From: mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.misc
Subject: Re: RPG Fiction
Date: 4 Sep 92 23:21:29 GMT
Article-I.D.: u.1992Sep4.232129.29289
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle

Speaking as someone who's tried it, the difficulty is that the qualities
which make a good game don't necessarily make a good novel.  Most
straightforward attempts to novelize FRP games founder on this.  The
most successful novels, like Salvatore's, seem to be stories with an FRP
world as their background, not campaign novelizations.  (Not that this
is any guarentee of success either.  I don't know if the Torg novels
were campaign-based or not, but the writing is of the quality where
random sentences read out loud are amusing as often as not--
unintentionally....)

Here's what I've seen first-hand of the pitfalls of FRP fiction.

Most campaigns give central status to a large number of characters, 
maybe 5-6, while a novel works much better with 1-2.  In my experience
this is the single factor most likely to torpedo campaign fiction.  The
author needs to ruthlessly cull characters, no matter how interesting,
to end up with a cast that s/he can deal with.  Stephen King can
sometimes get away with that many main characters, but it's beyond 
most peoples' skill (including mine).

It's also tricky to keep the mechanical 'bones' of the system from
poking out through the flesh of your story.  AD&D fiction seems
especially prone to this, perhaps because it has particularly odd-
shaped bones.  The reader shouldn't be encouraged or tempted to think of
game-system explanations for story events, because this breaks the spell
of the story.  A lot of campaign fiction will benefit from deliberate
rules-breaking, because the story will flow better and seem more 'real'.
(However, if one's looking to be published by the game company, one may
be stuck with the rules as written....)

This is especially important when describing combat or action scenes.
FRP lends itself to being translated into a sort of blow-by-blow account
which is exactly wrong for most fictional combat--it needs to be
replaced by a very loose, impressionistic account of all but the few
most critical instants of combat.

Working in a known world setting, rather than making up one for your
novel, is tempting but it can lead to laziness and flatness.  There are
a couple of passages in Feist's _Magician_ series (which is discernably
FRP fiction, but pretty readable) where the author got lazy with his
descriptions because he assumed the shared FRP background.  For example,
the characters encounter a wraith underground, but the author never
describes it; he just says it's a wraith, counting on FRP background to
fill in the mental picture.  This makes the scene much less exciting
than it would have been had he described the creature--and less
realistic, too, because it's not clear that his characters should have
recognized the wraith as such.

Finally, the pacing of a good campaign is much looser than the pacing of
a novel, at least for the campaigns I've been in--there's room for lots
of digression, for a few meaningless combats, for some times when the
players are just thrashing around looking for a plan....All of this
has to be strictly tightened up.  Meaningless combat can be quite fun
to play, but it is a bore to read about.

The only answer I've ever found, personally, to the question "Why write
FRP fiction if it's such a mass of pitfalls?" is that when I've got a
particular story in my head, that's the one I want to write about, and
frequently it's an FRP story....

Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu