Baldur's Gate writer spent 20,000 hours playing D&D to turn him into an RPG expert

Baldur's Gate designer and writer James Ohlen says 20,000 hours of D&D practice are what prepared him for his role at BioWare.

In an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, James Ohlen - who lent his writing and design talents to pretty much everything from Baldur's Gate to Anthem during his 22 years at BioWare - outlined the sheer amount of time he spent playing Dungeons & Dragons before he found his job at BioWare. As manager of a comicbook store, he used the shop to run concurrent campaigns for three different groups of players, noting that he "didn't really have much of a life outside of Dungeons & Dragons" during the 90s.

One of those players was BioWare programmer Cam Tofer, and Ohlen's reputation as a DM helped secure him a job at the studio. According to him, he was perhaps uniquely qualified, with a frankly astounding number of roleplaying hours under his belt. Citing the famous '10,000 hour rule' in which psychologists Herbert Simon and William Chase suggested that dedicated practice - at least 10,000 hours in the case of Chess Masters - was more important than innate talent at becoming an expert in something, Ohlen implied he might have blown way past that before arriving at BioWare.

"I think by the time I got hired by BioWare, I had done 20,000 hours of dungeon mastering. It was ridiculous. I owe a lot to D&D. My friendships, my career, my mental stability." 

It was more than that hours count that Ohlen brought to the studio, however. BioWare co-founder encouraged him to make use of his massive binders - each filled to the brim with character and world-building notes - in his new job. That hadn't initially been Ohlen's intention - it had seemed "narcissistic" - but it sped up his writing process: "all the characters had personalities that I already knew."

From those binders came characters like Minsc and Boo, who were played by Tofer and who resurfaced in Baldur's Gate 3. Mage companion Edwin and Baldur's Gate 2 antagonist Jon Irenicus were also born from Ohlen's tabletop campaigns.

I've done a bit of DMing over the past few years, but the idea of running three concurrent campaigns is staggering. Ohlen's efforts make my attempts feel like comparing an ocean to a puddle in terms of depth and breadth, but I suppose that's the kind of dedication required if you're going to make one of the seminal CRPGs of all time.

Ohlen's lent his talents to many of the best RPG games - and D&D probably influenced the rest.