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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 4710202" data-attributes="member: 9225">1) If I was restricted to the cliched story about beating the evil baron, I sure as hell *would* liven it up to keep it from being dull in both colour *and* plotting. Ugh. 2) Many RPG fiction books have been discreetly written by "serious" speculative fiction writers (using pseudonyms) who need to get paid. GW's Warhammer is famous for this. There's also plenty of fiction that's equally discreetly based on RPGs - Brust likes to be coy about this now for rather complicated reasons (among them: someone else *also* technically has the right to write stories in a very similar world, derived from the same RPG), but Joel Rosenberg, George RR Martin and Raymond Feist are other examples.3) Ignoring raising/resurrection is a pretty solid tradition. I don't think Ed Greenwood or Gary Gygax used it to any degree in fiction set in their own worlds. Yeah, it would be neat if D&D conventions were very closely obeyed to the point of mutating the genre, but when it comes to novels, gamers are by no means the sole audience. There's a reason why plenty of bookstores stock more RPG fiction than actual RPGs. Fiction set in a game world is designed to be entertaining in its medium, not to enhance the entertainment value of a different medium like tabletop play. Hell, Drizzt is despised as a tired Mary Sue figure among gamers who hated the 4e FR book mockup with him, but he's still fresh for non-gamers.</blockquote>

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