What makes a great game storyline?

[Jayson]

What I Prep

Last month I got on my soapbox about prep, specifically talking about how it does not matter how long your prep is, and I thought I would stay on the topic and talk about how I prep a game today. Â This article will be a snapshot of my prep process because this is a GM skill that constantly...

gnomestew.com

Two Page Prep
Today, my prep is basically two pages, or one-page front and back, if you are getting really technical. That is not a constraint, but rather where I wind up. That prep is good for 4-8 hours of play, depending on how hard I am driving the game. I don’t have a single format, allowing the prep to fit the structure of what I am playing, but I do have elements that are always present. When I run a game for the first time, I usually spend a bit of time figuring out the template for my prep, which involves incorporating the important elements I need with the overall structure of the game. For instance: In my prep for Blades in the Dark, the middle portion of my prep is sectioned into Freeplay, The Job, and Downtime, to reflect the three major phases of the game.

As with any good project - the time put in is essential. In fact, before a game is even programmed, I'm thinking - as this article suggests - that hours are put into thinking up every scene. Anyway, this is - of course, the same thing as you'd see in making a novel, writing a screenplay, you name it.

Anyway, who has attempted to make a game? How much time did you put into thinking about it? I mean, myself, I haven't made a game - but I'm doing online musical project - and it requires a lot of thinking ahead of time, though, I haven't really measured - how much I've done!

 

[Martin Berisford]

Back in the day I remember that me and my friends spent weeks at one point mocking up an entire gameplay/vocal script for a fictional GTA game set in Miami. This back in the days of GTA Vice City and I know we always planned to send it off to Rockstar (because they would accept scripts from two 12 year olds of course) and by the end of it we had one hell of a large script together but then being kids, we just thought "meh" and left it alone, never to be touched again. Was a waste of time now that I think about it but you don't notice that when you're kids I guess haha.

 

[Nova]

I think a large part of the success is based on the story. Because that's how the levels are made. Though PVP and Battle royale has removed the need for story. BUt the thing is that people want story based games. They want to be a part of something in the gaming. So story is pretty much the king in games.