Incline Chris Avellone Appreciation Station

[Zed Duke of Banville]

So Avellone passed his low point in life where he posted in this thread?

After November 10 2018, when Microsoft publicly announced it would be acquiring Obsidian, Chris Avellone has made 16 posts on the RPG Codex, and all of those were made before the end of the year.

 

[Grotesque]

 

[Tom Selleck]

To be fair, I am not a pumpkin he/him either.

 

[Herald of Durance]

To be fair, she/her looks a bit like a pumpkin.

 

[Sacibengala]

To be fair, she/her looks a bit like a pumpkin.

Don't do that, I like pumpkin.

 

[Athos]

So he joined the sjw team then lol. A game about killing Christians under the guise that it is muh cult. I doubt that there are any islamic,shinto,tao,buddist or hindu cults in it.

I think you should look up Jonestown to get a better idea of what this game is about before continuing to talk about it.

So an evangelist wacko sect used as a trojan horse by a megalomaniac commie to bring the utopia on Earth?

 

[Roguey]

When persistence pays off https://twitter.com/ChrisAvellone/status/1164094213056688128

hey um listen i have been working on a fallout story and i thought you might be intrested abaut the story you just have to listen to it and give your opinion

if you have time for it of course

Lay it on me

 

[StaticSpine]

When persistence pays off https://twitter.com/ChrisAvellone/status/1164094213056688128

hey um listen i have been working on a fallout story and i thought you might be intrested abaut the story you just have to listen to it and give your opinion

if you have time for it of course

Lay it on me

Is this one of Bethesda's narrative designers?

 

[Dedicated_Dark]

So today I learned reddit hates Chris Avellone & considers him overrated, & some of them claim his writing is trash as well. Old news, but new for me. Thoughts?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/9wak92/game_designerwriter_chris_avellone_continues_to/

They also hate RPG Codex, that's not really news though.

Also, today I learned he is writing for the new Vampires the Masqurade game.... ooo

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

So today I learned reddit hates Chris Avellone & considers him overrated, & some of them claim his writing is trash as well. Old news, but new for me. Thoughts?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/9wak92/game_designerwriter_chris_avellone_continues_to/

They also hate RPG Codex, that's not really news though.

Also, today I learned he is writing for the new Vampires the Masqurade game.... ooo

Examine your brain every time you take Reddit seriously. It's easy to do. Just take off your fedora to expose the gray matter underneath.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

So today I learned reddit hates Chris Avellone & considers him overrated, & some of them claim his writing is trash as well. Old news, but new for me. Thoughts?

based

 

[Dedicated_Dark]

Examine your brain every time you take Reddit seriously. It's easy to do. Just take off your fedora to expose the gray matter underneath.

 

[HarveyBirdman]

Avellone is a great pulp writer. He excels at creating atmosphere and evoking a sense of whatever theme is at issue. He's less good at avoiding tropes, but then again, very few authors are.
He's about as good as we'll get in the video game world.

 

[Dedicated_Dark]

Avellone is a good pulp writer.
He's about as good as we'll get in the video game world.

Depends on the novel. Considering the amount of garbage I read I am not so sure. He won't be the best but I think he'll still be pretty worthwhile. Proper themes with focus is pretty rare even among good/great novels. Though he might be limited by his approach as game writing & writing a book are different things.

 

[Latro]

Avellone is a great pulp writer.

what's "pulp"? he writes better than most modern fantasy/sci-fi writers.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

He’s not pulp. More like a poor man’s Moorcock or Wolfe (no offense Chris, standing on the shoulder’s of giants and all that).

 

[HarveyBirdman]

Depends on the novel. Considering the amount of garbage I read I am not so sure. He won't be the best but I think he'll still be pretty worthwhile. Proper themes with focus is pretty rare even among good/great novels. Though he might be limited by his approach as game writing & writing a book are different things.

My initial quote said he couldn't write a novel. (I edited). He could, and it would be about as good as other contemporary fantasy/sci-fi. But why do that? Practically none of that shit has any staying power, and he has a good thing going with video games.

On that note, I think video games help rather than hinder his writing. He loves info dumps. Video games can help reign some of that in by hiding it behind dialogue/in-game texts or embedding it into visuals.

what's "pulp"? he writes better than most modern fantasy/sci-fi writers.

Conan, Elric, and the like. A modern example is the Witcher book series.
They aren't Tolkein, but I consider them giants in their own way, <3sRichardSimmons.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

I disagree with the characterization of Elric as pulp (also it’s perhaps Moorcock’s weakest work), but otherwise fair enough.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

I disagree with the characterization of Elric as pulp (also it’s perhaps Moorcock’s weakest work), but otherwise fair enough.

Are you kidding? Moorcock would laugh in your face. He was very consciously writing that stuff in the pulpiest of pulp traditions. He would not see it as an insult.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Elric is a faggot though.

 

[HarveyBirdman]

That's a creative way of saying "roll a Barbarian"

 

[Nutria]

At the risk of sucking his dick too aggressively, Avellone has put a lot of thought into how his work fits into a game. There are so many people who wanted to be auteur filmmakers and failed at it so instead they write for games and they end up making really horrible, long, preachy cutscenes that they expect you to sit on your ass watching for 5 minutes. You can compare those guys to people who write novels, because they throw a whole goddamn novel at you every chance they get. But Avellone actually cares more about the game as a whole than jerking himself off as an artist.

I'd point to what he did with Into the Breach. It wasn't some life-changing experience that was better than Shakespeare, but he really did a great job of putting some life into those characters and that world despite having 1-2 sentences at a time to work with. Obviously there's a lot of people out there who are better at writing novels than he is, but for the niche that he specializes in, I'd challenge you to find anyone better.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

That's a creative way of saying "roll a Barbarian"

Everything in life points to "Roll a Barbarian".

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Avellone has put a lot of thought into how his work fits into a game. There are so many people who wanted to be auteur filmmakers and failed at it so instead they write for games and they end up making really horrible, long, preachy cutscenes that they expect you to sit on your ass watching for 5 minutes.

Uh...

How is that preachy though

 

[Nutria]

Okay, that's actually fair. I guess I forgot about that because it was shit and I stopped playing almost immediately. (The Sierra Madre one was great though.) The combination of being expected to do Bethesda gameplay in a story that was "omg, Americans in the 1950s were bad because the USA didn't have any legitimate security threats" was pretty disgusting.

[/QUOTE]