Josh Sawyer Q&A Thread

[Diggfinger]

He understandably makes exceptions for Matt Rorie.

Answers quite some NE questions here:

 

[Infinitron]

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/668951007230918656/hello-im-a-developer-working-on-an-rpg-and-i

Guten Abend, Josh!

My name is Steve and I’m a Game Designer (albeit on the dark side of the industry - mobile games) and I have question that I hope you can elaborate on a bit.

First I want to mention though that I’ve seen many of your videos and talks, but the one that resonated with me the most was “Game Direction on Collaborative Teams”. I seem to naturally fall into lead roles and I’ve learned a lot via this talk - I think it made me a better designer and quite frankly a less obnoxious lead. So my heartfelt thanks for that.

Considering a lead or directorial design role in a given project (similar to the ones you often have) I’m wondering how you deal with the challenges that naturally arise from the other side of game development - publishers.

I find myself often in similar situations as with the development team itself - lots of discussions, explaining/selling/defending a vision and unfortunately added politics.

Due to publishers virtually always being the people financing the game you’re building, you have to make compromises - sometimes ones that keep you up at night, because you deep down *know* it makes the game worse. No matter how much invest in explaining/pleading or even ranting, you can’t convince the other party and the decision has been made.

I’m pretty sure you know exactly what I’m talking about as the F76 jersey in your talk did not go unnoticed. With that said, i’d love to hear any insights, tips or experiences you have with working with publishers.

Danke fürs lesen und ich würde mich über eine Antwort sehr freuen!

Viele Grüße aus Berlin,

Steve Haßenpflug

Hi, Steve. Thanks for the kind words on my talk. I’m glad it’s useful.

Thankfully I haven’t had to deal with a publisher much on my last few projects. Pillars of Eternity and Deadfire were crowdfunded, and while we had partners for PR, marketing, and distribution, they didn’t have any say in how we made the game. We had a different set of expectations from backers, but I’d rather deal with backer/player expectations than publisher requests any day.

Making games is a marathon and there are only so many fights you can keep up over the course of development. You have to triage issues to keep the project/morale healthy. Sometimes I have to step back and ask myself, “What is the impact of this bad thing?” There are times when I know someone is asking for something bad and dumb – but if it’s not expensive and the badness of it is not catastrophically bad… maybe just let it go.

Save the knock-down-drag-out fights for the truly stupid things, the requests that will make the experience significantly worse for the majority of players.

Also, try to recognize when a compromised position is worse than either extreme. Too often, devs make compromises that no one is happy with because it represents a partial win, or some sort of obvious movement away from the thing they didn’t want. Sometimes these decisions can be worse than allowing the thing they don’t like to fully manifest.

I always try to keep everyone focused on the experience we’re trying to create and the audience we’re trying to make it for. If people get caught up in what they personally like or don’t like, arguments can become intractable. I’m not saying what you like doesn’t matter. It’s very important! But if everyone is just arguing on the basis of personal preference, it’s very hard to actually move anyone’s opinion.

Anyway, these are the things that have helped me. Good luck.

 

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[Major_Blackhart]

Yeah. It won't get done because the best writer was chased out.

 

[Roguey]

Yeah. It won't get done because the best writer was chased out.

Despite the fact that he's been unemployed for over a year, we still don't have Avellone's Wasteland 2 short stories and novel. If he wrote it, it'd never get finished.

 

[Latro]

“Few published novelists”

yea that’s nothing to be proud of

 

[Alienman]

Is it those novelists Fergus likes? For you that remember his reading habits.

 

[Roguey]

Is it those novelists Fergus likes? For you that remember his reading habits.

No, it's Carrie Patel and Megan Starks.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Figures. Has anyone dared read their work?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Figures. Has anyone dared read their work?

Megan Starks is actually decent, rest of Nusidian writers are trash.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Place to remove from inventory?

 

[Roguey]

Figures. Has anyone dared read their work?

I've checked some of em out and gave my thoughts https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...-go-to-new-thread.119594/page-96#post-5921621 https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...-go-to-new-thread.119594/page-96#post-5921627 https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...-go-to-new-thread.119594/page-97#post-5921694

 

[Major_Blackhart]

 

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https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/669526166656385024/hi-josh-i-like-to-dabble-in-ttrpg-design-theres

ccubed17 asked:

Hi Josh, I like to dabble in ttrpg design. There's a store near my house that has a giant stack of issues of Dragon Magazine from mostly the 90s. I didn't get into RPGs until much later. Did you ever read that magazine? If I was going to buy some to analyze or try to play, are there any authors or artists or modules you'd recommend I keep an eye out for?

Yeah, that was the era when I was reading Dragon, Dungeon, and Polyhedron a lot. I don’t have any of my old issues anymore, but I do reference the .pdfs from time to time.

Issue 148 is memorable as the Deck of Many Things issue, which had printed sheets of cards to ruin your campaign. That’s a Ned Dameron cover. Ned did a lot of nice art for TSR/Dragon, including a lot of the priests in the 2nd Edition Forgotten Realms Faiths & Avatars/Powers & Pantheons/Demihuman Deities series. He also did really beautiful pen and ink drawings in the Hall of Heroes supplement.

Daniel Horne also contributed some really nice work to Dragon, including the cover to issue 126, which served as the inspiration for Sagani in Pillars of Eternity.

Other artists who did things in a variety of rule/sourcebooks and Dragon/Dungeon at the time were Tom Baxa, Valerie Valusek, Jim Holloway, and Stephen Fabian.

One other issue of Polyhedron sticks out in my mind especially, #150, which featured an art nouveau stylization of Spelljammer. No offense to Jim Holloway, who did much of the art for Spelljammer (and also a TON of Paranoia art), but his style never really seemed like a great fit for for the setting. Art nouveau Spelljammer was really appealing to me.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/670076137573154816/hi-slightly-nebulous-question-but-one-ive-wanted

danby96 asked:

Hi! Slightly nebulous question but one I've wanted to ask for some time. It seems to me like the game dev industry - in terms of actual production - tends to only hire people with coding experience. In theory, makes total sense, easier to work on a team when everyone is on the same page. That said, I often wonder about potential pitfalls of that when I play games that have kind of lackluster dialogue or storytelling, half-baked settings, etc. For context, I'm a fiction guy (classic story: got an MFA, grinded for a little while, realized there was no money in it and looked for work elsewhere) and I'm obviously always on the lookout for jobs where I can actually use the thing I have degrees in. I always think writing dialogue or character concepts or whatever for games would be a really fun and interesting job, but I've found that whenever dev companies have job postings they either: A. don't have positions like this, or B. require tons of coding experience. As a total outsider, it feels to me like asking people to be jacks of all trades. That said, I'm totally not trying to say "game industry bad, should just hire better writers" because that's deeply unrealistic and I'm not in the know enough to recognize how decisions get made, let alone how they could be made better. I'm just curious, as an outsider, what your perspective about this divide is (if any) and how you navigate it on your projects. Pillars is one of the rare franchises with equally compelling narrative and gameplay and I guess I'm mostly curious what kind of team dynamic and backgrounds go into that.

While I have a limited perspective on the hiring practices of all the game companies around the world, I have to say I’m a little surprised that there are many developers requiring that writers be skilled at coding. At Obsidian, writers have to understand basic scripting, variables, and operator logic, but that’s about it. We don’t even really have to write our own scripts; we have a list of functions to pick from and then fill in the blanks (or just pick options from lists).

We use a flowchart-based node/reply tool to arrange our branching conversations, so coding isn’t really a thing that we have to do. To be honest, I haven’t heard or seen of it much from applicants who have come to us from other studios, either. Maybe you’ve just been unlucky?

We have a decent range of educational backgrounds among our writers. Your MFA comment got me wondering, so I polled the narrative designers. A few have writing MFAs and the rest of us have BAs in a variety of fields from Communications & Journalism to English to History to Biology. One of us has an MA in Museum Studies and other has an MA in Medieval Studies. I just have a BA in History.

Anyway, I’d keep looking at different companies. I really think that most of us don’t have a coding requirement for our writers, at least not the studios that focus heavily on narrative.

 

[Infinitron]

Eternity Tactics still on the table:

 

[LESS T_T]

Avowed: Tactics you mean.

 

[Cryomancer]

I created a trumblr only to ask him what he thinks about spell fixes for NWN2. My nick is ChaoticEvilNecromancer with some numbers in letters.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Cryomancer]

I din't expected that he would answer either of my questions.

The penalty which I mentioned for Shadow Wizards. d6+1 damage doesn't seem much in 5E but in 2E where you have only d4 hit points and +1 hit points, failing to prepare a couple of spells can kill him.

Defiler and preservers: The Wizards of Athas - Page 61

 

[rusty_shackleford]

didn't read either of victor's posts before reading this and immediately recognized who was asking the question

 

[Infinitron]

Avowed: Tactics you mean.

How about Saint's War Tactics:

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Nano]

Fuck's sake, Sawyer. I hope he regrets the decision to make her the narrator.