How To Make A Licensed Game That Hits
How To Make A Licensed Game That Hits
For Those Who Still Want To Make Games From Licensed IP
Let’s change our perspective for a moment.
Normally I’m looking at this from the perspective of the hobbyist at the table. Let me take my suit out of the closet, give it a good ironing, put on the nice shoes, and head downtown to Big Corporate Head Office. There, waiting for me in the C-Suite, is Mr. Johnson.
Mr. Johnson is responsible for a Brand. That Brand is the center of Mr. Johnson’s entire corporate operation, and it’s been a well-known Brand for generations. As I went downtown, I saw several advertisements for the Brand in different business segments: a television series, a line of casual clothing, a LEGO set, several videogames (including a guest appearance in a beloved franchise by another corporation), and a lot of comics and novels.
That’s not why Mr. Johnson called me into his office.
Mr. Johnson wants to move the Brand into the Tabletop Adventure Game space.
Well, more like “I want our own take on this Dungeons & Dragons thing.”
This is not a story, so we’ll skip the entire “Are you sure about that?” back-and-forth and get to the point: Mr. Johnson asks me how I’d go about making such a game for the Brand. Below is my best attempt to date to make a Game That Does Not Disappoint.
I will use The Shadow for our example. It’s not a Brand now, but it was in the past and the owner (Conde Nast) would certainly make it so again if they could- and they tried.
A Matter of Execution
Key Point Up Front: The success of a Brand-driven tabletop game relies on the game’s ability to fulfill the fantasies of the target audience, just like in videogames. This is why blind copy-paste game design, as if you were doing a White Label coffee brand, does not work.
Unlike a couple of very famous (and tanking) Brands1, I will actually bother to get familiar with the core material for The Shadow. Using a few helpful guides to keep me from going down miles-deep rabbit holes and thus lost in the weeds2, and I will use physical media—digital will NOT do here—and I will employ the same method I did in Graduate School when doing research on John Locke:
Read the source material once all the way through as if I were the target audience. I am going to make note of my emotional reactions to given uses of language, plot development, and other narrative techniques for the next point.
Read it a second time, with a notepad at the ready, slowly and deliberately. I am looking for common words, phrases, tropes, themes, and other things that would stand out as Brand Identifying Elements- things that the audience come to expect out of the Brand. This is, in essence, reconstructing a Brand Formula; it’s what so many tried to do with the James Bond film series in order to differentiate themselves in the marketplace.
If there are derivative elements in the source material (e.g. anything Warhammer 40,000 will be derivative of Dune, Dumarest, Moorcock’s Eternal Champion, etc.), I want to identify those and track down those influences as they are also going to be expected by the audience.3
I will then take note of how the central characters change (Positive Arcs, Negative Arcs, Flat Arcs) over the course of both individual stories and the series as a whole.
Why?
Because this is building up a list of things that I will want to reference when I do the next step: seek out the target audience. I want to know what their fantasies regarding The Shadow are. I want to know which ones are most amenable to the medium of tabletop gaming, and on a separate column I want to know what are the most common fantasies generally.
If there is fanfiction, yes I want to seek that out and read that too with the same idea in mind of finding common patterns in the fan-generated narratives and compare them against the core materials. Deviations between the two are telling.4
With regard to game adaptations of this sort, three fantasies are most common:
“I want to be (The Shadow)!”
“I want to be with (The Shadow)!”
“I want to be in (The Shadow)’s world!”
Therefore I want to go where the audience is and lurk. Not talk. Just observe. If there are archives, I want to examine them. I am looking for trends and changes over time.
Talk about the Macross franchise tends to be Type 3. Talk about Legend of the Galactic Heroes tends to be Type 2. Talk about Superman or Dragon Ball tends to be Type 1.5
A lot of talk about The Shadow is Types 2 and 3. Type 1 occurs when doing reviews, fanfic reviews, or other talk about writing stories etc. but that isn’t pertinent to identifying a viable game-playing group.
I want to profile the fantasies by demographics if I can. Some are not viable as a Tabletop Game, and I want to filter those demographics out now because they will not be viable customers for the game and it will help with marketing down the road.6
Now, with our example, what I see are fantasies about being either Agents of The Shadow or otherwise in that world but not directly involved with that character. As I am making a game for a Brand, I decide at this point to focus on a Type 2 Fantasy and leave Type 3 as an option; Type 1 is left out at this point in the process, but not wholly removed from the table.7
Why just lurk? Why not talk directly? That, unfortunately, is due to Revealed Preferences. Lurking quietly lets the audience speak at ease, showing what they really think by what they do and how they do it.
Being open about it runs a real risk of being told what they think you want to hear, or being hijacked by parties that are, at best, not suitable for the project at hand. That has led to a lot of disappointment, and not just in Tabletop Adventure Games, which in turn leads to Brand-cratering consequences like videos of your product rotting on Clearance Store shelves.
That is a good way to find yourself on the bad side of Mr. Johnson.
Once I have a profile of the target audience, an idea of how many of them would play a game as well as just read or listen to the source materials, and an idea of the most common fantasy they have I can decide how to proceed.
Calling The Technical Writers
I decide that my game about The Shadow will be a game where players take on the roles of The Shadow’s many and varied Agents. The Referee will take on the role of the center of The Shadow’s network, Burbank (i.e. the guy who dispatches the Agents on their missions).
Why? First, The Shadow is still just one man. He can’t be everywhere at once and there is a lot of crime to fight. Second, it means that having The Shadow show up is a big deal- one that can be gamified. Third, it leaves open the possibility that only one of the characters at the table is an Agent and the rest are heretofore unaffiliated folks- and The Shadow recruits his Agents by rescuing them from certain doom first.
Are there existing games that touch on this structure? Yes. Spycraft, Ninjas & Superspies, Mercenaries Spies & Private Eyes, Ars Magica8, Chill, and TORG9
Again, we do not blindly copy. Remember all those notes I took on what the audience expects from the source material and the experience of engaging with it? Now those come into play.
We start putting together a Gameplay Loop Model where a player, playing an Agent, undergoes the process of investigating a mysterious incident (usually a crime) and then works his way back to the responsible party. We want the structure of play to replicate the experience of being that Agent in that sort of narrative, and that includes find ways to turn key themes and tropes into mechanics and procedures. The experience of play should have a player saying “Because I did (X), (key audience appeal element) happened.”
Everything after this is iterating my way from a rough concept to a finished product.
With regard to The Shadow, things I would test and iterate upon include:
A Doom track mechanic, but for the villains; once it fills up, The Shadow appears and they are done. Players, in an inversion of the usual usage, are incentivized to advance this track.
Agent special talents. All the established Agents have something special, usually a skillset or an asset they control. Player-made Agents should follow that model.
Full procedures for combat (unarmed, armed, firearms), chases (foot, cars, air, water, mixed), investigation, and interrogation. This is a Spy game at its root.
Player abilities to Call Upon Burbank for aid, usually in the form of favors or information, at the cost of the opposition noticing their presence or losing time against a deadline.
Mechanics where key elements of the Brand give players an advantage, and defecting from them aids the opposition.
By this process, I hope to go from initial meeting to shipping in no less than a year and that’s if I have all my ducks in a row, do nothing else but work on this, have a team just as focused, and there is little iterating to be done from First to Final Draft.
It won’t be that easy, and I would not be that fortunate. Try 18-24 months (maybe longer, like 36), which is why if you’re looking to do this as a product tie-in for a bigger medium (TV, film, etc.) you need to be brought on board early and kept in the loop so your final product conforms to the larger marketing strategy. (Or you get the Serenity game. Ugh.)
As for the actual design process: there is a fine line between blindly relabeling an existing product and doing a scratch-built bespoke design. Going over the history of such games, I want to use something that’s known to work and focus attention on the specific elements that make the Brand what it is for the audience.
I would grab Spycraft, James Bond 007, and TORG for certain.10 Ars Magica, despite it being a fantasy game, has the gameplay structure that I may end up going for so I want it around for reference.11 If I iterate in a direction where the passage of time is non-trivial, I may want to look at Pendragon’s rules for Off Season (i.e. Downtime) and Legacy Characters, but that may be reserved as an optional supplement.
By the end of this process, the user manual—the rules manuscript—should be done and ready for publication. What remains after that is the actual product design (i.e. layout, trade dress, illustrations, etc.) which may or may not be mine to handle. I’d make certain I was in synch with Mr. Johnson’s marketing strategy (if he has one), and then plan advertising and convention/podcast appearances accordingly to promote it.
Conclusions
I write this under the assumption that I am the shot-caller start-to-finish once I take the job. The reality may be quite different. I leave that for the professionals to reveal.
“But doesn’t this mean you’re going to take some time to make this game?”
Yes. Both my reputation and that of the Brand demands that this be given the same care and attention that Larian Studios gave to Baldur’s Gate III, even if I am working with a fraction of the budget and team, because the product itself will outlast BG3 if I do my job properly. Even if I miss the mark and disappoint12, that care and attention to quality will bear out and it will still find an appreciative audience.
The big thing that Mr. Johnson must understand is that this is not a quick cash grab; a bad Brand product can poison the well in that market segment for generations, and that poison can seep into the rest of the Brand’s presence.13 If this is part of a larger market strategy, failure here can turn that into a disaster by association.14
Too many in the Tabletop Adventure Game niche as well as those outside of it do not appreciate this fact, which is why we have Games That Disappoint. For original works from within the hobby, that’s unfortunate; for commercial publications meant to tie into a greater Brand-driven business operation, this can be (and increasingly is) very damaging if not calamitous. This isn’t the old days; the Internet has so interconnected All The Things that even the smallest splinter can result in an entire limb being lost.
If Mr. Johnson doesn’t understand that, he won’t be Mr. Johnson much longer. If you don’t, you won’t be in a position to fail a second time because everyone will see that you whiffed your shot at the brass ring. Don’t think it won’t get out; the Internet now is the very character I’ve talked about.15
Do what it takes to nail it, and that includes getting and keeping Mr. Johnson on side.
Good luck on your endeavors, even if this is a market niche fast transforming into a very different space, but by no means should you ever expect this alone to be a pillar of your Brand. Wizards of the Coast doesn’t, and they’re native to the medium.
Marvel, D.C., and Lucasfilm. I can cite several more.
To the point where an ill-informed audience may think that the derivative is the originator, such as Space Marines.
For this purpose, it shows some degree of Revealed Preference regarding what fantasies they want to play out.
Macross talk involves a lot of “I want to be a pilot/idol” stuff, LOGH talk focuses on Reinhard and Yang and being in either clique, and the latter is straight up “If I were (X)…”
i.e. “Don’t sell Harlequin Romances to boys wanting to pretend to be Navy SEALs”.
Type 1 play is best done in videogame format. There is an unfinished game of this sort, meant to tie into the 1994 movie, floating around online. Razorfist played it live years ago.
Agents = Companions, The Shadow = Magus. Grogs you can slot in as lesser assistants.
Storm Knights, by default, are affiliated with The Delphi Council. AM has the Covenant structure, Chill has SAFE, and all the spy games have some Agency they are tied to- real or not.
TORG for The Nile Empire in particular as a guideline for making trope elements into playable mechanics, and other cosms generally. Spycraft has the core structure for play, and JM007 has some elements for player-characters of disparate levels.
Specifically the Round-Robin style where players take turns running the game. In this context, each player takes a turn as Burbank and the others are Agents. Spread the area of play around so that each Referee has their own area to run and this can work very well.
See my post on West End and Wizards of the Coast’s Star Wars adaptations.
Holy shit that entire “Femstodies” debacle with Games Workshop. No matter what your politics are, that was a horrible move as this exact Brand damage is what happened and ended up tanking Cavil’s production deal at Amazon.
Note for Lucasfilm: this is why you do the Tabletop Adventure Game after your film trilogies, not before or during. TAG’s are a Capstone Product for a Brand from outside the hobby, not a Builder.
The RPG commentary on YouTube alone is now far greater than it ever was on any BBS or forum, or even on Reddit, and orders of magnitude more influential. Why do you think Wizards of the Coast flat-out bribed a cohort of them recently in advance of the 2024 D&D revision?
Thank you very, very much for this, Brad. — Kent Allard
I notice that ADnD basically takes this approach as a kind of “fan TAG” for the Appendix N literature.
The core gameplay loop is go on bold adventures and raid the lost secrets of the past and lairs of evil wizards for the treasure needed to claim or reclaim your throne.
It wound up being more than that, but when I looks at Corwins effort to claim Amber; or Conan’s conquest of Aquilonia the gameplay loop is right there.