Finding Inspiration

[GMan]

Greetings,

I have been lurking on these boards for sometime now. I am constantly surprised by the quality of the games that are being designed here and by how much work their authors put into them. Bravo to all!

As an aspiring game designer/publisher, I would like to know where youse guys find your inspiration, both setting and mechanics wise. How much thought and preplanning goes into your work and how much do you know about where you want the game to end up before you start writing?

Thanks for any replies.

GMan

[Jack Spencer Jr]

... I would like to know where youse guys find your inspiration, both setting and mechanics wise. How much thought and preplanning goes into your work and how much do you know about where you want the game to end up before you start writing?

This is, unfortunately, the sort of question artists get asked all the time, and it really isn't answerable. Where do we get our ideas? From living our lives which inclused reading and playing RPGs among other things. Inspiration hits when you make a connection between two or more items that were previously unrelated. It comes if it comes.

As for writing, always write. Keep in mind that 90% of what you or almost anybody writes is shit and the first draft of anything is shit. Write to stay in practice so then you can bang out something good when you do get an idea. And it will take work.

This is not even mentioning playtesting.

[Fade Manley]

As has been said, it's not an easy to answer question.

For example, I'm working on two games right now. One of them is the development of years of creation, two campaigns, hundreds of sources of inspiration, over a decade of tweaking and rewriting and smoothing out wrinkles in the setting.

The other came from sitting around in two chat rooms talking about how ninja are cool, catgirls are cool, pirates are cool, and lesbians are cool, but it's hard to make a skill set for lesbians so why not make it amazons? Thus, Amazon Ninja Space-Pirate Catgirls.

Inspiration comes from funny places. Most of my ideas come from weird dreams, or throw-away comments of "Wouldn't it be neat if", or from seeing something done elsewhere that I want to do differently. It seems more important to grab it when it comes up than to go looking for it.

[GMan]

I guess the answer is to find something that interests you and just write. Wait for inspiration to come later and make some unforseen connections, either with the material you were writing or a completly new idea.

Thanks for the input.

GMan

[Tomas HVM]

I use to say that "Inspiration is not mandatory" when talking about being an author or games designer.

What is mandatory is the will to work, or lust for work. Hard work and lots of it! Work-work-work will make your day happy, and your art great.

Nothing more to it. Inspiration may come, and you may use it, but without the conscious effort and the trained skills you will never have any use for it.

People often say to me: "You've got so great imagination", and think that is the reason I'm an artist, and they're not. My answer is: " We all got a great imagination. Without it the world would stop. My job as a gamesmith is to make use of your imagination. It's not my imagination that makes this possible, it's my skill".

The reason some of us are artist, and others are doctors, is that both is needed, and circumstances forced us to choose one path somewhere in the dark recesses of our personal history.

[M. J. Young]

I should tell you to go get a $1 subscription to http://www.gamingoutpost.com/">Gaming Outpost and read through the one hundred twenty some Game Ideas Unlimited columns in which creativity is discussed from as many different directions; but let me suggest one thing from one of them.

When I was in college, I took a course in Creative Writing: Fiction. The professor demanded and required that each of us acquire a small notebook, and that we write something in it every day, based on our observations from that day. Anything was permitted. You could describe a scene, or jot down a plot, or record a dream or snippet of a story, or do a character sketch, or even discuss philosophy if that was what had your attention. The critical thing was to observe the world, and write something down about it.

During the course of my life I have not done that consistently; but I keep coming back to it, and I've found that many times in reading over the old journals I find ideas that are worth pursuing. You see, ideas are around you constantly; you just have to find them.

Several years ago, I worried briefly that I might have run out of game world ideas. I was trying to fill in the contents of The Second Book of Worlds, and at that moment I was losing contributing authors--one guy's job took away his free time, another guy's wife wanted him out of gaming for a while, a third guy was moving away and didn't know whether he could keep in touch. A lot more of the work was going to fall on me than I had expected, and I was scrambling to fill the gaps. I stopped to think about some of the worlds I'd done, or was doing. The Industrial Complex, which was being written for that book, had started by looking at the chemical factories along the upstream end of the Delaware Bay. The Playground, which I'm currently finishing for The Third Book of Worlds, was built around those gerbil-type jungle gyms at fast food places and public parks. For many of the worlds I'd done, I'd just looked at things and wondered what a world would be like starting with that as the centerpiece.

At the moment that I was considering this, I happened to be driving through Salem County, New Jersey, in the middle of miles of farmland. I thought to myself that I didn't have anything based on that, and maybe I could create a world idea from that. I thought about it for a few minutes, and soon had not one but two ideas for a world I could write up for Multiverser use, and The Second Book of Worlds wound up with The Farmland, in two forms.

Now, you might have to put some of your ideas together by noticing that something you wrote about in June of 2003 and something else you wrote about in January 2005 will fit together really well if you include what you wrote yesterday, but that's sometimes how it's done. Even when a world or story idea hits me in full form, it's often only later that I see other pieces that really make it work right. Although I disagree with Jack's assessment of first drafts, Nothing I write (other than e-mail and forum stuff) goes to press without several readthroughs, over at least several days, and each time it's possible that something will be added, deleted, changed, to make it work a bit better.

Hope that helps.

--M. J. Young

[GMan]

Hope that helps.

Yes, it does! Thanks for the advice. Time to grab a norebook off the bookcase and start writing.

GMan

[Daniel Solis]

I'm currently cooking up a post for RPG Theory about the American Institute of Graphic Arts' recently published guidelines for design as they pertain to the development of an RPG.

As for game design inspiration, that initial epiphany, it never comes from a vacuum. You can't just sit in front of a blank piece of paper and expect stuff to come out. In my case, I'll see a movie, read a news story, watch some funky documentary or have an interesting conversation.

Something about that spark will make me say, "Hey, it'd be cool if you could play...." Then I'll ask myself, "What would be cool about playing...?" Then I try my best to create a setting and system that encourages the "cool" thing. That's about it.

[Jonathan Walton]

The question I would ask is "How can you not be inspired?"

The world is an amazing place.  Life is full of beautiful and terrible things.  Just walking down the street, thousands of things are screaming for your attention.  If you don't hear them, that's because you haven't quite learned to pay attention to them.  All you have to do is combine your perception with your imagination.  Put 2 and 2 together.

Sitting in this room, in front of my computer, I can look around me and find enough inspiration for a dozen different complete works of art.  The real skill is choosing which ones to follow through with.  I probably have over 100 mediocre ideas each day, which I cast aside as uninteresting, at least in their current form.  I probably take 20 to put on the back burner, 15 of which will be completely forgotten by tomorrow and will never be used.  That leaves 5 to sit around stewing until they encounter other ideas that complement them and bring them to the forefront again.

Basically, you shouldn't have to "wait for inspiration" because you were probably inspired by something several years ago that has be stewing and is now ready to be implemented.  Inspiration is CONSTANTLY AROUND YOU, past, present, and future.  You are swimming in it.  So pluck something from the flow and start dreaming.

That's my advice.