Role playing games are a whole lot of fun and, with a good game master, they can produce interesting stories - the first two Dragonlance trilogies by Weis and Hickman come to mind. The problem is that most role playing systems use several short-cuts to make the game mechanics easier to deal with and to simplify and codify the complexities of life.

This is why fleshed out transcripts of role playing sessions rarely make good stories. Too often the underlying short-cuts leak into the prose and turn your wonderful role playing session into dreary, clichéd prose. There are exceptions - the infamous Dread Gazebo Incident comes to mind - but the exceptions are few and far between.

In the interests of preserving the poor, tattered remnants of sanity clutched in the shaky hands of slush readers, I offer the following suggestions to de-RPG your stories.

Drop generic terms like "healing potion".
A "healing potion" is a dead giveaway. It's used by RPGs to avoid the necessity of long periods recuperating from injury and the effect that would have on the game. If you absolutely must have a healing potion, try renaming it to something specific like "Starbright salve" or "Frederico's Astonishing Cure-All", and then give it nicknames the way real people do.

"Got any of Freddie's stuff? Cures anything that ails you, it does."

"Oh come *on*. You know as well as I do it's just honey water."

"It's honey water what's been blessed by all the Gods above and all the demons Below, it is."

This of course establishes character, as well - speaker 1 is uneducated and gullible where speaker 2 is more cultured, and more cynical.

Lose any reference to levels or classes of "goodness" or "evil".
This should be self-evident, but strangely enough it's not. No-one outside RPGs is "lawful evil" or any of the many other flavors of shortcuts used to provide instant characterization for role players.

Do not characterize by class.
This is another RPG short-cut to characterization, and like all such short cuts the end result tends to have the consistency and depth of cardboard. That someone is a "half-elf ranger" does not immediately guarantee anything except that the person's momma or daddy dated outside their species and they learned learned some wood-craft.

Don't use the standard fantasy races.
There's a reason the Tolkeinian standards are clichéd. It's because he created the cliché. If you have to use the classic -- and cliched -- fantasy races, remember that there's going to be a lot of individuality. You will find crass, nose-picking elves and opera-loving orcs. Introduce a few.

Go easy on the magic hardware and trinkets.
Ubiquitous magical doo-dads are a sure sign of a transcribed RPG session. They're used by game masters to avoid all that tedious and painful stuff with recovering from injury, unfortunate pregnancy of female adventurers, and so forth. Unless magic is so pervasive that almost everyone can use it, magical devices are going to be rare, and zealously guarded by their owners. Glow-in-the-dark swords and contraceptive jewelry are right out.

Evil is not a lifestyle choice.
With very few exceptions, no-one ever got out of bed and said, "What evil shall I do today?" Your characters shouldn't do this either -- especially not your villain. Villains who exist solely to oppose your hero or heroes aren't just clichéd, they're boring.

Factions and politics are not monolithic.
Not everyone opposing the hero is a bad person. And not everyone who helps is a good person. In fact, a good chunk of the opposition is likely to come from perfectly ordinary people who've managed to make an accommodation with whatever the hero is trying to fix, and they don't want their lives turned upside down again.

Do not, under any circumstances, have a 'cleric' as a character.
Your characters of any kind of religious persuasion will be priests, monks, or have some specific title appropriate to their position. If you allow them to perform magic by praying to their deity you had better have a long history of that particular sect doing this and include some kind of price they pay.

Get your gods right.
Do not use an Earthly pantheon or any easily recognizable variation thereof unless your fantasy is set in the appropriate location. There will be standard deity "types" including solar/lunar pairings, the every blade of grass has its deity pantheon, the monotheistic and every conceivable variation in between. People who are not from Earth and have never met Norsemen, Babylonians, Romans, Greeks, Celts, etc etc ad nauseam will not use the names any of the above people used for their deities.

Yes, this is another RPG short-cut. Rather than re-invent the wheel, they simply did a mix-and-match from pretty much every mythology they could get their hands on.

Be conservative.
RPGs are notorious for giving out lots of weighty goodies without considering how you're supposed to carry it around. As a general rule, it's a lot easier to keep moving when you're not also carting around half a ton of metal in the form of weapons, armor, and loot.

It's also worth remembering that the more protection armor gives you, the heavier it's going to be. The rule about magic applies here. Magically enhanced armor is going to be so expensive the only people who can afford it don't need it because they can buy small armies for less.

Know thy experiences.
Another common RPG short-cut is avoiding the mechanics of eating and sleeping -- and yes, that includes other inevitable bodily functions.

Go camping. Learn what it feels like to sleep rough. Learn how long it takes to put up even the super-easy tents they make nowadays. It won't take long to realize that unless he's dead on his feet or has no other choice, your hero is not going to sleep in his armor. He's certainly not going to wake up refreshed and pleased with the world if he was sleeping in his armor on uneven ground and doesn't have anything for breakfast. Fighting ghouls at this point will be done with less than his best skills, although probably worse than his usual temper.

Animals are not organic cars.
Horses and other pack animals are expensive and need maintenance. They will stop at odd intervals to perform bodily functions that smell bad, they will want food on their schedule, not yours, and they need to be treated with care after a long day, or your hero will be wondering how to preserve half a ton of horse meat on no notice. They also panic rather easily. Oh, and stallions are expensive. And rare. No sane horse owner will let you buy one to ride on. Plus, they have a nasty habit of trying to mount/attack anything that smells of menstruation. And yes, this includes any women traveling with your hero.

Not all weapons are the same.
A good sword is extremely expensive. A bad one is a hunk of metal that wears out your arm muscles because all the weight is in the blade, and needs constant sharpening to keep an edge. Guess which sort your hero is likely to have. It isn't the expensive sort, or he wouldn't be a hero, he'd have bought land and settled down.

Learn economics.
Really. RPGs usually ignore this aspect of life, but even feudal lords need to make a living from something. The something is usually trade, and that means growing stuff, breeding stuff, or making stuff. Chances are, your hero is going to make a mess of someone's economy, and it will bite him when he least expects it.

Dark Lords who have no viable local economy don't stay Dark Lords for long.
See the point about economics. The blasted wasteland is just showing off to scare the competition away.

Everything has to eat something.
If it's inhabited, there's got to be something edible there. You can't populate the blasted wasteland with were-orcs unless you're carting in food for them. Were-orc droppings probably make just as good a fertilizer as any other kind of manure, so before long the blasted wasteland is going to start sprouting food crops from the seeds in whatever the were-orcs ate.

No deity in the history of human religion has ever identified itself as evil.
As a corollary, most demonic beings have identified themselves as misunderstood. The worshippers of such deities/demonic beings will not identify themselves as evil even if their religion calls for throwing babies into lakes of flame. They will simply ensure they have plenty of foreign slaves to provide babies for the required sacrifices.

Slavery is not necessarily bad.
In fact, for most pre-industrial societies, slavery is an economic necessity. Slaves get called all sorts of different things, like thralls (Norse), serfs (most of Europe), peasants (ditto - but not nearly as common as you'd think), indenturees... For most of human history, the slaves have looked just like their free owners. Often, they've been able to save up and buy their way out. The USA's black slavery issues are a historical anomaly, not the norm.

Learn how royalty gets to be royalty.
Royalty does not automatically mean 'effeminate', 'inbred', 'stupid', or 'evil'. More often than not it has meant 'stronger than anyone else around' or 'smarter and more cunning than anyone else around', or both. In situations where there were at most small semi-independent villages, the smartest, strongest and at times most ruthless people ended up at the top of the heap.

Avoid 'collect the magical token' plots.
This is yet another RPG shortcut because scattering magical doodads around and expecting your intrepid heroes to find them all can keep a lazy game master in plot for months at a time. In a book, well...