gamesandrants

Kia Ora improvisers

Today's Topic: On the fly

As a GM, I tend to do very little prep. I lie to have a couple of ideas about where things might go, but I am most interested in taking things where the characters dictate. In a one-shot, I might bring in a possible idea for a main plot, but abandon it completely when someone makes a character that gives me an "aha" moment (I find this happens most of all in Monsterhearts). I very much appreciate games that specifically allow me to run the game with no preparation at all. In order to help me run games that can change around a lot or include a great deal of improvisation, here are some things that can really come in handy.

Use the players: There are a number ways of doing this, and you can do multiple in one game! Firstly, you can ask the players questions at the beginning of the game, perhaps as character questionnaires or have a list of questions about the scenario or situation, asking one to each player. You can also ask questions during the game. It helps for these to be quite leading questions. "You hear a chilling noise. What does it remind you of?"

Name lists: This is a small one but extremely helpful for creating NPCs quickly. In my recent Cane Hill Monsterhearts game, I named each NPC after a wing of the asylum. Having the list there was very useful and the themed names really helped to link everything together.

A map: You can find all kinds of maps online, and the best part is that you don't even have to label it or decide what goes where. You can ask the players! To be fair, you can create a map from scratch with the players as well, but both are fun.

Index cards: Everything the players say or do is valuable, so keep notes. You will be able to find ways for it to come back to bite them later. It also always sucks when you come up with a good NPC and can't quite remember their name when you need them again.

If you want to learn more about improvising your RPGs, I highly recommend reading Unframed. It contains a tonne of essays by some very prominent GMs and game creators and is definitely worth a read. I learned a LOT!

What I'm playing

I just got to play Questlandia for the first time and absolutely loved it! It combines things that I love about a whole bunch of my favourite games. It feels a bit Fiasco, a bit The Quiet Year and a bit Microscope, and adds dice pool allocation, which I am desperate for more of in RPGs (I'll go into that some more in a future blog). It is a GMless game that focuses on worldbuilding as you play key figures in a declining fantasy kingdom of your own design. The book is well written and laid out, and it is definitely a game I will be able to bust out in a wide range of situations. Although it is GMless, I could see myself acting as a dedicated GM rather than a PC for a group of newer players.
The different aspects of the game combine well to give you plenty to get started with and build tension as you make tough decisions with that dice pool allocation I mentioned earlier. At the end of our play through, we felt very satisfied with the story we had collectively told and the world we had created.

I ran a very short lived but fun "campaign" of 7th Sea, set in their South American analogue, Aztlan. It was supposed to be significantly longer, but issues with player commitments meant that it had to be cut short at just two sessions. Somehow, I feel like I did manage a pretty satisfying conclusion, tying together a lot of loose threads and making a suitably epic final encounter. I'm a bit sad that it didn't get to continue, but the finale went a long way to making sure I was at peace with it. I probably won't attempt 7th Sea as the next campaign I run, but I am pretty desperate to actually get to play in it myself at some point.

I've also been playing some tactical miniatures games, notably Imperial Assault and Zombicide. Both are pretty great fun. They sort of bridge a gap between RPG and board game. This is a gap I want to continue to explore (as hinted earlier, I'll be blogging about that in the future).

Here's a thing

I made this quite some time ago, but it fits well with the "Improv" theme of today. I still think it's a LARP, but others say it's really more of a long form Improv format. Either way, I have played it a bunch and enjoyed it every time. It is based on a play of the same name by my favourite writer of all time, Philip Ridley.

Brokenville


Ciarán