Improvisation: Improving stories since a long, long time ago.
There is no storyline that survives contact with the players. There is no character concept that survives contact with the DM. All adventures must be adapted. Each character finds a new niche. All design is local.
So, your character design is ultimately meaningless, and your adventure design is at best wishful thinking. This begs the question: much prep do you need?
Or, with more direct emphasis, how much prep do you need? Are you the kind of person that needs a deep, detailed set of guidelines that you can manage and control? Or are you the kind of person who can sit down at your table with no idea of what’s going to happen, and create what you need on the fly?
A related question: how much prep do you want? Because you don’t need much.
TJ and Dave are performers who do something startling with their craft: every hour-long performance they do is made up, from scratch, on the spot, without any outside input.
That’s a little extreme, but approaching this isn’t impossible for you. And this is true regardless of your favorite edition, from the rules-intense 3e and 4e to the wing-what-you-want feel of OD&D or BEMCI D&D. Consider this article the first step toward a D&D you can play without any prep.
BUT I LIKE PREP!
It should be said at this point that this isn’t a solution if there isn’t a problem. World-building or character-building itself can be fun, and even if you don’t see it in direct play, the planning isn’t usually “wasted.” It helps inform the things you do use during play. Prep can be in some ways like filing out a character questionnaire for your novel’s protagonist. No, you might never explore what is on your protagonist’s bed-stand in the actual story, but knowing that information helps you write that character more robustly in the actual story.
Which is to say that even if you don’t use that bit about the ancient lizard-folk gods who once-upon-a-time blessed a dynasty of kobolds, or whatever, you haven’t wasted your time in thinking that up. It still helps inform your world, and helps you think about the things that live there in a deeper way that helps them come more alive in the game itself. Even if you never use lizardmen or kobolds, you can include the tidbit in the planning of the invasion of the swamp by the evil duke you do end up using.
Prep, in and of itself, isn’t something to be avoided or disliked inherently. If it’s fun, do it.
There is only a price for that indulgence. When the game night comes, when people are ready to start rolling dice, you do have to come equipped to play. However much prep or world-building or character-building you like to do outside of the gameplay itself, if you’re not prepared to actually run the game, there’s gonna be a problem.
Of course, learning some improve skills will help you to be able to run a game regardless of your level of other prep. For those of you who like to spend time in the throes of world-building that isn’t likely to see the light of day, learning how to run a game off the cuff can give you an easy way to tie that speculative work that you do alone directly into your games.
If you do a lot of prep for your games and it works fine at your table, though, I’m not here to convince you away from it. Mostly I’m here, in this article, for those who might want a better handle on how to run things off-the-cuff.
THREE RULES FOR MANAGING CHAOS
The first thing to realize when you’re thinking about adopting a few improv-heavy tactics is that you’ve actually been doing prep for this sort of thing for most of your life. Those fantasy novels you’ve read? That previous character you played? The movies you’ve seen? These are all training for improvisation, because they fill your mind with the first requirement:
Use What You Know
The biggest secret about improv is that it’s not exactly as chaotic as it may seem at first. Your brain contains a cache of tropes, motifs, messages, stories, characters, conflicts, archetypes, and a host of other elements that storytelling relies on. The raw ingredients are already up there, banging around and waiting to be released.
Part of the fear here is that you won’t be being very “original” if you re-use elements from things you’ve already seen. But as artists and authors and all honest creators from time immemorial will tell you: everything is a remix. New things are made by re-combining the old, and the myth of some genius creating a fully-formed and un-influenced creative work is just that – a myth.
What’s more is that your own gaming group likely doesn’t consist of professional culture critics of any stripe (or at least, are willing to suspend that to play make-believe games of elves). Typically, we love little references to the media we adore, or else Monty Python jokes wouldn’t be a staple of any particular group. Though an experience that is a little too on-the-nose might raise some eyebrows, in general the experience of mashing together some scene or character from something you love with your own gaming group can itself take the experience in a new direction. Even if you directly crib Gandalf from Middle Earth and plunk him down in your game, chances are good your group isn’t quite anything like the Fellowship, and meeting him might go quite differently in your game than it did in the book.
That’s a good thing. All you need to do is access some scene, character, creature, or whatever you’re your memory and plunk it down and your game will go in interesting new directions. These new directions are what you want. And to cultivate them, there’s a second big rule:
Say Yes
AKA: “Don’t Deny.”
When you plunk Gandalf down in your own games, you shouldn’t expect to re-live the experience of reading LotR, and you shouldn’t try to force any particular experience. Once something enters your game world, it’s “in play” for the players as much as it is for you. Let them interact with it on their own terms, and respond to that interaction naturally. What would your version of Gandalf do when he noticed the party was extorting money to slay the local giants? Would he become a rival? A patron? A disinterested observer? What is he like when there’s no Sauron to work against, anyway?
Whatever the players do to him, don’t worry about it. You’re making the character your own by using him in your games, and no one is going to judge you for breaking character or not reading the appendixes here. React to what they do, and they’ll react to you, in a brilliant cycle.
This cycle can only be broken when someone refuses to play along. If you, say, employ some Gandalf Deus Ex Machina magic to force the PC’s to act a certain way, or if you resent the fact that they’re not treating your expy with reverence, you’re not being very game. And that leads to a stalled play experience, where the DM and the players are at cross-purposes.
Instead, “say yes.” The players want to try and bribe him to handle the giants for them? The players offend him in a tavern fight and incur his mischievous magical wrath and he tries to turn them into pigs? These are story ideas, and unique story ideas. Roll with it.
The same is true on the other side of the DM’s screen, by the way. If your PC is destined to be an expy of Gandalf, but you’re only level 3, play a weak Gandalf just beginning to learn his magical powers. Play him as a Gandalf learning the ways of the world as a D&D wizard (or wizard/druid, or deva/invoker/wizard, or whatever). Don’t assume that there’s a right way to play him and that anything less is doing it wrong. There isn’t a wrong. You’re improvising, coming up with the thing as it goes along. It should feel like a process of discovery more than a process of problem-solving.
And given that discovery, we come to the third big idea:
Add Detail
You know that when you plunk Gandalf down in your game, you’ve still got 1,001 or more random characters and ideas bouncing around in your head. What’s more, now that Gandalf has an independent existence and is being worked on by the people playing with him (including you), you’ve got some sort of idea of how he’s getting used currently.
In order to keep things moving smoothly, each time you react to something the other players do, try to help it define your addition. This adds weight and complexity to the base sketch, fleshing it out, and giving you more to work with. A hastily-drawn sketch of a character can be weak, as we’ve seen.
The major way to add detail and keep your contribution moving is to simply have the character engage with some element of the world. Maybe Gandalf smokes halfling pipe-weed on the frequent. This detail might seem kind of obvious and insignificant, but remember what I said about world-building up above: it’s never really wasted effort. If nothing else comes of it, it’s a wink and a nod to how the character appeared in The Hobbit. But the players might be able to pick up on this element and run with it, too, maybe declaring that one of them likes halfling pipe-weed, too, and so they bond with the NPC over a shared smoke, blowing rings and trying to out-do each other in a friendly rivalry.
PULLING IT TOGETHER
Improvisation is a supremely useful skill to hone as both a player and a DM, and its one we’re often a little intimidated by. But the basics are easier than it can look. Consult your inner library, keep encouraging interaction with the thing you pull out, and add detail to make it more robust and solid. This barely scratches the surface, and there’s a lot more I’ll talk about in the future, but it’ll do for an introduction.
So my challenge for you is to insert one NPC into your next session that is completely off the cuff, and see where it leads! Don’t plan out the interaction, just put the character in the game in the moment, and figure out for yourself the hows, whys, and wherefores of their existence.
Let us know how that falls out – or how other improvising you’ve done has fallen out in the past – in the comments.
