thread: 2006-02-16 : Throwing It Open: Pulling the Plug
On 2006-02-18, Michael S. Miller wrote:
My creative process is a long drawn-out thing. I carry a pocket notebook with me everywhere and scribble down whatever ideas hit me, so I don't forget. Ideas come over weeks & months, sometimes in short bursts (but nothing like you 24 hour RPGs do). At the moment, I'm tending to get ideas for 2 to 3 different games, and that's fine. When one of these game/idea clusters reaches a critical mass, I'll type up notes to myself, throw together some stark, ugly, but functional character sheets, and bring it to Kat & Michele for playtesting. Then it's to the revision-playtest-revision thing.
I think of all of the above as the "design stage" and it's probably my favorite—so much potential there. The problem is that when I'm finished the design stage, I don't have a game text—I just have a collection of notes to myself about how to play. Next is the "writing stage," wherein I actually explain to another person how to play the game. I also prevail upon the editorial genius of Thor at this point.
The obvious snag with the above process is that it makes external playtesting nigh-impossible. I'm working on changing that.
As for when to set a project aside? I've set two of them aside: Incarnandine (RolePlaying in a Shakespearean Style) because it's too big—it's my Great White Game—I'm not yet good enough to design it; and Limelight (movie star roleplaying) because I completely lost passion for the material. Whenever I'd mention it, people would bring up E! True Hollywood Story or the National Enquirer, and I'd try to explain that I was going for a more romantic, 1940s-esque kind of thing. They'd reply "oh, there was sex and drugs and scandal in the '40s, did you hear about..." and I finally realized that I didn't have the passion to re-educate, correct or otherwise fight to change people's first associations, so I moved on to other things.
