Building novels through RPG's

[Quiver]

This might be an etiquette question, but...is there anything wrong with using role-playing games to test drive or develop novel settings?

For example...say you play a game, and flesh out a setting. Is there any reason why one shouln't then take this setting that has kind of grown up around the game and use it to write stories?

Conversely, if I have a setting and want to stress test the worldbuilding, would dropping a group into it via a session be a good way to do that?

[Afgncaap5]

I don't think there's anything "wrong" with doing this, but I do think it's important to remember that games and stories are different things. Multiple authors of D&D and Pathfinder books have talked about how they don't "have a character sheet" for their main characters, even if they base a character's abilities on class features and such. So, if you make a novel based on a game world I'd begin by ignoring things like spell slots, hit points, class levels, and the like.

Conversely, making players stress test a world for you doesn't feel like a "bad" idea so much as it feels like a long way to go about it. You might get some interesting results, though, so there's nothing wrong doing it that way.

[Ezeze]

I've done something similar, though the PC's input was more practical.

I informed everyone up front that it was a campaign I'd written years ago and was in the process of turning into a Visual Novel. I've run it three times now, each time for a different group, and it has been very informative to see what kind of characters the PCs come up with and what kind of choices they make - more then once they have inspired an entirely different route for the main character to take in-game

[wumpus]

It has been done (successfully) a number of times (and unsuccessfully even more, no doubt). I'd recommend against ripping off an entire setting such as Raymond Feist did with his "Magician" series (Empire of the Petal Throne*). I'm pretty sure Steven Brust's "Taltos" novels have RPG fingerprints all over them, but the setting appears to be all his (or possibly his DM's and used with permission).

* my only exposure (other than "Magician") to Empire of the Petal Throne was J. Eric Holmes's (same guy behind the first Basic D&D) book "Fantasy Role Playing Games" [1981]. It was enough to set alarm bells off, and wiki confirms that Feist acknowledged this, but claims to be unaware of the source (how?).

[Ken Murikumo]

I did this for my first campaign. As the game was going, i realized how many plot elements and characters simply existed to satisfy my anime craving high school self. Doing this helped me refine the plot, cull the bad, emphasize the good, fix inconstancy errors, and shaped the setting into more mature and believable one.

[Perch]

Also, you need to be careful to not railroad the players intro following your plot... Making your world too rigid with cannon can make for a very fun game.

[Martimus Prime]

I like the idea of building setting through RPG experiences, in the sense that it lets you build a rich collection of historical or mythical figures and events to flesh out the background of whomever you're writing about.

Even in a very true-to-life or semi-realistic kind of story, legends of ancient gods and heroes are likely to be embellished in much the same ways as the characters in the power fantasy that is roleplaying gaming. Indeed, in my own writing, I occasionally use the characters and events from my previous 3.5 and d20 future stories as things that exist in that fictional world as common cultural touchstones, much in the same way that movies, books, and history affect our own way of talking and thinking.