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?

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.

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 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

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.

Jared A. Sorensen wrote: 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.

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.

Seth L. Blumberg wrote: 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.

Le Joueur wrote:
Where did you get your story? I'm really curious.

Jack Spencer Jr wrote:

Le Joueur wrote: 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 wrote: 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.

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

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

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.

...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.