Joseph Valoren's page

When writing technical documentation, we aim for a grade 5 reading level. When writing game mechanics, the designers seem to write in a similar concise style.

That's simply not accurate. Technical documentation is not hobby fantasy roleplay mechanics. The former has to be understood by any layperson on the project, the latter by an in-group of dedicated hobbyists.

"No apologies for the language in Dungeon. Part of the joy of this hobby is reading, and part of the joy of reading is learning new words." - Erik Mona

I disagree with all of you.

When I started gaming, I was eleven. There were many words I was introduced to for the first time via gaming books, and I had to look them up, process them, and understand them before I could really grasp the underlying concepts they represented. When I started playing old World of Darkness games at around fourteen, that presented even more extreme challenges.

Many of the words that are traded on in gaming fairly liberally are still mystifying to people outside of the fandom or gamer communities. But tabletop gaming is a reading-intensive hobby that requires being introduced to a massive lexicon of words that don't enter the average citizen's vernacular. The same could be said of many hobbies, but gaming, especially, by virtue of the breadth of words dedicated to its creation, demands an expansive vocabulary. Not to punish or keep out those who don't understand, but to give them a compelling reason to learn.

If we stop raising the bar of the understanding of the young and the newest additions to the hobby by insisting we create a dialog using only the words they can easily understand as a child, we do them a disservice by depriving them of the educational benefits of gaming, and we do ourselves a disservice by gutting one of the most positive, beneficial side effects of the hobby.

Edit: Almost all of you. Big ups, Raphael.

Also useful advice, if you think you have a chance at Top 32, arrange to be able to get time off work. I find I need time in big blocks to really get the brain focusing on a piece of work.

There is zero chance I can afford to do that. Missing a day of work means not being able to pay my bills. I'm sure a lot of my fellow contestants are in similar situations.

As someone who's used to project-oriented work where the deadlines are sometimes "two months from now", sometimes "yesterday", I'd like to offer another way to look at it. I'm sure three days is enough to write a good archetype. But since the contestants were given the details of the archetype round several weeks in advance, it wouldn't make sense to not start working if you think you have even the slightest chance of advancing. (And even if you don't, writing archetypes is good practice.)

As Neil said, when working as a freelancer, the turnaround depends on the assignment. For this particular assignment, you got lots of time. This time around, you do have the luxury of polishing your work. There's nothing unprofessional about using the resources you're given.

I didn't mean to indicate that it was unprofessional to start writing your archetype now. Conversely, I don't think it's an especially realistic representation of actual turnaround as a contract writer. Your experience is similar to mine in terms of meeting varying deadlines for a variety of work, but speaking for myself, I've never been asked to produce so little work so far in advance.

That being said, again, I'm not disparaging anyone who's been working on their entry for a long time. It's just not how I prefer to work.

I've got maybe a half dozen idea seeds, but I won't be developing any of them until the Round 1 victors are named.

Certainly I could be fine-tuning my Round 2 entry now, but it seems to me a little counter to the spirit of the competition to so thoroughly front-load my entry: for example, I don't expect that the folks who actually write these supplements have the luxury of fine-tuning a single archetype for a month before publication. Moreover, I tend to do my best work under a deadline, so I'm waiting, and jotting down any interesting flotsam that occurs to me while familiarizing myself with the River Kingdoms in the meantime.

I've seen my item three times now. I don't really know how many items I've voted on, but I've done so for hours and hours over the last week, to the point that there are some entries I've literally seen more than twenty times. I haven't seen a new item in days. I think I might be done, honestly.