other genres.

Of course there is a meta overlap between the two, like between a parent and an offspring, but there cannot ever be a full transmutation.
Trying to achieve it is a fulls errand, a Sisyphus toil, absurd in on itself and most often just a marketing shtick.

cRPGs should be considered a separate evolutionary fork. A seed from that tree that become a hybrid in a different substrate and environment that mutated into another form of life and needs to be allowed to grow in its own way instead of being hammered into a shape it cannot posses. In that way the PnP games themselves can continue their own evolution further in their own way.
Nowhere I said cRPG's should be like that but here's a thing for you. Way back I encountered a group who played AD&D with these huge drawings of dungeons, big enough to fit miniatures in them and have very detailed view how to position in combat encounters. And that's pretty much all they did and though it weren't my cup of tea, it's perfectly valid way to play the game if group agrees.

In retrospect I think of old Gold Box game like Savage Frontier and I don't know how different that game and the way this group was playing was. Anyway, sounds like you have no fucking idea what you are talking about.
 

Mr. Hiver

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First off i wasnt really talking to you. I was talking about the concept. Second, the last several morons who jumped in with same idiotic proclamations about how i dont even understand... turned out to be morons who dont even understand what i said.
As for your example, no matter the miniatures and rules - which is more or less standard in PnP, its not a video game and still has a GM that can change stuff on the fly.
So, you are a moron.

Anyway, i would just add to what i said above about non lethal combat and how it provides basis for a lot of different options - in that case the rule less is more should also be applied.
And of course there can be games that mix that with the usual kill everything that moves encounters. That just depends on the type of the game and what kind of the gameplay and story it wants to provide.
 

Roguey

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I was just thinking about node writing, well if it feels forced and uninspired, if you can't enter your fugue state, it's clearly forced and unnecessary. So, why not branch out only when it feels natural, have less nodes but each will carry more meaning? Reading the OP, it feels like writer(s) were given predetermined, blank node tree and forced to fill it with text. If that's how creative process went down, no wonder it turned to custard.

If there's one thing every cRPG writer should know (without doing research) it's that players hate fake, meaningless dialogue options that carry no weight and make no difference.

In either case, it feels completely wrong to search for some sort of magic formula for a successful conveyor line RPG production. The approach is wrong. Understand your audience, be inspired, have an actual vision, and let your creativity forge a (new) path.
In my experience, I had no problem with writing nodes out in text first and then pasting it into the editor when finished. This requires extra routine work, but if it works, it works. I hear Chris Avellone uses this approach as well. :M
 

baud

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RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I helped put crap in Monomyth
BTW I recently replayed SRR (DMS) in English and paid attention to the quality of texts. I really liked them but I am not a native speaker. Is it considered good?

I'm not a native speaker either, though I liked the writing, at least on the first part until the insects plot starts; mostly because it's selling rather well the setting/environment rather than the characters, which aren't that interesting. Also a few non-combat sequence, like finding clues in the room above the bar, entering the flat or the plane hangar offers multiple solutions.

Also congrats MRY for the edito, it was an interesting read.
 
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StaticSpine

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong
I wonder how those Russian guys at Owlcat managed to produce normal, functional, servicable writing not filled with exorbitant amounts of purple prose and verbal diarrhea. Must have been a monumental effort.
I didn't play myself but I listened to a podcast with one of their narrative designers. The guy said that walls of texts are cool because even if the player doesn't read them he still thinks "wow, guys did a great deal of work writing it":lol:
I attended the studio head's lecture yesterday.

Their original plan was 500 000 words for the game. They ended up with 1 200 000. He admitted: that amount of content was impossible to test and second half of the game is much worse than the first.
 
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Nalenth

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I'm not a native speaker either, though I liked the writing, at least on the first part until the insects plot starts; mostly because it's selling rather well the setting/environment rather the characters.

I really liked the whole game, even the ending. Granted, the module is just an introduction to the setting, but it's an excellent one at that.
 

CryptRat

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I have got a huge problem with the articles about writing in RPG. They only talk about aspects that at best I don't care about and at worst break the game for me while ignoring when not criticizing things which can actually enhance the game for me.

- You don't let me create my party in a D&D style game, for whatever reason. -> critical fail.
- An exploration focused game has badly-handled checkpoints just for the player to follow some strong predefinite narrative. -> critical fail.

I read the article several days ago but if I remember right the article almost only mention special snowflakes games as examples of good writing. And that's all the problem, that's the exact idea of cRPGs of modern game journalists and of MRY, but not mine. I could as well stop reading at these examples (but I did not :)). That's not my idea of cRPGs, leave alone of well written cRPGs. I want to play my group of adventurers doing stuff, that's a mandatory premise, not an afternought to whatever else the creator has in mind, which anyway is almost akways either to tell "personal" (as concerning who some main characters are, not as low scale) story, which I hate, or to simplify the game, which I hate too. I can enjoy the QfG case of single character games with a focus on different non-combat gameplay depending on your build but it's not like there are many such games apart from QFG series, direct QFG clones or Dark Disciples 1&2 (Fallout 1&2 to some extent).

However I can appreciate :
- many diseases and afflictions, and yes even if they don't improve the gameplay much, in which case they're not ton of work anyway. Things like alcohol being useful against fear RoA style and that sort of things. Unexpected death scenarii are cool. A very interactive world is ton of work, that is not.
- cool combat texts, like in Fallout or Aleshar : World of ice (that's the only screenshot I've found, they're better examples, of dismembering especially, in the game) :
aleshar-07.jpg
weird enemies,enemies doing weird things, once again even when that does not improve the gameplay much. Earthbound combats are far from complex but I never thought they were boring.
In a short scale highly tactical game where every protagonist's action matters this kind of things may not work that well but in a blobber an enemy can just lose a turn for whatever reason with a fun flavor text ("jeep driver stalls" or whatever).
- named items, no +, no template
- description texts of area when entering a new area and that sort of things, something like in Quest for glory, in which case it's important to the gameplay, but even when it's not. I love those. That I don't like scrolling through dialog choices with NPCs does not mean I don't like to read in games, I like to read in games, I have no problem with walls of texts and I have no problem with some CYOA style random events (randomly pops, choose an option and something happens).
 
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Nalenth

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And that's all the problem, that's the exact idea of cRPGs of modern game journalists and of MRY, but not mine.

Linear, dialogue-heavy or single-character games can be legitimate cRPGs, too. Most of the examples are relatively well-written with strong narrative that makes them stand out from the crowd.
Their other strengths vary depending on the game. It isn't like their only redeeming quality is the writing or the story.
 
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good game writing has little to do with narrative, plot or characters.

haven't read the article but i'm sure it's wrong if it's coming from a storyfag perspective and dismisses games that don't focus on plot.
 

Deleted Member 22431

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good game writing has little to do with narrative, plot or characters.
Good game writing is broad enough to encompass good design because it involves itemization, world-building, options, C&C, etc.

The main misconception in this discussion about writing in cRPGs is to make the simplistic mistake of assuming that cRPG writing involves only the written part in dialogue boxes and slides. It isn't. The writing starts way early in the vision document phase where you don't actually have a game yet.
 

Verylittlefishes

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The only good point in this thread is about non-game background as a contributing factor in good writing. If the writer himself used drugs, studied philosophy or fought the war, or travelled a lot, or an expert in martial arts or medieval history, he is more likely to produce something good than retardo who did nothing besides wanking on Tolkien and Baldur's Gate (or Lovecraft and Torment, whatever). Real life is the best story teacher. Also the researches conducted by the man himself, not because the college of boss told him so.
 

MRY

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The only good point in this thread is about non-game background as a contributing factor in good writing. If the writer himself used drugs, studied philosophy or fought the war, or travelled a lot, or an expert in martial arts or medieval history, he is more likely to produce something good than retardo who did nothing besides wanking on Tolkien and Baldur's Gate (or Lovecraft and Torment, whatever). Real life is the best story teacher. Also the researches conducted by the man himself, not because the college of boss told him so.
This certainly is plausible enough, though of course PS:T was written by a mid-20s fervid gamer who, as far as I know, had no other significant life experience. Here's what Wikipedia tells us:
Avellone is an alumnus of the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia.[1] He studied at the College of William & Mary, graduating with a major in English and a minor in fine arts, focused on architecture.[2]

Working initially as a freelancer in the two years after college, Avellone wrote campaigns for Dungeons & Dragons-inspired fantasy role-playing games.[2] After entering the video game industry through the company Interplay in 1995, he briefly worked on the development of the 1997 title Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. In 1997 he took over the development of Descent to Undermountain, which he later called a disappointment. Avellone contributed to the 1998 game Fallout 2 and continued to work on its franchise.
Hardly the Hemingway traveler-soldier-poet-boxer background.

TTON's writers all had more life experience under the belts, some of that experience being quite varied -- for instance, Adam Heine's experience running an orphanage or Nathan Long's as a semi-professional musician.

I share your instinct here -- if nothing else, it avoids the "bag of sand" kind of writing where a sheltered writer invents the details of an experience he's never had in a way that fails to convey anything true about the world. This happens all the time in fantasy, but of course the readers tend to be sheltered themselves, so if the author describes the way a wound looks or feels in a preposterous fashion, there's no reason necessarily that most readers will even notice. They will themselves simply go through life having constructed a secondary false image of those experiences. But while I share your instinct, I'm not sure the data really support the conclusion unless we keep adding special cases to gerrymander in the writers we think highly of.

Also I have a crucial question: does PS:T counts as "purple prose" (as you illiterate scums call it), and if not, why is it so?
Parts of PS:T are obviously purple prose (the sensory stones are low-hanging fruit), but they're wonderful, so who cares? "Purple prose" is one of those unhelpful pejoratives because it really boils down to "decadent language that doesn't work well," with the second part of that description doing all the work. Viriconium Nights is very purple prose, and its most sublime moments are its most purple. Here is the example I gave many years ago during the TTON Kickstarter:
But straight ahead among the bracken and coarse grass at the mouth of the valley ran a narrow track. Fifty yards from the road, the heather failed, and the terrain became brown, faintly iridescent bog streaked with slicks of purple and oily yellow. Beyond that rose thickets of strangely shaped trees. The river meandered through it, slow and broad, flanked by dense reedbeds of bright ocher color. The wind blew from the north, carrying a bitter, metallic smell.

. . .

In the water thickets, the path wound tortuously between umber iron bogs, albescent quicksands of aluminum and magnesium oxides, and sumps of cuprous blue or permanganate mauve fed by slow, gelid streams and fringed by silver reeds and tall black grasses. The twisted, smooth-barked boles of the trees were yellow-ocher and burnt orange; through their tightly woven foliage filtered a gloomy, tinted light. At their roots grew great clumps of multifaceted transulcent crystal like alien fungi.

Charcoal gray frogs with viridescent eyes croaked as the column floundered between the pools. Beneath the greasy surface of the water, unidentifiable reptiles moved slowly and sinuously. Dragonflies whose webby wings spanned a foot or more hummed and hovered between the sedges: their long, wicked bodies glittered bold green and ultramarine; they took their prey on the wing, pouncing with an audible snap of jaws on whining ephemeral mosquitoes and fluttering moths of April blue and chevrolet cerise.

Over everything hung the heavy, oppressive stench of rotting metal. After an hour, Cromis's mouth was coated with a bitter deposit, and he tasted acids. He found it difficult to speak. While his horse stumbled and slithered beneath him, he gazed about in wonder, and poetry moved in his skull, swift as the jeweled mosquito hawks over a dark slow current of ancient decay.
Complaining that this is "purple prose" is like complaining that turn-based combat has too many pauses.
 

Murk

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I think most people mean, but fail to communicate, that their issue with "purple prose" is not so much that it exists but rather that it was used in a place or in a manner they did not enjoy.

I'd call it a poor fit or inappropriate use(in the literal sense, not in the behavioral sense). There's a time and place for lavish language, but a bad writer (or one with bad taste) will use it incorrectly and ruin the work. Imagine a chef who is new to their job and lacks the experience to know how much of a powerful and pungent seasoning to use and ends up putting in too much.

I'd classify a lot of Lovecraft's writing as basically indistinguishable from "purple prose" in how it reads, but in his case it was the point -- he was writing about the cosmic, the infinite, the unknowable; you cannot describe such things using mundane and simple words or in mundane and simple ways -- here he relied on a synergy of form and function. The lavishness helped convey the greatness of things.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
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*Viriconium was added to your basket*
I will say: I read (by error) the fourth book first, and I think it might actually be better to do that. In the official order, the series goes from fairly conventional Dying Earth fantasy fiction to, eventually, crazy experimental fantasy fiction. (I might say: From low-brow Book of the New Sun to slightly inferior Gene Wolfe short fiction.) The stories in the fourth book are basically these crazy experimental riffs off the setting established in the prior trilogy. That makes the fourth book neat to in that you are reading this crazy retelling of the Lord Cromis who you know from the trilogy as basically your standard knight errant. But I think it might suffer a bit because you're eased into the craziness that way. If you go 4, 1, 2, 3 (I only went 4, 1), then "The Lamia and Lord Cromis" is mindblowing. Or was for me, anyway.

EDIT: This is a really neat article: http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2012/06/11/covering-viriconium/ For what it's worth, I believe the book that I read first was Ace, 1984 edition shown in the article.

Murk I don't disagree, but that's why I find the term unhelpful. "The recipe calls for this dish to be seasoned to taste, but it was not seasoned to my taste" doesn't help me much (as a consumer or creator). Many people criticize Lovecraft's writing as being purple. You say that's the point and it's great; many readers (including me, probably) would agree; but many others say, no, it's not great, it's embarrassingly bad. The older I get the less convinced I am that there's any way to get to a "right" answer here. When I tried to rewatch the show in law shcool, Babylon 5's writing struck me as cringe-worthily maudlin and filled with "bag of sand" nonsense; as an 8th grader, I thought it was transcendent and poetic. Lots of editors of this esteemed magazine still think it's transcendent and poetic. Who am I to say older-MRY is right and younger-MRY and all these other folks are wrong?
 
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MRY

Wormwood Studios
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I thought that the episode about Jack the Ripper and Sheridan's adventures in the abyss were supreme. I was 11.
:salute:

And, of course, Londo and G'Kar being Dostoevskian-level character studies. :)
 

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