Does CR approve every piece of Lore or have style guides and preliminary world building guides given you more autonomy since "rules" are in place?asked by Daigoji Gai
TL;DRChris Roberts reads almost all lore and gives broad tonal guidance, while Dave handles day-to-day narrative approvals and escalates controversial or established-canon issues to Chris.
I am consistently amazed by how on top of everything Chris Roberts is. He reads almost every piece of lore that we write. Like, you'll think, "Oh, this was just a small thing that I scribbled down," and then he'll mention it a few weeks later and he knows it all by heart. I mean, this game seems to be his lifeblood and it's kind of awe-inspiring to work with him in that manner.So, he sees everything. In the day-to-day sometimes he's not giving direct approval. A lot of times it's the larger kind of tonal pieces he has given us marching orders on and then Dave is kind of the stop gap for the approvals of all of the narrative stuff. Then, it's up to his call. If he thinks something is more controversial, or maybe steering away from something that has already been established, he'll run it past Chris and see. But those guides that were all agreed on... you know, we keep going back there to those as our source of fiction. And you've probably had this experience even more-so than mine from starting off more recently with so much more content in place... but about having, before you write anything, going and doing research on our already-written material.
Yeah... yeah. It's been a huge learning curve and I read all of the lore before I started day 1 too and already felt like I was up to date like you guys are... and then I came in and saw the internal website with all of the stuff going on and I was... mind exploding. But, it's been fun. You know, luckily Cherie, our Archivist, started at the same too so we've been going through the same process and I've been able to talk to her about stuff like that.But yeah, Dave has been in the ground floor with Chris on a lot of these kind of creative decisions, the lore decisions, from day 1 so he is very good about being the database... making sure that anything we write... if there's an issue, if he needs it to be more specific or less specific - he's on top of that and he knows that. Obviously Chris is looped into all of these conversations too and very hands-on with every aspect but Dave is very capable of keeping the lore portion in check, that's for sure.