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

[Quillon]

True Incline (tm) can only be accomplished by locking someone like Avellone in the basement for 2 years, juicing his food with huge bags of speed and waiting patiently until a masterpiece comes out.

 

[luj1]

True Incline (tm) can only be accomplished by locking someone like Avellone in the basement for 2 years, juicing his food with huge bags of speed and waiting patiently until a masterpiece comes out.

Actually that was how Morrowind was made. A handful of scruffy, malnourished devs working from a cellar under the creative guidance of Michael Kirkbride and Ken Rolston

It has been proven time and time again that modest conditions > AAA budgets

 

[Raghar]

Actually that was how Morrowind was made. A handful of scruffy, malnourished devs working from a cellar under the creative guidance of Michael Kirkbride and Ken Rolston

It has been proven time and time again that modest conditions > AAA budgets

With large teams there is often something that disrupts project, and then writing consistency goes on vacation.

With smaller teams nobody believes you'd be successful, nobody wants anything, nobody even thinks you can write, thus you have an environment calm enough for writing.

 

[luj1]

Yeah and it's way more than just that. Smaller teams are a lot more economic. They focus on core gameplay while big projects throw huge amounts of money on dumb shit like voice overs, eye candy, orchestral scores or marketing. Smaller teams are also more passion-driven and carry a different atmosphere than some AAA studio.

There are many reasons why small teams working in poor conditions produce cult classics, while AAA teams with millions of dollars behind them produce failures.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Right, which is why I said I'm assessing D&D through the lens of hindsight. Whatever the influence Tolkien had at the inception (more on this in a moment), my point is that the role D&D has today is basically dependent upon its wholesale incorporation of Tolkien.

No, the goblinoids in D&D are lifted from Tolkien, as are the undead, see here: http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2012/03/wraiths-through-ages.html and http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2012/03/back-from-dead.html.

When wraiths were first introduced to Chainmail, they were simply called Nazgul. Their characteristics were clearly lifted from the Nazgul. And wights were all but expressly based on barrow-wights. Indeed, I'm not sure the word "wight" as an undead creature was used in fantasy before Tolkien, and there he was lifting a specific translation of a saga that used "barrow-wight" for a draug.

This is the sort of thing that rustles my jimmies on the subject. The rule isn't "anything that existed as a vaguely associated concept in folklore before Tolkien wasn't copied from Tolkien"; and if that is the rule, it's not clear to me why "trolls" are attributed to Three Hearts, Three Lions when trolls are endemic in folklore. Though the regenerative aspect seems Poul Anderson's creation (I think? it's not even that central in the story as I recall), Anderson's gloss on troll seems much less distinctive than Tolkien's gloss on wights, wraiths, goblins, etc. The impulse to credit Anderson and derogate Tolkien smacks of a guilty conscience!

Anyway, Gygax is great, and I love that he put together Appendix N, and he obviously was very well read (better read than me!) in the fantasy genre, and a skillful assimilator of many sources. I just think downplaying Tolkien is kind of lame.

I had forgotten to put balrogs in the list, as they apparently were a monster included in the pre-lawsuit version of original Dungeons & Dragons and then removed from the bestiary (though a few mentions of balrogs remained elsewhere). On the other hand, I had added hobbits halflings when they in fact were not included in the bestiary (where gnomes, dwarves, and elves are listed), just as a player-character race. Moving wights and wraiths as well yields the following list:

Reality: Men
Classical Mythology: Medusae, Gorgons, Manticoras, Hydrae, Chimeras, Minotaurs, Centaurs, Dryads, Pegasi, Elementals
Medieval Legends/Folklore: Goblins, Kobolds, Hobgoblins, Ogres, Giants, Skeletons, Ghouls, Spectres, Cockatrices, Basilisks, Wyverns, Dragons, Gargoyles, Lycanthropes, Unicorns, Nixies, Pixies, Gnomes, Dwarves, Elves, Hippogriffs, Rocs, Griffons, Djinn, Efreet
Tolkien: Orcs, Wights, Wraiths, Treants, Balrogs
Other Fantasy/Horror Literature and Film: Trolls, Zombies, Mummies, Vampires
Original: Gnolls, Purple Worms, Invisible Stalker, Ochre Jelly, Black Pudding, Green Slime, Gray Ooze, Yellow Mold

At the end of the bestiary, Gygax briefly lists a few more creatures, including gelatinous cubes, but does not provide stats for them. The first three supplements released for original D&D (Supplement I: Greyhawk, Supplement II: Blackmoor, and Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry) did include a variety of new monsters, and these could be original creations (e.g. beholder, gelatinous cube, rust monster, mind flayer), extinct animals from reality (e.g. dinosaurs) or giant versions of real animals, from classical mythology (e.g. titans, harpies), from medieval legends/folklore (e.g. will o'wisps, couatl), or less frequently from non-Tolkien fantasy/horror/SF literature (e.g. displacer beasts, shadows). However, I don't think there was a single additional monster added from Tolkien (and Supplement I, at least, must have been released prior to the threatened lawsuit, since it still mentions balrogs, hobbits, and ents).

Again, Tolkien's popularity also resulted in players having the option of playing Tolkienesque elves, Tolkienesque dwarves, and hobbits halflings, but did not affect even the character classes, and the fundamental game mechanics are derived from miniatures wargaming combined with many original creations of Gygax and Arneson as well as intended player-character behavior that owes heavily to Robert E. Howard's and Fritz Leiber's sword-and-sorcery writings.

Actually gnolls came from Lord Dunsany books.

One story of Dunsany's featured a creature called "gnoles" but this seems to have been coincidental, as remarked upon by Gary Gygax in 2003.

 

[a Goat]

No. Having more than 1 writer indicates that they want to do some writing. The best case is when RPG has no dedicated writer.

 

[Chippy]

The writer sets the tone, having more than one can create more than one tone in the game. It worked with Cainarsky, but with W2 I think was a classic example of having too many cooks in the kitchen.
On a matter of personal taste, I rarely get drawn into stuff written by women. When I was a teen, I read Melanie Rawn and Katherine Kerr, but thay were just filler in between other male writers. The fact that I couldn't stand the writing in POE is explained a lot by the fact that a women was in charge it. Yes I'm sexist;- and don't give a fuck. I'd play, read, watch anything that was good and don't care who wrote it; women just have a different 'way' of writing altogether.

 

[cosmicray]

Yes I'm sexist;- and don't give a fuck. I'd play, read, watch anything that was good and don't care who wrote it; women just have a different 'way' of writing altogether.

I'm a sexist. No, I'm not. Yes, I am.

 

[Chippy]

Just being honest - give me one example of a literary epic that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Tolkien or G.R.R Martin? Look at games with MCA and...other game writers, look at worlds that have been built like Warhammer and Battletech. Take the Avengers films (whatever you may think of them; they're popular)...all created by men. Where are all the women? Add up all the men (I'm making an assumption and I know I'm right) and they will outweigh the women in number. I may be a prick for pointing it out, and it may be a "hatefact", but it's a fact nonetheless. And one that I consider before I spend money on entertainment.

It would be nice to be proven wrong, because the more entertainment in my life, the nicer it is, and being hung up on politics isn't a nice way to live. Just don't expect me to be spending money on Kathleen Kennedy's Star Wars films any time soon either though.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Just being honest - give me one example of a literary epic that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Tolkien or G.R.R Martin? Look at games with MCA and...other game writers, look at worlds that have been built like Warhammer and Battletech. Take the Avengers films (whatever you may think of them; they're popular)...all created by men. Where are all the women? Add up all the men (I'm making an assumption and I know I'm right) and they will outweigh the women in number. I may be a prick for pointing it out, and it may be a "hatefact", but it's a fact nonetheless. And one that I consider before I spend money on entertainment.

In my experience, people who say this kind of stuff haven't really tried to read anything by female authors. Fantasy as good as Tolkien or GRRM? Easy. Read Ursula Le Guin.

You want something a little more traditional, or at least more feudal Europe? Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy.

Something more literary? Anything by Patricia McKillip.

More modern? Catherynne Valente.

More experimental? N.K. Jemisin has won so many awards she could probably build a house out of them.

More mass market? I was pleasantly surprised by Lois McMaster Bujold's Chalion books--much less pulpy than I expected.

More grimdark? R.F. Kuang's Poppy War.

 

[cosmicray]

Just being honest - give me one example of a literary epic that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Tolkien or G.R.R Martin?

I wasn't arguing about whether women could write, but rather about your strange dichotomy regarding calling yourself a sexist, but in the next sentence saying you don't care. If you're sexist, then don't shy away from it by saying you don't care which gender wrote game/movie/book, when you obviously do.

I'm not really into discussing sexism here(on a fucking Codex), but saying Avengers were written by men is one thing(it's a fact, yes), but then saying were it written by women it would be worse is another(you didn't specifically say that, but I thought you implied). "Where are all the women"? I don't know, but I think it's a bit more complicated than a simple "they're shit at writing". Yes, you're factually correct about men having more writing credits than women. But you can't just leap from it to claim anything you're trying to claim.

I hope it won't turn into some ugly discussion.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

I hope it won't turn into some ugly discussion

 

[Chippy]

Ehh...don't feel any need to go full retard. I didn't really say what cosmicray is saying I said. I stand by my mysoganistic assumptions/statistics though. Let me know when the writing team for the Cainarsky game hits the level of PST or we have a 1:1 ratio of Joan Rivers > Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Bill Burr, etc though.