Finding Fun in Roleplaying Games (Part III)

On the subject of improv and roleplaying, I recommend Paul Tevis' talk What Improv Has Taught Me About GMing. I'm tempted to get a couple of tattoos: "Do your thinking outside of your head" and "Listen and React." I also recommend Carol Hazenfield's book Acting On Impulse, which Paul's talk mentions. I took  classes  from Carol when I was studying improv and they were fantastic. What you learn in improv can be helpful in real life as well as on-stage, and this was especially true of Carol's classes.

Of all of the elements of roleplaying, I'm most interested in Character: the "role" in roleplaying. I don't want to confuse roleplaying with acting, but I believe they share some things in common. All of the players in a roleplaying game including the GM (if there is one) are playing characters who speak, act, and make choices.

I studied three aspects of character in improv: Vocal, Physical, and Emotional. Acting On Impulse talks about each of these.

Vocal

Vocal elements include dialects, accents, pitch, how fast or slow you speak, where you speak from (nose, chest, etc.), and where you place your pauses. Learning dialects and accents takes a lot of study and practice. The other elements are more easier to do. When roleplaying, I think a little can go a long way.

Speaking in-character is pretty common in roleplaying. I've played with a fair number of role players over the years that use vocal characterization and are good at it. Like everything else in improv and roleplaying, one of the keys is full commitment to whatever you are doing.

I'd like to speak in-character and use vocal characterization more often. I've found it can be a useful  tool in finding and expressing character. Unfortunately, I'm having more fundamental problems these days - in the heat of the moment, I can jumble up speaking in first and third person. In a recent game of Leverage, I spoke in the first person and said, "I'm pissed off" when I meant to speak in the third and say, "Amanda is pissed off."

Physical

I loved physical characterization in improv after I discovered mask acting. I found it was the easiest route for me to find characters, especially conforming your facial expressions to the mask. Physical characterization includes how you carry yourself, walk, where your physical center is, and more.

Unfortunately, you don't move around a whole lot in roleplaying (I haven't played LARPS or Jeepform) .  Ryan Macklin suggested that I can stand and move around more (he's often standing), but I haven't made good use of it yet. Fortunately, if you aren't moving around, what you describe about your character's physical appearance can be helpful with characterization. I was delighted with Apocalypse World's "Look" traits.

Note that above I've mentioned "finding" characters: like everything else in improv character is much more of a discovery process than a planning process. I find this is true in roleplaying - I can completely fill out my character sheet during character creation, but it isn't long before I want to change something. Some of my favorite games these days like Leverage flesh out the characters through play. In addition to "do your thinking outside your head, one of my other favorite phrases right now is "acting should precede planning." You can create elaborate plans ahead of time but once you act, things change and that's when you really need to plan.

Emotional

This is the hardest part of all in improv, and I've known improv actors skilled in all of the above areas but have very little range in terms of emotionality. It's easier to be funny than explore emotional perspectives quite different than your own, e.g., optimistic, pessimistic, spiteful, joyous, sorrowful, naive, etc. Usually, I was only able to access this when doing mask acting.

I don't even know how to start talking about character emotionality in roleplaying games. I've seen very little or none of it in games like D&D 4E. I've struggled with it when playing "story games."  I can look at all of the items on character sheets and try to reason through logically, given the current situation, "What would be character do now based on all of this stuff?" but I have to say that it feels like a very mechanical exercise and I usually come up dry if I don't have emotional understanding of or connection to the character.

Other Tools for Characterization

Two other tools for characterization in improv were Objectives and Status. I mentioned Objectives in my last post describing C.R.O.W. What does your character want? What are his or her goals? Status refers to social pecking order. Keith Johnstone, who introduced the idea of status transactions to theater, talks about status in his book Impro. It was a useful tool in improv, and I find it to be a useful tool when I can think to use it in roleplaying.

People aren't one dimensional and showing different sides of a character does a lot to bring a character to life and add interest. I believe roleplaying games like Burning Wheel support this - beliefs can show different aspects of character and it gets really interesting when they conflict. On a related noted, Change is vital component of character development. This is a core part of Burning Wheel (I believe the Spokes, actually) and many of other my favorite games provide great support for character change and development, e.g., Smallville.

A final tool that I think can be useful is to define the importance of characters'  Intrinsic Desires:

• Acceptance - the need for approval
• Physical Activity
• Curiosity - the need to think
• Power - the need for influence of will
• Eating
• Romance - the need for love and sex
• Family - the need to raise children
• Saving - the need to collect
• Honor - being loyal to a group
• Social Contact - the need for friends
• Idealism - the need for purpose
• Status - the need for social standing
• Independence - being an individual, to be autonomous
• Tranquility - the need to be safe
• Order - the need for a stable environment
• Vengeance - the need to strike back
• Competence - the need to feel capable, for mastery

Many roleplaying games focus on skills and attributes like strength, dexterity, etc. These are most useful in determining how competent characters are at accomplishing tasks. The parts of roleplaying that interest me most are figuring out what characters say and what characters choose to do, particularly when facing difficult decisions. I still struggle when roleplaying (actually as much or more than I did in improv), despite all of the things I write down on character sheets. Perhaps a good design challenge for myself would be to design a game that helps me with this. Or maybe I'll re-read and play A Penny For My Thoughts.

Finding Fun in Roleplaying Games (Part II)

There are a lot of different kinds of fun you can have playing roleplaying games. I think I enjoy them all to greater or lesser extents. Attempts have been made to categorize the different aspects of roleplaying, e.g., The Big Model. Weeks could be spent reading all of the theory.

A lot of the way I think about roleplaying is influenced by my experience studying improv acting for a few years back in the mid-90s. I took a lot of classes, read some books, and gained as much wisdom as I could from experience and instruction. I was never interested in performing on stage for audiences so my improv career was short-lived.

I was delighted to discover "indie roleplaying" several years ago since it seemed to combine a lot of what I liked the most about improv with my other life long passion - games. Today I roleplay for many of the same reasons I was interested in improv acting years ago: I love storytelling, I want to exercise my creativity, I want to continue to overcome my inherent shyness, and I want to practice being in the moment. (I  also have a habit of sticking to hobbies that don't come at all easily to me).

So looking through the lens of improv, here are some of the things I enjoy about roleplaying and some  recent experiences I've had having fun:

• Say yes.  I'd like to think this is one habit that I've gained from improv that has stuck with me - accepting offers and doing my best to support my fellow players. I occasionally catch myself blocking or negating, and I can still get better at building on offers (yes and...) instead of just agreeing to them. It can be tremendous fun to collaborate with fellow players. My favorite recent moment was in a game of Little Fears - the GM took my offer that an evil troll was ticklish and established that the troll could then be attacked using characters' Care ability. This suddenly made another player with an non-combat PC into a combat power house. It turned the tide of battle and was a lot of fun. It felt like a magic moment. 
• Don't be prepared. This is the absolute hardest thing for me to do, but I've gotten gradually better over the years. The moments of spontaneous creation in the moment, where great ideas come from Who Knows Where, are the absolute best (and, alas, all too rare for me). The "ticklish" idea in the Little Fears game was one such moment - I didn't think about it, it just came out of my mouth. I had spent a couple seconds thinking of "clever" ideas, let them go, and then BAM! an idea came out of my mouth. I think I was only able to do this because I was really into my Character (a 8 year old boy who was like a misbehaving Encyclopedia Brown).
• Character.  There's a useful mnemonic in improv, C.R.O.W., standing for Character, Relationship, Object, and Where. These are the main building blocks of scenes - if you establish them then you have the foundation for a good scene. For me, it starts with Character, who am I? That also happens to be what the heart of roleplaying games, the character sheet, is devoted to. I struggle a lot with character (one of those things that doesn't come at all easily tome ). In improv, I most easily accessed other characters and felt I was truly "acting" when doing improv mask work. Mask work is very physical (unfortunately, masks often don't do a lot of talking until after you spend a lot of time with them). When I feel a character like I'm wearing him/her like a mask, that's when magic happens. It happened in the Little Fears game. When roleplaying I'm usually somewhere between tongue tied - "What would Stilgar, a kick butt Fremen leader do in this moment??" - and saying things that are functional but not particularly imaginative (and I'm rarely funny). I miss the time I had in improv to work physically with the character and the environment so I don't have to be talking all of the time.
• Relationship. I truly understood the importance of Relationship a couple of years ago when playing With Great Power. The next best tool I know of next to, "When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand," is to establish strong (usually familial) relationships with PCs and NPCs. It's so much easier to create stakes that mean something and make conflicts personal. Smallville is a fantastic game for this. The recent Duneville game I played was incredibly intense and reminded me of an improv performance - the heart of that was driven by the characters' relationships and their conflicting Objectives.
• Objective. I'm usually going absolutely nowhere roleplaying unless there's an objective to follow somewhere. The simplest are provided by the GM to the players, doing something an NPC asks and obeying heroic logic, e.g, "Kill the bad guy before bad stuff happens."  It's absolutely awesome when PCs and NPCs all have their own individual objectives to drive them and they variously agree and conflict. The Duneville game was propelled along by strong player character objectives and my recent games of Leverage were pretty good in this way too. (Burning Wheel is the best game I know for defining and working with character objectives.)
• Where. This means the scene location, props, and more broadly the mise-en-scène. Aside from being able to get into characters kinesthetically, this is what I miss most from improv theater. You physically inhabit the imaginary space in improv (there are exceptions like radio plays). In my experience, a lot of the scenes in roleplaying games have a weakly established "where." (It can help if games explicitly support assigning traits to locations.) The best RPG scenes have had "just enough" quick, concise narrative description and color to bring the scene alive but not too much to bog things down. The weakest almost always involve talking heads, lost in abstraction with no walls or props or anything to work with. I love when "where" is well defined. "Assets" have provided a lot of great props in my Leverage games. I (Strangely, in D&D 4E I find that the map usually limits "where" to what is physically visible on the table).
• Reincorporation. Reincorporation is another fundamental technique of improv. One description of improv acting is that the actor is like a person "walking backwards and remembering and reincorporating things that have been established along the way." I think of establishing a "frame" for the story, populating elements within it, and the farther you go, you're reusing elements more and adding fewer and fewer. I've hoped that the games of  Leverage I've played in would have awesome Wrap Up scenes with great uses of reincorporation but so far this hasn't happened. In my recent game of Freemarket, one of the players made repeated brilliant use of reincorporation. I was stunned, but it was really quite simple - she used what we had established at the table in previous moments instead of spending a lot of time trying to grab new ideas from some theoretical "clever" space, which is in a dimension rarely connection to our own (where my mind often tries to visit).

Finding Fun in Roleplaying Games (Part I)

This is the first in a series of posts I want to write about finding fun in pen-and-paper roleplaying games. Why do I play roleplaying games? What's fun about them? What's not fun?

A lot has been written about roleplaying game theory. The effort continues to understand the nature of roleplaying games and how to talk about them (e.g., in this recent forum thread). I've read a fair amount of the theory, and some of it has stuck with me and been practically useful including the ideas of Shared Imaginary Space, The Lumpley Principle, deprotagonizing, Czege Principle, types of storytelling authority, and the differences between Intent, Initiation, Execution, and Effect.

I'm not thinking about theory a lot these days. I'm more interested in reflecting upon my actual roleplaying experiences and making sense of them. What do I find fun? What don't I enjoy? What do I do well? Where do I struggle? How can I have more fun? It occurred to me that if I were to attempt to design a roleplaying game, I should start with thinking about what I find fun when playing (and not theory or clever mechanics). Not coincidentally, working in video games I have learned some things about fun and the challenge of finding it.

It is too late to write more tonight. In my next post I want to touch upon my recent experiences playing Leverage, Smallville, Little Fears, Hero System, and Freemarket and mention some things about  what I  try to bring from improv acting to roleplaying games.

Complexity at the Workplace

Reading Management 3.0 is a departure for me. I've never been enthused by the thought of being a manager or been interested reading books about management. Despite my reservations, I picked it up and started reading it because it's a Mike Cohn series book, has a forward by Robert Martin, and explicitly mentions "agile leadership" in the subtitle. When I saw that it had a section explaining complexity theory, it jumped to the top of my reading queue.
 
I've sprinkled Management 3.0 with copious post-it notes and highlighted sections. I think I'll have to read the book at least 2 more times to fully digest the material. There are several main points I've taken away so far and I want to more fully explore and understand:

1. Management and leadership can be interesting. I thought the subject of project management was as dull as particle board until I read "Agile Estimating & Planning" by Mike Cohn. In agile, I  found planning and scheduling tools that were useful and practical to my daily life as a software developer. Management 3.0 seems to provide the same for leadership and management: how to empower teams, develop competence, facilitate communication, etc.
2. "Agile" is a memeplex. I'd heard about "memes" but hadn't heard the term "memeplex." Memeplexes are groups of memes. Memes grouped together in a memeplex because they are more successful when "teamed up." A lot of the elements of "agile" development and management aren't new or magical, but they reinforce each other when combined. I find "agile" and "lean" development subsume a large number of useful tools and ideas that work well together. For me, they have been more easy to understand, remember, and communicate when grouped together.
3. Leadership isn't just the domain of managers. Reading Management 3.0 has helped me untangle the big ball of elements subsumed by "leadership"and "management." I have a better understanding of the roles and responsibilities of managers and the difference between "governance" and "leadership." I haven't been a supervisor with direct reports for much of my career.  However, I have been a leader. I have acted as an adviser, architect, coach, mentor, and "competence leader" frequently over the years. I will be much more effective and confident as I gain a better understanding of management, leadership, and authority.
4. "Management 1.0" pervades my thinking. Somewhere my brain wiring has equated strong leadership with telling people what to do and placed faith in  "command-and-control" management (Management 1.0). Despite all I've learned through study and experience, those biases still linger. Those biases feel young and immature. Management 3.0 is helping clear up the muddle and gain a better understanding of the nature of complex systems. It's a much bigger deal than I imagined, and I understand why it's at the core of the book.
5. Practices not processes. I like studying, thinking about, and designing processes. However, I've never liked the idea of being the "process guy" whose job it is to impose rigid processes (thinking in these terms relates to #4 above). I was delighted to learn about this article, Enough of Processes: Let's Do Practices. I've found the best way to implement Agile processes is to do it our own way at the studios I've worked at. I've also noticed that places that supposedly do agile "by the book," make (what are to me) obvious mistakes and run into problems.
6. Manage the system, Not the people. As a person who loves to think about and manage systems, my favorite sentence in Management 3.0 so far is, "Manage the System, Not the People." My (not fully formed) understanding is that the core of the book is to treat teams as self-organizing systems and the job of management is to develop, protect, and direct the system. Before I read this, I told a person that I have experience as a development director and project manager, "managing projects and not people." I don't think I'll say it that way again, and I have yet to finishing putting together my pitch. Whatever the job titles are called, my interest is definitely in managing systems (it was also my interest when I was a software engineer).

Performance Metrics at Work

I'm in the middle of reading Management 3.0, a book about Agile leadership and management. The book has been thought provoking, and I would like to think and write about dozens of different topics. The subject that I've been thinking about today is "Performance Metrics," measuring individual or group performance at work.

In my experience, Agile usually just focuses on team performance, e.g., the Balanced Scorecard method described in the book Succeeding with Agile. The author in Management 3.0 argues for measuring metrics at multiple levels of an organization including individuals, teams, and higher levels.

I've worked in the software industry for over 20 years, and I've only seen the use of reviews for individuals with annual corporate "performance reviews." It's an ritual I always despise, both as a manager having to do reviews and as a person being reviewed.  I despise the multiple choice "satisfactory / unsatisfactory" questions. Right now I'll get angry even trying to remember them.  I liked having of list annual objectives in theory, but they never worked in practice: 1) a year is a long time, and there was usually no review or follow-up during the year; 2) what I'd written at the beginning of the year was often irrelevant because the direction of the company had changed so radically in the intervening time. I would have liked to see reviews or metrics done at higher levels of the organization. The top management usually rolled out nonsense goals every year like my favorite from Spectrum Holobyte, "Ship hits on time."

It makes me wonder what a good individual performance review process would look like. I've heard of "360" reviews, which are mentioned in , Management 3.0 and that sounds like a good idea particularly if done in a group meeting. Among Management 3.0's 8 tips for measuring performance, I was most taken aback by

• "Never create ratings yourself: The value of your opinion as a manager about the performance of a person or a team is very, very, very small. ..."

Upon reflection, I find I agree with this. Direct interaction with my manager is often been a lot less significant and frequent than my other work relationships: customers of my code and tools, departmental directors I'm supporting, etc.

Individual evaluation criteria and performance metrics I've seen have almost always been qualitative. I'm curious what useful quantitative ratings for individual software developers could look like, e.g., for programmers, producers, artists, designers. I've never worked in sales so "dollar sales" has never been relevant. I've been a fan of various agile team measurements: velocity, burn-down and burn-up charts, etc. Without measurement, I find both self-discipline and continuous improvement to be more challenging.