Chris Avellone

An American video game designer, Chris Avellone started out with Interplay, working on such titles as Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment and the Icewind Dale series. He left Interplay after the cancellation of the Fallout title Van Buren, heading over to Obsidian Entertainment. His first work there was Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, followed by Neverwinter Nights 2 and action RPG Alpha Protocol. His most recent project to date was Fallout: New Vegas, on which he is a senior designer and was heavily involved in the development of the DLC campaigns.

Avellone is noted for subverting trends in RPGs that he often finds particularly infuriating. In Planescape: Torment, he took his dislike of the Goomba tendencies of rats and utilized cranium rats, which are somewhat troublesome when encountered in large numbers. In Knights of the Old Republic II, he took his dislike of the way that the Force is often portrayed and used it to create a character that sought, for better or worse, to kill the Force entirely. He is also noted for making established game mechanics part of the story. In KotOR2, your player character was described as being able to gain power through the Force by killing others, involving the Experience Points system directly in the story. In Planescape: Torment, the Nameless One's immortality made death not a liability, but an advantage, allowing the player to circumvent some death traps by simply dying, and reviving later once they had been removed from the death trap. He is also known for having a very extreme aversion to traditional romances, preferring ones that are somewhat tragic or unrequited.

Chris Avellone provides examples of the following tropes:

• Arc Words:
  • "What can change the nature of a man?"
  • "Let Go" and "Begin Again"
• Author Appeal: He seems to have a thing for mute girls such as Christine Royce and Sis for the non-verbal communication factor.
• Author Avatar: He has gone on record saying that he does characters like Kreia and Ulysses for conveying his personal opinions on the settings of said characters.
• Deadpan Snarker: For a man known for drama, he's actually quite good at being funny.
• Deconstructor Fleet
• No Hugging, No Kissing: He is known to dislike romance in his games, stating that he prefers romances that end poorly.
• Obvious Beta: Unfortunately, games that he's worked on are known to be unpolished. It's even become one of Obsidian's trademarks.