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

[Trans-Financial-Man]

There are various points in the article that I would agree or disagree with at whatever levels, and I don't think there's much purpose in mentioning them, so I'll just quote one that I disagree with p. strongly.

To some degree this could be dealt with by reducing the amount of text, but I doubt the text could be reduced enough (in the kind of RPG we're talking about) to make such revisions feasible. Thus, I think that an inherent feature of narrative, dialogue-heavy RPGs is that they are immune to the rewrites and structural changes that you would tend to see in other written works, despite the fact that editing and iteration are critical to good writing.

I think there are some people whose response would be that this is an argument to return to the much slimmer text of RPGs before the mid-90s and to focus on other means of story-telling than dialogue. That is a whole other debate, and one that's a little hard for me to wrap my head around because it is at least a little bit like saying, "If you find fantasy novels too long-winded, you should just watch fantasy movies." There obviously is a huge swath of players who like dialogue-tree-based RPGs, and so I think trying to abandon the form altogether is probably not a great idea.

Here's the thing. If you'd take your list of "well written RPGs" (Planescape: Torment, Fallout 1, The Sith Lords, Mask of the Betrayer, Bloodlines, Arcanum, The Age of Decadence, The Witcher, and Betrayal at Krondor) that seemingly share no common traits at all but somehow remain well written, I dare say that perhaps with the sole exception of PST, they are NOT dialogue-heavy in the way that the current crop of deep lore logorrhea the likes of PoE or Numanuma is.

The dialogues in Arcanum are actually resolved pretty quickly. Depending on your character, you might not even have a whole lot of options. It's very much like AoD in that regard. Meanwhile AoD is very much like another series that I hold in high esteem for natural flow of dialogues, and that's Gothic - in Gothic the conversations often flow with the protag's speaking without the player's input, because what's the point of adding a single dialogue option that says: "1. Whoa!". In none of these games are NPCs also information vendors that have a 6-option dialogue tree that can be shortened to "tell me about shit". Actually, Gothic is the only exception, but this kind of dialogue is reserved only for the generic, unnamed "townsfolk" npcs, and copypasted 100% without any shame, as it should be. I believe this is also the same for Kotor2, Witcher and Bloodlines - prob mostly because of full VO in dialogues that is a strain on budget, so copypasting it all up is much more reasonable and cheap. Do Kotor2 and Bloodlines actually have that many long-ass dialogues, except for people like Kreia or LaCroix? I honestly can't remember, especially for Bloodlines.

Then we have, say, Krondor and Fallout. If you ask me, both of these don't even have a lot of characters to talk to. Krondor can have elaborate and long dialogues, but its cast of NPCs is actually very limited, thanks to which all of them count and can be made important for the story. Plus, again, a lot of their dialogues with the PCs flow on without the player's input, and occasions of "tell me about stuff" are very rare. I would say Fallout is similar. Pretty sure the majority of people in the world are generic Melcars who only give you quips, not dialogues, when interacted with. The longer dialogues are reserved for major characters, either those important for a specific location, or for the general story. Otherwise you could probably reduce them to "hi, let me see your wares, bye". Again, none of the "tell me about stuff" unless they are actual historians.

Meanwhile you have those modern RPGs that really like them yuuuuuuge, beautiful dialogues with every janitor you meet. It simply isn't interesting, in fact it's tiring more than anything else, especially when they keep jammering on things you'll never see, or on things you've read about a hundred times before (I'm looking at you Shadowrun: Hong Kong), or better yet they just keep talking for the sake of talking, because spouting nonsense just to get them dialogue counts up for the "huge swath of players who like dialogue-tree-based RPGs" is obviously the priority. If you cut down on all of that useless shit, you'd probably already help the entire process tons, without losing anything (or very little) of import.


And in all of that PS:T is the only one where you get to ask NPCs to spam you with everything they know, and it somehow works. Why? It is a mystery. Maybe it's a fluke. Who the hell knows.

The core path of dialouge in PT is pretty suscinct. Any verboseness is optional. Even the characters with a few paragraphs of text are few. But it makes sense for them to exposit a lot. It doesn't make sense for a random NPC in the Bronx to tell you the entire religious makeup of the catholic church. If I were writing an RPG (which I might be soon, watch this space) I would have the core exposition. Maximum two or three lines. And then a dialogue choice to elaborate. If it makes sense for a character to know certain things.

 

[Alpan]

Good article. Reads like a typically reasonable, 40-degree-day MRY post with hints of the great Primordia desolation through the words.

 

[Jaedar]

The "random" dialogues in PS:T also work better than they should because you can *never* know when one of them will feature one of your past lives. Also it is a genuinely cool and unique setting, which means that even the unrelated stuff is novel.

Writing in motb is fairly to the point, there's no talk of cities (unless you are going to visit them), I don't think the game even mentions what countries rashamen borders, let alone their cultures, histories and preferred naval tactics. It is left as an exercise to the reader to compare this with say, PoE.

Perhaps modern game writer (bosses) think they are being clever by parallelizing the work by adding unrelated cruft to the story, reducing the need to synchronize between different writers?

 

[Taurist]

Writing isn't just the text that appears in dialogue boxes. It encompasses quest design, animation, voice acting, cut scene direction, level design, and artwork. Four lines in VtMB express more than 12 paragraphs of DivOS2's word vomit.

The canonical Well Written Games tended to have quality writers somewhere higher up the design tree, people who care about "what do they eat". People who know that you can convey more about a character in their appearance than in their words half the time.

If it's true that you can't cut that writing, you can at least present it a little better.

 

[Maculo]

This piece, along with Roxor's post, provide a lot to consider. Regardless of whether I agree with the points, thank you MRY and Darth Roxor for putting so much time into these posts. This is what brings me back to the Codex (and the various shitposting).

One matter I thought was never given much, or as much, consideration was how many of the top RPGs originate from existing source material. PS:T, Bloodlines, MotB, Kotor 2, and the Witcher series all have source material to some extent, whether that be novels or module books. That source material, in my mind, imparts a certain advantage in terms of focus or a starting point for the writer. That is not to say the writer's task suddenly becomes easy, but I do think there is something to be said for not having to start a setting from scratch. For example, the fact that Avellone used Kreia to point out all the absurdities in Star Wars was great, but he had several decades of movies and books to draw from. In contrast, I consider PoE, where I viewed the information dumps and "bilingual dialogue" as less an attempt at thought-provoking writing (although that is present with distressing frequency), and more so an attempt to compensate for a lack of established lore by Obsidian. Rather than allow the lore to slowly unfold, it felt like Obsidian/Sawyer was trying to cram an almanac down my throat.

MRY, I am curious, do you view writing for an already established setting or source material to be an advantage or a hindrance?

 

[Crescent Hawk]

Writing is hard sure, I say that a lot as much everyone else here, but the problem is deeper, its when the stories and themes themselves are shit.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[MRY]

Franklin’s is the best, brisket is my favorite. Was just for my own sake. A lot had no sauce, so pretty safe from ketchup. I would usually try to do two places per meal, then take a break.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

 

[Mustawd]

Franklin’s is the best, brisket is my favorite. Was just for my own sake. A lot had no sauce, so pretty safe from ketchup. I would usually try to do two places per meal, then take a break.

Austin is generally trash for real Texan food, lately. I recommend checking out bbq comps in Dallas, San Antonio or Houston (or even the Rio Grande Valley or Corpus Cristi). There’s always the local places, but the comps just tend to bring out the best stuff. Same thing for Texas chili. In the opinion of most Texans I know, Austin is quickly divorcing itself from the state heritage in order to chase the “cool city” vibe and attract trendy out of state folk.

It’s to the point that I think it kind of deserves an earthquake or two to remind it of where it came from. And I say that as a life long Texan who used to live in San Antonio and visited the Austin salsa/mambo scene often. Place has changed, and not for the better. Sad!

 

[Mustawd]

Blowhard and Kalarion feel free to disagree or comment. But I’m just becoming an Austin hater lately.

 

[Mr. Hiver]

First and most importantly of all - you need to stop with that constant self deprecation. It doesnt become you. It makes you look like you are trying to apologize for every subsequent thought by throwing yourself under the bus - and it does not look like humility at all. Maybe because you dish it too often, repeatedly and with effort in variations which all say the same thing in the end. Some restraint and frugality would serve you much better.

Just like it would serve better all of RPG writing.

I would also say that in your case it is a case of misplaced self criticism, certainly when expressed in those amounts. No doubt every single one of us is a shit in one way or another and we all fail at various points in our life but to take that as some constant and ultimate qualification misses the point and wastes the opportunity.
Remember that one of the things that can change the human nature is regret. So dont fucking waste it so cheaply.

Im still reading the article, but you two had sidetracked me with this exchange here on the first page and i want to say a few things before i forget. And ask.

Otherwise, it's a total sucker's game, and I'm not at all surprised that Avellone has no interest in doing it any longer. There is no way for the story as a whole to be your story without absurd sacrifices.

What does this mean? Why and how there is no way for the story as a whole to be your story without absurd sacrifices?
What do you mean by "your story" and what absurd sacrifices would then enable that?

Lousy writing that is well voiced in a well constructed dialogue tree is infinitely better to the player than brilliant writing in a lousy dialogue tree.

Where the hell did you get that idea and who is that "player"? Tell me so i can get some plane tickets and beat the snot out of that shit.

And the story-telling is largely subordinate to other things (like gameplay systems and visuals).

NO, no, no, no. The two, or three or four, must flow together and work to inform each other and to enhance each other.
They are not separate entities in video games, especially in RPGs - but simply different tools and instruments with which to tell a story and to create a narrative. Just like in ordinary writing you have a description and a dialogue, so in video games you have these various tools to create the "story" - which includes the gameplay itself.

Look at Half Life, especially the second one. The whole story was told and actually created through what you as a player did, what you saw, places you went through, events that you witnessed or affected - through the very gameplay. Without a word from yourself as a protagonist. And for a good length of the start without anyone telling you whats going on in some idiotic exposition dump or any written guide. Later occasional dialogues with other NPCs were more of a hindrance than necessity. They added some flavor, gave a few details, but the actual story and the experience of the game didnt really need them. It was all clear.
You discovered what was going on and created the story - by playing.
And that is always the case in the best games of any genre.

There is no "i am reading this stuff now, this writing stuff, words and letters - then im playing, doing stuff, performing these actions - now im gonna read more written words now" - in great games. Same for the voiced dialogues instead of written words.
As soon as that separation between writing and playing can be felt - its a bad game.
In RPGs, although that transition between action and reading written words is present, the very nature of the genre and its settings serves as the connecting medium, as reading is actually expected as a part of the gameplay.
Same for more modern action-rpgs with voiced dialogues and few written parchments between them. In examples of those that are good these seemingly different parts blend and work together with every other part including gameplay to create the whole.

Just like in a band you have five, six different musicians with different instruments creating a good song. A hit.
As soon as one starts to think his guitar is separate from the drums and the bass - it alls falls apart into shit.
Maybe the game dev studio is more akin to a symphony orchestra with several conductors leading different sections and one or two overseeing it all.
If those conductors keep fucking up and the ones overseeing make horrible choices in preparation and during execution which turn out to require rewriting the symphony as it is performed... And we did have a very elucidating examples of that provided by mr Avellone quite recently...

The result is discordant clash of different sections that start to think they are supposed to be separate from each other.

I spent a huge amount of time and energy on TTON for a role that was basically anonymous, rendering a contribution that was basically irrelevant, and earned money that made no difference whatsoever to my standard of living and was all poured into backing Kickstarter projects and charity bundles, and paying Fallen Gods contributors. If TTON is great, it is great because of someone other than me; if it isn't, no matter how great my work (I doubt it was that great), it couldn't meaningfully change that fact.

I feel you consider this a loss because you had a chance to work on a Planescape/Torment game and then seen it waste away.
But take head, i bring words of succor to your ills.

That was never a Torment game and it certainly isnt great or even good, so you dont need to feel any loss.
As you say later, you earned some money, ordered stuff from amazon, indulged in charitable actions and learned better from the experience.
Thats much more then the rest of can claim, mate.

Moreover, even if my contribution hadn't been a trivially small part of the game, the nature of this kind of RPG is that if it's done well, the vast majority of what you write will never be seen by a given player, and some of it will never be seen by any meaningful number of players.

Again that "player". Seems to me you developers suffer from some nasty pathological fantasy about "the player" who takes the worst form of all your fears and doubts and fills your minds until all you can see is "it" shambling down the hallway towards you.

Besides, you are not right either.
If the game is done well players will search for such nuggets and hidden treasures in it. Because in that case such hidden nuggets will be properly integrated into overall wellness of the whole and serve as parts of that wellbeing.
But if "any meaningful number of players" for some reason never find those parts - its irrelevant. Because value of those parts is in themselves and in the whole game they are parts of, not in how many morons see them or not.
Millions upon millions never played Fallouts or PST, so what?

The real art is excellence in any particular field and excellence is value in itself.

Its entirely different matter when the game is bad enough that nobody is interested in discovering those hidden sections, nor can they understand what those are for, to what they relate in story or the gameplay (which should be the same!) when they find them, - because the overall direction of the game was utter shit.

It's a silly way to spend your time and energy when those things are precious, unless (as I said) you're building a dream project for your own sake.

Yup. So you wont do it again and youll do something for yourself instead. Problem solved. Lesson learned. Fuck Inxile.

And in all of that PS:T is the only one where you get to ask NPCs to spam you with everything they know, and it somehow works. Why? It is a mystery. Maybe it's a fluke. Who the hell knows.

Darth Roxor
Again, "shorter is the route to better" seems plausible, except that the ultra-long-winded PS:T is the most acclaimed, and many other fairly long-winded titles (like MOTB) are also well acclaimed. While TTON and POE may draw more negative reviews, it's not like there are 100 RPGs with PS:T-length dialogue that are bad, and one that is great; the ratio of greatness to lousiness is actually very high, possibly higher than it is for more terse RPGs.

That's my point re: the impossibility of drawing firm rules. The dataset is small, and the results are all over the place.

To both here,

PST worked because of its setting. Because of Sigil.
Because of the immortal amnesiac waking up in the fucking City of Doors orbiting on a spire in the center of creation. And there was a floating skull talking to you and the next thing you know you got it to read instructions to you, from your body, that you tattooed and carved into yourself. Every single thing in it from the first second was strange, unexpected, weird, interesting, never seen before and full of potential. Potential for things great, terrible, and wondrous at the same time.
Which automatically made every single bit of info you can get from anywhere and anyone extremely interesting and valuable.
Valuable not just for some vapid "story" but for your own existence and the whole gameplay that became your experience and your story together with every other part of the game.
Info you had to go and find yourself. That you had to fight for, cheat for, (Lie) for. And die for.

Unlike, say, for example,... the completely broken start of the TToN with all that mind-numbing horrendous exposition, hand holding and idiotic self destructing "narrative" of the intro into an even dumber "plot".
Thrown onto nonsensical mess of the first area in which you are then bombarded into catatonic state by all the fucking "writing" put there for its own sake, dissociated from anything else. Playing a role of a bland sack of contrived crap.

The results aren't all over the place.
They are right where they needed to be and where they always were.

When i asked you why the Fallen gods dont have better art it wasnt because i wanted nicer visuals.

 

[Mr. Hiver]

Ive read the rest of that... stuff, now.
So rage inducing. So many thing to beat ones head with.

It seems my post above answers the unfathomable question MRY ponders in that.... article.
Although, posing a question in a way as he does, requesting some exact method of quantification and calculation of quality of writing in RPGs, is as misguided and pointless as his notions of "writing" as separate from the rest of the game, dialogues separate from writing, or as his hallucinations about the audience and the "players" (they mutliply). The only answer to that question is 42.

For now, ill just point out

Only a neurotic masochist can take the time to learn much useful, and he may, like a prospector in the Glow, come away permanently sickened.

You either cured yourself and leveled up or died after the Glow.

There was no "going away permanently sickened".

 

[Jestai]

It seems that this piece was written in one go, until physical and mental exhaustion and the writer never looked back once done. How fitting for a "thought piece" about RPG writing!

MRY, my friend, let me be your writing mentor : you need to immediately and definitively stop with your insufferable stream of self-deprecation. This is indeed what is the most awful about your writing. What's the point? If you think that your opinion on your own writing is important to your arguments (I highly doubt it is), why don't you summarize your thoughts in one tidy paragraph and BE DONE WITH IT?


By the way, Primordia was great, big fan.

 

[Bohrain]

I tend to get much less upset about allegedly bad writing in video games than others, perhaps I expect something different from my gaming experiences or I apply different standards of writing to a game than to a book. Maybe that is a mistake.

I notice this too, but writing serves a bit different function in games, which doesn't make the absolute quality as important as in say, in a novel.
Games make you do several different things and I'd argue that it's sometimes beneficial to offer something bad-to-mediocre in order to break the pace of some other activity. Torment had very forgetable combat, but nevertheless I think it added to the experience, since just playing a point and click or visual novel would've made the game too text-heavy. And dungeon crawler like SMT: Strange Journey benefits from the occasional written segment to break away the monotonousness of combat and exploration.

 

[MRY]

Franklin’s is the best, brisket is my favorite. Was just for my own sake. A lot had no sauce, so pretty safe from ketchup. I would usually try to do two places per meal, then take a break.

Austin is generally trash for real Texan food, lately. I recommend checking out bbq comps in Dallas, San Antonio or Houston (or even the Rio Grande Valley or Corpus Cristi).

Ridiculous. At least, ridiculous as of the last time I did BBQ hunting in Texas. Maybe things have changed, but Houston was lousy, Dallas so-so, and only San Antonio (where my mom's from) is good. Next thing you'll be telling me about how great pulled pork and vinegar sauces are...

In the opinion of most Texans I know, Austin is quickly divorcing itself from the state heritage in order to chase the “cool city” vibe and attract trendy out of state folk.

Certainly possible. I've always thought the idea of cultivating affectations to be a doomed enterprise. (See, e.g, https://www.theonion.com/new-billionaire-tries-to-develop-eccentricities-1819569103) The city's organically distinctive culture is not something that you can preserve by "keeping weird" or whatever.

 

[MRY]

you need to immediately and definitively stop with your insufferable stream of self-deprecation

Nope. Now I'm going to add a meta-self-deprecating strain where I apologize for the apologies ("Proof, if you needed it, of what a bad writer I am."). There's no escape. (As a character sneers in Koestler's Darkness at Noon: "The ecstasies of humility and suffering are as cheap as those induced chemically.")

 

[Mustawd]

Next thing you'll be telling me about how great pulled pork and vinegar sauces are...

Well...

I actually am partial to the mustard base bbq sauces you get in the Carolinas, as I spent some time out there in the early 2000s.

And look, maybe I was being a bit harsh on Austin BBQ, but the way the city is going feels very anti-Texan the last few times I visited.

 

[Mr. Hiver]

At least he is aware of it.
I dont want to waste time checking, but i figure there were atleast five or six instances of apologetic self criticism in that article. One is enough.

I wont go over all the details of it all, especially since my "tone" may trigger some sensitive emotional daffodils, again, despite there being no such tone at all.
Especially not on this day, a holiday of throwing deluded romantics to the Lions.

But the argument about there being no coaching for RPG writers as one of the reasons for lower quality of writing isnt really true.
Most of all because writing in any form for any genre is by large a lonely singular task. I dont know a single writer whose works i enjoyed the most or even read at all, that created their work in an environment of coaching and group studying of the craft.
At most they present their manuscripts to a select few closest friends for early drafts and revisions. And later to some editor of the publishers, before final release.

Secondly, because nobody in any sort of sport or business or whatever is free from criticism for performing badly. Not basketball players, not anyone.
Just look what happens to the most famous NBA players when they fuck up a game.

And the idea that some kind of professional critic would help is complete nonsense. All that would achieve is provide criticism performed in some nicer literary manner and style.
Which would then be nicer to read for the devs, opposed to rabid masses of the internet imbeciles and dumbfuckery - but there we again get into that issue of devs selectively choosing who to consider "fans" and "players" to pay attention to.
It seems to be a subconscious urge rather then conscious selection, but that makes it even worse.

As i said and explained above writing in games cannot be thought of as separate from the gameplay, setting, and art direction. In turn all those main components have to be as best as possible and fuse with eachother to provide the positive end result of the whole gestalt of the game. In some cases several really good parts may cover up a single of them being less good.
But when the overall direction is bad from the top down and these main components are thought of as separate, with purpose to itself, the result cannot be good.

Meres were not badly written at all, atleast the few ive seen. But their problem was that they hanged in the vacuum of the game with no purpose or significance the player can glean.
They would appear without any rhyme or reason, with no apparent connection to the gameplay itself, present walls of texts - and then disappear without a trace connection to the gameplay. Another problem was they were often much more interesting then anything we could encounter in the actual game. That and more has already been said about TToN failure, but the main culprit for all those mistakes came from the top management. Including decisions to fire the Lead director and rewrite everything in the middle of development. And to misunderstand fans desire for more writing - as desire for walls of texts just for the sake of walls of purple prose texts without any measure or nuance and subtlety.

And the same downstream results are very visible in the case of Obsidian too.
So it isnt just the fault of the writers at all - and cannot be.

 

[Tigranes]

"I did not understand the article at all!"

The second part of your post is... part of what MRY is telling you.

 

[Mr. Hiver]

You talkin` to me bubba?

Dont be so fucking stupid when addressing me again.
Put some more effort then writing simple one liners and strawmans that blow up in your face. Thats not what i expect from you.

Its not what MRY is saying, although he mentions some of the similar factors, he doesnt understand how they actually work.
Other than that i would need to telepathically guess what exactly you are talking about - so fuck you.

 

[Tigranes]

Sorry, did I step on your daffodils?

The discussion really doesn't have much to do with 'hiring professional critics'. And one of the problems with game writing is precisely that whereas writing is generally a 'lonely singular task', with video games writing is now forced to negotiate with multiple writers as well as game designers, producers, the level design pipeline, etc, etc.

And one of the points everybody's already understood is how there needs to be a better process for writers to understand just where the fuck their writing is going so that they don't write a big dramatic thing and realise it's going in some shitty place where it's going to be an annoying word-dump breaking the gameplay loop.

 

[Mr. Hiver]

No, i threw them to the lions.
Im far more pissed off by single liners proclaiming how i didnt understand something - which turn out to be your own misunderstanding of what i actually said. And why.

I never said that the discussion has much to do with hiring professional critics. You might wanna stop hallucinating. MRY did mention it, to which i was responding and adding my opinion about it.

And one of the problems with game writing is precisely that whereas writing is generally a 'lonely singular task',

Which is the reason why it cannot be solved by any kind of coaching and training - which MRY listed as one of the bigger faults of the process.

with video games writing is now forced to negotiate with multiple writers as well as game designers, producers, the level design pipeline, etc, etc.

That very FACT of seeing writing in games as something separate that has to then negotiate with other departments is the fucking problem.

everybody's already understood

Is that your global telepathy working again?

I dont see that understanding in MRY article or much of it in this thread either.
The problem is precisely the disconnect between writing and the gameplay and other main components of the game and that the fault largely lies with the management of dev companies.
The problem are people that think writing for a game is writing text - which is then inserted somewhere in the game.
Instead of realizing that writing in games is done by text and by the gameplay itself and by visuals and art style and music and any other component.

That all those together are language and tools of expression in which the game is "written", not just by letters in an alphabet in the form of some text or a dialogue, voiced or not.

Thats why i mentioned HL2 which wrote its whole story by gameplay alone. It literally had shown you everything, and forced you to play through it to experience it, instead of telling you. Which was fitting for that kind of a game. It was done masterfully.

And thats what PST did which is different then TtoN, for example.

Every sprite, every idea, line of dialogue, text, art style of architecture, design of characters, of the setting, of individual locations, every plot and resolution to that plot, the overall story, the intro, the ending, every quest and everything it contains, every icon, every character portrait, every weapon and item and what they could do, the way characters move, every special effect, every spell and even the UI and the main options screen, every enemy, monster and NPC (and music!) - and the rules of DnD that were used - are language in which PST was written.

It was "written" in all of those things. Not just words.

The combat wasnt that great, but the strength of all other components of the whole "language" of the game was so good that one part didnt ruin the whole.
And the same or similar goes for Fallouts and every other great game in any genre.

Thats also the reason WHY Mask of the betrayer is a better, fuller game then NWN, although they are made in the same engine and with practically same systems.
Same reason why New Vegas is a better game than failure3.

Get it now?

-edited to add more details.

 

[Azarkon]

Tldr rpg writing is hard

So is game design, and indeed, if you replaced writing with design in MRY's editorial, it reads almost exactly the same.

The issue is not just CRPG writing... It's the game industry as a whole.

 

[MRY]

The aspect of RPG writing that is hardest (or most susceptible to the concerns I have) is the design aspect. Simply writing segments of dialogue or fiction is not some esoteric skill in a domain that lacks training methods.