Inspiration

[Paganini]

In another thread Ron asked this question:

"My question is very basic: what do the main characters actually do in play?"

It's a very good question, and his following examples served to illustrate his point very well. My question approaches the same issue from a different direction:

How do you *decide* what the characters actually do in play? Or, more generally, how do you generate premise?

It always impresses me that the games designed by the most talented (IMO) forge designers have a great deal of *point* to them. There's a lot of meat, actual content, in their games... I'd almost say it makes their games *important.* In fact, I think their games are important, at least inside the sphere of RPGs. For example, in spite of being quite short, Paul's latest "Nicotine Girls" has a great deal to say.

I personaly find it fairly easy to design game mechanics, and my offerings have met with a certain amount of approval from various circles. However, my games always lack the content that - to me - sets great *games* apart from decent *mechanics.* Ron, Jared, Zak, Paul, Mike, Moose, etc. etc. etc., do you actually have a method for coming up with such ideas? Is it a skill that can be learned in the same way that good mechanical design can be learned, or do great ideas just spring unbidden into your heads?

[Jared A. Sorensen]

I do things two ways:

1) Wait for Inspiration to strike. This is a very cool and easy way to go about making games...but it's also frustrating because Inspiration is a fickle creature.

2) What I call "Flashlight Design." Uh, basically you figure out one idea you want to take a stab at then you "shine a flashlight" (ie: focus) on it. I usually don't do setting stuff and mechanics are just useless without something to use them FOR. What I do is say, hmmm...I wanna make a superhero game without superpowers. BAM. Or, I want to create a game that little kids would like that involves a very limited number of actual game choices. Or I want to make a game where the characters' jobs that other people think is weird but the characters themselves think it's a normal way to make a living. This is the foundation that your game will be built upon. With a shaky foundation, your house falls down (even if it's a lavish piece of artistry). When you have any questions or doubts, flick on the flashlight and re-examine that one idea. Ask yourself how it will affect whatever your plans are...

Game design is not about all the stuff that folks usually talk about (setting, dice mechanics, metaplot, whatever). It's about taking an abstract idea and turning it into something...aahhh, ignore "stat naming" and just call them A, B, C...think about how the game is to be played. Figure out what reward system you're going to use. Then when this skeleton has been created, you can say...okay, now to plug in all the colorful details that make people want to play. Take Monopoly: NOT a game about real estate. You randomly move from space to space, with the option of spending a resources to acquire the ability to generate more resources. The game ends when everyone but one player has run out of resources.

[Paul Czege]

Hey Nathan,

Ron, Jared, Zak, Paul, Mike, Moose, etc. etc. etc., do you actually have a method for coming up with such ideas?

If I tell you how I created http://www.123.net/~czege/nicotinegirls.html">Nicotine Girls you're going to laugh.

Influenced by having read Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way a couple of years ago, I'm conscious of how detrimental being analytical is to my ability to be creative. The core of Cameron's theory is that the analytical mind scrutinizes and stifles creativity, and her book requires the reader to write three pages, stream of consciousness, every morning. She calls this the "morning pages." You're never supposed to show them to anyone, or re-read them. The idea is that your creative mind is given room to grow and becomes strong when freed from scrutiny and analysis and pressures that it be significant. And so for a couple of years I've written morning pages pretty much every day, recording my dreams, pitying myself for my relationship failures, and never re-reading or scrutinizing them. And the feeling of being a creative force is definitely magnified for me by doing them.

The past six or seven months, however, I've prioritized them less, hardly ever written a full three pages, skipped them often, and felt less resistant to pressuring myself to do significant things, and more of a blocked creative, more obsessive. I'm not sure why.

Except when I created Nicotine Girls. The experience was an aberration within those general feelings of creative frustration. I was playing around in a graphics program, downloading and installing fonts from the Internet and messing around with text effects. And after a while of directionless toying around, I found myself with the font, text color and background color that became the Nicotine Girls logo. For some unconscious reason the text I typed was "Nicotine Girls". And that night I created the logo for a game that didn't exist, a game I had no intention of writing, complete with the little Surgeon General's warning that said it was a roleplaying game by me.

It's almost disorientingly strange in retrospect how empowering that creative act was. And I couldn't stop thinking about the logo.

The next day I came up with the subtitle, and from there everything just fell together. I wrote the complete game in less than two hours. It took me longer to format it and create the HTML and graphics than it did to write it. I can't help but think that messing around with graphics was essentially the same process as doing morning pages, except in a different medium. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil came together for me in the morning pages. Nicotine Girls came together for me from messing around with text effects.

Paul

[Zak Arntson]

What an honor to be listed among those designers! I think the key to good game design is to design, design and design some more. And show them all off, even the stinkers.

After writing the below, it looks like most of my design comes from: Thinking about wacky game mechanics, watching movies and reading books. At times, a game mechanic and a creative inspiration coincide and an rpg appears. Writing tons of half-assed RPGs also helps. See In the Works (http://www.harlekin-maus.com/works.html) for tons of half-baked ideas.

Here's the skinny on all my games, roughly in their order of creation:

Chthonian - First attempt at design after visiting the Forge. It's bad game design, don't play it. I wanted a rules-light CoC game, but instead I have a dull system with non-CoC related metagame stuff. Oh sure, there's Terrible Insight, but it's crippled by weird "spend a node and get Author Stance" type stuff.

Courts & Corsets - Attempt at diceless, competitive gaming prompted by watching Dangerous Liasons (and maybe Amadeus). I noticed that everyone had tragic endings, and boom. There's the game.

Adventures in Space!! - I had just finished reading a cheesy space comic compilation of 50's stuff. I _really_ wanted to do an rpg. I stripped the concept down to it's most basic elements: What you are (pilot, everyman, etc), Words of Science, and dastardly Villains.

I Am a Sports Hero - After reading Jon Morris' Gone and Forgotten (www.ape-law.com) on bad sports comics.

the Jon Morris Sketchbuk Roleplaying Game - Woot! This one was essentially a weird mechanic coinciding with a desire to do an off the wall rpg.

SLURPS - I came up with the name first. SLURPS (a play on GURPS). Then I figured out what it stands for: Simplest Little Unitarian Role-Playing System. Then the game presented itself to me. I had just read Unknown Armies, so I was all over the d100 flip-flopping.

Sitcom - I already had the system (it's for a game for children in my head right now, called The Fantabulous Adventures of Professor Glump), and independantly wanted to do a Sitcom game.

Superpets - Designed totally on a lark after reading the Super Pets edition of Gone & Forgotten (www.ape-law.com). No thought towards mechanics whatsoever (and it turned out to be the worst game I've written).

Fungeon - A direct answer to a question about GM-less dungeon crawling on rpg.net.

Cubes - I had been toying with Poker as an rpg mechanic, and had just watched Office Space. Voila!

Divine Right - My first attempt at explicit Narrativist game design. This game was designed with a Narrativist Premise and a wacky d20 mechanic firmly in hand.

Shadows - A lucky accident. I invented the precursor to this game on the spot for my niece and nephew (then ages 7 and 10). It was clunky, but I streamlined it and it became Shadows. It used to have difficulty numbers, and spending/earning Tokens to raise/increase difficulties. Blech.

Metal Opera - Jared sent me a link to Iron Savior, and I have Players that were frustrated at the average-joeness of InSpectres. I was thinking about that and flip-flopping the typical "effectiveness decreases during a session." In most games, though you improve from session to session, _within_ that session you constantly lose Hit Points, Sanity, etc.

[Zak Arntson]

Take Monopoly: NOT a game about real estate. You randomly move from space to space, with the option of spending a resources to acquire the ability to generate more resources. The game ends when everyone but one player has run out of resources.

I love this analogy. But then, I think Jared and I share sensibilities on game design.

I can't imagine someone working from pure mechanic to color (I have this system of random movement, involving earning and investing a resource, and forcing others to give me the resource based on my investments -- I know! It'll involve houses and property and dollar bills!). I'll bet most games are a marriage of Concept and Method, with Concept occuring first. Monopoly Concept: A boardgame about monopolizing property. Method: Random movement, purchasing property, forcing others to pay rent.

[Seth L. Blumberg]

The history of Monopoly is really quite interesting.  It started out as an educational tool designed by a Socialist activist, intended to demonstrate how monopolies hurt the common man.  (The rules were a little different then.)  It was one of those games where the only way to win is not to play.  Charles Parker stole the idea, revised it (completely vitiating the political agenda), and sold it as his own creation.

Indie game designers beware: this could happen to you.

[Le Joueur]

The history of Monopoly is really quite interesting.  It started out as an educational tool designed by a Socialist activist, intended to demonstrate how monopolies hurt the common man.  (The rules were a little different then.)  It was one of those games where the only way to win is not to play.  Charles Parker stole the idea, revised it (completely vitiating the political agenda), and sold it as his own creation.

Now there's an urban myth I've never heard.  According to all the other sources I've read, it's a depression-era pasttime that Parker Brothers turned down time and again until raw sales figures of the cottage industry changed their mind.  (They said it 'was poorly designed' game, being too complicated and having 52 design errors.)

Where did you get your story?  I'm really curious.

Fang Langford

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Where did you get your story?  I'm really curious.

This is off-topic as hell but he might have gotten it from here. There's also this article. This is probably what happened. The point of the original board game was a warning against capitolism but the people who played it enjoyed bankrupting family & friends to gain wealth. Go fig.

[Le Joueur]

Where did you get your story?  I'm really curious.

This is off-topic as hell but he might have gotten it from here. There's also this article. This is probably what happened. The point of the original board game was a warning against capitolism but the people who played it enjoyed bankrupting family & friends to gain wealth. Go fig.

Interesting stuff, not terribly useful (being of harsh slanting).  Those arguments suffer from the idea similar to saying that Abner Doubleday created baseball.  Surely anyone can point at Cricket or any number of other similar games played around the time of Baseball's creation exactly the same way.

The error made here is the assumption of the idea that Darrow created Monopoly from whole cloth.  Or saying that Sorcerer or Scattershot owe nothing to Dungeons & Dragons. It does not matter whether other people had games ridiculously close to what Darrow sold to Parker Brothers.  Darrow wrote the words, Parker Brothers bought them and sells them under the name Monopoly.  That means that Darrow created Monopoly; or more accurately Darrow created the Mononpoly game that Parker Brothers (owned by Hasbro, which also now owns Dungeons & Dragons; I bet you thought I couldn't tie that back together) sells.

Darrow didn't 'steal' it, anymore than Duracell 'stole' single cell batteries from the ancient Egyptians.  Darrow wrote the interpretation of 'monopolization as game' that sold to Parker Brothers, and no one else did.  (Even if the game he may or may not have based it on had been offered previously to Parker Brothers, it is Darrow who brought together the specific pieces that make it a great seller.)

What does this have to do with Inspiration?  Plenty.  It has been said 'there are no new ideas in the world.'  I grant that, but the whole purpose of copyright laws in not to protect ideas, but their specific presentations.

The problem most people have is a very 'moving target' definition of 'originality.'  If they like something, they will always 'get specific' enough to be able to say that it is vastly original.  If they don't like something, they will always generalize it enough to say that it lacks originality.  This has nothing to do with whether the 'something' (or even its specific presentation) really is original or not.  Because of this, nothing you say will change their mind.  (This is also, in part, why I take everything said by a critic with a big grain of salt; first I try to determine whether they liked whatever they reviewed before they even saw it.)

Inspiration is much the same way.  When you're in the 'honeymoon phase' with an idea, it seems totally original.  After you've been working with the same idea for years it takes someone else 'discovering' your work to make it seem original again.  However original your idea was has never changed.

I know I like that 'lightbulb going on' feeling of epiphany when it comes to inspiration, but as a writer I see it more as a trap.  Always going for that creates an inescapable mystique that inspiration is necessary.  I'm sorry, most of my 'best work' has been a result of exactly that, work.  People around me think I'm quite the wizard (I do the 'behind the curtain' thing better than many), because I do most of my work in 'secret.'  I'll tell you, being 'outed' on Scattershot has been a terrible experience for me (that I wouldn't pass up, mind you).  Everyone can see the design in all its roughness creeping out a little piece at a time.  (And frequently I get these stunned reactions that, as well as I speak about design, I don't have tons of them 'in the can.'  What can I say?  "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.")

I'll tell you what inspiration usually is for me.  I get ideas, all the time, good ones and bad ones.  What I do is take them all down and fiddle with them.  I play with the pieces, sometimes for months.  Only when I have something substantial and robust do I show it to anybody.  Then I call it an 'inspiration.'  Was it Edison who said genius was 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration?  You know what I have learned using this technique?  Most of the best ideas sound the worst when they're first 'born.'  The converse is also usually true; the best-sounding ideas often turn out to be useless.

How about an example?  When I was just getting into the Scattershot project, I knew I just had to have a Star Trek interpretation.  Back then Roddenbury was still alive and the 'new series' (the Next Generation) was going strong; I had recovered my old trekker mystique.  Years went by and nothing I came up with worked.  Gene died, the series became popular propaganda for environmentalists, and I began to realize the 'hollowness' of all the Next Generation stuff had to do with the fact that the first half of the shows did a great job framing a compelling Premise and the last half spent all of its time avoiding making a statement on it.

I grew cynical about it, and the supplement too.  What good would it be, a hollow echo of...well, hollowness.  Then I started having these other ideas.  What about all those 'transporter accidents?'  I decided that in the supplement, the 'Confederation' (as I had come to think of it) had all this technology far beyond the common scientific understanding, having been created by virtuosos.  Then I was seriously disappointed by the 'softening' of the Borg; from that point on, I saw them for what they could have been, the symbol of modern man's fear of losing his identity to technology.  How could I put that into a game before I even heard of, or considered, thematic objects?

Even later, I realized that the Borg are exactly what this m-life stuff would be with Star Fleet technology; a great 'play' on Paramount's product.  That's when the Star Trek supplement for Scattershot took on new life.  I would present the background as a careful parody or satire of Star Trek.  Everything in it would be a tart homage to something in the source material, similar enough to be recognized, different enough to be satire.

So here you can see an 'inspiration.'  I wanted a Star Trek supplement, no surprise or epiphany there.  What I did with it sucked, but I didn't throw it away.  I kept adding in clever bits here and there and one day, 'boom,' it became an 'inspiration.'  Not once was there a 'lightbulb;' if anything it was more of a "well, I might as well..." that paid off.

Well, this is getting a little long so I'll sign off saying that don't chase 'inspirations' for their own sake.  Work with what you've got and develop the skill to know what will be well received.  Inspiration and originality are just marketing ploys to hide the hard work and 'make it look easy.'  You probably have all the 'inspiration' you need everyday, you just haven't trained yourself to recognize it.  Have fun!

Fang Langford

p. s. For the record, I always wanted to tell Aesop that foxes don't eat grapes.

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Inspiration is much the same way.  When you're in the 'honeymoon phase' with an idea, it seems totally original.  After you've been working with the same idea for years it takes someone else 'discovering' your work to make it seem original again.  However original your idea was has never changed.

This is similar to a quote by Georgia O'Keefe which I have been unable to find after spending the better part of an hour searching, but it was something like "As the artist I have spent much time working on the painting so the flower has become perfectly ordinary to me, but not to you."

Or something to that effect. It has been over 10 years since I had read it.

[Mike Holmes]

The quote attibuted to Thomas Edison seems to apply: "Invention is 99 percent persperation and one percent inspiration."

The more I work on RPGs, the more I am inspired.

Mike

[hardcoremoose]

I shouldn't say this, but I flat-out steal a lot of my ideas.  Not in a plagiarizing, copyright-infringng sort of way, though.  Rather, I will sometimes see something I like in a game, but I won't like the way it's implemented, or I'll become frustrated because it's is buried under a moutain of distracting and useless stuff, or I'll just want to try to apply it in a different way.  So I'll take the idea and make a game around it.  Human Wreckage came about because I thought SOAP was cool, but wanted something I could play horror games with.  Man's Worst Friend was a stab at doing werewolves right (although by that time, Clinton had already done Urge, so what was I thinking?).  Appalachia Now! was my attempt to do something with Elfs-like director's stance.

Of course, that's not the only way inspiration strikes me.  WYRD actually followed directly from the mechanic.

And I watch a lot of horror movies.  That always gets my juices flowing.

- Scott

[Zak Arntson]

Scott's got a good point. A lot of our design, I think, comes from two initial sparks:

* Wow, that would be a great idea for an RPG!
* Holy crap, that RPG sucks. Here's how I would have designed it.

[Jack Spencer Jr]

...until early April of 1975. Someone brought a copy of the original boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons to a gaming get-together...I read for about an hour and a half, alternaying between feelings of "this is nutty" and "this is great."...
...I couldn't play Gygax's game, but I could write one of my own that would make more sense.

Ken St Andre about the origins of Tunnels & Trolls in an article in Heroic Worlds

I guess this IS how it tends to work, isn't it?