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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GMSkarka" data-source="post: 2430652" data-attributes="member: 763">Long post, but here goes:About 10 years ago, I tried experimenting with something that I ended up calling Intuitive Continuity (a term which I then described in my RPG, <a href="http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=470&products_id=3700&src=EnWorld" target="_blank">UnderWorld</a>, released in 2000, and which has since been adopted by the theorists over at <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/7/" target="_blank">The Forge</a> as part of their ramblings).The Forge defines Intuitive Continuity as:"in which the GM uses the players' interests and actions during initial play to construct the crises and actual content of later play.Which is all well and good....but I invented the damned thing, and MY definition of it is as follows: The development of your own Story Arcs with little or no prior planning.  The planting of plot elements throughout the campaign that, in retrospect, will appear to make a unified whole...and yet began as mere improvisation on the part of the GM. My first experiment in Intuitive Continuity was a campaign that I ran using Precedence Publishing's Immortal RPG back in the mid 90s.  The entire campaign was based upon notes that I had written in a hotel room on a business trip--a single sheet of legal paper. Over the next few months, I dropped in plot elements as they occurred to me...Immortal is a BIG game, with little to "tie it down", and so I just decided to wing it, rather than spend time detailing things that the PCs might ignore or never encounter.  As I did this game-mastering improvisation, I noticed that the players, who weren't aware of the fact that I was improvising, reacted to everything I dropped out of the air as if it was of critical importance to the plot.  Rather than telling them that I had no plot in mind, I started to react to their reactions, if you will...and after a couple of months of this, a plot began to develop naturally.  When it ended, it was the most "literary" campaign I have ever run (and general consensus is that it was the best GMing job I've ever done...and I've yet to top it)...a complete epic story arc, with a beginning, a rising action, a mid-point, a climax and a denouement, with thematic elements, and foreshadowing, and reflections of Campbell's "hero's journey"...and all of it was unplanned.  It just fell together, from bits of improv and spinning new events based on the players actions and reactions.This can be done in any RPG.  The trick is to remember that nothing is "set in stone" until such point as you reveal it to the players.   If one of your PCs "figures out" that NPC "X" is the Big Bad Villain, but you had intended it to be NPC "Y", there's nothing saying that you can't change it to "X" if you think that the idea is more interesting.   You just need to master the art of improvisation.You’ve heard it before, I’m sure—the adage that a role-playing group is similar to a band of musicians, each playing their own part, and creating a collective work.  I’ve noticed that the similarity gets even more specific.  A gaming group operates in almost identical fashion to a group of jazz musicians.   Lacking any pre-defined structure or script, the individual players rely on impromptu combinations of their individual riffs, which combine to create a complex new composition on the fly.So, I started to apply the lessons of improvisational jazz to my role-playing.The first lesson:  By careful combination of well-prepared riffs, one can improvise, and if it’s pulled off well, the audience will never quite be able to tell what was rehearsed and what was thought up on the spot.Apply this to the gaming table. Nothing is established until you commit to it.  Until you divulge the information to the players, it is mutable…ever-changing.  If this is done correctly, your players won’t know the difference.  It will all seem as if it had been planned by you from the beginning, part of a grand tapestry that you wove for their entertainment…when in reality, they did most of the work, and you merely reacted to them.As such, I tend to keep a number of “riffs” in my game-mastering repertoire: plot elements that can be dropped in on a moments notice.Here is the first of my improvisational methods:  I don’t come up with ideas for campaigns.  I come up with ideas for the beginning of a campaign.  That’s it.  After that, I let the direction of the campaign be created by the characters.  Let’s face it—the average playing group has something like 4 players and a GM.  It is simple numerical fact that the players have, in the average case, 4 times the imaginative power of the game master.  There are simply more of them than there are of you…why should you do all the work?They come up with character concepts…why not sit back and have them create the direction of the campaign as well?What I have done in past campaigns is to create the opening, and then sit back and observe what the players do with it.  I then react to what they’ve done, and we’re off and running.The key here is to make sure that you take copious notes during play, rather than before.  Make sure you keep a record of everything that has been solidly established (so you don’t violate those in-house “rules” later on), and quickly jot down any possibilities that occur to you as play progresses.   Remember that the possibilities only become fact after you’ve presented them as such.  You’ll find that as play progresses, some possibilities will naturally grow more likely, as other options are eliminated through player actions.  At that point, you can change a possibility to a fact by presenting it during play—or you can completely come up with something else, completely out of left field, that puts an entirely new interpretation on even the previously established facts.How do you handle things like NPC write-ups?  Have some published adventures or supplements standing by, and simply lift the stats from there.  Since you won’t know in advance who will turn out to be important, just use this method as a stop-gap measure initially—if the NPC turns out to be more important later on, go ahead and write them up as a unique character, using the initial “lifted” stats as a starting point.  Again—unless you let on, your players will never know that the recurring villain who has plagued their every step started out in your notes as “the guy they meet on the docks”, whose stats were lifted from a published module.I keep a bunch of NPC write-ups ready to go, to be plugged in where needed.  It’s one of the riffs that I use—like a 4-bar break-down from a jazz pianist, that he slips into the end of an improvised phrase to lend it some weight.The point here is that your players are more than capable of dragging any carefully prepared story that you have off to hell and gone.  Almost every “how to GM” article or section in a rulebook that I’ve read has contained the “be prepared to have your adventure completely screwed up” admonition.  So, if they’re going to do it anyway, why not roll with it?  It only takes a couple of things on your part:  the ability to think on your feet, and the ability to keep a straight face when they assume that you’d planned it that way all along.</blockquote>

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