From: dfrancis@tronsbox.xei.com (Dennis Heffernan)
Subject: Re: Improvisation!
Organization: Xanadu Enterprises Inc.
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 06:29:06 GMT

In article <1992Aug19.143910.13887@solix.udac.uu.se> magnus@nexto.udac.uu.se (Magnus Ring) writes:
|I think the GM job is to respond to the players actions. If the  
|players go another
|way that you anticipated you have to be able follow that way. In a  
|Hack'n'Slash
|game it's rather easy to prepare the lines a game will follow but  
|when you play
|Story Telling or Role Playing you need to respond a lot more to the  
|players actions. You can't expect to be able to prepare all the ways  
|the players can take 
|the adventure.

	ALL of them?  No, not hardly.  MOST of them?  You bet.  The ones that I
think they'll take based on how they've performed in the past?  You can bet
your lungs on it.

	As I said in the beginning, I consider improvisation to be a necessary
evil.  Hey, I've got a scenario on the pad here that probably won't have ANY
plot to it.  It sets up a situation that will give the player the
opportunity to deal with a loose end from a previous thread.  Ultimately,
all I can do with this is write up the dramatis personae, set the scene, and
then wait and see which way he jumps.  This will work because there is no
mystery to solve, or a villainous plot to defeat, or even a timetable of
events that must occur.  It is entirely character-driven...but you can bet
the ranch that I'll have those characters nailed down COLD.  Every bit of
preparation that can be done, will be done...and this is for a BBS game,
where I really CAN make it up as I go along because I have hours to plan my
every move.  I'll improvise what I have to, but no more.  Saying you won't
improvise anything is silly...but so is trying to improvise EVERYthing.


|OK. Say you have your properly written mystery with a lot of clues  
|and stuff
|for the players to find in proper places. After a while you find that  
|your players
|never locate any of the main clues. They get into numerous useless  
|sidetracks
|(some of wich you might not have any prepared material for).
|Here you have two choises. You could let the players drift of and  
|never get closer
|to the solution. Hardly much fun for anybody. Your second choise is  
|to start pushing the players in the right direction. That, IMHO,  
|would be 'changing reality'. I think this would really offend me as a  
|player.

	Real simple answer:  THEY FAIL.  The crime goes unsolved; justice is
not served; the perp walks.  And he'll probably rub their noses in it on the
way out...after all, the only real penalties for failure in an RPG are death
and disgrace, and the former is way too final.  This is happening in my
campaign even as we speak; in one thread (a fairly typical drug-dealer
scenario) the players are flopping around without much of a clue, and in the
other ("The Killer Out Of Space" from Cthulhu Now, being run in a GURPS
Supers game....) the player is being a total moron; after an important NPC
(General Drako, for those with the module) made it perfectly clear that he
wasn't going to take any bull, the player mouthed off at him.  I did
improvise a save here, since being stuck in jail would have been tantamount
to a death sentence, but his karma meter is on the floor now, and it's very
unlikely that he'll be able to achieve the personal goals that lead him to
the scenario in the first place (a subplot I added to the module).

	Leaving MODE_ANECDOTE, there has to be a reasonable chance of failure
in order for success to have any meaning whatsoever.  Improvised scenarios
basically boil down to the GM letting the players flop around for a while,
then delivers the answer.  There's not much chance that they'll fail; that
would be "hardly much fun".  This is why I hate them.  I want victory
because I EARNED it, not victory by fiat.  It's like cheating at
solitaire...pointless.

	Alternately, some brave (or sadistic) improv GM's might decide NOT to
hand over the answer and let the players fail, but this is just as bad.  I
want to fail because I FAILED, not have defeat inflicted upon me.  I'll go
insult the college football team if I want to get beaten up by overwhelming
force.

|I think you missed the whole point with improvisation. There is no  
|reality for the GM to change until you made your action. The GM  
|respond to what you do. There is nothing saying what you do has to be  
|the right solution. The GM is still free to think your action was the  
|wrong one if he likes to.

	Right:  there is no right answer to the problem, so my actions are
meaningless.  Imagine "solving" a Rubik's Cube that changed color so that no
matter how you turned it, it came up right.  Why bother?


dfrancis@tronsbox.xei.com   ...uunet!tronsbox!dfrancis     GEnie: D.HEFFERNAN1
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