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Message: <blockquote data-quote="PaulKemp" data-source="post: 1066280" data-attributes="member: 2809">Crusader, I'd be lying if I told you I hadn't considered that question myself, many times.  I think a great part of it is attributable to the fact that a world designed first for gaming, and second for fiction, cannot capture the same epic feel as a world designed solely for fiction.   In other words, what Martin and Jordan and Tolkien did with their respective worlds, simply will not work well for a game world.  Lasting, commerical game worlds rarely have an ubervillain, whose defeat brings on a golden age of peace.  The commerical gameworld has many sub-ubervillians, allowing many smaller tales to be told (in the form of campaigns set therein).  Dragonlance broke this mold, which may explain why it failed as a game world, but succeeded as a world of fiction.  IMO, the Dragonlance novels had the potential to be great, but the execution was flawed, in that inexperienced writers wrote the trilogy.  Their strength was characterization, which was excellent in those books, but their technical writing proficiency -- everything from mastert of point of view, to plotting, to sentence structure -- was less than ideal.  Otherwise, you might have seen something fairly characterized as "great" in gaming fiction (and many think the trilogy great anyway).That general lack of "epicness," for lack of a better word, that is characteristic of game world fiction, may be what keeps the works from achieving greatness, at least in the eyes of many. Now, even with all of that said, I've read gaming fiction that I thought was great -- some of Cunningham's work; some of J.Robert King's short stories, etc.  Of course, my definition of great writing does not include a requirement that the story be epic, only that it be engrossing and well told.What say ye?Paul</blockquote>

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