Seth Ben-Ezra
Q2. Explain the process of creating an RPG.
First, I have to give a disclaimer. I’ve published three roleplaying games, am on the verge of releasing a fourth, and have three or four others in various stages of design, and each process has been a different experience. So, rather than give a general answer, I’ll tell you about the process I went through for two different games to give a sense of the different ways that a game can come into existence. First, I’ll talk about Dirty Secrets, which had a fairly standard production process. Then I’ll talk about A Flower for Mara, which was a very different animal altogether.
Dirty Secrets is my detective noir roleplaying game. Think Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, and you’ll be in the right vicinity. However, Dirty Secrets isn’t intended to be a period piece. Rather, you create a detective story in your home town, last week. So, when I play Dirty Secrets, it’s set right here in Peoria, where I live, in modern times.
The seeds of this game were planted in my mind a number of years ago when I was exposed to the works of James Ellroy. Game designer John Tynes had listed Ellroy as an influence, saying, “If you want to read the best in new horror fiction, avoid the ‘horror’ book rack—Ellroy is fighting on the front lines of the human nightmare, and has handily left the sad remnants of the horror field in his wake.” After reading Ellroy’s Los Angeles quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz), I understood what Tynes was talking about. These were dark stories of crime, corruption, and depravity, where everyone is hiding something and no one is truly clean.
Sounded like the perfect stories for Christians to be telling. After all, we’re the ones who proclaim that man is truly fallen, right? But do we really know what that means? Have we really accepted how twisted we are? It is only in this context that the goodness of the Gospel shines forth. When we see the darkness for what it is, the light is all the more precious.
I didn’t do anything with this idea until August 2006. That was a fairly stressful period in my life, and I often deal with stress by being creative. So, one Sunday afternoon, I sat down and banged out my first draft of the game rules.
They were awful. But that’s part of the process. You write some rules, see how they don’t work, and then you write new ones that work better.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
During Dirty Secrets I consciously developed a creative technique that I’d used unconsciously in the past. I call it “media immersion”. Basically, when I’m in full-on design mode on a game, I will immerse myself in all kinds of related media and, as a corollary, avoid all media that is unrelated. My thinking is that this will better enable me to internalize the various aspects of the genre I’m working in. I’ll be more in touch with the “rules” and general feel of the genre (e.g. the first-person narration of many detective stories or their generally melancholy tone) if I’m spending lots of time around that genre.
For Dirty Secrets, this meant that I read a lot of books. I read all Raymond Chandler’s novels. I read Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. I read everything by Ross MacDonald that I could acquire. (I have nearly all his Lew Archer novels now.) I watched the classics (The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Chinatown) and discovered new works (Brick). On the musical front, I assembled a personal soundtrack of jazz, trip-hop, and chillout, featuring artists like Portishead; Bitter:Sweet;Esthero; and Medeski, Martin & Wood. This way, as I was listening to music, I was surrounded by the sort of stylish, neo-noir urban vibe that I wanted for my game.
For nearly a year, I lived in a noir world. My wife is incredibly longsuffering.
Someone once compared designing a roleplaying game to the deconstruction of literature. That may not be always true, but it’s a fair description of how I usually design my roleplaying games. While I’m doing my media immersion, I look for common threads between the various stories. Then I design rules to try to recreate those particular themes, tropes, or experiences. For example, in Dirty Secrets, all the narration is from the perspective of the detective. The players are only allowed to describe what he can sense. This is because the detective genre is ultimately about an single detective pursuing the case. It’s a very lonely genre, actually, and I reflect that in my game.
At this stage, I’m feverishly reading books, scribbling ideas, brainstorming rules, and then seeing if they accurately reflect the stories that I’m reading. Then, at some point, comes the dreaded necessity of playtesting.
Game design is ultimately a cycle of creating rules, testing them, and then changing them based on your testing. The fancy term is “iterative design”, and it can be a real drag sometimes. This is where most designers fall short. It can be a whole heap of Not Fun to gather people who will play your unfinished game and then get them to tell you where it isn’t working.
For Dirty Secrets, we decided to be hyper-organized about playtesting. My wife, my sister, and I playtested twice a week for two or three months. Each night I would lay out the new rules that I’d made. Then we’d play while I took notes on what was and wasn’t working. Then, at the end, my wife and sister would tell me what they thought of the game so far. Then I’d go off and write new rules. Repeat for a while.
At this point, I wrote up a beta playtest draft and put the word out on the Internet that I was looking for outside playtesters. I managed to land a couple of outside playtests and listened carefully to what these players had to say. This is an important step, because these people are learning to play the game only from the document that I wrote. This is when you find out all the bits that you thought you had explained well enough or that you assume that “everyone knows”.
With this information under my belt, I sat down to write my manuscript. This was sometime in early May. Our goal was to publish and release at GenCon, a major game convention held in mid-August in Indianapolis. Three months isn’t really enough time to do the job, so there was a lot of cramming. I actually took a week off work to help around the house so that Crystal could finish laying out the book. Even with that, I remember sixteen-hour days as we rushed to get everything ready to go.
However, we eventually got the books printed and were able to release the game as planned at GenCon in August 2007. All told, the game took just about a year to produce.
It was at this particular GenCon that my particular Internet community became exposed to Jeepform, a different form of roleplaying that was being developed in the Scandinavian countries, particularly Sweden. As I heard about some of these ideas, I thought about a languishing project of mine about a dead woman named Mara.
A Flower for Mara started as someone else’s idea. Ben Best, a friend of mine, was working on a screenplay about a man and daughter who were haunted by the ghost of his dead wife. But really, the point of the story wasn’t to be scary. Rather, it was about this man learning to move on with his life and maintain a good relationship with his daughter after the death of his wife. Well, I thought that it was a great idea, and I had all kinds of opinions. For instance, I named the wife. “Mara” is the Hebrew word for “bitter”, which seemed like an appropriate name in a story about death.
Over time, the project was increasingly my project. So, Ben and I traded ideas. I took the Mara story, and he took a different idea that I’d had which interested him. So now I could take the Mara story and run with it however I wanted! But, um, what did that mean? I’m no screenwriter, and I didn’t really think that I’d ever be able to see it through to film anyways. I started the process of adapting the story to the stage. I even had a friend write a draft because she is much better at writing dialogue than me. But the logistics of putting on a play were beyond me.
And the project languished. Every so often, someone would look at it and say, “You know, we really ought to do something about the Mara play.” And we’d all nod, and that would be it.
But, when I started hearing about Jeepform, I suddenly thought, “You know, this would be perfect for the Mara play.” After all, I’m not a playwright; I’m a game designer.
The process for this game was very different from Dirty Secrets. Because I had three years of background for the story and a draft script for the play, I almost felt like I was adapting the play to game form. So, for example, the game has four acts for the four seasons of the year when the story takes place. Each character gets a scene in each season where he is in the spotlight. And so on. The final result feels a lot more like a free-form play than a traditional game.
The playtest cycle was shorter on A Flower for Mara than Dirty Secrets, though this is mostly because there are fewer rules in A Flower for Mara. We playtested three times, though the changes made between iterations were fairly minor.
In light of our experience with Dirty Secrets, we set specific deadlines for production of A Flower for Mara to avoid a last-minute rush. The fact that the manuscript was only a third of the length of Dirty Secrets probably helped.
Once again, we managed to get the books produced in time for GenCon, so we released A Flower for Mara in August 2008. Again, the game took about a year to produce.
Designing and producing my games is a lot of work. But it’s all worth it when the proof shows up from the printer and I’m holding the final product in my hand. When I am touching the book that we’ve worked on and I find that I’m giddy and excited, then I know that we’re finally finished.
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