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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 9215233" data-attributes="member: 16586">Theater kid here. 6 years of drama club from 7th to 12th grade. I have done some community theater stuff, although not in the last couple of years. While I'm a software engineer now I started my undergrad experience with two years of film school. I like improv comedy theater as its own thing. I've done some workshops in the past even.Sure, in the sense that we're collectively improvising details about a fictional experience taking place in a nebulously defined fictional setting we're doing the same thing in a roleplaying game and improv theater, but like how we're going about it and the principles we rely on are often completely different.First and foremost, the biggest improv sin, blocking, is fundamental to roleplaying game play.  While it may have uses in specific circumstances, we're generally not doing a lot of 'yes, and' in roleplaying games. Instead of relying on consensus building we rely on interpretive judgement based on the fictional situation, rules on who gets to say what and when and resolution mechanisms. We play the game to find out what happens.There are a lot of different ways to structure collaborative conversations about what happens in the imagined space. Improv comedy is not the end all be all on that score. There's even a fair amount of dramatic improvised theater setups that don't rely on comedy improv principles. I think it's fruitful for different roleplaying games likewise to structure that collaborative conversation differently.I know some people will feel differently, but I personally am not a fan of independently interesting mechanics. I want the fiction of the game to feed into the mechanics and for those to feedback into the fiction. Synergy so that the mechanics help you to step into your character's shoes and so you are never not playing a game.I also think it's one thing to have a preference for a certain structure of play, but quite another to claim games that don't match that structure are bad games. Sometimes a design can be a solid one even if it does not fit the intended experience that you are looking for.</blockquote>

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