Roleplaying Games Are Improv Games

[Emberashh]

I’ve trimmed your response down to these two paragraphs because they get to the heart of why I don’t think Events are analogous to kickers. If there’s something a player wants to explore, your Events system would have them add more detail while a good kicker should invite exploration. If a kicker has too much established, you’ve taken things off the table for play later. I also think that since the Keeper could have the answer show right up, it’s not quite the same either. Kickers are supposed to be a way for players to make the game about what they want, so if they get resolved immediately, then that defeats (or undermines) the point.


Do Birthsigns allow players to define their own instigating event? For example, say a character with the Wildfire Birthsign receives a letter from a courier saying that an orphanage was burnt down with the same signature style as his own flames (assuming the character chose to attune fire). That doesn’t make sense to the character since the character was home last night, but they want to find out more, so it’s time for an adventure to find out and/or stop whoever is causing this trouble. (Assume that the group, tone, etc supports this particular set up; and everyone is on board with stopping this villain.)

I would say the issue is that you're approaching it from perspective of trying to tell a story. You might not believe you are, but thats what's resulting in how you're engaging these systems. You're thinking up a story, breaking off a chunk of it, and throwing it into the system.

Which, apropros to the response to to clearstream, is something I'd identify as yet another manifestation of an improv problem.

I've related in the past that Ive observed the hobby as being over obsessive with trying to tell stories, and I think there's a case to be made that this isn't fundamentally all that different from how, in improv, players might end up obsessed with trying to deliver a performance.

For an improviser, if you want to achieve a real sense of presence, you essentially have to get a point where you've eliminated any notion that you're being observed; not just shake off any self-consciousness you may have, but reach self-forgetfulness. Its a state of flow where evaluation and awareness of self has given way to a vulnerable, open spontaneity.

If you approach improv from the perspective of performance, reaching that flow can effectively be impossible, because doing so means you're engaging in that conscious evaluation that stands in its way.

And this in turn, relates to what I've spoken to before about how trying too hard to tell stories through certain video games just burns me out. Its the same issue. I've thought up a story, and I'm trying to make a game turn it into something organic through brute force. It doesn't really work, and even if the story I have in mind is something special, the actual experience of it even if I got through it wouldn't be nearly as endearing as something more genuinely organic.

But if I step back from storytelling, and just be present in the moment to moment of play, and trust the game, the fun comes back, and the stories that result from play mean so much more.

Events as a broad system were designed to emulate "Attractors" in open world design, as a way of enhancing and bringing fun to the procedural process of moving around in the gameworld, and indeed, exploring it deliberately.

Opening them up as prompts to kickstart a collaborative, improvised narrative is a natural evolution as, in tabletop, we seldom have the visuals that a video game has to spark curiosity, so we have to seek another avenue to foster that feeling, and reinforce the choices to act on that curiosity when it manifests.

Birthsigns, meanwhile, call back to that necessity in Narrative Improv, Identify the Protagonists, establishing not just how players can set motivations and conflicts in motion for themselves and the greater narrative that will emerge, but also how the Game can interface with and interact with these esoteric ideas, and influence them as part of the improvisational process by consistently prompting you to consider who you are, and to question what you value, and what you are becoming.

As your Luck waxes and wanes, its not a matter of you trying to hit the plot beats you think you need to hit, but a matter of whether or not you're embodying who your character is, whether the times are good or bad.

But it only works if you trust the game, just as you would your fellow Players or your Keeper, and if performance or story take precedence, you've lost any grasp on that trust you might have had. I describe Labyrinthian as a game of "life and legend", and this is true in the broad strokes, but what Labyrinthian is really driven by is choices and interaction, before anything else.

What the game is shooting for, even if we must admit it isn't fully there yet, is what I'm talking about when I describe a story like Lord of the Rings, that results not from a story being defined and told, but from emerging from spontaneous, but guided, interaction. Its what I'm saying when I describe a story as something that couldn't have ever been told, because it had to be experienced first.

When I describe the beauty in a group coming together, in character, to cook a meal together, its not because these players decided to tell this cutesy story about doing so, improvising the dialogue as they went.

Its because it emerged unprompted from interaction between players being present as they interacted with a deep crafting system and each other, with the system reinforcing the scene, tying their choices and actions to something concrete that will stick with them in their adventure, and the players reinforcing the system in turn, using its rules to generate unique, bespoke mechanical boons for themselves that isn't just numbers and dice, but a tangible part of their emerging story.

Its a system where cooking with love isn't just an expression, but something you can tangibly see and feel, because the things you seek out the most become your characters favorites, and this becomes something other players can interact with.

Its easy to just tell a story of this moment where two characters express how much they care for each other in the exhange of gifts. But it'd pale in comparison to feeling the actual emotions involved with not just this individual moment, but every other moment, and all the choices within, that lead up to this happening, going back to the beginning.

We may know the story of Lord of the Rings, and the broad story told of how it comes to that penultimate moment when Sam tells Frodo that he can carry him. But what we don't know, is what its truly like to be Sam, to be someone of such moral and loving fortitude, and in a story we tell, we can only just grasp what it must be like, even with the gorgeous prose of the Professor to guide us there.

But if we play as Sam, or whomever we decide to be, and we reach that critical flow as him, then we'll know, and in so doing, as Walt Whitman says, the powerful play goes on, and we may contribute a verse, and that is where the good stuff is, not in the stories we tell, but the ones that are made.

I may have gotten a little overly poetic there, but, I think its important to really drive in this nail, because while all I've said serves as a valuable perspective that might help one understand what I'm trying to do, the point of the game is ultimately still to be fun. There's toys in these systems, and we shouldn't take them so seriously we begin to slip into that disruption of our flow. But not should we be afraid to trust, and to surrender control, and just be.

 

[haakon1]

“All the world’s indeed a stage
And we are merely players
Performers and portrayers
Each another’s audience
Inside the gilded cage

Living in the limelight
The universal dream
For those who wish to seem.
Those who wish to be
Must put aside the alienation
Get on with the fascination
The real relation
The underlying theme,”

- Neil Peart, “Limelight”, a song by Rush

Which is to say, just because there’s no audience outside the group, doesn’t mean there’s no audience.

And, of course, actual play by folks who definitely seem to be improv actors has been a thing for a decade now.

For my email campaign, I may eventually publish it all (it’s done in Word), or perhaps not.

 

[John Dallman]

I disagree, there are too many differences between improv acting and roleplaying.

Yup. Using the specific term "improv" is a bad idea, because that has a lot of baggage attached to it. Decades ago, I tried studying theatrical improv, but got nowhere with Keith Johnstone's Impro. I got the chance to talk to the late, great Ken Campbell about it, but he couldn't think outside the boundaries of Impro.

So I use "improvisation." All players and GMs have to improvise dialogue and reactions, but GMs also have to improvise situations when players do something unexpected. An inability to do that is crippling, leading to the "It is a large object" story.

 

[kenada]

I would say the issue is that you're approaching it from perspective of trying to tell a story. You might not believe you are, but thats what's resulting in how you're engaging these systems. You're thinking up a story, breaking off a chunk of it, and throwing it into the system.

What I’m trying to do is assess whether either of these structures are similar to kickers — another structure I know. Going back to your OP, I would liken them to story spines in that they provide the structure but don’t lay down specific elements beyond establishing the premise. You’ve been critical of games that railroad thematic premise. Kickers are a way to put some of that back in the players’ hands by having them provide provocative statements to kick off play (hence the name).

If neither Events nor Birthsigns fill that roll, I don’t see an issue with that. Game mechanics exist to effect some change in game state. Not all of them are going to do the same thing, and sometimes games don’t have (or maybe yours does have, but we haven’t discussed it) certain mechanics because they’re not appropriate. As discussed, my game doesn’t really have kickers, though this discussion makes me think I should mention it as an option for setting the campaign goal.

Which, apropros to the response to to clearstream, is something I'd identify as yet another manifestation of an improv problem.

I've related in the past that Ive observed the hobby as being over obsessive with trying to tell stories, and I think there's a case to be made that this isn't fundamentally all that different from how, in improv, players might end up obsessed with trying to deliver a performance.

For an improviser, if you want to achieve a real sense of presence, you essentially have to get a point where you've eliminated any notion that you're being observed; not just shake off any self-consciousness you may have, but reach self-forgetfulness. Its a state of flow where evaluation and awareness of self has given way to a vulnerable, open spontaneity.

If you approach improv from the perspective of performance, reaching that flow can effectively be impossible, because doing so means you're engaging in that conscious evaluation that stands in its way.

And this in turn, relates to what I've spoken to before about how trying too hard to tell stories through certain video games just burns me out. Its the same issue. I've thought up a story, and I'm trying to make a game turn it into something organic through brute force. It doesn't really work, and even if the story I have in mind is something special, the actual experience of it even if I got through it wouldn't be nearly as endearing as something more genuinely organic.

But if I step back from storytelling, and just be present in the moment to moment of play, and trust the game, the fun comes back, and the stories that result from play mean so much more.

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t generally care much about story when playing RPGs. However, regardless of my preference, that doesn’t prevent me from analyzing games on their merits even when they’re not something I’d normally like to play. I think it would be helpful if one avoided conflating analysis (which includes making comparisons using a familiar point of reference) with preference. I found myself having to do this recently when trying to introduce RPGs to my brother.

After playing BG3, my brother started getting interested in D&D. He had found some videos of people playing on Youtube, but he didn’t quite like what he was seeing. He wasn’t into the theatrics and drama and stuff like that. I’m not really either, but I defended it and tried to explain why people like it. I also described some other play (including my own), which did end up interesting him. He’s picked up a copy of Blades in the Dark and is interested in running sometime.

Events as a broad system were designed to emulate "Attractors" in open world design, as a way of enhancing and bringing fun to the procedural process of moving around in the gameworld, and indeed, exploring it deliberately.

Opening them up as prompts to kickstart a collaborative, improvised narrative is a natural evolution as, in tabletop, we seldom have the visuals that a video game has to spark curiosity, so we have to seek another avenue to foster that feeling, and reinforce the choices to act on that curiosity when it manifests.

Birthsigns, meanwhile, call back to that necessity in Narrative Improv, Identify the Protagonists, establishing not just how players can set motivations and conflicts in motion for themselves and the greater narrative that will emerge, but also how the Game can interface with and interact with these esoteric ideas, and influence them as part of the improvisational process by consistently prompting you to consider who you are, and to question what you value, and what you are becoming.

As your Luck waxes and wanes, its not a matter of you trying to hit the plot beats you think you need to hit, but a matter of whether or not you're embodying who your character is, whether the times are good or bad.

I had originally guessed that Events and Birthsigns were similar to a structure another game uses, but I don’t think I was right about that. As described here, they clearly don’t seem to be very similar except superficially.

But it only works if you trust the game, just as you would your fellow Players or your Keeper, and if performance or story take precedence, you've lost any grasp on that trust you might have had. I describe Labyrinthian as a game of "life and legend", and this is true in the broad strokes, but what Labyrinthian is really driven by is choices and interaction, before anything else.

What the game is shooting for, even if we must admit it isn't fully there yet, is what I'm talking about when I describe a story like Lord of the Rings, that results not from a story being defined and told, but from emerging from spontaneous, but guided, interaction. Its what I'm saying when I describe a story as something that couldn't have ever been told, because it had to be experienced first.

When I describe the beauty in a group coming together, in character, to cook a meal together, its not because these players decided to tell this cutesy story about doing so, improvising the dialogue as they went.

Its because it emerged unprompted from interaction between players being present as they interacted with a deep crafting system and each other, with the system reinforcing the scene, tying their choices and actions to something concrete that will stick with them in their adventure, and the players reinforcing the system in turn, using its rules to generate unique, bespoke mechanical boons for themselves that isn't just numbers and dice, but a tangible part of their emerging story.

Its a system where cooking with love isn't just an expression, but something you can tangibly see and feel, because the things you seek out the most become your characters favorites, and this becomes something other players can interact with.

Its easy to just tell a story of this moment where two characters express how much they care for each other in the exhange of gifts. But it'd pale in comparison to feeling the actual emotions involved with not just this individual moment, but every other moment, and all the choices within, that lead up to this happening, going back to the beginning.

We may know the story of Lord of the Rings, and the broad story told of how it comes to that penultimate moment when Sam tells Frodo that he can carry him. But what we don't know, is what its truly like to be Sam, to be someone of such moral and loving fortitude, and in a story we tell, we can only just grasp what it must be like, even with the gorgeous prose of the Professor to guide us there.

But if we play as Sam, or whomever we decide to be, and we reach that critical flow as him, then we'll know, and in so doing, as Walt Whitman says, the powerful play goes on, and we may contribute a verse, and that is where the good stuff is, not in the stories we tell, but the ones that are made.

I may have gotten a little overly poetic there, but, I think its important to really drive in this nail, because while all I've said serves as a valuable perspective that might help one understand what I'm trying to do, the point of the game is ultimately still to be fun. There's toys in these systems, and we shouldn't take them so seriously we begin to slip into that disruption of our flow. But not should we be afraid to trust, and to surrender control, and just be.

I’m a big fan of designing games to do exactly what you want. That’s why I’m designing my own (since nothing I’ve seen does the kind of exploration-driven game I want in the way I want). While the kind of flow state you seek is not something I desire in my RPGing, I’m trying to engage with you on your system’s merits, but I need to use points of reference to help me understand.

What you describe reminds me of what those who enjoy “deep immersion” liken to slipping into the secondary world (as Tolkien describes it). The point is to be the character and experiences things as the character, which includes emotional aspects and not just playing in the absence of the primary world. Am I close?

 

[Emberashh]

Going back to your OP, I would liken them to story spines in that they provide the structure but don’t lay down specific elements beyond establishing the premise.

In a very zoomed out sense Birthsigns could be thought of that way, though in practice story spines are directly emulated through Quest Blocks and Questlines; basically stat blocks that give you different story spines to employ throughout play. Birthsigns are much less specific and concise.

You’ve been critical of games that railroad thematic premise. Kickers are a way to put some of that back in the players’ hands by having them provide provocative statements to kick off play (hence the name).

I would say that its a similiar function, but it goes deeper than that given it interacts with more aspects of the game. Generally speaking, it'd probably be wise to not try to understand it by way of another game.

While the kind of flow state you seek is not something I desire in my RPGing, I’m trying to engage with you on your system’s merits, but I need to use points of reference to help me understand.

What I've found is that my game isn't likely to track with what any other game does unless you really zoom in and isolate things. To make an analogy, knowing about tacos isn't going to teach you much about chicken pot pie, even if a lot of the same ingredients are involved. And like food, you do miss some insights if you're not able to get a taste of it firsthand.

What you describe reminds me of what those who enjoy “deep immersion” liken to slipping into the secondary world (as Tolkien describes it). The point is to be the character and experiences things as the character, which includes emotional aspects and not just playing in the absence of the primary world. Am I close?

Pretty much. How I put it is something I'd say is a more specifically defined explanation (if over-verbose as is my unedited style) for what that means, given how often people find the idea of immersion vague and ill defined, but also relates it in a way that speaks to what most people are looking for in terms of a "story", whether thats something emotionally resonant and deep or just a solid, fun adventure game where you can do practically any wack crazy things you can think of, or anything inbetween.

 

[pemerton]

Games as a medium are all about interaction. If there is no interaction, there isn't a game.

<snip>

But now, coming back to Improv, we have to think of it in these terms. Is improv a game? Of course it is. Improv is nothing but interaction, and whether its a short comedic bit or a long, drawn out dramatic narrative, a story is being made in that interaction.

This seems to be a non-sequitur: from the fact that interaction is a necessary condition of something being a game, it does not follow that it is a sufficient condition.

All Games, of any type, are fundamentally story generators, and this is born out even when you isolate singular mechanics; there is no compelling mechanic that does not, through interaction with it, tell a story.

<snip>

This, ultimately, is why game mechanics even in their barest form tell stories. There's a goal, there's interaction, and theres a clear beginning, middle, and end to the interaction.

This seems to be using "story" in a very loose sense, of something like "tension" and "release" occurring over the course of a series of connected and intentionally-driven events.

There are other ways of thinking about story which can be relevant to RPGers, but which don't entail that all games are story generators.

What makes RPGs an Improv Game?

I mentioned at the start that an easy shortcut to understanding it is by thinking of what RPGs fundamentally do. They present you an open-ended possibility space, and ask you "What do you do?" That interaction is where improv comes in, and there isn't an RPG that has ever existed that did not or does not do this.

The reason that RPGs present an open-ended possibility space is because (i) players have a fictional position, which both shapes what moves they can make and matters to the resolution of those moves, and (ii) a fiction is inherently open-ended.

I don't think that RPGing needs to involve "improv" in any sense beyond this. I mean it might, of course, in some particular game; but the bear minimum is simply the salience to play of the fiction, as per my (i) and (ii).

The Story Spine
The first step the blog identifies for Narrative Improv is what it calls the story spine. This is essentially meant to provide structure to the session, and ensure it doesn't strictly meander off without a satisfying, or at least obvious, conclusion.

<snip>

But what the blog doesn't talk about is that these details can also be established ahead of time, rather than directly in the improv.

There a range of approaches to establishing a "story spine" for a RPG session. Many have little connection to "improv" because they rely heavily on prep. And prep - establishing stuff ahead of time - is not improv.

Perhaps the single most ubiquitous and contentious one is that of railroading. While it can be alright if one approaches it with consent

<snip>

particular kinds of RPGs, especially in the PBTA style, are enforcing a very specific railroad of thematic premise. It doesn't always produce a feeling of unwelcomeness, but its pretty normal to see how blocking manifests; its an expected part of these games to stop the game, disrupt the flow, and hash out how things work out, either in the narrative specifically or due to some mechanics issue, if not both. This is where the "Writer's Room" idea comes from, as this process often feels less like two improvisers smoothing over a hiccup and more like you're writing the scene.

<snip>

The G part of them, however, isn't always particularly compelling on its own, and this I think is a misstep in design.

I don't really see how agreeing on a premise - be that a genre premise, a situation premise, a thematic premise, or whatever - is railroading. Or blocking.

Nor do I see what that has to do with PbtA or "writers' room". If, when playing Apocalypse World or Dungeon World, you're having the experience that you describe, then I think something is going wrong in your application of the procedures of play. Because those rules are pretty clear about who is obliged to say stuff when, and what the parameters are that govern what they are allowed to say.

As far as the mechanical "G" part of AW: it's about rolling 2d6, adding a small integer to it, and then following the resulting instruction. That's not meant to be especially fun in itself. Like other RPGs that use this sort of resolution (eg Classic Traveller), the fun is in the shared fiction - imagining it, experiencing it, creating it.

What does the Game in RPGs do, if not provide Consequences? Well, they also React the same way Players do. Are the Moves of PBTA style games not reacting to the improvisations of tbe players?

The rules of a RPG are there to tell us who is supposed to say stuff, and when they're supposed to say it, and what the parameters are for the stuff that they say. The rules can prescribe all this very narrowly (eg rolling a result on a RM crit table) or very loosely (eg the rules of Apocalypse World telling the GM to make a soft move by looking to their fronts). But the basic purpose of the rules is pretty clear and well known.

I personally have found that through this understanding I can actually get into pretty much any RPG I can get my hands on (short of ones that are just boring or rote anyway, but thats a separate issue), because now I pretty much cannot approach these games without informed consent of what I'm getting into.

I don't need to adopt the strange notion that the game is a player of itself, in order to understand that there are different ways of RPGing, and different approaches, and that the game experience will vary with these, and that if I'm going to join a game it's helpful to know what the approach and hence experience might be.

 

[pemerton]

You ask, “What does the Game in RPGs do, if not provide Consequences?” My answer would be: the Game provides structure and procedures of play; players provide Consequences. The Game on its own doesn’t provide Consequences because it doesn’t do anything. It’s just a text (or video or etc). Much in the way that the actors in Whose Line Is It Anyway? have to do something, the players in an RPG have to actually play the game. If the MC in Apocalypse World is not framing provocative scenes, it doesn’t matter what Baker has to say on the matter in the game’s rules.

Full agreement with this!

 

[pemerton]

The game designers' intent and goals in creating the game you are playing, by necessity, makes them almost an invisible player in your session - their decisions shape everything you do in a game.

As Luke Crane said, game design is mind control!

 

[pemerton]

It's a long essay, and there's more going on than I can respond to, but I wanted to get to this point specifically. Played properly, I don't think Apocalypse World should have a 'writers' room' feel, at all. Everyone at the table has a clear role and responsibility to speak about certain things at certain times -- the MC about the world, players about their characters, various people about various outcomes, depending on the move and the dice. The jargon for this is 'authority'.

Like, if I say 'my character picks up the gun', and then everyone stops the game and has a conference about whether I really pick up the gun and what that looks like, then either the system hasn't sufficiently defined what the game's authorities are, or my group is being extremely rude and not respecting my authority over my character's actions. This is a failure-state, not a problem caused by the game not being sufficiently railroaded, and absolutely not a virtue.

I'm not sure I understand. Is the problem that the system creates an outcome that is unwelcome, or that there is some sort of disjuncture between what you intent your character to do and what the move says should happen?

Regarding the move itself: personally, I like it, but I can see how it might annoy some people: it slightly upends the normal authority structure, robbing you of agency over your character, just for a split second (a lot of moves in AW play games with authority). In this case, I think the authors were making a statement: if you shove a gun in someone's face, you might end up killing them.

Right. I mean, of course if the group wants to ignore the rules - say, in this case, the rule for resolution of going aggro on someone - then the game might turn into a meta- "writers' room", just the same as might happen the first time a player in D&D has their 50 hp PC jump down a 70' cliff because they know they can't die.

But that's not a feature of the game; it's a consequence of players wanting to play a different game from the one that they chose!

 

[pemerton]

I appreciate you committing the time to dive deep into this theory about TTRPG.

I have one initial question. As I understand it, a theatre improv troupe is oriented toward entertaining an audience, where that audience is not identical with the troupe. Something I believe distinctive of TTRPG and what it means to be a player, is what I've called elsewhere the ludic duality. Cast in your terms, a game player is simultaneously actor and audience.

If right, then there is a strong separation between theatre improv and TTRPG play. I think you could argue that the audience is a side issue, and for the improv actors themselves, they are also audiences of their own efforts. But I suspect that there would be choices made in improv for the sake of the separate audience that would never be made in game play. So that there is at least a forking of activity kinds.

I made this very point in another recent thread:

I've never taken part in improv, and don't watch much of it, but one aspect - as I understand it - is that it is for an audience and therefore has to "flow" smoothly.

Whereas in RPGing, the audience and authors are the same people, and so they can pause to clarify - are you sure that's right? - or to improve contributions (the AW rulebook has plenty of examples of this) - or to think about what would be good (in my session of Torchbearer today, I had to stop and think a few times to come up with what I thought were good ideas for compromises).

So in a discussion about RPGing, I think it makes more sense to talk directly about the rules, practices etc that are doing this work of shaping the negotiations; rather than trying to mediate that discussion via a somewhat inapposite notion of "blocking" taken from a medium that is different in the way its pacing/editing works due to its different relationship to an audience and its quite different procedures.

Against that, one might point to streamed game sessions... although I could in response identify them as occupying a space between improv and localised TTRPG (i.e. I could claim that they affirm the distinction by showing that there is such a space.)

Streamed game sessions, or at least those that are played to be streamed (and even moreso the commercial ones of that sort) are clearly a type of performance for an external audience in a way that differs from (say) my friends and I getting together to play Torchbearer.