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Quote: Posted 11/17/08 11:17 (GMT) by Adam Andersson

I was wondering how the creation of the major NPCs come about. Does a writer get assigned to a certain number of NPCs, to write their personality, history, etc, or do all writers chip in to all NPCs?

I would be very interested if you could explain this process to me. Thanks.

It depends on what you mean by "major NPC." Party members are each assigned to a single writer. Even if that character winds up having dialogue written (for NPC interactions or for plots or whatever) by all the writers on the team, that first writer is responsible for making sure the character stays consistent.

Plot NPCs who aren't party members are sort of shared by the writers working on the plots they appear in. So if a character is important to, say, both an origin story and a later plot, and those plots are written by different people, the writers have to work out what that character sounds like, his personality, and what his history is together.

Quote: Posted 11/17/08 17:36 (GMT) by Beerfish

And I would think that it's a real skill to try and keep the npcs consistent with multiple writer input. I've seen dialogue in games before for the same npc that was different enough style wise that you had a real suspicion that there were multiple writers.

(All of the npcs that go around stabbing people in the face are Daves.)

That's why we have the voice consistency pass Mary talked about.

It generally is pretty easy to "get" the character's voice and personality once you read through a lot of their stuff. The more subtle characters have a more elusive voice, but once in a while you come across a character that just has such a strong personality that you just know what they're going to say at any point.

It's the difference between the shy wallflower and that obnoxious guy that dances on the table naked. We have a few "dancing on the table naked" type characters.

ETA: Okay I just re-read what I typed and maybe that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Huh. Mondays.

Edited By Sheryl Chee on 11/17/08 17:55

Quote: Posted 11/17/08 17:36 (GMT) by Nighteye2

Interesting. Do you also role-play conversations, to see how they work out? With each writer roleplaying his own character it would be interesting...

Was it you who asked this before? (Several months ago, now.) No. That would be highly impractical. We can't all stop work on our own characters and plots to RP a conversation for one person's plot. We're writers. We can figure out how a conversation will go all by ourselves. Sheryl may ask me how Fluffy Mackerel Drywall-Trout, Lord of the Zombie Kittens, would respond to a given situation, for instance, or I might ask her a question about Rabbit's favorite foods, but that's about it.

And David does not write all the romances evar, Imported Beer. Just some of them. (Well, he wrote most of the ones in DA. But still not all of them.)

Quote: Posted 11/17/08 17:48 (GMT) by imported_beer
Tell me about it. What has surprised me most is that the romantic styles have also remained consistent with the characters. I'd suspect that Mr. Gaider writes the romances even for characters he has not written for otherwise- yes?

We plan out the characters and their arcs before we actually start writing, and this applies to romance characters as well. David, as lead writer, helps us with the plans. In DA's case, he wrote the first characters and we followed his basic structure for how things should progress. The details differ though.

Quote: Posted 11/17/08 18:35 (GMT) by imported_beer

Also..more specifically- don't the character and romance clash, ever? I mean suppose you wrote a Fluffy Macherel Drywall-Trout who is a dance on table drunk and nekkid type, but this romance writer seems to be making him a tad more sensitive and sweet than you'd want. He is YOUR character but someone else's romance and I'd think that would make for some disagreement....

If you sign up to write a character that's also a romance, you have to write their romance as well.

Quote: Posted 11/17/08 19:25 (GMT) by Nighteye2

Also, you're still writing your own characters even while role-playing - because your character would be an actor in the scene.

For example, take a conversation between an NPC David wrote and an NPC you wrote - David could roleplay his own NPC while you roleplay yours - and then you take note of how the conversation plays out, given the circumstances. And perhaps how it looks and sounds on camera, if the conversation is to be part of a cutscene.

A conversation that occurs between one of David's characters and one of mine is not written by both of us. If it's occurring in my plot, I write it. If it's occurring in his plot, he writes it. If it's part of Sheryl's plot, she writes it. So it would be deterring from the ability of everyone but whoever owns that conversation to get their own work done.

Quote: Posted 11/17/08 23:29 (GMT) by Adam Andersson
But seriously though, I'd also be very interested to know who wrote her.

You'll have to ask Mary for confirmation on this but I think David, Mary and Jennifer have all written dialogue for her.

Quote: Posted 11/18/08 00:13 (GMT) by Sylvius the Mad

Do we know Jennifer?

I don't know, do you? *peers at Sylvius*

Knowing Jennifer is a $5.00 extra above the cost of membership.

Quote: Posted 11/19/08 19:56 (GMT) by imported_beer

I was hoping to get her or Wynne hooked up with Duncan Will I get to play matchmaker?

Wow, has the shipping started already? Nifty. I'll have you know that I already have Wynne shipped with someone else so your ship is not canon.

Though I guess neither is mine...

(Edited to add a link to an explanation of "shipping", for the less dorky of us.)

Edited By Sheryl Chee on 11/19/08 20:22

After seeing you guys ask, "Are they romanceable?" for every character who has so far been announced, hinted at, or even randomly name-dropped, including Shale and the dog, I am not even a little surprised that you would want to romance Cauthrien based on nothing but her name and four seconds of footage in a cutscene. That's volumes more than you've known about most of the characters you've done this to...

Quote: Posted 11/20/08 18:25 (GMT) by n2nw

As for the writing, the way it's been presented would mean (if my understanding is correct) that the romantic dialogues would be written by different writers at various different points in the game (since they write the dialogues in their plots). Is that the case? In other words, David would write the romantic dialogue options for our PC in plot point #1 but then Mary would write the romantic dialogue options in plot point #2?

Nope. Romance plots are per character. The whole plot is within that character. It may have events and interjections that show up at specific plot points or locations around the game, but it is a whole plot to itself, and is written by just one person.