Category: blathering

You will get better at improvising.

This post is aimed mostly at people who GM or want to GM, but I think it goes for all players. Role-playing is, fundamentally, about improvising in the moment, which is funny because that’s also one of the most difficult things to learn, to get good at, and is one of the things people are most nervous about when it comes to TTRPGs.

The most basic thing is also the most challenging thing.

But don’t worry. You will get better at it. 

You can get better at it, just by playing TTRPGs. But maybe that’s not good enough. Not in this age of self improvement and watching videos about going to the gym! No, indeed. So let’s consider how you can improve your improvisational skills, since you don’t always want to increase a skill by performing it in anger, do you? You are wise to look for other strategies!

HOW YOU CAN PREPARE

One of the most common bits of advice I see — and this is good advice — is to prep for improvising. Not just read the scenario and now some monster statblocks or whatever, but have other stuff to hand that you can use if you need to. This seems contrary to just being off-the-cuff in the moment, but if you want to be good enough to just create stuff off the cuff, then actually having a bunch of stuff ready to deploy as needed is a pretty good way to start. Check out Cordova’s 7-3-1 technique for a useful example of it. 

“Before a session, I come up with 7 total NPCs, locations, and encounters. I give each of these a motivation. I then come up with 3 sensory details for each that I can describe at the table (sights, smells, sounds, and so forth). Finally, I think of 1 way I can physically embody each at the table (a distinct noise, voice, verbal tic, body posture, mannerism, etc.). I write all these things down.”

However, this in itself is not improvisation. Cordova says it’s not prep, either. “I’m hesitant to call it “session prep,” because the point isn’t necessarily to end up with a bunch of notes I can use during the game,” he says. “Rather, the point of 7-3-1 is to help interrogate my setting so I understand it at an intuitive level.”  These things you can prepare to allow you, the GM, to inhabit the people and places you’re going to have to talk about.

So if it’s not session or game specific prep, it’s sort of GM self-prep. Preparing yourself as a player in the game. And one thing I’ve heard a lot from GMs, wannabe-GMs, and GMs who struggled once before and don’t want to go through it again, is that this sort of stuff is THE solution to improving their game. Innumerable times I’ve heard folks express anxiety about not having read enough, or that if they had created more plans and notes, then they might have been ready for all the situations the players throw at them. And all that will help, but it’s not improvisation. It’s the intuitively understanding stuff that I think is the most important part here. And that is really practice. Ultimately the goal is to prep less, to a point where you need the thinnest sheaf of notes, and can be prepared to just find out what happens, or to not feel devalued when your prep is of no use to you.

So here are some other suggestions that don’t involve just struggling through it at the table, and some of them are already games.

THINGS YOU CAN DO AS EXERCISES

Play Solo Games

Now I admit I find solo games to be a lot like work, but the structure of them is very much like improvising on the spot. Set yourself a time limit. Don’t ponder, just do whatever it is the game prompted immediately. Getting faster at it is the exercise.

Regard solo RPGs as exercises intended to improve both your writing skills and your improvisational flexibility, and they soon become even more interesting to play, I think. They need a chess timer or something. Read prompt: go!

I suppose you could boil this down to: write! Writing is always good, whatever it is that you write. The gym of the mind. Especially when you try to write stuff from someone else’s point of view. But the point is here that solo RPGs are great at creating situations that you didn’t think up but now need to respond to with something sensible. And that’s improvising as a GM.

Practice with story dice

My kids loved these things when they were small, and I quickly realised they were getting better at improv when playing them. Initially they would look at the symbols and say “uuhhhhh…. Ummmm…” But after we’d done it a bunch of times they reacted immediately. You could practically hear those brain connection pathways being formed. So get some! Make up a story every day. Do it as quickly as you can. These are direct exercises that will improve your response time and the convincingness of your made up shit during the game.

Pause the TV show

Dialogue is one of the trickiest bits of a running and RPG, and when people have to pause and stop to think “what would this character say?” then it can become particularly stilted and awkward, “uuhhhhh…. Ummmm…” As with the story dice, this can be improved. Not least in intuitively inhabiting the characters. 

Try this: when watching a dialogue sequence on a TV show, pause it mid scene and make up the next line of dialogue. Say it out loud. If one character asks another a question, supply your own answer. This is amusing for its own sake, but it will improve your response time and flexibility. Just don’t do it while your partner is trying to watch TV. Nothing on Earth will be more annoying, and you will end up in the bad place.

Practice With Spark Tables

If a game comes with spark tables, as Mythic Bastionland does, then practice with them. You can buy entire books full of the things, and picking a couple of these for a situation or person and then seeing what it suggests to you is great practice both for actually using the spark tables in anger, but also for having descriptions and twists on your improv generally.

There Are Other Tools

I don’t have anything like an exhaustive list, but TEETH-friend Pate has linked to his It’s Worse Than That tool to us on a number of occasions, allowing you to practice your Night Move responses for games like Brindlewood Bay and The Between.

I am sure there is something similar for Forged In The Dark complications and consequences, but I am too lazy to dig it up. Hey, I wrote the rest of this article. 

HOW TO GET BETTER AS YOU PLAY

Play games that force you to improvise

Ultimately you need to get better at improvising at the table. Games that require you to come up with improvised moments includes basically all RPGs, but anything PbTA-derived (so, Forged In The Dark Games, Brindlewood games, and other favourites of this parish) will force you to do it for their very most regular and fundamental mechanics.

You can also play a GMless game. Or play games that are nothing but narrative, with nothing more than prompts. Our own False Kingdom is a pretty good example of that. I say, modestly.

A key part of why people struggle with this stuff is that they’ve played games where they can read off the NPCs, the monsters, the encounters and so forth. And that’s all good stuff: a fine pre-written adventure is a great thing to have at the table, but the more it’s meticulously set out, the less you need to flex that muscle.

So, for example, we ran a few sessions of Blades In The Dark where I, the GM, was not allowed to prep at all. And so I did not. Blades is pretty forgiving when it comes to this sort of play, but making no prep at all, not even mental notes, well, that was a bit of a high wire act. The players told me what they wanted to do, and I just went with it. It worked really well. After the first session the gang were extremely sceptical that I hadn’t prepared, and I can imagine this being incredibly tricky if you weren’t used to it, but maybe ease into it. Start playing Blades in the Dark instead of D&D! Take fewer and fewer notes, slowly ease yourself out of prep. You aren’t going to do a 200kg deadlift on your first time at the gym, nor are you going to go straight to pure improv as a GM. But with the right games, you can do it.

Play some For The Queen, too, stuff like that will help everyone in the group.

Adopt the trait

This might be the toughest one. TTRPGs are rightfully lampooned for GMs doing funny voices, but the thing is about the voice or adopting a mannerism is that it helps you intuitively inhabit the character. Kieron likes to wave about a glass of wine when he’s Lord Scurlock in Blades In The Dark, for example. You might not be able to keep it up, it’s tough to get over the embarrassment of pretending to be a naughty goblin, and accents especially are hard, I know, but the more you adopt the character’s mannerisms, the easier it is going to be to answer as they would. I don’t know why this works, but I promise you it does.

(I try to give my badguys Russian accents, which is heinous and maybe even unfair stereotyping (not really), but it meant I got better at the Russian accent and improvising at the same time.)

Make the players do it

If you are the GM and you are stuck at the table, just offload it onto your players. Having a bunch of stock questions that creates a character out of thin air. “Who is the person in this room? How do you know them? How do we know they are angry with you?” 

There’s a bunch of other people sat at the table! Make them do it. 

I was struck recently by someone who said that they didn’t like the Blades mode of action roll, because they struggled to think of the complications or consequences. Well, my solution is to outsource that. There’s a bunch of brains working less hard than yours at the table, and you should be making use of them. The more I have done this, the more I made the players tell the story, the easier improvising has become. And it’s the fundamental trick to making all this work, because it includes them, and it reduces your cognitive load, and ultimately it tells a story that they’re invested in, because they came up with it. 

So yeah. Make shit up, and make others make shit up. That’s the motto.