Text in RPGs. How much is too much, assuming that there is such a thing as "too much text" in RPGs? Chris Avellone has recently stated* that dialogues sometimes get in the way of fireball casting & other exciting activities. What are your thoughts on this matter? Also, what do you think about augmenting visuals with text descriptions?

I think having text in big chunks can often be daunting. While I can’t speak for Chris’s meaning, I do agree that dialogue shouldn’t weigh down the story. It should be concise enough to get across what’s needed – for those who want to explore the dialogue in more detail, the ability to do so should be there, but it shouldn’t be mandatory. The challenge for writers as we move to more cinematic levels of art and animation, I think, is that we must learn to avoid heavy exposition and verbosity as movies do while also offering depth of interaction for those who are looking for it.
Using narrative to augment visuals adds a lot in the right circumstances. I think it worked well in “Planescape: Torment”, as a for instance, though in that case it approached the narrative level of a novel. We used it to a lesser degree in “Hordes of the Underdark”, and I thought it added a lot. The problem with using narrative now probably has more to do with the graphics level that is expected in modern games.

I’ll avoid the whole “uncanny valley” argument and say that the more that you show the less that you can effectively describe. One could probably argue that moving to a level of detail where you see every bead of sweat and every emotion animated for you to see leaves less for the imagination to do, and that this is a bad thing, but perhaps it doesn’t need to be.

Used well, such detail could prove just as effective as the narrative in building atmosphere – though being more of a reader, myself (duh), I have my doubts. Seeing some of the animation technology that’s developing for the next generation of games, however, I have to say that it’s very impressive and makes me think more as to how it could be used to make my dialogue work in tandem with it rather than thinking about using text to cover the lack of it.