Josh Sawyer Q&A Thread

[rusty_shackleford]

Figures. Has anyone dared read their work?

Megan Starks is actually decent, rest of Nusidian writers are trash.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Place to remove from inventory?

 

[Roguey]

Figures. Has anyone dared read their work?

I've checked some of em out and gave my thoughts https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...-go-to-new-thread.119594/page-96#post-5921621 https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...-go-to-new-thread.119594/page-96#post-5921627 https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...-go-to-new-thread.119594/page-97#post-5921694

 

[Major_Blackhart]

 

[Infinitron]

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/669526166656385024/hi-josh-i-like-to-dabble-in-ttrpg-design-theres

ccubed17 asked:

Hi Josh, I like to dabble in ttrpg design. There's a store near my house that has a giant stack of issues of Dragon Magazine from mostly the 90s. I didn't get into RPGs until much later. Did you ever read that magazine? If I was going to buy some to analyze or try to play, are there any authors or artists or modules you'd recommend I keep an eye out for?

Yeah, that was the era when I was reading Dragon, Dungeon, and Polyhedron a lot. I don’t have any of my old issues anymore, but I do reference the .pdfs from time to time.

Issue 148 is memorable as the Deck of Many Things issue, which had printed sheets of cards to ruin your campaign. That’s a Ned Dameron cover. Ned did a lot of nice art for TSR/Dragon, including a lot of the priests in the 2nd Edition Forgotten Realms Faiths & Avatars/Powers & Pantheons/Demihuman Deities series. He also did really beautiful pen and ink drawings in the Hall of Heroes supplement.

Daniel Horne also contributed some really nice work to Dragon, including the cover to issue 126, which served as the inspiration for Sagani in Pillars of Eternity.

Other artists who did things in a variety of rule/sourcebooks and Dragon/Dungeon at the time were Tom Baxa, Valerie Valusek, Jim Holloway, and Stephen Fabian.

One other issue of Polyhedron sticks out in my mind especially, #150, which featured an art nouveau stylization of Spelljammer. No offense to Jim Holloway, who did much of the art for Spelljammer (and also a TON of Paranoia art), but his style never really seemed like a great fit for for the setting. Art nouveau Spelljammer was really appealing to me.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/670076137573154816/hi-slightly-nebulous-question-but-one-ive-wanted

danby96 asked:

Hi! Slightly nebulous question but one I've wanted to ask for some time. It seems to me like the game dev industry - in terms of actual production - tends to only hire people with coding experience. In theory, makes total sense, easier to work on a team when everyone is on the same page. That said, I often wonder about potential pitfalls of that when I play games that have kind of lackluster dialogue or storytelling, half-baked settings, etc. For context, I'm a fiction guy (classic story: got an MFA, grinded for a little while, realized there was no money in it and looked for work elsewhere) and I'm obviously always on the lookout for jobs where I can actually use the thing I have degrees in. I always think writing dialogue or character concepts or whatever for games would be a really fun and interesting job, but I've found that whenever dev companies have job postings they either: A. don't have positions like this, or B. require tons of coding experience. As a total outsider, it feels to me like asking people to be jacks of all trades. That said, I'm totally not trying to say "game industry bad, should just hire better writers" because that's deeply unrealistic and I'm not in the know enough to recognize how decisions get made, let alone how they could be made better. I'm just curious, as an outsider, what your perspective about this divide is (if any) and how you navigate it on your projects. Pillars is one of the rare franchises with equally compelling narrative and gameplay and I guess I'm mostly curious what kind of team dynamic and backgrounds go into that.

While I have a limited perspective on the hiring practices of all the game companies around the world, I have to say I’m a little surprised that there are many developers requiring that writers be skilled at coding. At Obsidian, writers have to understand basic scripting, variables, and operator logic, but that’s about it. We don’t even really have to write our own scripts; we have a list of functions to pick from and then fill in the blanks (or just pick options from lists).

We use a flowchart-based node/reply tool to arrange our branching conversations, so coding isn’t really a thing that we have to do. To be honest, I haven’t heard or seen of it much from applicants who have come to us from other studios, either. Maybe you’ve just been unlucky?

We have a decent range of educational backgrounds among our writers. Your MFA comment got me wondering, so I polled the narrative designers. A few have writing MFAs and the rest of us have BAs in a variety of fields from Communications & Journalism to English to History to Biology. One of us has an MA in Museum Studies and other has an MA in Medieval Studies. I just have a BA in History.

Anyway, I’d keep looking at different companies. I really think that most of us don’t have a coding requirement for our writers, at least not the studios that focus heavily on narrative.

 

[Infinitron]

Eternity Tactics still on the table:

 

[LESS T_T]

Avowed: Tactics you mean.

 

[Cryomancer]

I created a trumblr only to ask him what he thinks about spell fixes for NWN2. My nick is ChaoticEvilNecromancer with some numbers in letters.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Cryomancer]

I din't expected that he would answer either of my questions.

The penalty which I mentioned for Shadow Wizards. d6+1 damage doesn't seem much in 5E but in 2E where you have only d4 hit points and +1 hit points, failing to prepare a couple of spells can kill him.

Defiler and preservers: The Wizards of Athas - Page 61

 

[rusty_shackleford]

didn't read either of victor's posts before reading this and immediately recognized who was asking the question

 

[Infinitron]

Avowed: Tactics you mean.

How about Saint's War Tactics:

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Nano]

Fuck's sake, Sawyer. I hope he regrets the decision to make her the narrator.

 

[Decado]

Fuck's sake, Sawyer. I hope he regrets the decision to make her the narrator.

She was hands down the worst fucking narrator I've heard in a game that I can remember.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Fergus wanted to sex it up and have a former porn star voice actor telling you seductively to "harvest my soul harder daddy", instead they went with this.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

I haven't played deadfire, so I've no idea if it would have been a

 

[Sigourn]

Sawyer not involved with Avowed.
Into the trash bin that game goes. Yet another bait game for the Bethtards to say "IT SUCKED, BETHESDA GOAT".

 

[Decado]

I don't know, it could be good.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Now that Parker’s been put in time-out there’s a chance for it to be good for what it is.

 

[Diggfinger]

Yeah. It won't get done because the best writer was chased out.

Is your secret crush on Avellone the reason for spewing constant mouth-diarrhea in these posts?

 

[Nano]

Is your secret crush on Avellone the reason for spewing constant mouth-diarrhea in these posts?

Secret?

 

[Major_Blackhart]

No, it's my disgust of Obsidian and hatred for Soyer. The two are vile and mortal enemies, Diggfinger and you'd know all this if you were a real codexer.