How to Write a Murder Mystery Dinner Party Script
© 2007 Dark Secret Software Inc.
This document is property of Dark Secret Software Inc. You may not copy or distribute it in any form without the expressed, written permission of Dark Secret Software Inc.
Writing a Murder Mystery Dinner Party Script is unlike writing a Murder Mystery for a novel, it is perhaps more akin to writing a screenplay for screen or theater. From here on in when we say 'script' , we are referring to a Murder Mystery Dinner Party Script. These scripts are written to be performed real people, not to be read by a single person. The setting for this performance is historically at a dinner party or in a dinner theater environment. MyDarkSecret.com takes this concept to the Internet where game players become actors. Each player is given cues for how to act and behave in conversation with other players. Your script becomes the road map for unveiling a fascinating story. All players are suspects and one is the culprit, but everyone appears guilty. The challenge to the players is to identify the real murderer while avoiding being accused themselves. This document will explain more about the “rules of engagement” and provide some tips and techniques for how to write a really effective and engaging script for this wonderful new media.
You should assume that the actors in a MyDarkSecret.com game are novices. Novices to the Murder Mystery genre. Novices to role-playing in a public forum. You, as the writer, know your characters intimately. You know all about their background, their outward appearance and the reason they are where they are in your story. Imagine you have to tell an actor in a play all this information quickly and then push them out on stage. That's what it means to write a MyDarkSecret.com script. We'll get into all these details in a minute, but first let's summarize the ground rules:
A Script has Characters. Characters are the participants in your Murder Mystery story.
Characters have a Summary. The Summary is a couple of paragraphs that tells about how the outside world perceives this character. All characters are aware of the summary of each character.
There is usually a Victim. The poor victim is the character that was killed in your script. Usually, the victim was killed before your script began. Your script usually starts with the characters reflecting on the events around the murder and other events that may be occurring in their lives.
Generally, all Characters have a Motive. You want to make all characters look guilty, but ultimately you want to make the culprit looks slightly more guilty. There should be some form of reasonable doubt between the culprit and other characters to make things challenging.
MyDarkSecret.com Users can review your script and make Games out of it. You could have many copies of your script running at any given time; one for each game being played.
Users “join” a game and become Players. All of the Characters in your script are represented by real people (users). The only Character that is not played by a User (and represented by a Player) is the victim. If one of the Players was to be the Victim, they would find the game pretty boring from the moment they were killed onwards.
A game is divided into Scenes. A scene is collection of things you want to expose about the plot or the characters in a manageable chunk. If you try to divulge too much information all at once, it will clutter up the game user interface and make all the information hard to manage.
Your script has to tell the Players how to act, what their motivations are, what their dark secrets are. As an author, you need to decide how you want to portion this information out the Players so as to pace the story. Remember that you can only pass this information onto the Player and hope they do a good job in conveying it.
Information in a Scene is divided into two types: Facts and Challenges.
Facts are pieces of information that the Character knows, but wants to keep secret as long as possible (ultimately they will be required to divulge these secrets). Players will not willing convey Facts, but rather they will wait until they are challenged on them by other Players, at which time they will let the details leak out. Once the player feels they have fully divulged the information in a Fact, they can mark the Fact as “Established”.
Challenges are pieces of information that a character is aware of. They are aware of them so much that they bug the character. They bug the character so much that the character feels compelled to speak up about it and challenge other players about it. Challenges manifest themselves in the game as new conversation “threads” initiated by that player.
Facts and Challenges are written in the second person because you are talking directly to the player. The script summary and public biographies of each of the characters is written in the third person.
MyDarkSecret.com manages threads of conversation between players.
When every character has both Established all the Facts for their Character, and initiated all the Challenges for their Character, they can vote to proceed to the next scene. The reason we vote to move between scenes is to give all the other players a chance to establish their Facts and initiate their Challenges.
After the last scene has played out, it's time for accusations.
Each player then accuses another player as the culprit and defines what they think the Motive and Method used by the culprit to kill the Victim.
Once all the accusations have been given, players can review them and, if the correct suspect was accused, rank the accuracy of the Motive and Method given.
Later, Players can review all the rankings and see how they did in the game.
For you, as the script author, you only have to worry about the story and the characters. We say “only” very loosely; We know how hard it can be to produce a compelling murder mystery script! The MyDarkSecret.com system takes care of managing all the game set-up, Facts, Challenges, game play, accusation and rankings.
One of the benefits of this genre is that you do not need to spend a lot of time trying to find the perfect phrase for something. You don't have to struggle considerably on establishing setting or mood. Everything in script is exaggerated. Character traits are black or white ... there are rarely shades of gray.
You can frame out the structure of your mystery using whatever means works best for you: index cards, bar napkins, grid paper, but often what works best is the following approach (your mileage may vary).
Define a loose Setting, for example:
fans of a famous book series all meet at a “birds-of-a-feather” meeting at a cozy cottage where the author is found drowned, or
computer geeks with a large computer firm wonder how their CEO was killed, or
gangsters from a mob family gather to discuss how “The Don” was recently rubbed-out.
You get the idea. No doubt you can come up with more creative scenarios / setting than the one we've outlined, but coming up with this setting is going to be very important for defining your characters.
Sketch out some Character outlines. These should be people that have some reason to know the victim and may or may not know each other. You should be able to write a sentence or two about the character and their public persona amongst the other characters. You'll generally want at least five characters to keep the number of options up. Don't add a lot of detail to your characters at this stage, they will surely change later, at this perhaps just names and roles are good enough.
Decide how you are going to allocate your scenes. One way might be to use Scene 1 for hinting at the motives of the characters. Scene 2 might talk about the means the suspects had to bump off the victim. Usually, for a small number of characters (around 6), two scenes may be enough. If you have, let's say, more than 8 characters you may need to spread the exposition of the motive and methods out to a third or forth scene. You have a lot of options with respect to this.
Start to establish the relationships of the characters to the victim and to each other. Are some of the characters in relationships? Are they brother and sister? Husband and wife? Father and son? Manager and subordinate? Is a covert relationship? Are they having an affair? Are they doing something illegal together? Don't get too hung up on these relationships as they are likely to change, but try to pin something down. The relationships are very important for defining the murder motive of your characters.
Update your character descriptions to subtly define the public aspects of these relationships.
Start to define the motives for your characters wanting to kill the victim. This will require you to amplify their relationships with the victim. If the victim was the boss of a particular character, perhaps she was a horrific boss. If the victim was having an affair with a characters wife, then it was a heartless, torrid affair and she was going to leave her husband over it. Remember, these characters all wanted to kill the victim. Just being mad at him isn't good enough.
Consider some of the standard motives for murder: money, love, pride and protection are the big ones. Money could be someone losing a lot of money, or potentially gaining a lot of money. Love could be for love lost or the prospect of unhindered love. Pride is usually to protect against the revelation of someones “dark secret”. Last but not least, there is protection or the Father Complex. One character wants to protect themselves, another character or group against harm. With a simple mix of these motives you can surely come up with creative motives for your characters.
Start generating Facts for your characters. Facts are information your character has about the plot. Facts have two purposes, first they help instruct the player how to role-play this character. Second, they give the character knowledge about how to deal with a challenge by another character. Try to give each character 2-4 meaningful Facts per scene. In the first scene you should certainly tell the character about any interesting character traits they possess. This can range from the obvious (“Yourself and your receptionist Mary have been having an affair for the last 3 months. You are really bad at hiding this and are always flirting in public), to the absurd (“You have a childhood phobia of poultry and always scream when someone says the word 'chicken'”). The player can take these Facts as cues for how to interact with the other suspects.
Start to allocate these facts to scenes. For your first script you may want to complete a single scene completely before moving on, but it really depends on your style. The players will not know anything about their character other than the public character summary before the game begins. This is same about of information that every player knows about the other players. When they start the first scene of the game, you really want to give them enough ammunition to role play their character, even if they don't fully understand their motive or even if they are the murderer or not. It is a good idea not the tell the player that he or she is the murderer until a later scene. That gives them some time to get into character and not stress about if they have to do anything special being the murderer.
Allocate Challenges to Characters. Now that your players know how to act and have enough information to act, it is time to make them perform. A Challenge is a action a player must take against another character or group. When a player initiates a challenge they are starting a “thread” of conversation on a very specific topic. You should write your challenge in a descriptive manner and not verbatim text for the player to regurgitate. Let the player paraphrase the text in their own words and manner.
Let's look at an example. Consider two three characters: Jamie, the world-champion surfer; Bridget, the famous Paris runway model, Maxwell, the butler and the victim “Noah Boddy”. Assume there are other characters in our script, but these are the ones we are interested in at this time.
Maxwell might be given a Challenge like:
“You saw someone running into the victims office shortly after supper. It was dark and you couldn't quite make out who it was, but they had long blond hair like Jamie and Bridget has. You should ask them if either visited the victim after supper.”
Jamie could be given a Fact like:
“After supper, you wanted to catch Noah to tell him to stop blackmailing you or things were going to serious. You can't afford to have your drug habit exposed as it would destroy your sponsorship arrangements.”
Bridget may know nothing about visiting Noah.
At game play time, the person playing Maxwell might initiate a challenge and say something like:
MAXWELL:
“Terribly sorry to interrupt Madame and Sir, but I have an inquiry to make. I do hope it is not a bother. After tea was served I believe I saw someone heading into the masters quarters. The light was dim and I was harried and I could only catch a glimpse, but I did notice some lovely long blond hair. Could that have been you Master Jamie or Madame Bridget?”
to which, the player acting as Jamie might respond with:
JAMIE:
“Cha. That was me Bro. I wanted to catch the Boddy-man and talk about business. No worries dude.”
You can see how elusive Jamie is being. He hasn't fully divulged his Fact yet, but has established that he was the person that visited Noah. It's up to the other players to drill into this and get more clarification. That's good role-playing, but you can't be sure all players will be as good as the one paying Jamie this time. Once Jamie's player has fully revealed the Fact he would mark it as “Established”.
It is a good practice to back up a Challenge by giving a similar Fact to another character. That way, if the player with the Challenge isn't aggressive enough chasing down the information, perhaps the other player will jump on board. This means that for every hidden piece of information you should plan on having at least two other characters armed to get to the bottom of it. Each player should feel they are getting ganged up on to divulge the real facts.
Refine your Scenes and juggle your Facts and Challenges to balance out the Script.
Go back to the Script Summary and fill in the Motive and Method fields about the mystery and mark your culprit as the murderer.
Review your script. Check that the Script summary and public Character biographies are still accurate. Often, you will find that your Characters have changed quite a bit since their biographies were first written.
When you think you are ready, mark your script as BETA quality and open it up for play-testing. The MyDarkSecret administrator will do a quick review of your script and, if it looks suitable, make it available to the users and announce your work to the community.
Make revisions. Tweak your script to smooth out the rough spots in the script where key plot points are not revealed easily. This can take some patience and careful review of played games (a benefit only available to script authors).
When you think your script is ready for prime time, mark it as PRODUCTION READY. Some players will not pay for BETA quality scripts, so moving to production can be a real advantage.
There are currently two ways to write a Murder Mystery Script for MyDarkSecret.com:
using the web-based script editor, or
using an XML-editor and importing your script onto the MyDarkSecret.com server.
We are working on other editors and will announce them when they are complete.
Both mechanisms are completely interchangeable. You can start a mystery on-line, export it to XML and work on it off-line and then up-load it again later, or vice-versa. The choice is yours. Some people prefer to work off-line with a standard editor like Word, Write or Notepad, while some like the graphical nature of the on-line editor. This section will explain how both mechanisms work.
The MyDarkSecret.com web site has a fully functional script editor available for you use. To access it simply click the “Enter Script Management” link from within the Lobby.
In addition to allowing you to create new games and review existing script, the Script Management area allows you to create new scripts. You should see a screen somewhat similar to the one below.
The main button you are interested in is “Create Script”. When you click it, you will be prompted to enter some basic information about your mystery like:
A short, public summary of your mystery. This is the summary that others will see when they review the script.
An explanation of the motive and means used by the murderer to commit the crime. If you don't know what the motive is or how the crime was performed just yet, you can leave these fields blank.
The number of scenes in your mystery. There has to be at least one scene. You can always add more scenes later by increasing this number. NOTE: If you decrease this number, you will LOSE ALL THE FACTS AND CHALLENGES DEFINED IN THE DELETED SCENES. So change this value with care.
The number of characters in your script. There has to be at least four characters in a script. You can increase this number later if you wish to add more characters. AGAIN NOTE: If you decrease this number, YOU WILL LOSE THE FACTS AND CHALLENGES FOR THE DELETED CHARACTERS. For example, if you have six characters: Adam, Bob, Charley, Derek, Evan and Frank and then set the number of characters to four ... all of the Facts and Challenges for Evan and Frank will be deleted.
When you hit Save, you the Script Editor will open fully and present you with some additional “tabs”. There is one tab for your biography, one for defining your Characters and one tab for each Scene in your mystery. You will also notice that on the “General” Tab, all of your basic information is stored and a new field call “Script Status” is shown as “Under Development”. We will come back to this field later, but for now assume you want to leave it as is.
Your biography is shown before all the scripts that you have authored. The same biography will be used for all scripts you author. Feel free to include information about any other content you may have produced or have in the works. You may also include a reference to your personal website for richer information.
The Characters Tab is a great place to start authoring your mystery. You can define the public information about each of your characters. This is the information that shows up in the game and script summaries and is included in game invitations. Don't give away any private information about your character in the public summary ... this is information that all suspects should know about each other. You can mark one of the characters as the murderer.
To create a character, simple supply the following information:
First Name
Last Name
An optional nick name. When you supply a nick name your character will show up as Firstname 'Nickname' Lastname in displays.
Check the “Is Murderer” button if this character is the murderer (you can change it later)
Enter your public description of the character
Choose an Avatar for your character. Avatars are referenced by their photo name and also indicates their approximate age range and gender.
There is a summary of available avatars at the bottom of the Characters screen for your convenience.
When you save the character, it will appear above the blank character field. You can keep adding characters until you reach your limit defined on the “General” tab. In the example below, you can see we have created a character named Jill “Jackson” Jolly and we want to represent her using the Cho avatar. You can edit the name, description or avatar as required. If you need you can delete your character and a new blank entry will re-appear. As mentioned earlier, if you delete a character, you will lose all the Facts/Challenges associated with that character ... so be careful.
NOTE: Don't edit more than one character at a time or your changes to other characters will be lost when you click Save. Always make your changes to one character at a time and click Save for that character before changing other characters.
When you have defined some characters, you can start to associate Facts and Challenges to the character in each scene. You cannot create Facts or Challenges until you have at least one Character defined.
To create a new Fact or Challenge, simply:
Select if the script element is a Fact or a Challenge,
Which character it relates to,
Supply the text of the Fact or Challenge and
click Save.
You may want to supply a scene summary for this scene. You can only have one scene summary per scene. Just like the character tab, be sure to click Save after making changes to any fact, challenge or the scene summary or you will lose your other changes. In the example below, you see Jill has no Facts or Challenges associated with her, but the scene summary is defined.
If we add a new Challenge to Jill, the display would change to look something like this:
As we described in the “Getting Started” section, you should try to get at least one Fact and Challenge per Character per scene. This is so each character can start a conversation and knows how to defend a challenge from another player. But, technically, you can add as many Facts and Challenges as you like to each character each scene. You can remove Facts or Challenges by clicking the “Delete” button next to the element you want to remove.
To complete your mystery, you need to supply Facts and Challenges for each Character for each Scene in your story. When you think you have things completed, review the following checklist:
Go back a review the information on the “General” tab. Does the script summary, motive and means still match what you have written for the characters?
Go to the Characters tab and review the public descriptions for each character. Do the descriptions still match how your characters have developed in the script?
Have you marked one of the characters as being the culprit on the Characters tab?
Do all the characters look guilty, but only one have sufficient motive and means to be the murderer?
If everything checks out, you are not ready to release your script into the wild. Go back to the General tab and switch the Script Status from “Under Development” to “Beta Testing”. This will send an e-mail notification to the MyDarkSecret.com administrators. They will review your script and if it looks complete, they will switch your scripts status to Beta. Beta games are available to the community to create games from. After a few beta games have been played, you can request to have your game status switched to “Production”. Players have higher expectations for Production-ready scripts (no script inconsistencies, grammatical or spelling mistakes and good mystery logic).
While you are working on your script, you may want to save a copy for local editing or to create a backup so you can play around with script ideas or new characters. To do this, go back to the Script Management screen. You new script will appear under the “Scripts You Own” header. You can edit, delete or export your script from this screen.
Exporting the script will produce an XML format text file that you can copy and paste to your local hard drive. We will explain the XML format in the next section.
If you need to restore your backup, you can use the Import Script option from the Script Management screen. Simply click this button, paste your saved XML file into the block provided and click Save.
Note: MyDarkSecret uses the Title of your script as the way of identifying it. If you import a script with a title that matches another script you own of the same name, the old one will be overwritten with the imported script. You can prevent this if you like by changing the title of the script in the XML file before importing it.
This section is a little technical. If you're not comfortable with text editors or special files like HTML you can avoid this section.
You can author your mystery in XML format using Notepad, Wordpad or any number of other text editors. The file must be in plain text format and contain no special formatting such as HTML, Bold, Italics, Underline, etc. This will all be stripped out when the script is imported anyway, so don't bother.
Once created, the XML can be imported into the game from the “Import Script” option under Script Management.
The Murder Mystery XML file has the following format:
<Script>
<Title>The title of your script</Title>
<Summary>The summary of your script</Summary>
<Motive>The motive of the murderer</Motive>
<Method>The method of the murder</Method>
<Characters>
<Character id='some unique id per character'
fname='First name' nick='Nickname' lname='Last name'
avatar='Avatar name' isMurderer='True or False'>
The public description of the character.
</Character>
<Character ...>Next Character with unique id</Character>
<Character ...>Next Character with unique id</Character>
</Characters>
<Scenes>
<Scene>
<SceneSummary>
Text of the summary for this scene. One SceneSummary per scene.
</SceneSummary>
<Fact target='id of character this Fact refers to'>
Text of the Fact for the character to establish.
You can have as many Fact sections as necessary.
</Fact>
<Challenge target='id of the character this Challenge refers to'>
Text of the Challenge for the character to initiate.
You can have as many Challenge sections as necessary.
</Challenge>
</Scene>
<Scene>
<SceneSummary>
The next scene.
Text of the summary for this scene. One SceneSummary per scene.
</SceneSummary>
<Fact ...>another Fact</Fact>
<Challenge ...>another Challenge</Challenge>
</Scene>
</Scenes>
</Script>
If you have questions about anything you read in this document, please send your questions to the MyDarkSecret Google Group at http://groups.google.com/group/MyDarkSecret
© 2007 Dark Secret Software Inc. – All Rights Reserved