In the Trenches #10:

Storybuilding Quickstart

by Laurel Stuart
June 7, 2002

The past few weeks I've talked to a lot of enthusiastic folks who want to be game designers. Some had a specific story in mind, others less than that. Over the course of conversations, I began to articulate a process that I felt is well-suited for initial game design, that fundamental foundation that comes before actual Chat Theatre construction.

1. Create Your Paradigm

Get out a blank sheet of paper and write down a list of everything you want your game to do/be and just as importantly what you want your game to -not- do/be. Don't worry about grammar or punctuation or run on sentences. Just get the thoughts from your head to the paper. It's helpful for me to take a sheet of paper and divide it into two columns and to write down everything that comes to mind. Here's an example, based on my initial notes for Devil's Cay.

My Game Should	My Game Shouldn't
1. Keep players interested for months or years	1. Rely on lots of NPCs
2. Be set in modern day	2. Feel like rehashed WW
3. Focus on human characters	3. Be boring
4. Involve demonical pacts	4. Use stereotype demons or Gods
5. Have an exotic location	5. Be so exotic it's out of my league
6. Treat Players fairly	6. Have a draconic ST dicatorship
7. Focus on interpersonal socialization	7. Promote "combat" just "conflict"
8. Reward "chat-style" RP	8. Be rules-heavy
9. Make new characters or players welcome	9. Give all the power to old chars
10. Fluid social heirarchy	10. fall into IC anarchy

The list can easily go on past a full page of more. The two keywords to articulating a game paradigm as as always sustainability and containability. Every rule, every NPC, every room and object needs to promote either or both of these traits. Mastering sustainability and containability will only come with practice, however. Outlining what your game should offer and promote is an excellent way to starting the process.

2. Choose a genre

Travis Casey has been discussing game genres for months in his excellent series "Building Stories, Telling Games". You can find over there interesting tidbits regarding a number of game genres. Your game should have a genre, even if it's an amalgamation of several larger genres. Genres offer specific styles, forms and content that will enable all of the players to easily create their own interconnected stories. One of the hardest things to appreciate is that as a StoryBuilder, you are not writing a story. You are creating setting, premise and situations- what the players do, via their characters, will be interactive fiction.

Looking back at your game paradigm, it's probably easy to determine what genre is best going to suit your game world. Devil's Cay rides the line between dark fantasy and horror. I have monsters, of a human origin. PCs will be allowed to join the ranks of those monsters and PCs will be allowed to participate as heroes and victims.

3) Create a premise that meets fufills #1 and #2.

4) Choose a location for your premise and map it out very roughly so you can evaluate if this is a location that will work for a Chat Theatre.

5) Practice making one of the rooms, to assure yourself you really want to be a StoryBuilder and will put the time-energy into the building of the theatre as well as all the fun stuff like plot and system mechanics.

6) Fill out an actual StoryBuilding application and submit it to Skotos, including your experience with game design and chat administration elsewhere. Give Skotos some reason to believe you'll have the dedication and enthusiasm to commit a year of your life to making a great game.