How stories emerge

Good stories arise out of what the characters do. Bad stories result when you decide on a plot outcome first and then manipulate the characters’ behaviour to reach that goal.

Showrunner Peter Gould explains how it works on Better Call Saul. And that’s the writers’ room on a TV show, where you might think they can just make the characters do whatever the plot demands. Not on a good TV show, they don't. So if you’re running a roleplaying game and you’re defining a story goal and only then going through the motions to get there, you’re not roleplaying, you’re writing – and you’re not even getting writing right.

I’ve talked before about stories as a cascade of events, the same way a series of gravitational tweaks to a ball’s velocity leads to a parabola. This was what I was trying to do with Dreams at Elixir Studios. Designing from the top down is entirely the wrong way to go about it.

(Incidentally, designing a game like that using grown-up characters in a modern town was also the wrong way to do it. The player's expectations of how human-like characters ought to behave are too high. If you want a story-creating game, start with simple animal characters and stories like you’d find in Farthing Wood. That’s my Figments concept, but let’s talk about that some other time.)

How do you encourage that cascade of events? I think the best stories arise when the rules themselves don’t address story as a goal. Take care of the details and the story will take care of itself. A good simulation system is the best narrative game.

The proof? Look around you. It’s all just physics. Real life has no story-creator processes going on at the level of the engine. Yet here’s the universe doing drama very well indeed – sometimes a little too well, as when a preening bully whips up a riot because he can’t accept he lost a fair election – and all of that is just because everyone’s acting in the moment.

I grumble about GURPS. It’s even a tag on these posts. But it’s like finding fault with an old friend. Many of our best games have sprung spontaneously out of those mechanics, which might look dry on the page but are fertile soil for stories. Like nuclear fission, GURPS if used responsibly will do whatever you need.

Maybe you’ve been put off trying GURPS because it has the reputation of being complicated? (It’s easier than physics, believe me.) The books cover everything, but you’re meant to pick the parts you need for your campaign. Admittedly I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve said to players, “We are using just the basic books, no mental disadvantages, no quirks or perks,” only to have them come back with some skill they found in a supplement. Be firm and it’ll work. Start off with GURPS Lite (which is free) and take advice from The Path of Cunning, a fine fanzine (also free) published by Roger Bell-West and John Dallman.

That and imagination are all you need, and the stories will take care of themselves.

So you want to be a game designer?

I spent more than ten years working as a designer in the games industry and, although I've also been an author, comic book creator, scriptwriter and TV producer, it's game design that I get asked about most often. In particular people want advice about courses and ways into the business. Well, everybody's story is different, so anything I say probably won't be usable as a route map. Even so, if it's a career that appeals, maybe some of the following will be of interest.

I think of game designers as being "interested in everything" and in particular in straddling the arts/science boundary that tends to divide the majority of people. My college degree was in Physics but I'd always been interested in English too. After college I started writing role-playing game articles, and then choose-your-own style gamebooks, and that got me into writing novels and comics. And then I got a job as a game designer at Eidos (working on Warrior Kings, pictured below) and that seemed like the job I'd been training for without knowing it.

But there are other experiences. My senior assistant designer at Elixir Studios, Sandy Spangler, came into it from a quite different direction. She studied Fine Arts, went from there into character design and animation for TV, and then into art direction at a game developer, and from there into design.

As the game designer is really the "show runner", you need to be able to communicate your creative vision to the artists, coders, writers, voice and mo-cap actors and so on. Design is almost by definition the thing that unifies those disciplines into a new coherent opus. Of course, you have to be able to nudge people to do their best work without coming across as a supercilious know-it-all. Charm, humour, passion and a collegiate manner - what I used to describe as a "bridge of the Enterprise" attitude - will all help.

I'd always been a movie and comics buff right from earliest childhood, so over the years inevitably I picked up some visual skills by osmosis. Two weeks into my time at Eidos, I was showing one of the artists how giving his Tyrannosaurus rex a low, forward-leaning stance with its body parallel with the ground made it look a lot more threatening than an upright Godzilla-style posture. A decade on, working on Dreams (pictured above) at Elixir, I was drawing on rules from cinema to create a game with the focus on character interaction. If I could rewind now, I'd probably add a cinematography or photography course somewhere in my school years.

A designer doesn't need to be able to code but it won't hurt. Coders can be pretty superior types until you earn their respect by proving that you at least understand the architecture of the system. My degree-level maths, rusty as it is, counts as mad skilz in the games industry. Likewise, while you'll probably be hiring writers rather than doing most of the game dialogue in person, you should know enough about storytelling and drama to manage that part of the process. If you like acting or role-playing, that'll help both with narrative structure and performance.

So the skills needed are:
Creative writing
Planning
Visual sense (cinematography/narrative art)
Some maths
Some code
Some drama and storytelling
Communication and leadership skills

- and I guess the angle you come at that from (whether science/maths first like me, or art first like Sandy) really depends on what you find most inspiring. Then fill in the other skills as and when you get the opportunity.

Kick it

With all the talk about Kickstarter (launching soon in the UK, in case you didn't see the recent comments discussion) this seems like a good moment to mention a game venture by Howard Phillips, the original "Gamemaster Howard" at Nintendo US.

I had the privilege of working with Howard a few years back when I was at Elixir Studios developing the game Dreams for Microsoft. Howard was my sounding-board for design ideas - but, much more than that, he was the project's champion at MGS. We were trying to do a Sims-beater (or at least a Sims-challenger) and Sims 2 was just about to send the Microsoft execs scurrying for cover; so having a bold, passionate champion like Howard was essential. It didn't save our project (I knew from pretty much the day I joined the company that the release of Sims 2 would kill us) but I got to work with the best darned group of people I ever met in my life and we did work we could all be proud of. And that's not nothing.

I quickly came to appreciate that few people in the industry could equal Howard's instinctive grasp of gameplay. So when he says he has an innovative game idea and he's looking for backers on Kickstarter, this is in another universe from the twits who are jumping around saying, "Hey! I never did a comic/gamebook/whatever in my life but wouldn't it be cool?" Know-It-All sounds like it'll be fun, it's original, the guy behind it has a track record second to none, and on top of all that he's one of the nicest guys you could hope to meet. If any project deserves your backing, it's this one.

The scrapbook of Ada Byron

A break from Frankenstein today - kind of. This is Frankenstein's Legions, which was originally conceived as a videogame with Martin McKenna when we both worked at Eidos, the publishers of Tomb Raider. The idea then was a strategy game of resurrected soldiers, in which you would harvest body parts from the battlefield to build your armies. (A very different concept of "the monster" from that in Mary Shelley's novel, as I discussed in a recent post.)

Over the years we had various ideas of what to do with it. A comic book? I love writing comics, but Martin has no patience for that sort of narrative illustration. A movie? I wrote a treatment. Took it to Hollywood, even. But, really, you can fritter way your life on the meandering streets of studio lots. It's wearying, even if you have a cart to ride on.

A novel was the obvious plan, which is no doubt why we thought of it last. By then I was working at Elixir Studios and, as lead designer on a big, ambitious, Sims-type game called Dreams, I barely had enough spare time to write grocery lists, never mind an entire book. So I handed it over to acclaimed SF author John Whitbourn, who wrote a cracking adult steampunk novel in our setting - which you can get as an ebook here, incidentally.

Martin and I even worked out the obligatory airships. Jean-Pierre Blanchard and Henri Giffard had both proposed more-or-less contemporary plans for dirigible galleys. In real life, the crew couldn't row with enough strength to propel Giffard's prototype vessel other than on a perfectly still day. But suppose the "oars" were driven by bicycle-like mechanisms that were pedalled. And suppose too that the people doing the pedalling had been specifically assembled to have huge legs, hearts and lungs. I love it when a plan comes together.

After Elixir folded, a victim of the economics of the UK games industry, I found myself with time to devote to cherished projects. It was either Frankenstein's Legions or gardening. During a long walk across Hook Heath on a day of freezing fog, the teenage Ada Byron peered palely from a window in my imagination and there it was: the idea of treating the material as a young adult novel. Perfect, and it only took seven years to think of it. The opening of the story, which I wrote down as soon as I got back from my walk, is actually based fairly closely on Ada Byron's peculiar upbringing:

Ada rattles around inside a cavernous manor house in the depths of the English countryside. Fourteen years old, she knows no-one of her own age and spends her days between lessons mostly in silence. When she looks outside she sees a garden hemmed in by trees and steeply rolling meadows. For much of the year the fog brings the boundaries of the world within yards of her window, which Ada loves as she can use her imagination to paint whatever she likes in the space beyond the misty white.

The house has dozens of servants. Some of them are young enough that Ada can imagine being friends with them, but in fact she hardly knows their names. They are trained to turn their backs and study the floorboards when she goes by, or to retreat discreetly through paneled doors to the hidden rear staircase.

Ada has seen the backs of those paneled doors and knows they are lined with green baize. She spends hours crouched on the lofty staircase, ear pressed to the wood, straining to hear the muffled sounds that intrude from the servants’ world – a shout of laughter, a swear word, the clatter of plates. These lively noises, muffled though they are by the baize, affront the fusty dignity of the old manor, to Ada’s great delight. In her mind’s eye she is as familiar with the servants’ quarters as the house she knows. She pictures it: noisy, cooking-smelly, crowded, cramped and cosy. A hearth-warmed cottage built up to the eaves of her home.

The manor is a vast chilled mausoleum where half-full grates and stone bedpans provide islands of inadequate warmth. Ada considers how it would look if she could view it through the eyes of a snake – the rooms seen as empty gaps like melting caverns in the interior of a huge iceberg, a smoky blue gloom lit here and there by pulsing dull spots of red. After lessons she pulls on her overcoat and goes out into the grounds, where the cold air is at least fresher and the grass is more comfortable than ancient iron-hard settees.

Ada’s only confidant is Kearne, the groundsman. He rarely speaks, having spent several years on the continent fighting in the war. The pale round scar in the base of his throat shows that he was killed at least once. Perhaps that is when he got his new hands – slender and delicate they are, younger than Kearne’s own leathery skin. They lovingly tend the hedges and lawn borders, something that was not in Kearne’s nature before he went to war.

When he speaks to Ada, it is as though he were recounting half-remembered jumbles of dream: "They give 'em to me in a big jar. I have to put my arms around it to hold it. They're not doin' nothing, just floatin' in there, I says. Soft and white like grubs in ink. Wait till we put them on, the surgeon says. They don't understand a great deal, he says to the sergeant. An' thank God they don't, sir; not likely as 'ow they'd keep gettin' up and goin' out and gettin' shot to tatters every day if they unnerstood a blamed thing."

Kearne’s anecdotes seldom have beginnings or endings, yet Ada loves to hear them. They are all she really knows of life.

Of the things written in books, and that can be measured or mapped, Ada has great knowledge. Her mother, who is absent from the house for weeks at a time, is anxious that Ada should receive a comprehensive education. Private tutors give her lessons for six hours a day in a small pantry that was formerly used for hanging pheasants and rabbits. Ada’s mother has a system of vouchers to ensure Ada is attentive. Her mind is inclined to wander, and Ada’s mother has reason to be anxious about flights of uncontrolled fantasy. The vouchers are issued when Ada achieves full marks in a lesson, and can be redeemed for small treats – an extra half-hour before bed, a square of chocolate, a sheet of music for the piano.

Ada no longer hands the vouchers in, having long outgrown the childish rewards an individual voucher can buy. Instead she collects them, pasting them into a scrapbook. She has been doing this for a long time now, and the pages of the scrapbook are stiff with many jars of gum. She leafs through it every night, marveling at the hundreds of vouchers she has collected. She has no idea what reward the book might earn when she slots in the final voucher and presents it to her mother. She has tried not to think about it, keeping even her wayward imagination from exploring beyond that door. She hopes it will be something very different in kind from earlier rewards. Something much more than a hundred squares of chocolate. But Ada is ill-equipped to imagine what such a reward could be. She has no experience of the thing she is missing.

I plotted the whole book in detail - in fact, the whole trilogy. So why abandon it? Partly because Mirabilis came along, and that grew to occupy as much of my time as developing Dreams at Elixir had. But there was something else bothering me. Ada Byron... Victorian airships... Babbage machines... It all feels a bit stale nowadays. There are hundreds of novels that recycle the same tropes, to the extent that even the (often brilliant) spoofs like Lovelace and Babbage are now pretty commonplace.

In short, I didn't feel the world needed another version of those characters in a setting with all the usual steam-powered trimmings. There has to be something new. So Ada's wan face withdrew from the window, the white curtains of fog rolled in, and I walked by in search of other stories to tell. But I like to think she's out there somewhere, yearning to experience the outside world, and if I ever find an untrodden path to her door then I'm going to help her escape.