Does role-playing game writing help fiction writing?
My feeling is that role-playing scenario design helps the fiction writer in a couple of ways but is no help at all in most others. I think the place it helps most is contingency plotting. Because of the non-linear nature of most role-playing adventures, we have to spend a lot of effort coming up with scads of alternate paths for the characters to take to reach their goals. In fiction, we can do the same to begin with, then (in theory) choose the best of those plots for further development. In second place is world-building. With role-playing game supplements, we have to do a tremendous amount of world-building — not just maps and lists of characters, but also basic assumptions of how things work, and what ramifications those choices have on the various “systems” of the setting. Unfortunately, game experience doesn’t help that much in developing characters in fiction. The process of creating the character may be the same, but forms of expression are so different between games and fictio
