More On New Choices & Roleplaying

A friend made several excellent points about the improv game "New Choice" and making stronger choices. Her comments got me reconsidering the way I was thinking about choices. I know there's always the risk of being partially or completely wrong when I write about something, but that's part of the reason I'm writing.

I'm not entirely sure what the instructional value is of the game New Choice (also called Bell & Buzzer). When played it, I thought it was about learning to make stronger choices. As my friend points out, it might be seen as tool for getting out of ruts, e.g., reusing the same locations again and again. How many scenes to you want to see in the kitchen or a park? It might also be an exercise to give "'permission' to improvisers to explore extreme states."

I'm rethinking the importance of coming up with "strong choices" (aka strong offers). My friend reminded me that I seen a lot of amazing improv moments where "dull" offers were accepted and built upon and made into great scenes. Those moments may outnumber the number of scenes made great by strong offers. I've also seen a lot of dull scenes that started with strong offers. It's ultimately about the teamwork and chemistry of the players.

I can't say I've played in a lot of roleplaying games with great chemistry and teamwork, except maybe in tactical battles destroying groups of monsters. I've experienced group chemistry playing scenes in improv. My effort now might be better spent listening to other players' "offers" and building upon them than thinking about "New Choice" or obsessing about character. I think it's still good "blurt." Whether players look at my offers and make "Yuck" faces is out of my control, but I can work to listen and help make other people shine.

After obsessing about improv and roleplaying, I'm now busy reading books about project management. I finished Management 3.0 a few days ago, and I got through another excellent book, Kanban. I now want to read more about lean development so I'm going to tackle The Principles of Product Development Flow after I read Project Management That Works. Whew!

New Choices & Roleplaying

I've been reading this thread on story-games.com about "Try A Different Way" in the game Archipelago. As I and Graham mention in our posts, there is a game in improv, "New Choice," where someone rings a bell and an improvisor needs to make a new choice during a scene.  To take Graham's example,

"This steak is undercooked."   (dull)
[Bell rings]
"This steak is overdone."        (the opposite, dull)
[Bell rings]
"This isn't a steak at all."       (trying to be creative, dull)
[Bell rings]
"I am a steak-pervert. Bring me seventeen juicy..."   (trying to be creative, dull)
[Bell rings]
"My steak just talked to me."   (something to work with!)
[Bell doesn't ring, scene continues.]

The intent is to practice blurting from the sub-conscious and finding stronger choices. It's not for one player to say to another "That's bad." You can accept the other choices, but they are weak. For awhile I've wondered if this could be used in roleplaying, either through structured statements like used in Polaris and Archipelago or maybe using a resource system like spending "fan mail."

Someone else in the thread suggests that most games he's played have something like "Try A Different Way" when people say,

"Oh! No Wait! I know! How about something more like this?"

Thiis is different than "New Choice."  Sometimes the new idea is a "Yes, and..." that builds upon the player's original choice, e.g., "Yes, the steak is speaking with the voice of your dead lover !" Often, the new idea offered is something entirely different .

This is an area where  improv and roleplaying are different.  In my experience, weak choices can be made in improv and they are accepted. If possible, they are built upon and otherwise may be dropped because they don't go anywhere. The players are acting and putting on a performance. In roleplaying, players aren't always talking in-character and the group's narration of the story can take many forms. Taking the Dust Devils description of Regular Play (outside of Conflicts) as an example:

The Dealer [GM] and the players talk freely among one another, and everyone has the opportunity to make suggestions about what happens, to talk with each other as characters would talk, to add details to the scene, and to create a story together. Players can request scenes or alter the story, even aggressively. ... However, during regular play, the Dealer has final say in what happens.

Generally, players have narrative authority over their characters' actions and dialog, which is something roleplaying has in common with improv. Depending on the game, players can also be called upon to frame scenes or narrate the outcome to conflicts.When the spotlight shifts to player and he or she needs to make a choice, one of the following can happen:

1. The player quickly steps up with a strong choice and everyone is satisfied and play flows smoothly
2. The player quickly steps up with a decent choice and someone suggests a better idea before play moves on. The player can accept or reject it. A discussion might ensue.
3. The player quickly steps up with a weak choice that people see he's clearly not entirely satisfied with and people make suggestions
4. The player doesn't have an idea, maybe after a pause, and asks for suggestions
5. The player is quiet and slow coming up with an idea and people jump in with suggestions

Perhaps because of my experience with improv, #1 is what I always want to happen when called upon. For me, #1 and #2 happen less likely than I'd like. It might be for any number of reasons like if I'm having a bad day (I need to watch out for H.A.L.T.), playing a game that isn't right for my tastes, don't have a handle on my character, or perhaps I'm just in my head and using my intuition (perhaps because I'm anxious and focused more on playing "well" than having fun). I think the last reason is probably the most frequent, which is why I'm interested how well "New Choice" could work in roleplaying. The narrating player can "blurt" and other players can call for a new choice, helping the narrating player without having to throw out ideas of their own.

In my experience, #5 above is the worst for me to do. When I do this too much, what results is 1) the GM or players get in the habit of immediately offering suggestions if I pause and sometimes before I have an opportunity to speak; and maybe 2) my engagement with the other players decreases quite a bit and I end up in the spotlight less often.

So just as in improv, I find it's a bad idea in roleplaying to spend time being quiet, trying to think of a strong choice. At best, if you are playing with friends who give you the space, the play often stalls.

I want to find a away for there to continue to be engagement at the table when #3 and #5 happen and for the game to keep flowing. My current working theory is that, absent a mechanism like "New Choice," I really need to get into the habit of blurting from my intuition.

The best case scenario for #3-#5 is that a strong idea is offered (maybe following an engaged discussion) , the player chooses it, and play continues to flow smoothly. I can get stuck when there are a lot of ideas or time passes and none of the ideas are clearly strong choices, i.e,., "Oh yes! That's right!"

What to do? The best I can think of is to pick the strongest idea, fully commit to it by narrating as colorfully as you can, build upon as much as you can, and keep things moving forward. I believe this is something I just need to practice (like having the courage to blurt).

Roleplaying Flow

Today offered up another outstanding blog post by one of my favorite bloggers and writers about roleplaying, Rob Donoghue: A Framework of Faces.

Everything in the game has faces. Bring those faces to life, and the game takes care of itself.

The idea that there's time for characters to "settle in" and improvisation can take over is what captured my imagination when I got into "indie roleplaying" several years ago. I was bringing hopes and expectations from improv theater, and I was looking for something quite different than the traditional roleplaying I'd done in the 80s and 90s. I was looking for character-driven play and improvisation.

Rob is speaking as a GM, but I don't know how often I've experienced "critical mass" as a player and I certainly haven't as a novice GM. A lot of my roleplaying experience in the last several years has either been traditional RPGs (e.g., D&D 3.5/4.0) or conventions in one-shots. At conventions, you create your character and charge ahead as fast as you can. Sometimes I have a hard time keeping track of all of the characters, PCs and NPCs. I'm often tongue-tied and breathless and definitely not "settled in."

After reading Rob's post, I reflected upon my Getting Lost in Narrative post. In addition to "peak experience" moments I also enjoy experiencing "flow." I have great memories of peak experiences, but they usually happened in the context of "flow."

Getting Lost in Narrative

Holy cow, I've spent days trying to write a post about narrative in improv and roleplaying. I keep starting, stopping, and starting over. Being me, I also couldn't help picking up a couple of cool books - one by Orson Scott Card and another about screenplay writing (it's Mike Stout's fault).

It was much easier for me to write about character. Character has always been my primary interest in both improv and roleplaying. In both, I learned that I need to know how to play strong characters with well-defined abilities, beliefs, and goals before I can create interesting stories. I can and probably should write more about character (with examples and maybe pictures).

Thinking about narrative is proving a useful exercise for me since I've been pondering definitions of words like 'narrative', 'story', and 'plot' in ways I haven't since high school English classes. I haven't even gotten to 'theme' or 'genre' yet.

I've never thought much about plot in either improv and roleplaying games. I don't think I ever heard the word "plot" mentioned once in improv. You are extemporaneously creating a plot when playing either short form or long form formats in improv. I suppose certain games or genre work may provide a loose structure, e.g., a crime is committed, there's an investigation, there's a confrontation with the bad guy at the end, etc.

I think the main reason I haven't thought about plot is that I'm not interested in thinking ahead and "plotting." I have a hard enough time "not thinking," playing the character, and being in the moment. I really enjoy it most when there's no "wrong" place for the story go to. In the section on long form improv in Acting on Impulse, Carol Hazenfield writes:

There is no preordained "right place" for any story to go... There's no such thing as "The Story" existing in its entirety in advance of the end of the show.

In improv, you focus on one moment and one scene at a time. The audience can very forgiving of broken stories if there are great characters, scenes, and moments. I've watched probably over 200 improv shows, and I can't remember a single "plot." I do remember great characters, scenes, and moments where I said, "Wow."  A couple of memories from years ago:

• In LA theater sports, I remember a scene with a bunch of young single characters in a hot tub. It was funny but the characters also expressed genuine emotion that fit the moment perfectly.
• In Theater Roulette in SF, I remember a criminal gang with the most amazing collection of personalities, particularly a not very smart thief (Theatre Roulette was a short lived group I believe formed out of Carol Hazenfield's classes [EDIT: It was actually a class by Gerri Lawler, one of my favorite improvisors.]).

That's what I'm also looking for in roleplaying. When all is said and done, looking back on the game, a solid "plot" is just nice to have.

It occurs to me that I haven't really enjoyed roleplaying game sessions when I've put an "author" hat on and plotted things out in advance or in lieu of actually playing. I prefer it when there's scene framing and you just "go."
 
I don't think this is at all the last word about plot and its creation:

• I'm most concerned about characters and being in the moment, but it's still the case that we're creating a plot during play.

• In improv you can practice genre work,  which can provide more than "trappings." Directed improv can have a player who isn't playing any characters.

• Roleplaying games can provide a lot of support for structuring stories, e.g., games like Burning Wheel, Grey Ranks, and Leverage. Also, some games with GMs (like Smallville), the GM isn't necessarily playing NPCs who are pivotal to the story.

Fail Faster

Paul Tevis' blog post today captures the mind set of improvisation pretty well. There are a lot of skills to practice in improv, but the most important to practice is taking a leap and "going in" with eyes wide open.

"Nope, screw it. I'm going in."

In retrospect, I wish I had practiced it a lot more back in my improv days. Staying safe has been a hard habit to break. I used to frequently repeat the improv mantra "Dare to fail." Now I prefer the mantra I learned from game design, "Fail faster."

In "Finding Fun (Part IV)" I'm going to dare to briefly dip my toe into the subject of roleplaying and narrative. Libraries of books have been written about narrative including books with charts and graphs. I just picked up Robin Law's book, "Hamlet's Hit Points", which I plan on reading soon. Maybe this time the theory of turning points, rising action, and denouements will stick in my head better than it has in the past. Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey" has managed to stick with me pretty well, probably thanks to Bill Moyers.

For wisdom about narrative and roleplaying, there are people much wiser than me including Rob Donoghue, John Kim, among others. Next post I'll say what I can based upon what I've learned from improv and roleplaying.

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.