Article: EUOLogy about RPG Campaigns as Books

[Fellfrosch]

I was mostly kidding about Van Gogh being a hack, but he's certainly overrated. Nobody cared who he was until they realized that he was gonzo bonkers and cut off his own here and died young and insane; then he fit some sort of tragically romantic ideal and was suddenly very fashionable.

Which is not to say I that I don't think Starry Night is awesome. But that's probably because of the song.

[EUOL]

To Sprig:

umm...no it's not.  If something is successful it sells well.  If's it's not successful then it's becsaue no one bought it.  There are different levels of success, not evey book is going to sell 1 million copys

Actually, I think success and sales are quite different things.  Fell wrote the best gothic vampire historical humor fiction novel I know--but even if it were to be published, it wouldn't sell like Jordan--or even, I suspect, like Farland.  It's too narrow a subject field.  Yet, I consider his accomplishment quite a success.

Success has to do with achieving certain goals.  Sales can be one of those goals, but it doesn't have to be.



To 42:
I think most of what you said was quite lucid.  Good arguments, and I think you cut to the core of some of the things I was saying.  Yes, you're right--it isn't the fact that RPG books come from gaming settings that dooms them.  It's the fact that most gamers aren't willing to sacrifice for story.  It's the fact that the best quality usually isn't dedicated to gaming fiction.  

It's that people who decided to translate their campaign into a story don't have the experience to do it.  It COULD be done successfully--but I think it would actually be harder than writing an original piece.  New authors mistakenly believe it is the easy route, and end up mired down in all the problems.  


To Skar:

Well said.

[Peter Ahlstrom]

in the musee d'orsai

Gordon Dickson is turning over in his grave

[fuzzyoctopus]

I remember that Musee.  Lovely hot chocolate with whipped cream and shaved chocolate on top.

[stacer]

Mmmm, they do that in Scotland, too. And add pink marshmallows. Yeah, it's a little rich, but yum!

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

pink marshmellows in Scotland? That doesn't sound very ... manly. Does explain a bit about Ent though.

[Entsuropi]

No, its just part of the grand scottish drive to die of massive overfatty and oversweet foods.

We have the most lethally unhealthy diet in europe apparently. And the highest rate of drug abuse and teenage pregnancies IIRC. Lovely country, come visit sometime!

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

yeah, but you have to DYE them to get them that way. So you get pink on PURPOSE. that's what's unmanly

[Fellfrosch]

Actually, most marshmallows found in the wild are naturally pink. It's because they eat so many shrimp.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

See, that's a common misperception. But I minored in Marshmellogy (the study of Marshmellows) with a focus in the wild Marshmellow of the North-east Atlantic Isles. The Marshmellow that roams the islands in Scotland, and in fact most of Europe, only eats BLUE Shrimp, since a strange evolutionary quirk left them color-blind to pink, and pink shrimp are completely invisible to them. Thus the Scottish marshmellow is naturally blue, though sometimes a touch green from the parsley which supplements their diet in lean times. Pink Marshmellows have to be imported from more southern lands, like Chile. Or else dyed by gay Scotsmen.

[Fellfrosch]

I suppose the fact that blue shrimp are, of course, male only makes the imagery worse.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

only if they're all balled up.

[Spriggan]

To change the topic a tad bit, I found this interview/article with Tracy Hickman at Enworld.  Going to quote the instresting part, if you want to read the whole thing check it out here.  Though it's not so much of an interview as a guy paraphraseing what Hickman told him.

While he appreciates the positive reviews Mystic Warrior has received, Tracy agrees with the view that critics do not seem to appreciate fantasy as legitimate literature. Tracy has received letters from high school students assigned to write about their favorite author, asking him if he is a legitimate author; their teachers say he is not. Tracy said, the question is asked, "because I write science-fiction and fantasy, which is populist fiction, not true "literature". In comparison, he pointed out that Charles Dickens was a populist fiction writer in his own time and was paid by the word.

Tracy says he and Laura "are not concerned with being considered legitimate'authors' by someone else's arbitrary standard. Our sole concern is to write a story that people can enjoy and feel like they have gone somewhere, done something, and learned something through the experience"

[Skar]

Can I say how much I am disgusted with the public school system?  The picture of some public-school-teacher-drone declaring to his/her students that Tracy Hickman is not a "legitimate" author just infuriates me.  Especially when the statistics coming out of public schools today show that it's pretty likely that the only thing that TEACHER has ever done is make kids dumber than when they entered his class.

Not that I like Tracy Hickman's work all that much...I loved dragonlance when I was 14 but I'm pretty much over it.  He still accomplished a great deal then and since.  For him to be dismissed out of hand by a mindless...sigh.  

I must stop letting such things upset me so.

If anyone's interested there's a good book here:http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm that makes a pretty convincing argument about the sources and nature of the problems we have in the American Public School system.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

the core problem, I think, (and I haven't had time to read that article) is that teachers are not paid enough. This means that fewer people want to get in which means that the systems have to be less selective about who they want in. You have to have those 100 3rd graders taught this year. You can't put it off. So SOMEONE has to be hired.

Plus teachers are given tons of extra panel and committee responsibilities. I'm not talking about how they have to get a certain number of education credits. I'm for that. But I hear my mom (public school teacher)go on and on about how she's had to do all this extra admin work and has to be on these committees that take her away not from planning and grading, but from actual TEACHING each week. How does that make sense? Plus they're putting kids with special needs (not wheelchairs, but things like mental retardism and autism) into standard classes -- with teachers not trained to deal with it. And before you go off on it, Fairfax County Public Schools is consistently rated among the 10 best in the nation (scored by standardized testing and students that go on to college).

How do I draw my conclusions? Well, despite all that irrelevant crap that teachers have to do here, the county pays 5-10 thousand more a year for teachers than most other places. It makes a difference.

Think about it, we pay starting teachers $35000/yr to teach for 6-8 hours a day. To do that, they have to spend many hours at home preparing. My mom gets to work at 8. She doesn't get to leave till after 4:30. She's there for 8.5 hours. Then she comes, and on the average spends 2-3 hours per DAY grading or preparing lessons. We're asking for more than 10 hour days for teachers and we're paying 'em phone center rates.

Well, how the heck else did we think our education system was going to turn out? The best of the best don't come to it because they can live much better working elsewhere.