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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Emberashh" data-source="post: 9509189" data-attributes="member: 7040941">If there's one thing that could explain why I run into so many issues its probably my bad habit of not caring enough to revise and edit when it comes to posting online, even when it comes to something more intentionally formal rather than conversational. You can improvise in the third person, and I'll get into it more in a bit, but the point isn't to say you need to be an actor putting on a performance. This was something I had on my mind, but I didn't end up finding a clean segue to talk about it. But, this was what I was leading into by discussing where our modern idea of improv comes from in Viola Spolin's work. Her original games and exercises were not strictly meant to be for an audience. They were teaching tools to help actors learn their craft, which just so happened to be entertaining in its own right and grew into something you'd perform for others. Now, games becoming something people want to watch isn't unheard of. Sports have been doing this practically forever, and in modern times video games, and indeed, RPG liveplays, have come into a strong vogue, often to the perplexity of many who can't figure how any of that is entertaining, especially if compared to playing the game yourself. To relate my personal experience, I personally can't get into watching most sports, but if I were to play I could get fully invested. Why that is, I could actually probably trace to the fact that Im very near sighted and have been since I was born. So growing up, sports were as unfun to play as they were to watch, because I couldn't see naughty word. So as an adult, while I've grown to appreciate baseball and hockey (no doubt because these were my dads favorites that he kept sharing with me), I don't go out of my way to watch them. Even as a more conscious discerning adult, I just don't find the spectacle of sports intrinsically interesting, and this is exacerbated, I think, by a distinct lack of what makes things like video game streams or rpg liveplays interesting to watch, both of which I readily get into and enjoy. The reason I think this is is because of the personalities involved, which we are much more intimately communicating with through this medium. When I watch someone play a video game, I'm not watching because the gameplay itself is intrinsically the interesting thing to watch, but because the personality interacting and reacting to that gameplay is. This might be because they're highly skilled at it, or it might be because they're hilarious. A lot of times its both, and I don't think its a coincidence that when it comes to RPG liveplays, the two single biggest names both qualify for those distinctions. D20 and Critical Role have this air of highly skilled play and total hilarity, so much so that as is tradition in RPG discourse, we invented jargon to talk about it in the Mercer Effect. But even between these two, there's some stark differences that are important to relate here. For one, its well understood that D20 is generally a more scripted, or rather, structured experience. They largely have an episodic format with a relatively brief time limit, and early on this was very specifically structured, with a combat episode every other episode. The game was still genuinely being played, improv and all, but they also established a very firm story spine, if you will, ahead of time. But in addition to this, D20 is often much more consciously performing for the sake of an audience, and you can pick this up when you watch enough of it, as the people who come on and don't do so stick out; usually they're the ones getting more invested as opposed to just reacting. With Critical Role, however, as much as people try to make the leap from "professional voice actor" to "this is all scripted", its actually very apparent that they are embracing a more open ended structure to their games, even while also integrating pre-planned terrains for certain fights. But whats especially key is that there's a huge difference in what the players are doing. While CR is no doubt aware they have an audience and play to them, this group is genuinely playing for their own sakes, and we can see that because there's genuine investment and attention being paid by the table even when its just one person dominating a scene. A great example is in Campaign 2 when Travis finally commits to roleplaying romance (with his actual wife, ironically). When the pair are going through the scene where their characters kiss for the first time, this clearly isn't a bit or a melodramatic performance for the sake of the audience, and the whole table is fully invested in whats going on, not just for the story of it but also because of what it means for Travis himself in being more vulnerable in that moment in doing something he'd been uncomfortable with up to that point. CR is littered with stuff like that, and their audience doesn't find it entertaining because it was specifically meant to, but because the personalities involved are captivating and genuine in how they play. The reason why this is, especially compared to D20, is I'd argue related to them approaching the improv they're doing much more closely to how the original improv games were done. These players are highly present in the moment to moment of play, which was the entire point of improv as a teaching tool for acting. And when they are actually just performing, it sticks out like a sore thumb. And we can see how this shakes out when these two shows inevitably overlapped, when Brennan in particular ran Calamity, and is reported as saying it was the best game of DND he ever had. While Calamity wasn't the standard CR cast, it did include Lou Wilson whose a d20 regular, and yet we see that Calamity falls right into the same space standard CR does with regards to how they're approaching the improv, which I personally think goes to show that this goes down to the structure they're employing, and the overall point of the experience in the background. Calamity was structured with at least a fixed endpoint, if not a loose plot, but it wasn't a performance, and this shows with how not only Brennan Lou seamlessly fitting into the dynamics at play, but also the brand new people (at the time) in Aabria and Luis.While I haven't gotten up to watching it, I wouldn't be surprised if the same effect happened going the other way with The Ravening War where Matt DM'd on D20. So, to bring it all back as I clearly rambled a bit, what I'm getting at is that while improv can be performed for an audience, it isn't strictly about that. Nor is it, I'd argue, a matter of RPGs being a case of players being both audience and performer. I think improv is inherently captivating because of the genuine presence it can lead to, which is just as captivating for the players as it might be for anyone watching, and if anything, if you approach it as a performance, you probably suck at it still, and people can tell the difference even if you're still managing to be entertaining. (Most of D20 are also comedians...)This actually brings to mind a nice little reference:[MEDIA=youtube]-VGajDTNKFU[/MEDIA]The late Alan Rickman is recalled as saying that, after Tim Allen felt intensely uncomfortable after this scene, that Tim had finally discovered acting. Tim achieved high presence in this scene, and this carries through to it as part of a deliberate performance, standing out from much of Allen's other films. Part of this is because Allen is a Shatner like actor to begin with, so there's not a lot of barriers here (and this is part of what made the casting and writing for Galaxy Quest brilliant, as everybody was written and cast along these lines), but it also comes down to scenes like that one, where he had developed a real emotional vulnerability. Improv as a tool teaches us how we can do that as part of being an actor, but we can also do improv for its own sake, because this kind of vulnerability is enjoyable in of itself, not just for people watching, but for the players as they do it. After all, this is why kids enjoy playing pretend, and is why it can often be said that learning how to both improvise and play RPGs involves learning how to be a kid playing pretend. A lot of people get hung up on what they think improv is, but for me, I keep finding this direct parallels all over the place, and any topic I read now about some RPG problem or concept, I can't help but draw the connections and throughlines back to improv dynamics.</blockquote>

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