Cooking Up the Big Show

My wife is a fantastic cook, she can do things with seasonings that would you make you sing praises to your maker. She’s always telling me that cooking isn’t terribly hard and can be distilled down into a couple of main points. Use fresh ingredients (preferably organic), season well, and always salt the water. Gaming is like cooking, you have to be prepared, have all the rights ingredients and a little TLC goes a long way (that way they really don’t expect the traps).

The Hook

The beginning of every story starts here; the event that starts the characters on their course. Your hook has to be strong; enticing players with its alluring provocative scent. A good hook should scream of enchanting mystery and adventure. It should waft out to the players luring them in until it’s too late, and the jaws of the hook sink into them. Slamming around them and thrusting them into the adventure, powerless to stop the course of events that has been set into motion their only course of action is to follow where few dare tread.

The Plot Twist

A good soup is one that is done slowly, the ingredients have time to soak in the juices of everything and really bring out the flavor. Good seasoning is a subtle art, too much and the dish is spoiled; too little and you can’t taste that it’s there. The art of the plot twist is that it’s unexpected (I mean it is called a plot twist) so letting it fester in the background until the last minute is half the fun, well at least for the GM. When coming up with the plot twist try coming at it from unexpected angles but be wary of being to over the top as it becomes rather obvious.

The Big Finish

They say that presentation is the biggest part of food. For me it’s the build up to seeing it, smelling the food, talking about the food, and then finally seeing the food. A big final finish is much the same way, its 90% build up. All of the careful planning and work we put into all the details leading up the end is all presentation. It’s nothing more than window dressings, which is why some fail even after careful planning. Still if all your ingredients are there and you’ve been simmering it just right, it should be one hell of a brawl.

What are your three tenants of game design? What can you compare to gaming that, like cooking, has a simple enough idea?