From: swann@acsu.buffalo.edu (Stephen Swann)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.misc
Subject: Re: Improvisation, do I do it?, do I not?
Date: 20 Aug 92 19:07:20 GMT
Organization: UB

In article <57311@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> jacobus@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Bryan J. Maloney) writes:
>Note that I am not asking whether or not I should improvise, I ask whether
>or not I actually DO improvise. 
> [...]
>I pre-plan backgrounds.  I settle areas.  I design inhabitants and their
>actions.  The PCs then interact with my designs as they will.  My world
>then responds to them, the PCs respond to the response, the world responds
>to the PC's counter-response, et cetera.  I do not pre-write plotlines, nor
>do I have predetermined directions I want my players to take. 

(1) You are improvising, because you aren't locking the players into an
expected pattern of behavior.  (Like a previous poster who said
"why do you throw a scenario at them if you don't know how they
will handle it?")

(2) You do the (only) kind of prep that I would do if I had the time &
inclination.  The only kind of prep that I really like.

>Instead, I try to make my world as detailed as I can--so much so that
>the players will nearly always have something to run into whatever
>they do.

Well, fortunately, my campaign has acquired a temendously detailed 
background "because of" improv playing.  Meaning that I have improv-
created so many areas/NPC's that most of the campaign is actually
pretty well defined and populated at this point.  :-)

>My players tend to make things very easy for me as well.  Their characters
>are rather three-dimensional, for the most part, and thus have motivations
>and goals.  This works in two directions:  First, their are the "ordinary"
>adversities they encounter on the way to their goals.  Second, there are
>those forces which actively seek to thwart their goals.  There is also a
>good-sized "shit happens" factor in my world, wherein I decide that it is 
>time for the big, bad world to intrude uninvited into the PC's lives.

Heh.  I generally think in terms of what the big bad world is up to,
while the characters are trying to "do their thing".  The result is
that often reality :-) comes crashing in through their ceiling.

>This makes my world an ongoing dynamic, temporally seamless (or as seamless
>as is possible).  I would have to say that my world does not have discrete
>"adventures", but the whole thing is one enormous serial story. 

Yup.  Same idea here.

>In fact, one player even commented upon that fact last time we played.
>He said that the whole world felt "real"--he explained that he meant
>that the world didn't have the jarring episodic feel that other worlds
>he had played in possessed--worlds run on a more plot-driven or
>"adventure" model.

I think of those "other" campaigns as being a more primitive form of
RPGing, a throwback to the days when Dungeons&Dragons really was
about just that - hopping from dungeon to dungeon, with intervals
between where you went to some abstract "town" and traded treasure 
for more supplies.

>Anyway, I'm not saying that my way is better, just that my players and I
>seem to like it.

Well, my own thinking on the subject is similar except that I would
go so far as to say that I dislike adventure/plot-driven campaigns,
except for an occasional brief diversion, because they seem "contrived"
to me.

>But, on the subject at hand--improvisation.  I would have to say that I
>do improvise, 100%, and I NEVER improvise, not at all.  What I mean is that
>I put a good deal of work into my settings and backgrounds, but I let
>the plot go where it will. 

Well, I see your point, except for one little thing - there is no such
thing as NO improvisation.  :-) You can't possibly have written up
your campaign in sufficient detail to take into account ever possible
and potentially important detail of the scenario.  Not unless you know
the location of every single loose paving stone in every city in your
campaign, and every knothole in every piece of wood in every building,
and every article of clothing on every living person, etc etc etc...

Of course equally true (as Chadd, I think pointed out to me quite
insistently :-) is that there is no such thing as pure improvisation,
because ideas are always cooking on the back burners of your mind.  :-)

>"Gee, does that mean that you're being dominated by your players?"
>Well, I'll tell you, Sphincter Boy, it doesn't feel that way.

The whole idea of the players "controlling my scenario" because I'm
making it up on the fly just cracks me up.  The people saying these
things have just never witnessed my campaign in session.  :-)

-- 
Steve Swann                 |    Speak to me in many voices; make
swann@acsu.buffalo.edu      |      them all sound like one...  -BOC
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.misc