How to extract rules from a story/setting?

[Groffa]

[Onix]

That's a good question, my answer would be that my setting and mechanics alter each other and I just watch them to make sure they don't alter into something I don't like.

I'll come up with a setting and then I'll think about what mechanic I would like to use. I'll try it out in my head and see if anything unexpected happens. If it does, is it good unexpected or bad? Bad unexpected means I need a new mechanic. Good unexpected is great. Then I talk about it with my playtesters and we debate what effect it will have on the game. Again, you get the same vetting process.

Sometimes the good unexpected is so good, I alter the story to fit it.

[vulpinoid]

A common answer to this question is to think of the top level questions for your game.

What do you see players doing when they play the game? Are they telling stories? Are they competing?
What do you see characters doing in the game? What jobs do they have? How do they interact with the people around them?
What sort of stories do you want to tell with the game?

Once you've considered these questions you'll start to see the types of rues you'll need to accomplish these goals. If you find that social interaction is important, you might want to focus on this in your rules (explaining how to deal with things through role portrayal, or explaining how dice can handle the situation).

I try to keep these high concept ideas in mind while working on the setting and the rules...bouncing between setting and rules as they symbiotically work with one another.

Every designer is different though.

[John Michael Crovis]

Currently, I only have one published RPG and one that I'm working on... The one that I'm working on, Super Action Bros, is based very closely on a popular 80's video game of a similar name. So, in essence, I started with the setting for this game.

What I did first is ask myself what the characters would be doing in the game. I wrote down a list of verbs I expected would be used in the course of a game. Jumping, Kicking, Running, Bashing. Then I looked at the verbs and ranked them from most important to least important, and found a way to combine the least important verbs with the most important verbs to come up with my "Skill List".

Now, I've chosen to keep my game as simple as possible because it reflects the cartoonish nature of the game - so I stopped at "skills". However, if I were to want Attribute scores, I rank my skills from least important to most important, and find a way in which they could fall together under different Attribute scores.

Then, I would ask myself what type of core mechanic is needed. My game needed a simple core mechanic; it's a simplified version of the Savage Worlds mechanic; depending on skill level, roll a d4, d6, d8, d10, or d12 - and roll over the difficulty number. Again, it fits the over-simplified and cartoonish nature of my game system. However, you may want to do something different depending on the feel of the game setting. A lot of science fiction games seem to use percentile dice, for example, because it adds to the precision-feel of the game system. In contrast, you may decide that you want to use as many dice as possible to your need for an old-school feel to your game - pulling out even obscure dice such as a d14, d16, d24, and d30.

Then, craft your combat system, being mindful of how deadly your setting is and how you would like to see combat play out. In my game, combat isn't deadly, and "death" is more of an inconvenience than a serious problem. The same way video games has "lives," so does my game system... and even if you lose all your lives, it just means that you can no longer play until next session or until the players reach the next town. Your combat system may be deadlier if you are writing a game that simulates the extremes of war, or more complex if you are writing a game that emulates kung-fu movies.

I then ask if there are "powers" that go along with my setting. For my setting, most "powers" are either innate abilities shared by all the characters or special abilities granted by "power-ups" - items. However, some settings have magic, psychic abilities, and other special abilities that only a fraction of characters would have access to. So you have to figure out how these powers are granted to the characters and which characters can gain those powers. It is also important that these powers fit into your combat system and utilize your skills and abilities to make the system a unified whole.

Now, I haven't written many games, so you can take my perspective with a big-ol' block of salt... but this is what seems like a logical step progression to me.

[maledictus]

I've been asking myslef this question in the last days.

I want to make a game based on a comic. I've been asking what are the main themes from the comic and how can I transport this feeling to the game. For example, some events happen in the mind of the character, some battles are fought in dreams and stuff. Which are the habilities and weaknesses of the characters and what systems may work to represent them?

The diceless Marvel Universe RPG did a nice job doind this, translating things from comics to game, even adding panels and pages.

[Groffa]

Good points everybody. I'll start with that advice, vulpinoid, and see what I come up with!

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Writing a game is a lot like crafting a map. You start with some benchmarks, and fill in details in multiple passes, refining as you go along. You are trying to find the geography of the genre. You initial focus if probably going to be on characters, level of detail required, competence, and consequences.

I apologize if I'm being somewhat generic here, I haven't had a chance to read your story yet.

Story first established what type of characters are there, what can they do, and what level of focus do setting elements need. Are there wizards, and if so are they walking artillery pieces, or is there no such thing as an offensive spell and they're all soothsayers and philosophers. In a space opera, are the spaceships push a button and they go, or Hard SF Nuclear electric rockets? Is a car just a way to move from one scene to another, or is there a focus on vehicular combat and thus the need for detailed mechanics on acceleration, armor, and horsepower.

The story also lets you gauge the level of heroism and consequence. You could arguably make a chart of this - on one axis is freedom from lethality, the other how much of the world players can change.

Teenagers from Outer Space has character that can't die, and is about aliens in high school, so it marks the lower left hand part of the chart. Epic star-wars is saving galaxies and stars Jedi that can dodge bullets (not that they need to against stromtroopers) so its the far right hand corner. Paranoia is very deadly, but has multiple lives per character, so its kind of a middle ground on consequences.

You can also focus on character competence. Do they succeed most of the time, better than baseline human, or is the deck stacked against them, except for an occasional ace up their sleeve? Should there be a hero point mechanic that lets players chose when they want/need a victory, or are they always prisoners of fate? If there are critical hits, what causes them and how often - a ten on 1d10 is 10% chance, a 12 on 2d6 is on in 36, and an 18 on 3d8 is 1:216.

You don't need the stats for technology right away, in fact, you start with story to know if you need stats for equipment at all. Instead, the focus should be on systems that move the narrative at an appropriate pace.

[Groffa]

Chainsaw Aardvark: good points, and I like the analogy!

Let's say I've extracted the core mechanical elements of my story, and realise they mimic a game that already exists (free of course!). Go on and still create my own version, or use the existing rule set?

I was thinking of this (the second option) as a way to "promote" another free game; my game would still come in a single package with setting and rules (so the user wouldn't need to hunt all over the Internet), but the rules themselves would build upon/derive from an existing. Is this a way to solve what have been discussed in ?
So if my game is successful, players may find an attribution to the original rule set and think: "Hey, I like this game, I wonder what that other is like? Maybe I'll like that one too?" And if they like the original, maybe they'll think "Oh if he could do his own game using these rules, so could I!"
(or am I being naïve?)
(am I getting too off-topic in my own thread??)

[Onix]

Are you thinking of something similar to how FATE came from FUDGE?

All I'd say is ask politely. Most writers would love to see their system live on in more games.

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

It depends on the type or person you are, and what you want to focus on in the setting.

I'm proud of making the rules on my own, and want something that has very close fidelity to the worlds I'm creating. The challenge of creating a system, and understanding the trade-offs and concepts of its design amuse me. Its fun to study and learn about games (especially since that often involves playing them) and the way decisions are made.

However, I can't deny that using a pre-made system saves a lot of time, and avoids the need for play-testing. You are free to focus on writing additions to the story or other elements. If my Anarchy Zone setting was written for FUDGE, it could have been ready for sale years ago.

Now, does your use of that system encourage other people to look into that system? I don't really have much evidence either way. My personal experience with buying games is that I'll go for the setting that I like first, and if they're by the same company and have the same rules, that is a nice bonus. Given our usual trend to argue for story, it seems kind of a tall order that your setting showcases that set of rules well enough to popularize it. Reversing that, you would probably need to write something that specifically explores the strength of those rules to sell them - adapting story to mechanics vs mechanics to story.

Of course, it would still be nice to say - "if you like this game, check out these others that use a similar system".