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

gamesradar.com:

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