After 5 days of starting a post and then trashing it, I decided to look at my unfinished projects to see what I could focus on to kill my latest white page syndrome. When I picked up my very creased stapled copy of Robin Laws’ book, I noticed that it was opened at the last chapter, dealing with Improvisation. How convenient since I’m currently trying to run an Improv-based adventure.
Find all other posts of this 20 month-old series here.
Improvisation is this odd duck in the GMing toolbox. I’m willing to bet that half of my GMing readership will say they suck at it while the other half will say it’s the easiest things to do and that they haven’t prepped for a game since Nixon was President.
I consider myself more in the first group, so that’s why I was very interested in reading what Robin Laws had to say about it all.
It’s all about choices
According to Laws, the trick to improvise a successful scene is to develop the skills to rapidly review the possible outcomes of a PC/party choice and chose the best one. He proposes an 8 steps process to get Improv-deficient DM going.
Now Robin describes this process as it applies to individual PCs. I think he assumed that improv scenes would most likely involve just one character who made a decision whose outcome the DM didn’t plan for. I’m going to add my own spin on things by repackaging it into a mostly party-focused process.
When a PC/party decision leads to an undefined outcome, you need to:
One: Relax
Your players won’t slash your tires and the outcome does not have to be award-winning. Adequate is still good. Here is when you stop the flow of the game, take a deep breath and kick start your brain for some brainstorming.
Two: Imagine the most obvious outcome
What would be the most likely outcome of the choice the PCs made? For example, if the PCs enter a random house to dodge pursuing city guards during the evening, the most obvious outcome would be to have a family having dinner in the main room. The obvious choice does not have to be ordinary or boring, but it has to be what the PCs would expect the most.
Three: Imagine the most challenging result
What kind of outcome would land the PCs in hot waters or put them in a bind they must struggle to overcome? In the previous example the house would actually be a guardhouse filled with fresh soldiers playing cards. This kind of outcome usually leads to a conflict of some sort, or put the PCs in a situation where brains/brawns are needed to resolve.
Four: Imagine the most Surprising Outcome
What if the PCs meet something they really don’t expect? Think of the wildest possible outcome that would still make sense in your game world. If the ‘enter a house’ example was from a fantasy role playing game, maybe the house would actually be a portal to another plane, sending the PCs into a whole new adventure. Or maybe the house they entered was occupied by a cult of alienist right in the middle of some dread summoning ritual the PCs just interupted.
Five: Imagine the most pleasing outcome for the player(s):
This one might be a bit trickier for a party. Robin Laws basically says to imagine the one thing that the player would like the most to see happen. This is usually related to the player’s type (Storyteller, Power gamer, Butt Kicker, etc) but could be something the player had been seeking for some time.
When applied to the party, this would mean the outcome the players would most likely enjoy as a group. In our example, if the party seeks to dodge the guards for good, maybe the house is abandoned and features an undiscovered access to the city’s sewers, allowing a foolproof escape route.
Six: Pick the outcome that feels right
So in the 20-30 seconds you’ve been brainstorming (don’t linger, your PCs are waiting), you’ve come up with 4 different outcomes. Now you need to let your guts decide what outcome is best given the circumstances. If you find an outcome that hits more than one requirement (obvious, surprising, challenging or pleasing) then chances are you had a great idea for the outcome. If you don’t know what to chose, Laws says to roll for it.
Seven: Think of the consequences
Make sure that the outcome you chose won’t paint you in a story corner, with no way to move the adventure forward. For example, if you chose the ‘portal to another plane’ outcome in the previous example, you need to be able to imagine how the players will return or where the adventure will go from there, taking into accounts your players’ expectations.
Consider this step to be the QA of your process so far.
If all else fails, you can always have ninjas break through the walls and attack.
Eight: Go with it!
Now that you’ve made your choice, don’t agonize over it. By this time your players have been looking at you for about 30-60 secs so forget about all the other outcomes and dive in!
I must say that this method was totally new to me. As many of you know, I have always been a more of a scripted DM. I would either adapt published adventures or create them with clear hooks, scenes and expected outcomes. Improv games scared me.
Yet, as I’m writing this, the method is slowly sinking in (I read the chapter just before I write the post… yes I’ve been reading that 34 page book for 18 months now). I can’t wait to try it out with my gaming group!
Laws then goes over advice about improvising an entire adventure and how to pace it. I’ll leave that to people who purchase the book to discover. It’s so worth the 8$ it cost me.
What about you? What are your best tools to help you improvise a scene/adventure/campaign.
And while we’re at it, how would you differentiate a fully improvised campaign from a sandbox game? I had a discussion earlier today about that and I really don’t see both as being the same thing. I’d say they could overlap, depending on DMing styles, but they wouldn’t be the same.
What say you?
I’ll write one last post on the whole book, where I’ll assess how well it ‘aged’ and the key lessons I took from it. When? I’m not sure but soon as I secured a copy of Tracy and Curtis Hickman’s XDM book, which I’ll also review.
To expand on our conversation earlier, and put my point into better words:
This chapter is about improvisation as a GMing technique, which is a part of all games. Sandbox games especially, as the freedom of choice of the players necessitates improv frequently.
But when you say to me that you ran an “improv game” that implies something more than a game in which you improvised. A completely improv game would be done 100% off the top of your head, which sandbox (as defined by most people) is not. A truly improv game would have no prep beyond the initial concept.
So sandbox is a game type that has a lot of improvisation, but it is not an “improv game”.
Though it’s an odd pairing, as improv games would be, by some definitions (the ones that define sandbox solely by player freedom), sandbox games by their very nature.
It’s one of those “all squares are rectangles, but rectangles aren’t necessarily squares” arguments, I think.
Though if you took a stricter definition of sandbox, improv games probably wouldn’t qualify.
…I’m rambling again, aren’t I…
.-= Graham´s last blog ..Damn you, Dave! You and your… logic… =-.
“Sandbox” refers to a cluster of related things, so it can cause some issues in a discussion like this, but what I think differentiates sandbox games from other types of gaming is that they’re largely player *driven.* In it’s most pure form, the DM doesn’t even set up “hooks,” per se, there’s just stuff going on and it’s up to the PCs to find it.
Thus, there’s strong overlap with improv-heavy games, but it would also be possible (easy, even) to a run a game that was both entirely improv’d and entirely DM driven. Start with “ninjas attack” or equivalent, move on to “the ninjas leave a mysterious clue to their origins!” and roll from there. It’s not sandbox because the players are in a primarily reactive role.
But that’s just for a given value of “sandbox.” And, heck, since I’m defining the term in a way that describes player behavior/social contract stuff as much as it does DM style, a game could move from “non-sandbox” to “sandbox” pretty easily, particularly an improv game. The players just have to decide they don’t care about the ninjas and go looking for a caravan to guard or something.
.-= Oddysey´s last blog ..Sort of a Death Frost Doom Review =-.
@Oddysey –
Good point about the DM-driven improv games.
I suppose what it all comes down to is that improv is a method and style of running a game, while sandbox is a game type. They really define two different things, which may or may not overlap.
.-= Graham´s last blog ..Damn you, Dave! You and your… logic… =-.
The way i see it.
Sandbox game = let the player steer the story only provide world
Non sandbox game = steer story.
Improvisation DM: Create on the spot.
Scripting DM: Create in advance trying to cover all possibility.
A Sandbox game without improvisation is the equivalent of running a game in Ptolus… I mean you’ve got 300+ pages of material, you can just say “Ok, you’re in a Ptolus inn what do you do?” and flip page from there on…
An all improv sandbox game would be something like “You are in… a bar! in the city of … Port Swala which is a coastal city in… Lala land. What do you do?” You create world and story as you go.
A non sandbox game you often star the campaign in media res or in bar when somebody burst through the door looking for you. The PC are hooked right from the start and lead from hook to hook.
Whether this is improvised or written is just a matter of whether you prepared all the scene in advance or just create as you go.
I think that no GM are purely any combination of these. As we’ll use tool from the other approach to fill the weakness of our favored one.
When I need to improv, I usually rely on a combination from these tools:
1) Throw something (some would call it a red herring) at the players and listen to them figure it out for inspiration
2) Come up with my best ideas and use the third one
3) Freeze, stutter and curl into a ball of shame.
I love Law’s ideas and I should have a post-it on my DM screen.
.-= Eric Maziade´s last blog ..Meta != Crunch =-.
I think in general the tool that has most helped me to improvise in RPGs is that I don’t really plan sessions strictly. I make a bunch of random dungeon tiles maps of “generally neat places” that I would “like to see people fighting on” for example, and I have stat blocks in a big folder on my computer, and if something weird happens I can always pop out a map and an encounter in a second, because generally I don’t plan for the short term.
I don’t plan a session, I plan a flowchart of the major objectives of a quest or adventure. I have in mind some ideas of how players will move from A to B, and I even have some ideas of, if I’m bored enough, slapping them towards B with a large trout. But I don’t have a straight line of “players will go here and do this”. I LOOK like I do, because whenever a player goes anywhere, there’s something there for them. But in reality that something is basically pulled out of a hat. Usually.
.-= Wyatt´s last blog ..A Punishment Ill Fit (III) =-.
I’ve not done an improv game in 4e, though a lot of my 2e and 3e gaming was improv gaming.
I find there are certain skills necessary to run an improv game, and thinking fast is only one of them. Whilst these tips are very good regarding thinking fast they do not deal with some of the other problems you may run into, then main two for me being:
1) Continuity. Every now and then your brain will play a trick on you and you will use a name you’ve already given to something else, or you will put an NPC where he isnt supposed to be. There are several ways of dealing with this, but the best bet is to try keep notes on things as you make them up so this sort of thing doesnt happen too much.
2) Flow-breaks. If you have to stop for 10 minutes to draw a map, find monster stats and total up XP budgets (especially prevalent in 4e) then your players are likely to get bored and the attraction of an improv game (it can go anywhere do anything) wears thin quite quickly. To avoid situations like this encourage your PCs to aid you in combat prep. Have someone do math, someone else draw the map while you rummage through books/PC folders etc. to find the relevant information, doing this prevents your players becoming bored during combat-setup.
Another way of avoiding this is having pre-made combat maps that you can drop in where relevant, and a couple of pages with “random encounter” stats on for the same level as your PCs, but if you start to do this players will begin to question how improvised their improv game is.
Latest Blog Post: Before 1st Level, WIP
General guidelines for improvisation:
1. In case of player character and risk, roll the dice (or say yes to the player).
2. Go to the direction of most uncertainty; do whatever gives others such choices that you don’t know what they will decide.
3. Do the obvious thing. It is generally not obvious to the others, especially when the obvious actions of many players create very nonobvious outcomes.
4. When in doubt, think of what might happen and roll the dice.
5. Ask ideas from the players. Really. Just go ahead and ask.
Applying them in the given order should give decent results. I think that I don’t quite do that, but it is something of an approximation.
A set of rules that helps in impro would be useful; 3rd and 3th edition of D&D put pretty much focus on interesting combat encounters, which require some planning or lots of skill to pull off without it, so they are not the best systems out there for improed play.
Yan; you wrote:
What about games where you don’t provide the world, maybe only a starting situation, and let the players steer?
.-= Tommi´s last blog ..… but I’d rather be roleplaying =-.
That’d still pretty much be a sandbox I think. Lots of people run sandbox stuff without actually planning out a whole world. In fact, I hear a tip thrown around often not to plan too far beyond one town and some wilderness and such to start with.
.-= Wyatt´s last blog ..Paradiso: Behind the Wyatt I =-.
@Tommi –
Actually, regardless of how much is prepared to begin, you would still be providing the world to the players. Just not all at once, and some of it will be pulled out of your ass, but it’s still provided by the GM.
.-= Graham´s last blog ..Damn you, Dave! You and your… logic… =-.
Wow, talk about self-sustained discussion.
@Graham: I suppose what it all comes down to is that improv is a method and style of running a game, while sandbox is a game type. They really define two different things, which may or may not overlap.
That’s pretty much my thoughts on the subject.
@Oddsey: Thanks for the definitions! I also agree that player ‘jumping the rails’ could shift a campaign from DM-driven to player-driven. In fact I’m sure some structure-light campaigns alternate between DM-Driven to Player-driven quite often.
@Yan: Ptolus is indeed the ultimate published Sandbox setting (it’s also 700 pages long) and would serve as a great tool for DMs who want to test such types of game but are daunted by world building. Although, as you say, there are intermediate game types where you prep only as much as you expect players to explore in a given session and improvise anything you didn’t plan for.
@Eric: Lol! Yeah, a lot of us rely on your tool #3. I have to try #2 soon, as I’ve seen in in the book you gave me. As for Laws’ process, I’ll print it out on a sheet of paper and keep it nearby when next I need to improv…
@Wyatt: I think you are one of the DMs of the second half I spoke about in my post. Like Yan, you’ve made improvisation your main way of running a game. While you may not t always feel confident about it. I think that prepping some modular pieces of adventures (Tiles, Stats, plot ideas) is a great way to help you piece together an adventure rapidly.
@David: The issue of Continuity is very real. While I wouldn’t sweat using the same name for a NPC, I would use the slip to fuel something funny in the game, I would be worried of making stuff up that completely contradicts what I did in an earlier session. That’s one of the reasons why I write game reports.
In terms of avoiding dead time, so far my technique of having all my pre-drawn battlemaps (I have dozens) and game stats all done has allowed us to play without breaking the flow. So yeah, that’s also a very good point.
@Tommi: I really think that the ‘say Yes’ cardinal rule comes to the forefront of an improvised game. Saying no closes doors and stifles the GM’s creativity for sure.
As for doing impro work in a stats heavy/mini-driven game like the last 2 instances of D&D, I would say that it’s possible but needs a bigger toolbox, a bit like David and Wyatt mention (pre-drawn maps, pre-made stat blocks, etc)
Thanks for the comments so far.
@Tommi: As graham and Wyatt said. A GM always provide the world, whether you create it on the spot or prepared in advance is just how you do it.
@Wyatt: You GMing style is pretty much like my own. It’s improvisation heavy with some snippet of preparation.
I’ve got typical encounter plan that they could find in the region (mostly as David mentioned to avoid flow breaks of creating an encounter on the spot) a few line describing the major places of interest and that’s it. I’ve played 3 sessions in my campaign with 2 page of notes. The battle map is draws on the spot on my large vinyl map usually by the players with me giving them some general guide line, while I get the figurine and make some last minutes adjustment to my planned encounter to feel more in tune with the current situation.
That’s all pretty good advice about improv. One thing I might add, though, is to cheat a little to avoid dead time.
I use two techniques for this. The first one is the Little Cliffhanger. Right before the dead time begins, do something that makes your players incredibly nervous. If the players are all on edge and chatting with each other, it’s not dead time. Either have something relatively minor go wrong, have the bad guys do something really clever, or if all else fails, just roll a bunch of dice and say, “Uh oh” (That last works especially well if your players know you have a large collection of random tables for weird things – the City District table, the Building Contents Table, the Wacky Street Encounter Table, the Magic Curse Table, and so on). Of course, if you actually have a fairly benign table for whatever you are doing, a roll on it will often do the trick too.
Second, make good use of Table Breaks. Any time you are doing a bit of serious improvisation, like your “What’s in this random house?” scenario, get up from the table and take a break while you do the brainstorming. Use the restroom. Grab a beer or a soda. Refill a bowl of chips. Sharpen a pencil. Whatever. When you get back, you’ll have your answer; with any luck, your players will still be mulling over your Little Cliffhanger; and it’ll look like you knew what you were doing the whole time.
Just remembered I wrote an post on DnD & improvising/”sharing narrative control” a while back which might prove interesting to readers of this thread.
Please pardon by plugging away:
http://eric.maziade.com/post/2008/12/22/The-Rules-of-Sharing-Narrative-Control-%28and-Improv%29
NB: What I construed as “sharing narrative control” back then is less about sharing the narration than it is about sharing story building.
My point was mostly that simplistic sandbox/not sandbox – division is somewhat misleading, as it conflates preparing a world and letting players take the game where they will. They are separate axes (axises?).
The paradigm of GM taking the lead without having prepared much anything is little explored. Do people actually play like it? I have no idea.
Also: Players create world in play in the same way that GM does, but usually to lesser extent. They may do it by suggesting things or by simply adding them. I had little idea about what space ships looked like before a player applied pencil to paper. Now we have a map and all. Player creating world.
.-= Tommi´s last blog ..… but I’d rather be roleplaying =-.
@Tommi: That’s the way I see thing sandbox/no sandbox is like an axes in which these two position are extremes. The same thing is true with Preparation/Improvisation. Each GM will be somewhere in this chart with a tendency toward something. No GM that I’ve seen so far is purely one of those.
As for the shared narrative/creation with player, that is something else. What I meant by the GM provide the world is that he will tell you what happen when you do this or that. If you prefer he provides the physics of the world. The world in itself could be from a source book, create by a friend, yourself or a group. It has no real significance whether the game is an improvised non-sandbox game or else.
Like I said that is the way I see things and is in no way the meaning of life and the universe. We all know it’s 42. 😉
@Yan (“As graham and Wyatt said. A GM always provide the world, whether you create it on the spot or prepared in advance is just how you do it.)
I’m not sure this is always the case, and the current Primal/Within campaign is a good example. You are a player and Phil is the DM, yet it’s clear that you have been a strong force in designing the world.
Another example I encountered recently is “open skill challenges”. When our party got lost in Thunderspire Labyrinth, our DM simply said to us “How do you get out?” In doing so, he gave us narrative control that included creating the problems we faced (caverns and locked gates) and the solution to how we solved them (the “Jump” power and Athletics checks).
Admittedly, the DM will likely always bear the greater portial of world-building, but it doesn’t have to be (and often isn’t) completely black and white.
@BMcS: I really like your Little Cliffhanger technique. That coupled with doing the brainstorm while doing things away from the table is excellent. Perfect tools to complement Laws’ techniques.
@Tommi: Players are as likely to build worlds as the GM, but their contribution may be less oblivious. Often what my players say or do will shape my vision of the world and I’ll implement new elements to it based on their indirect input.
@Colmarr: The Primal/Within experiment is actually the first time I’ve built a game world as a team. Yan has the super extra bonus of building it both from the inside and out.
I’m curious to see if we’ll stay in this world over the next season.
@Colmarr: as I said to Tommy th word provides was not meant as creating. Adding the words “only Provides world” in an attempt to clarify what the GM was doing was a poor choice as it lead to misinterpretation. I never wanted to imply anything about the world building. You point it out yourself I contributed largely to the construction of the Primal/Within world in which I’m a player. The question was about what is a sandbox-game vs and improv game. The definition was aimed solely at clarifying only that.
This is typical of wanting to define something, in the world nothing is black or white and an all encompassing definition would take legal document to provide. Obviously the moment you try to put a simple description to something you leave to interpretation the things in the grey areas. Obviously poor choice of word like here can lead to assumption not intended.
The main point was that improvisation and sandbox-game are two different thing that could or not co-exist.
As for sharing narrative. I don’t see it affecting whether the game is sandbox or not. I would definitely expect it to be used more often by improvisation heavy GM then those with heavy prep as you’ll have a hard time to be fully prepared for it, but not exclusively.
Hope it clarifies what I meant.
I really liked your improv decisions steps. I run most of my game sessions heavily improved. I’ve got a basic over-all concept and list of events that need to happen, but the time, place, and sometimes even the NPCs involved can change depending on PC actions. An event can even be negated by player actions and new events get added all the time. I do keep a basic flowchart of what the world around the PCs is doing so I have something to base my decisions on.
Trying to come up with improv-ed results can be difficult and I’ll admit I sometimes get stumped. I’m going to keep your revised list of techniques with me for my next game session to jog my creativity 🙂 .
When I get really stumped, I have a fall-back: I use a tarot deck. I’ll surreptitiously draw a card behind my GM screen and I’ll improvise an outcome based on that card’s image. Heck, the result may not even remotely resemble the card — I just use it to jog my creativity. Truthfully, any stack of pictures can do the same thing, it doesn’t need to be tarot cards. I just happen to collect tarot decks, so there’s usually one in easy reach. But I’ve done it from Everway story cards, art history text books, photography magazines … anything rich in visual images will do in a pinch for me.
.-= Cheri Arbuckle´s last blog ..Wormy’s Back!!! =-.
You’re right, good GMs need to improvise and not just clumsily shove the players back towards the plot rails. It feels not just a cop out to players, but ruins the suspension of disbelief. How does that guy in the Star Destroyer the GM sent after us know we were planning to sell the spy over to the other side?
If players have a better idea than I have. I always go with it, but only after they give me a few monutes to write down a few notes during which they talk in-character.
I took improvisation to a whole new level one session when I let the players work out a plan for the task I was setting them when I wasn’t in the room. I gave them all the necessary information for the task, in this case it was breaking a prisoner out so I gave them maps and a few hints about what sort of equipment they would need. And I also told them I would be handing out XP for originality.
I thought I could anticipate the players, I was wrong.
.-= Katana Geldar´s last blog ..There’s one at every table… =-.