The Long Answer - November 2011 - BS-S

By Amanda Valentine

“So, what do you do?” That seemingly innocuous question inevitably comes up, whether it’s at that big family dinner with aunts and uncles you only see every few years or when you’re getting introduced to someone for the first time. If your job is unusual—say, a writer, game designer, or editor—that question can cause some anxiety. You frequently get that quizzical look that suggests that you can’t actually make a living doing that. Often, people offer career advice without really understanding what you do.

Usually, you develop some canned response that satisfies them or at least deflects the topic to something else. But I’ve had trouble devising an answer that’s both accurate and concise. I’m a freelance editor of roleplaying game books. Most people don’t really understand what editors do (“Oh, you’re a proofreader?”), and they sure don’t understand what I mean by roleplaying games. It’s usually a totally new concept to them or a totally misunderstood one. I remember trying to explain my first editing project to my mom: “No, it’s not really stories. See, it’s kind of like encyclopedia entries about the dragons that exist in these novels, plus guidelines for telling your own stories in that world. With your friends. And dice.” Six years later, I still don’t think she really gets it, but she’s unceasingly supportive of me anyway. And I’m still trying to figure out what to say when people ask, “So, what do you do?” I don’t have a good canned response yet, but I’ve given a lot of thought to the long answer, and I think it sheds some light on a small but fascinating niche of the publishing industry.

A roleplaying game book is an odd beast. It’s typically one part game world resource and one part instruction manual for how to play in that world. It presents characters described in numbers and phrases. It’s a toolbox for helping other people create their own fiction together around the gaming table. In many ways, it’s more nonfiction than fiction, even if people can fly and dragons are real—I call it “fictional nonfiction.” Many people are involved in each book—usually multiple game designers and writers, often several artists, as well as a project manager, editor, and layout artist. Teamwork is crucial to keep all those people working toward a united purpose and to deal with the inevitable—and very valuable—overlap in roles. Designing game books is a remarkably social endeavor.

Most of my work has involved editing game books for licensed properties, i.e., games that are set in a universe created by someone else, usually for a different medium. Some of the games I’ve worked on are based on the Dresden Files novels, the world of Dragonlance, and the Smallville TV show; I’m currently managing editor for a game based in the Marvel comic book universe. Working with a licensed property adds another interesting layer to the whole fictional nonfiction thing, because there’s an entire fictional universe out there that millions of people have experienced through the novels, comic books, movies, and TV shows. In many cases, it’s become part of their own world as they share and discuss it with other fans. In the game books, we try to reduce that world to its most important aspects, present the crucial information, and apply rules that mimic the narrative laws that govern the fictional universe. Ideally, this in turn hands the universe back to the fans which now have some extra tools to help them tell their own stories in that world.

As an editor of roleplaying game books, I wear a lot of hats. Of course it’s my job to make sure the text is as error-free as possible and that it’s all ready for layout with proper formats and notations, but in many ways that’s the least of what I do—and when I’m working with awesome writers, it’s one of the easiest things I do. My primary role is to stand in as the potential audience to find things that might be confusing or annoying. This can be loosely broken down into improving structure and tone, and respecting the license and fans. I help structure the content so it makes sense to the reader and I ensure that the book does what we intended it to do. I smooth out the tone throughout the book so the many writers sound like one voice, I make sure that voice suits the book and the license, and I ensure that the rules are clearly stated. Lastly, I make sure that we’ve stayed true to the license we’re working with. I’m certainly not the only person working on these things—the writers, designers, and project manager are responsible for these things, as well. But in the end, it’s the editor who needs to guarantee all of this happens.

Structure is always an issue with game books. It would be nice if we could download all the information into the reader’s mind, Matrix-style, but reality sadly demands that we determine some order for how the reader encounters the information. Do the readers need to know all about the world before they can understand the game? Does this part of the rules make any sense before we’ve discussed this other aspect of the rules? Adding to the structural challenge, game books are primarily a reference—people don’t read them from front to back like they would a novel. Every page needs to make a certain amount of sense even if it’s the first page you read, without being too redundant and repetitive. Parts you know people will turn to frequently in the midst of a game need to be easy to find. Determining the best way to structure the book is a constant challenge; it’s a conversation I have about each book I work on since there’s no obvious “This works for everything” answer.

You also need to take the purpose of each book into account when thinking about structure. Some books are mostly rules, others are mostly setting or characters, still others offer advice and expand existing rules. When developing the Smallville High School Yearbook, for instance, it needed to mirror the structure of the Smallville Roleplaying Game which the Yearbook supplemented. The other primary purpose of the book was to break down the genre of high school drama in general so that these rules could be easily adapted for other high school settings, such as Veronica Mars, Harry Potter, or Beverly Hills, 90210. We accommodated those multiple purposes by modeling the book after actual yearbooks—this approach reflected the high school theme and gave us a creative way to incorporate sections on faculty, clubs, and sports. The write-ups of the Smallville characters were laid out like senior pictures.

Tone is important in any book as it helps mold the reader’s expectations. It’s absolutely essential when you’re emulating a licensed property. The game needs to sound and feel like it’s part of the universe of the license, and it needs to stress whatever is centrally important in that world. Let’s take Smallville: think teenage soap opera where some of the characters happen to have super powers, and Marvel Heroes: think comic books full of action and—sometimes literally—earth shattering decisions. Even though both deal with super heroes, the tone of each game needs to reflect those very different interpretations of the theme. For Marvel Heroes, we’re still working out that tone since it’s currently in development. How much STAN LEE excitement can the text handle?!?

One way to deal with tone is to have a character in mind as the voice for the text—in Smallville it’s Chloe in her role as Watchtower, looking down on the action and knowing more than she should. In the Dresden Files Roleplaying Game, we took it a step further—the conceit is that Billy the werewolf, one of the characters from the novels, designed this game based on his world. It adds yet another layer to that whole fictional nonfiction thing. Several of the characters from the novels make cameos with notes in their voices scrawled in the margins. This is the most overt voice in any of the books I’ve edited, and it certainly won’t work for every game—it was a lot of fun for this one, though.

The big challenge with tone is the rules—how do you clearly explain something so procedural while still staying true to the tone of the stories those rules help tell? As an editor, a big part of my job is translating “design speak" into something a bit more conversational and fun to read. The focus of the rules themselves also adds to the tone. Smallville is all about the drama, so the game rules focus on values (duty, love, glory, etc.) and interpersonal relationships, which is a unique approach among roleplaying games. The rules for the Dresden Files Roleplaying Game are based on the rules in the adventure pulp game Spirit of the Century. However, the Dresden Files game needed to be darker and more dangerous—the central character of the novels, wizard private investigator Harry Dresden, gets battered and bruised throughout the novels, so we make sure your characters will, too. And yet even with tons of drama or gritty action, the sense of humor that’s central to both properties needed to come through. A lot of this rests with the designers and writers—and a surprising amount relies on the visuals, such as art and graphic design—but it’s up to the editor to make sure it all really comes together.

Emulating a world is a lot like building a world—you need to figure out how everything works so the world still holds together when the story jumps the rails and frolics unexpectedly in the meadow. In some ways, it’s probably easier to adapt a licensed world because you don’t have to figure out everything from scratch. However, because the world isn’t yours to create, you also can’t change things that are problematic. There’s an entire world that needs to be accurately captured—and if you get it wrong, there’s a legion of fans out there eager to correct you. This requires lots of research, even if that research looks a lot like reading comic books, watching TV, or rereading a favorite series.

It may seem like a no-brainer that the best way to stay true to a license is to make sure that everyone working on it already knows the universe backwards and forwards. Who better than die-hard fans to take on that job, right? Although it sometimes makes me feel guilty to admit it, I didn’t start out as a fan of most of the licenses I’ve worked on. I’d read the Dresden Files novels, but I wasn’t involved in the fan community. I was a total newcomer to Smallville and Dragonlance, and I’m learning how much more there is to Marvel than some cool movies and the Spider-Man cartoon I watched as a kid. I know there are a lot of devoted fans out there who would love to have my job, and their vast encyclopedic knowledge can be incredibly useful.

On the other hand, having an outsider’s perspective has its advantages. Fresh eyes allow you to fill in the gaps that fans might assume are filled. Things that seem obvious to long time fans may be confusing to me—and to all of the other readers who haven’t joined the fan club yet. I think it’s often easier as an outsider to identify what’s critical vs. what’s just cool, partially because I don’t understand how this little detail suggests an awesome subplot that we won’t actually be addressing in the game, so I can cut it without guilt. However, an outsider has to be particularly careful about treating the license and the fans with respect. Maybe I don’t really get it—that’s fine, as long as I can understand why other people do get it. Their devotion reminds me of my responsibility to do right by them, and the world and characters they love.

Successfully handling a license requires a lot more than simply knowing the names of all the minor characters and being able to list the events in chronological order. There’s also context you need to know. What things does the fan base value? Where can—and can’t—you take liberties to adapt the universe to your game? What are some of the pitfalls you need to avoid? With any extensive world—10 seasons on TV, a long running series of novels, a world created by multiple authors over several decades—there will be inconsistencies and a few missteps. Treating a license and the fans with respect means knowing how to deal with that. Can you make good natured jokes? Are there some things you should just sweep under the carpet and forget about? There’s a fine line between laughing with and laughing at. An editor has to know where that line is and make certain the text never crosses it.

Roleplaying game books are a unique hybrid. They’re fantastical nonfiction and they encourage creativity by providing rules for storytelling. Because you can play with order, structure, tone, and layout, the guidelines that govern other published formats often don’t apply. An editor of roleplaying game books must constantly adapt, juggling structure, tone, and the license—and that's in addition to catching errors. I find it exciting and rewarding, although it means I’ll probably never have a simple answer when someone asks me, “So, what do you do?”

Taking a break after a decade of teaching writing to college freshmen, Amanda Valentine has turned her hobby of freelance editing into a full time career. She blogs at www.ayvalentine.com where she discusses editing, games, and raising her two geeklings.