Yes, And: Using improv tips to improve your game

Well, friends, I'm trying to get a gaming group together here in Wisconsin, made largely (entirel) of friends from the improv troupe I joined; I look forward to some fast and furious roleplaying action.

This puts me in mind of the Rules of Improvisation, which I think might be of some use to gamemasters worldwide. Here, now, are the Rules of Improv, which we should all keep close to our hearts:

1. Yes, And: "Yes, and..." is a magical phrase, full of potential and discovery. It acknowledges the offer you have just been given, then builds on it. "Yes, and" is the foundation of improv. It says to your scene partners (or players, as the case may be) "I trust you, and I accept the wrench you just threw at me;" it acknowledges that you and the players are building the world together, and it may give you things to think about.

In the game: "I cast detect arcana on the sword the Prince was using!" "I make a Notice roll" "I knock down the mayor!" may all seem like tiresome phrases; to first acknowledge and then build on these actions may enrich your game. "You detect faint strains of magic on the sword; the wizard knows this may simply mean it's very old and has been used to slay magical beasts in the past" is a great way to handle the first; yes there is magic and it's not a +5 Holy Avenger, but it's got a little history. "You quickly scan the room; there's a fireplace over there, lit, there's a table in the middle, and the orcs are all seated on solid-looking chairs" may lead to more questions about the environment, which leads to more interesting combat. "The mayor picks himself up and lowers the reward" acknowledges that player actions have consequences.

2. Don't play drunk or crazy: Onstage, this is a real problem; in RPGs, this is a little different (since it's fun to play drunk or crazy characters). Let's look at the reasons this rule exists: At the core of this rule is the concept of denial, that is, your scene partner rejecting the reality you've set up. Imagine we're in a scene where we're on the moon; if your scene partner then says you're having a hallucinogenic episode, then we've taken a step back - we're no longer on the moon, we've lost the characters and conflicts we established when we were on the moon. How's this work in roleplaying? Easy: The players only know what you tell them. If you give them unreliable information, expect them to act on it and get mad at you later.

3. Remember the Big Three: In improvisational theatre, you have about sixty seconds to establish the three things you fall back on: Relation, Location, and Motivation, or Who, Where, Why. It's impossible for the PCs to have any sense of purpose without all three of these coexisting.

• Relation: How do the characters know each other? Not just the PCs, but the NPCs: How do they know the player characters? Do the NPCs know each other?
• Location: Simply put, where are we? This is bigger than "Tarth" or "The Ten Towns." Location also informs the rules of the universe - is there magic? Are there feudal kingdoms? Is it the 30s? Are we balloons?
• Motivation: In RPGs, this is split into two umbrellas, "conflict" and "drive." Conflict is supplied by villains first and the party's machinations second; drive is fueled by allies first and the party second. Conflict represents what's at stake - a PC with a childhood foe may find her family in danger and move the party to act; drive represents the rewards and prestige the PCs receive for resolving conflicts.

4. Don't ask questions: Okay, so, I brought this up because it's one of the Rules of Improv. For roleplaying games, ignore it; it's totally cool to ask open-ended questions like "what the hell are you doing" because honestly the players should be answering this. Don't worry about this one.

5. You will look good if you make your partner look good: In improv, it's easy to look good and funny and charming. Hell, at least two of the people in the company got dates from audience members just from being awesome improvisers. The secret is to give your partner your trust, and to give them lots of offers.

Let me break this down a little: Your players take an interest in a the mysterious lake you intended to be a mere piece of scenery; now it's your job to tie this to whatever plot you had in mind. In the end, this makes you look much smarter than you are and gives the players something to talk about - because it turns out everything they did at said lake revealed pieces of the puzzle! In reality, it was just you, panicking, adjusting your adventure notes and encounters to the thing the players were interested in. You made the players look suave and intelligent; in turn, you look like you had everything under control.

Evaluating RPGs

EDIT: Tyson J. Hayes, not Jeff Carlsen, wrote the article in question. Sorry, guys.

Jeff Carlsen over at Apathy Games posted this article, which I found insightful. The point I was most excited by is that there's no agreed upon metric for RPG analysis; I also understand that everyone is out there trying to create their own experience, but once you have two thousand pretty intelligent pudgy white guys talking about the relative merits of their opinions you tend to get into trouble.

So how do we evaluate gaming in a way that we can objectively score?

Obviously, there are some things that are NOT shared by all groups:

• Fun: I always have fun with my games, but the kind of fun I have is different from what other groups are doing. We can safely count out "how much fun did you have" as a quantitative measurement of a game's worth.
• Roleplaying: Again, different groups get into this in different ways. We shouldn't slam a system for our own inability to roleplay - grognards, I am looking at you.

Then there are things we can evaluate based on a shared experience. As a control group, I suggested using some of the Pinnacle pregens with Pinnacle one-sheet adventures. Now we can start to look at things like:

• Do the pregens have the ability to get through the adventure? I know for one I'm always alarmed when there's not a single character with more than a d6 in combat skills. Call me crazy, but I like the tactical element myself; even if you aren't so into combat, you have to concede it's more fun to win a fight on the tabletop than to lose.
• Is the system an impediment to the story? This is a tricky one but I think it's worth mentioning. If you spend so much time looking up the rules that you forget what you're doing, then either the adventure needs work (calling up a bunch of esoteric seldom-used rules as it does) or it's not meant for the system.
• Is the story any good? Does it have a beginning, middle, and end; does it have a clear villain; does it have a clear reason for the PCs to be involved; does it change the world of the game in some way? As a player, I want to feel like my character matters. Some of these ideas go into my own bias about how world and adventures should be constructed, so I'm open to feedback.
• Is there a reason to drive forward? What's keeping the PCs from throwing up their hands and saying "nope, this can't be done?" What is at stake?

I think these are some of the ways we can evaluate a story, if not a game. This may lead, ultimately, to better stories, which should lead to better gaming experiences.

I just finished watching "Survival of the Dead," George Romero's latest effort. And I invented a drinking game to go along with it:

Every time there's an unresolved plot hook, take a drink!

Like most drinking games, it's designed to get you fucked up as expeditiously as possible.

What a Twist!

I've been working on a project for a while now, and I have had a thought that might make it more interesting and cinematic.

Here's where the thought came from: I hate the Adventure Deck. Hate it, hate it, hate it. It's ridiculous, game-breaking, and often runs my story off the rails. However, I do like the idea behind it, of mixing the game up and giving the players some more control.

So I thought, why not give it to the GM?

And then I thought, why not let the players choose when it gets used?

So I'm toying with the idea of a Twist Deck. The Twist Deck is a deck of cards the GM has which can be used by the players for risks and rewards. Currently, the idea is if a player spends a benny and the reroll succeeds with a raise, the player can keep the benny if she draws from the Twist Deck. The Deck would be different based on the game you're playing, but here's an example for Swarm on the Somme, a World War One-meets-Aliens campaign I've been working on with my brother.

Achtung!: A squad of German soldiers equal in force to the player characters plus allies shows up on the battlefield. Roll to determine their reaction.
How Could This Get Worse: An NPC ally is infected with alien larvae, which will later burst out of the poor sod at the worst possible time.
Fire!: A fire breaks out on the battlefield! It starts as 1d6 Small Burst Templates placed randomly. Check to see if they spread each round.
Gas! Gas!: Chlorine or mustard gas drifts onto the battlefield. It's a Medium Burst template that moves 1d8" randomly at the top of the round.
They Just Keep Coming!: A band of eight Drones, led by a Soldier, pour onto the field.
Heavy Rain: A rainstorm starts, reducing visibility to 6" for humans and 3" for most Bugs. Flying drones are grounded and gas is useless.
Stash: What luck! A cache of 1d10 potato mashers (German trenches), Mills bombs (British trenches), or rifle grenades (French trenches) is somewhere on the field.
Take It To The Maxim: A single Maxim gun is somewhere on the field. It is fully loaded and ready to fire.
Bad Luck: The GM gains a benny!
Tougher Than It Looks: One of the Swarm is promoted to a Wild Card instantly.
Out of Ammo: Damn this rationing! All allied Extras have their Ammunition reduced by one level.

There would be probably 3 of each of the "bad" cards and 2 of each "good" card, but you get the idea - plenty of options for making the battle more interesting and upping the stakes.

From Penny-Arcade

I am doing a bad thing here stealing words from another man but I found the following text, from today's Penny-Arcade, incredibly inspiring:

The high point of the show for my Mom was watching "Of Dice and Men" the first night. Playing host to dramatic theatre is not, strictly speaking, in the PAX charter. We talked about moving parts on Wednesday, but if you want to talk about some moving-ass parts, a stage performance constitutes an authentic whirligig. It takes some fucking balls to put on a show anywhere, let alone in a converted convention room. Something special must have happened in there, though, because people wanted to talk about it for the remainder of the show.

My mother has never entirely understood roleplaying. I don't intend to belabor the point, but when I was a young man it was the position of our church that Dungeons & Dragons held within it the clustered seeds of apostasy. She was so bewildered by what she had seen during Of Dice and Men that she made it a point to attend our D&D Live panel, where her son and his friends played this mysterious game on stage. The devil did show up, true, and we did go to hell, just as the clergy had suggested we might. Except in the actual version of events, as has happened so many times, we stood against the King of Lies at the very gates of his damned realm and emerged triumphant.

My mother came up to me after the panel was over, saying, "I'm sorry, Jerry. I'm sorry." She wiped the corner of her left eye with her thumb. "They told me it was something else."

Penny-Arcade changes lives in a very real sense. I was motivated to finally seek help and go on medication for anxiety after learning both creaters were actively using Lexapro. Hearing that someone could affect their own mother through their passion for games in such a deeply personal way really touched me.

More Ideas for Games that Won't Get Made

In The Gadget, you play as "The Gadget," a superhero cleaning up the streets in a world where traditional law enforcement has been banned in favor of "metas," men and woman with superpowers reporting to a government agency. People without powers are strictly forbidden from fighting crime, so there's no Iron Man or Batman at work in this world.

As The Gadget, you turn in criminals for cash which you use to upgrade your gear and you fight for XP which you can use to train in the standard attributes (fighting skill, strength, intelligence, endurance, speed).

Your gear is upgraded along many tiers in pseudo-scientific disciplines, such as Explosives (traps and bombs), Chemistry (gases and poisons), Electricity (ranged attacks and electrical control), Ballistics (guns and knives), and Pneumatics (exoskeletons and other devices like a grappling gun), which constitutes the main focus of the game.

The Gadget plays like a sandbox game, so you're free to build up a network of contacts and informants who give you missions once you do certain favors for them. There'd also be a small investigative component, enough to satisfy gamers who like solving puzzles but not enough to detract from the action-oriented flow of the game. A multiplayer mode is unlocked after you accomplish certain objectives, and it allows you to build up a character in advance and take on people with similar interests (eg, people who mostly play king of the hill or only play deathmatch) and similar skill levels (time played and win/loss records).

The story revolves around the Gadget making the streets a safer place first by cracking down on protection rackets and other criminals, then by addressing white-collar crime that traditional supers aren't equipped to handle, taking care of corruption in the metas, cracking a serial murder case, and finally facing off with a dangerous mutant which evolves in response to the gadgets you create.

Tarantino would be proud

I write violent adventures. I try my best to treat combat like a puzzle. This is partially because I'm invigorated by tactical exercises and partially because that's what my friends were used to - we all wanted violent, fun adventures because we're all action movie fans.

But how much is too much? And how much does authorial intent inform the level of violence in an adventure? For instance, I wrote an adventure that is one combat encounter stacked on top of another, repeated until the end. I wrote it to be unrelentingly violent, but I wonder if it was too much.

Has anyone got experience with ultraviolent adventures out there?