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).
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