[4e] What good ol' Bill has been up to...

[Windjammer]

...why, writing novels of course!

See, after copying the Paizo product plan of releasing 32 page softcovers to escalate the bang for buck ratio to new depths, WotC moves once again to copy a Paizo product - the Game Novel TM. (See the forthcoming "Golarion" novels by Cunningham & co.).

"Now, now, WotC did D&D novels first, so what's your point?", you might say. And fair enough.

Except that WotC hasn't done D&D novels as such since the craptastic "T.H.Lain" series backfired for them badly sales-wise. They've since switched back to doing what they've always done - which is, pluck a "Forgotten Realms" logo on the book's front cover to raise sales. Because the D&D logo does not, inherently, have much marketing pull on book covers.

Well, apparently things have changed. The logo couldn't be large enough for the upcoming novels. And, that's the real excitement, they got the best man for the job. Why, Bill Slavicsek himself. Who's so busy to oversee R&D for an actual game that he can write a 320 page novel in no time!



# Softcover: 320 pages
# Publisher: Wizards of the Coast (3. August 2010)
# Language: Englisch
# ISBN-10: 0786956224

Edit. On reflection, here are to ways to hedge this OP.

1. Chances are that the mock cover art is just that, and that Slavicsek's name is a filler here.

2. Chances are, that the mock cover gives the real name, and even when it does, that a ghostwriter will do a hack job for Bill to put his name on it so when the dreaded 'end of year firing season' sets in Bill can reassure the Hasbro suits that he was actually doing work and not sitting there idly as 4e-The-Game crashed.

[shadzar]

Anything I have read by him sucks, so under normal circumstances I would tell him not to quit his day job, but he sucks at that too and might fair better in a job at writing for the Boston Herald, or Fox News. Those types of writings are more his caliber.

[souran]

Windjammer;

Even here on the gaming den you don't score points for pointing out that D&D novels are sucktacular.

We all know that D&D "novels" are little more than pictureless comic books, wait scratch that there are some truely super comic books out there.

We all know that D&D "novels" are little more than the modern equivalent of the pulp swords & Sorcery and Sci Fi novels of the 20's, 30's, 40's and 50's.... wait some of those gave us awesome authors like clark, heinlien, howard and so on.

We all know that D&D "novels" are .... what do you call it when people pump out shitty 300 page paper backs at a rate of 1 every 3 months that are so terrible they would be better used ripping the pages out to and taping them together to make paper blankets for the homeless.

Anyway D&D books are corporate crap that basically kicks swords and sorcery/high fantasy-romance/grimdark epic works that acted as its foundation in the nuts.

If you have the choice of reading ANYBODY else or a D&D book you are better off choosing anybody and that knowing that you might get "the fith sorceress" by robert newcomb.

[shadzar]

I think you missed the point. Along with Creative Director (Chris Perkins), and a few other people responsible for D&D, the Research and Development Pres, is failing his intended job by not doing it and instead doing something else entirely, like writing a book on the side for the extra cash.

Their time could be spent better by learning the game THEY make, and doing their main jobs to make a D&D game of quality, rather than wasting time on other crap that only deprecates their abilities on the team working on D&D in the first place.

[ggroy]

[Username17]

It is slightly unfair to lambaste all of D&D novels as shit. They are just mostly shit. Like all licensed genre fiction, they are normally uninspired (since they are contracted, and therefore not normally written because the author has something to say but because the author would like to get 5 cents a word). But there are diamonds in the rough. The first Dragonlance trilogy is relatively well thought of, and there are more than a few Drow books that get positive reviews.

I think it's important to note that writing novels is pretty much the direction that Ed Greenwood went. So suggesting that Bill Slavicsek is perhaps going through an ego explosion while slacking off at work is not unreasonable. It would appear that Bill is attempting to define his vision as the way D&D "is" for the current generation in the way that Ed Greenwood defined D&D in the 80s and Gygax did in the 70s.

-Username17

[shadzar]

I think you missed the point. Along with Creative Director (Chris Perkins), and a few other people responsible for D&D, the Research and Development Pres, is failing his intended job by not doing it and instead doing something else entirely, like writing a book on the side for the extra cash.

Their time could be spent better by learning the game THEY make, and doing their main jobs to make a D&D game of quality, rather than wasting time on other crap that only deprecates their abilities on the team working on D&D in the first place.

Wonder what exactly Slavicsek's duties are in the first place, besides being a "rubber stamp".

Well one of them was convincing everyone that 4th edition plays like an MMO and is made for MMO players.

http://g4tv.com/videos/21318/The-MMO-Re ... D-Special/

However most people claim that this was never intended to make 4th edition look like a video game....

-Teams play co-op against other teams
-MMO type powers
and whatever else he says in that video.

[ggroy]

[souran]

It is slightly unfair to lambaste all of D&D novels as shit. They are just mostly shit. Like all licensed genre fiction, they are normally uninspired (since they are contracted, and therefore not normally written because the author has something to say but because the author would like to get 5 cents a word). But there are diamonds in the rough. The first Dragonlance trilogy is relatively well thought of, and there are more than a few Drow books that get positive reviews.

The so called diamonds are more like pyrite. The original dragonlance triology is well thought of true.... but it is also not well written and its not very good even when only compared to contamporary writters. Remember that the thing that was interesting about Dragonlance as a place to play D&D was that it had these "novels" and a story that seemed to give life to the world beyond the prepublished adventures TSR was selling (the Greyhawk model).


Forgotten Realms, in all seriousness is just Dragonlance Take II. It was a campaignworld that was built around the setting author writting new material that was not just GAME materials.

I think it's important to note that writing novels is pretty much the direction that Ed Greenwood went. So suggesting that Bill Slavicsek is perhaps going through an ego explosion while slacking off at work is not unreasonable. It would appear that Bill is attempting to define his vision as the way D&D "is" for the current generation in the way that Ed Greenwood defined D&D in the 80s and Gygax did in the 70s.

-Username17

Also, greenwood has now written novels outside of the D&D line/licence and they are considered unremarable. On the other hand, guys like salvatore really do write more interesting non D&D stuff.


Anyway, I think that warhammer novels, star wars novels etc. All suffer from the same problems. So do not think that this vitrol is aimed only at Wizards novels. Heck I don't even mind that Bill is trying writting novels.

I often figured that EVERYBODY at wizards had to crank out a novel a year. Just as a side project to meet their company goals. I just thought there was no way for the prose in a novel to end up being as dry and stilted as the D&D novels EXCEPT for rules writters to write them.

[ggroy]

[CapnTthePirateG]

I can't wait to see him put game mechanics in his novel (reading Salvatore and seeing crap like "The Faceless One was a high-level wizard", anyone?). Wonder how he plans to justify all the 4.Fail breaks from common sense and outright stupidity.

"The zombie had superhuman strength. Yet as Bill approached it, he could see it was too dumb to swing it's arms like clubs. Just then it tripped over a rock and died."

Undead Servitor FTW!

[CatharzGodfoot]

Troy Denning has written some decent books for WotC, although his best were Star Wars.

[Windjammer]

I think you missed the point. Along with Creative Director (Chris Perkins), and a few other people responsible for D&D, the Research and Development Press, is failing his intended job by not doing it and instead doing something else entirely, like writing a book on the side for the extra cash.

Their time could be spent better by learning the game THEY make, and doing their main jobs to make a D&D game of quality, rather than wasting time on other crap that only deprecates their abilities on the team working on D&D in the first place.

Thanks, that was indeed my point.

And Slavicsek is a special case here. He basically made sure his name is on the cover of Dungeon Delve when he contributed 1 measly delve to it (the book consists of 30 delves and nothing else). By contrast, the LFR guy who wrote half of the book (Shawn Mervin) didn't make it on the cover page.

From then on I pretty much suspected Slavicsek to try to save his ass from the annual sacking by getting his name on products - for no better reason than to get his name on the product.

[Windjammer]

2 small corrections:
1. Slavicsek wrote 2 delves
2. It was several LFR guys, but yes, they wrote 90% of the book.

PS. I'm having connectivity issues and serious trouble with the forum software. Neither IE nor Firefox will compute with the Edit button.

[TheWorid]

At best, I thought the original Dragonlance trilogy was average. Tried to read the first few Forgotten Realms books, but gave up less than half way. I didn't think they were particularly memorable.

Even a mainstream hack novelist like Dan Brown writes better books, than most game/fandom related novels like Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc ...

That's very similar to my experience. I actually quite enjoyed the Dragonlance novels, although the actual game material associated with them did not live up to that. On the other hand, Forgotten Realms books bore me.

[shadzar]

I have somewhat same feeling about DL. the classics are great, but there is something nice about and also a disconnect with the setting. The moons play so little in the books that they are or can be overlooked, but you are slammed with them in gameplay. I like them as an added twist, but the extra accounting for them got a bit tedious. I don't really recall reading any other D&D books outside of Dragonlance. I know i read one book about a dagger/knife and a sphere of annihilation and think it was a D&D book, but don't really recall it...oh and the endless quest books. I wish those were still made today.

[Orca]

The first DL trilogy seemed great when I first read them, but they don't bear rereading. The best D&D books I've read were Rich Wulf's Eberron books (Voyage of the Mourning Dawn etc.), but those still weren't good enough to recommend to an occasional scifi reader like my mum. Even used only occasionally and inconsistently, the mechanics get in the way of the story.

If you have the choice of reading ANYBODY else or a D&D book you are better off choosing anybody and that knowing that you might get "the fith sorceress" by robert newcomb.

Sadly true, if you're going to pick a book more or less at random to read you're better off excluding D&D books. If you can take a look first I wouldn't exclude all D&D books though.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I don't know, reading something like the Fifth Sorceress will make you fear trees.