by Samantha H., staff writer, Inside AX- Anime Expo

Inside AX recently got the exciting opportunity to sit with George Strayton of Secret Fire Games during Gen Con 2011. Having previously worked as a screenwriter for Xena: Warrior Princess and the writer of several books from Star Wars and other franchises, Strayton was here to promote his new RPG game “The Secret Fire.”  Check out our exclusive interview!

Please introduce yourself for those who may not know who you are or what you do.

I’m George Strayton. I”m a screenwriter and a game designer.

Your game “The Secret Fire” was release today at Gen Con, could you please tell us a bit about it?

The Secret Fire is a role playing game that is very fast to play and learn. It involves a very heavy role-playing component that involves special effects that gives you more energy as you role-play your character. Energy points can be used for things such as speeding up the time it takes to search a room or reduce spell casting time.

It says in your biography that you used to sneak into Universal Studios and eventually landed a job there. Is that true?

Yes, I used to sneak in through the roof of the building by going through the forum credit union roof’s fire exit which had a sky-walk that I could cross. You can’t do this anymore though. But that’s how I got there. I’m surprised no one figured it out.

Since you eventually received a job at Universal Studios, how has that aided you in making your game?

I was the head of marketing there and worked on TV shows there. It allowed me to meet a lot of writers there and gradually overtime they allowed me to write episodes and I started writing all these fantasy shows. I learned so much from various people who I used to work for. I learned about writing in a cinematic way . From all my experience I learned how to make 3 dimensional characters and stories. I wanted to figure out how to make a game with these features since I used to play Dungeons and Dragons. Putting all these things together in a visual world to teach how game masters to come up scenarios to evoke certain emotions (like having a horror game or comedy game). The game mechanics of the game are straightforward and I wanted to use words such as might to convey strength (such as my character is very mighty). If my character had low intelligence I would say they were reckless. As you play those traits in your game you can get energy points by acting moronically or recklessly. If you went against your character traits, you moved further along the alignment line (of good and evil) so you are able to see the progression of your character.  Like television shows or movies I wanted characters to have the same type of development that I learned about during my work at Universal.

Were there any hardships that you encountered while making “The Secret Fire?”

In business ways I was trying to figure out what type of licenses I wanted. The hard part in terms of design, I wanted everyone to feel like they were creating their own characters. I told my staff to not give me any “math” and focus on story stuff. So it was hard to take these great story ideas later and apply the “numbers” and mechanics to it that were simple and still fun. I didn’t want to have a base system where you simply rolled a d20. I wanted you to be rolling lots of different kinds of dices. I went through a bunch of different builds for skills. For hit points I didn’t like how if you had a 100 points or 1 you still acted the same way. I wanted it so that you would have penalties as you lost more since it’d be harder for you to fight. So I needed to figure out a system to have that work and is understandable.  I definitely wanted to keep the amount of numbers involved small since it’s harder to add larger numbers together. I made sure that calculations would be faster. Balancing game play and mechanics without hurting the story and that encourages people who would never want to role play to role play their character. And so I figured out this system of energy points that basically rewarded you for going along with your character traits and be in character. It takes about an half an hour for people who have never role played or played a game like this before to see how it is done. It gives you memories about your game instead of just a simple game where you just killed a monster, you instead killed a dragon by shoving a casket of alcohol into the dragon’s mouth and made it explode in the maw of the monster because your character is an alcoholic (who just happens to be looking at the casket, wanting to drink it) and is clever.   But yeah, definitely the hardest part was trying to apply the math part to the story so that way players would still be interested and engaged.

Do you have any advice for aspiring game writers and developers?

I think for games specifically, just try try to play as many games as you can. Play a lot of board games, LARPs, card games… anything. YOu never know where you can get inspiriation. Just exposing yourself to as many games as possible is a big part of it. Once you’ve done that just let your imagination go. I often just start writing idea down.  Basically research and make up as many versions of what you want to do as you can. I would write down the type of game I’d want to play so you’d have a sense of where you’d want to get to as you research. It’s amazing how suddenly things start to come together.

Any comments to future players of your game or readers of Inside-AX?

I want to say something that is important to me is “to make a world a better place.” I wanted to try to think of how to make my design skills and make the world a better place. So I have an appendix in the book that has a list of different sorts of things you can do like mentoring a child, or doing something for yourself like reading a book you’ve always wanted to read. Things that you would consider good things for everyone. Before the next game session you count up the number of things you’ve done between session and you get a bonus percentage of experience points for that session. This is not an exhaustive list. It gives and incentitive to do the things you want to do. I mean there’s no one who’s going to be like “I don’t want to do charity.” It’s because you may be busy or something but you’d love to do it sometime. So it gives you a little motivation to do it. If this even happens once, I’ll feel like the game is a success. It’s not something you think of when doing a role play but it’s something important to me. So hopefully people will take that to heart and act on it and all together we can make a better world.

We’d like to thank Mr. Strayton for taking the time out of his busy schedule to do an interview with us. You can visit his webpage and learn more about “The Secret Fire” at http://www.secretfiregames.com.

Tags: George Strayton, Secret Fire Games, The Secret Fire