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Thrawn4
2017-12-19, 02:28 PM
Hello everyone,
I thought it might be nice if we shared some tricks and techniques about the perhaps most important skill of DMing: improvising.

You probably know this situation: The PCs are relaxing in a tavern.
"What does it look like?" the players ask.
"A square room with chairs and tables."
"Okay... any people there?"
"There is the innkeeper."
"Slow day, huh? Alright, I go over to him and introduce myself. 'Hello good sir, my name is Mandrake. What do they call you?' "
"Bob."
How to come up with interesting details and names that add flavour to the plain facts? Although a DM can plan ahead, there are limits to predicting the actions of the PCs (gross understatement).
So for fun and profit, here are my two cents:

Improvising just takes a little practice. You really don't need much to create a vivid scene. In most cases, two or three details are enough, and you can just elaborate those if necessary. Just boldly grab some ideas that come to your head, even if they seem kind of stupid at first glance.

So let's say the PCs are in said tavern. What does it look like? I am sure we all could give a detailled description if we had enough time, but neither is this the case nor do we need a complete description. Instead, I just add one or more random details, for example: There is a broken table in the corner and it smells of fish. Or: There is a huge painting behind the bar and the floor creaks when you walk over it. There are dozens of mental images in my head, and I randomly choose a few.
If the players want to investigate them, that's fine. By the time they say so I can come up with some explanation for the painting or the broken table. Most things are there for a simple reason: Maybe the picture is a drawing from the innkeepers wife or the price for tomorrow's drinking contest. If you feel bold, you can add some quirky details. Maybe the painting shows the hero of a local legend or is adored by the innkeeper despite its horrid quality.
The same is true for random people. Just add one or two details like equipment, facial expression, appearance, occupation or clothing. Suddenly the tavern is occupied by a "man" with a "sullen glance" and a "letter" and a "bald" woman "lying on the floor". Are any of these things connected? Maybe. While the players decide whether they want to get involved, you can just lean back and pick the reason you want.

Names are slightly different. With some practice, you can just combine some random syllables to create a fantasy name, but often it is helpful to have a list of names to choose from.

Airk
2017-12-19, 03:14 PM
Coming up with descriptions barely even qualifies as "improvisation" in my mind. I mean for bob's sake, are you putting the PCs in a location without the faintest mental picture of what it looks like? Picture it in your mind and throw out a few random details. "The walls are wood, and the ceiling is low - if you're too tall you might hit your head on one of the beams. There's not much light, except for the fire in the fireplace." People now have at least some idea of what the room looks like. If they need more details because they have something in mind, they can ask more specific questions.

Similarly, you should really just be extrapolating from what you already know if you're asked about people. What time is it? If it's dinnertime or a bit after, things are probably busy, if it's 2pm, probably less so. What kind of inn is this? Is it mostly a gathering place for locals, describe mostly locals, if it's big stopover for travelers, show off some of the sorts of cool people who would be there.

Honestly, 90% of "improv" isn't "making stuff up" it's just extrapolating from what you already know.

Darth Ultron
2017-12-19, 06:52 PM
Well, ''Improvising'' is such a bad word for this as it does not really fit. We really need a unique RPG word for ''Quick Spontaneous Creation'' .

And at least half of this is just natural skill: the ability to do Quick Spontaneous Creation.

And the other half is a skill you can learn.

After years and years of Dming, I can make up stuff in the blink of an eye. What is in the tavern? Oh, well, let me type out 100,000 words and you tell me when to stop....

My tips would be:

1. Travel. You don't need to travel the world, just go anywhere that is not Wal Mart, McDonalds or the like. Country places are the best as they closely fit ''old time'' things. The store Mary Beth's Hidden Treasures is a lot like a typical store in a fantasy setting, minus the air conditioning, electric lights, and the website. Go see barns, stables, houses, shops and stores and whatever else you can. Of course, any historical place is great (like say the home of any US president) or even recreations of things(like I went and saw the Bounty several times before it sank).

2.Read/Watch a lot of Books/TV/Movies. And not just one narrow topic, but try get a broad selection. Things like the History channel are great here, as are books about history.

3.Learn how to Write You don't need to take a writing course(but it is still a good idea ) but you should understand how to describe things and word things and other wise use language.

Then you just need to put it all together.

So for a tavern, in a pinch, I can describe The Hungry Bear restaurant. Or any of a hundred others. But you don't want to just stop there...you want to take bits and pieces of each place and put them together. And don't stop there, as you can still add things from real life history or any fiction you have seen or read. All together to make a unique place.

And you can do the same thing with people.

Jay R
2017-12-19, 11:06 PM
Well, ''Improvising'' is such a bad word for this as it does not really fit. We really need a unique RPG word for ''Quick Spontaneous Creation'' .

That term is almost as bad. The ideal situation is to be ready for the questions, so you don't need to create spontaneously.

The first and most important part of that is to have an image in your head, so that you have a reference to use when questions come in.


And the other half is a skill you can learn.

Oh, yes. Absolutely.


After years and years of Dming, I can make up stuff in the blink of an eye. What is in the tavern? Oh, well, let me type out 100,000 words and you tell me when to stop....

My tips would be:

1. Travel. You don't need to travel the world, just go anywhere that is not Wal Mart, McDonalds or the like. Country places are the best as they closely fit ''old time'' things.

This is crucial. Many of the places where important encounters have occurred in my games are spots at Philmont Scout Ranch. If you ask me for details about a location, I will shut my eyes, remember what there is at Burn Meadow, or the Tooth of Time, or Cathedral Rock, or the Contention mine, and I will answer the question - because I know that place.


2.Read/Watch a lot of Books/TV/Movies. And not just one narrow topic, but try get a broad selection. Things like the History channel are great here, as are books about history.

Fiction is just fine - if you use it. You can set an encounter in Moria, or on the deck of the Arabella, or at Tara, or at the Cliffs of Weyr, and you know exactly what it's like.

I once had an ambush in a pass that was pretty much based on the location I had just seen in a Lone Ranger episode.


3.Learn how to Write You don't need to take a writing course(but it is still a good idea ) but you should understand how to describe things and word things and other wise use language.

Very true. I haven't had a "writing course", but I've had several literature courses, including ones on Tolkien and Shakespeare.

I can't imagine how somebody could enjoy being a DM who doesn't enjoy writing.

how it can be done.]

Jormengand
2017-12-19, 11:27 PM
I can't imagine how somebody could enjoy being a DM who doesn't enjoy writing.

how it can be done.]

I play D&D, including DMing, precisely because I don't like how frightfully monodirectional writing is.

LordEntrails
2017-12-19, 11:51 PM
When you are stuck, pull from what you know.

Describe a bar or restaurant you've been too. Describe the innkeeper as a teacher you have/had. Take people and places from movies, no one will figure it out.

The big bad evil guy? Describe Vin Diesel or someone else from your favorite movie. No one will pick up on it unless you give obvious clues (he has a tattoo on the back of his neck "xXx"...

LordEntrails
2017-12-19, 11:52 PM
Oh, and keep a list of names next to you. Male, female, places, etc

JellyPooga
2017-12-20, 04:33 AM
The biggest and most important thing about improvisational GMing is to have focus. It's all well and good being able to describe a scene off the cuff, or jury-rig an encounter on the fly, but if it doesn't achieve progress in terms of the over-arching plot or even the short-term goals of the party, then the game can swiftly fall down the hole of mediocrity. Too many disconected, unrelated or diversionary encounters or descriptions will make your players believe that nothing their characters are doing is actually achieving anything. Keep it on track; every scene needs to drive the story somewhere, even if it's something that isn't picked up on until much later (e.g. "remember that weird side-quest with that dude with yellow boots when we got those magic swords? Yeah, turns out those swords are, like, the only thing that can hurt the big bad." "Sweet!"). Keep a log of your campaign and use previous scenes every now and then to influence your improv, but don't keep your players waiting too long on too many things, though, or you end up with the same result as being completely unfocused; disinterested players and no cohesive story.

In short; look forward, look back and make sure the path makes some kind of sense.

Jay R
2017-12-20, 03:30 PM
I play D&D, including DMing, precisely because I don't like how frightfully monodirectional writing is.

"Monodirectional" in what sense? If you are claiming that writing eventually ends in a single place, having followed a single path to get there, then that's a characteristic it shares with any D&D adventure.

If you mean that one one direction was ever considered, well, I don't write that way.

Jormengand
2017-12-20, 05:33 PM
"Monodirectional" in what sense? If you are claiming that writing eventually ends in a single place, having followed a single path to get there, then that's a characteristic it shares with any D&D adventure.

If you mean that one one direction was ever considered, well, I don't write that way.

Games are the greatest artwork because they can react to the players' reaction to them. Writing (along with drawing, music, and even film) suffers from the fact that it says something, but can't listen to a response and say something else. That's the sense in which it's too monodirectional.

Jay R
2017-12-20, 10:17 PM
Games are the greatest artwork because they can react to the players' reaction to them. Writing (along with drawing, music, and even film) suffers from the fact that it says something, but can't listen to a response and say something else. That's the sense in which it's too monodirectional.

This theory implies that threads like this one (which react to forum readers' reaction to them) are inherently greater art than the works of Shakespeare, Homer, Dickens, Faulkner, or any other great author, which don't.

I find this literary theory ... unconvincing. Or at least insufficiently documented.

But we don't need to agree. the fact that you enjoy being a DM and don't enjoy writing. Absolutely disproves my thesis.

I will adjust to accept the new data. Ahem:

DMing seems so closely related to writing (in my mind) that I don't really understand those DMs who enjoy DMing but not writing.

[This statement is about the limits of my understanding, not an objective statement about DMing. Looking back, I see that technically, so was the first one. "I can't imagine how somebody could enjoy being a DM who doesn't enjoy writing."]

In any event, enjoy DMing the way you do, even if I don't really understand it.

Darth Ultron
2017-12-20, 11:07 PM
DMing seems so closely related to writing (in my mind) that I don't really understand those DMs who enjoy DMing but not writing.


First, by learning how to write I'm mostly talking about the abilities to create out of nothingness and how to describe things. And not just the ability to describe things, but to really make the descriptions come alive.

The rest comes from the mistaken wacky wrong idea that the DM does very little in the game, and somehow the amazing players do everything and create the whole game world and the DM just watches in awe. Or even worse, that the player called DM is exactly like the other players and everyone just group hugs and everyone(except that player called DM) makes the amazing game experience together.

Of course the above is just silly. The DM does 95% of the creation/improvising/world creating and all of the players together do all of 5%.

Just take the tavern example: The DM makes and describes the tavern, all the people in it, and the whole world around it and everything else. Each player says maybe a whole line of something like "Bork the Barbarian buys a drink!" So you can see the clear 95/5% here. But sure you can give the players equal or more shared credit for creation/improvising/world creating.

martixy
2017-12-20, 11:08 PM
@Jay R
a) You're moving the goalposts, and
b) I tend to agree with Jormengand, with the slight caveat of better wording. Games are the greatest artwork medium for the reason he described, simply because the notion of "interactivity" is more powerful than any other medium's schtick.
But it's apples to oranges here. They all excel at different things.

ImNotTrevor
2017-12-20, 11:39 PM
I'll go in on the above.
Games are better at being experiential because... they are. You experience the thing in a much more direct way than just reading about it.

Here's the other thing:
When I pick up a book? The last page is already written.
When I start up a campaign? No idea where I'm going. And that's when I'm GMing.

On Improv:

I love having GM tools for this for the same reason I imagine plumbers bring their tool kits with them to every job.

My favorite system is Apocalypse World, precisely because of its great tools!

It includes a bunch of great GMing tips on its own that I use all the time suxh as:

-turn the question back on the players. Ask THEM setting questions and write them down. This is doubly effective when the characters have a sort of "home base" to inquire about.
I usually ask things like:
What are the people of this town most boastful of?
What are the people of this town most ashamed of?
There's this guy in town who nobody really trusts. What's his name?
You see someone walking towards you who's mere presence has made your day worse. Who is it and why the hard feelings?

-keep a list of names handy

-write out the goals of the various factions, and what they will accomplish provided the PCs do nothing.

- have some very vague planned reactions for when PC plans go awry. Things like:
Separate them
Put them in a spot
Make them pay
A faction makes a move

Things like that. I use them in both literal and metaphorical senses.

LordEntrails
2017-12-21, 01:08 AM
@Jay R
a) You're moving the goalposts, and

Good for him :) I thought it showed a great sign of maturity and self-confidence to state that what he said before wasn't accurate and this discussion had changed the way he thought about things.

As for writing vs. roleplaying; I think people like Jay see writing differently than people like martixy. Myself, when I start to write a story, I do not know where it will end or what the last page will say. It develops as the story develops. Yes I guide things by deciding what happens, but I am still surprised at times by how a story I write ends. Perhaps a lot of that is because I write like a roleplayer; I create a character and through situations at them and then try and figure out what happens.

Guizonde
2017-12-21, 02:41 AM
i'm another of those dm's who don't like writing. i've got a mild case of a.d.d. (the disorder, not the rpg) and it frustrates me to no end to actually have to spend time writing down what is all done in my head. so instead of writing, i'll think. i'll grab anything: friend, family, significant other, hell, even a teddy bear (but that is usually for working out kinks in my story) and tell them the vague details and ask to critique it.

i'm a storyteller, not a writer. i can do writing but as judged by my grades in college, i excel at talking more than writing.

so if you're like me and writing isn't your thing... think. work on your memory training. do memory enhancing exercises. take notes, doodle pictures as you see fit, but most importantly get a story that flows naturally and won't fall into either a stereotypically banal story or a complete ass-pull of a tale (that can be a good story to tell at the pub, but not playing dnd).

i always go back to the fundamental questions of the journalist: who, what, when, where, why, and how.

bob the barkeep, at around 4pm, is cleaning glasses in his pub because the town's miners have finally gone back to digging. he enjoys this lull in the day to get his washing up done.

now i'll add another detail: miners? must be dirty and grimy. "the chairs are irremediably stained by soot on the seats. there's a young boy sweeping the floor while another is stoking the fire. it's getting damp in here."

in under a minute, i've got more info than before, and so many more leads to pull for details. may i also recommend learning how to think and speak simultaneously? that's always helped me with overall good results.

martixy
2017-12-21, 02:13 PM
Good for him :) I thought it showed a great sign of maturity and self-confidence to state that what he said before wasn't accurate and this discussion had changed the way he thought about things.

As for writing vs. roleplaying; I think people like Jay see writing differently than people like martixy. Myself, when I start to write a story, I do not know where it will end or what the last page will say. It develops as the story develops. Yes I guide things by deciding what happens, but I am still surprised at times by how a story I write ends. Perhaps a lot of that is because I write like a roleplayer; I create a character and through situations at them and then try and figure out what happens.

I'm not sure how mine differs from his, but here's some stream of consciousness:
What does the concept of being surprised by the story you're writing mean? To me(and I suspect some others) it means that you might start with a plan in your mind, an ideal place where you intend to take your story and you need to chart the route there. But in the course of writing there may come a moment when an idea pops up in your head and you know you'd be doing a disservice to yourself and/or any potential reader if you did not follow. However following this idea deviates you from the original plan. In a sense, when talking about surprise, we are talking in the frame of reference of our past selves.

Also, btw, I actually enjoy writing. I have a feeling when speaking about the link between DMing and writing, different people in here refer to different little skill-sets within each. Like maybe the joy of carrying over a large vocabulary of diverse embellishments or whatever. As many complex tasks, each of these is made of scores of little techniques, some of which overlap between, some of which don't. And you don't need to master all of them to be good at the overall thing, just a large enough subset. What I suspect is that those that conflate writing and DMing tend to focus on the overlaps, while the others tend to focus on the differences.

Jormengand
2017-12-22, 04:03 PM
This theory implies that threads like this one (which react to forum readers' reaction to them) are inherently greater art than the works of Shakespeare, Homer, Dickens, Faulkner, or any other great author, which don't.

I find this literary theory ... unconvincing. Or at least insufficiently documented.

Well, it's certainly an art form with fewer artistic limitations. Pong may not be as artistic as a decent song, but that doesn't mean that games are less artistic than songs. Trashy pop music, technical drawings and the blobby paintings of a five-year-old say nothing about the merits of the art form in which they reside. Gaming can be better than writing without the Tomb of Horrors (which I maintain is an exercise in rolling dice at people until they go away) having to be better than The Lord of the Rings. But if you think that writing is better than gaming, you don't have to prove that your five-year-old's essay on what they did at the weekend or anything by McGonagall is more gripping and emotional than Life is Strange. That's precisely as unfair as you can get.

Particularly, some great games are less great as artworks precisely because they don't accept the player's input and change what they're doing as a result. The little "He/She/They will remember that" message that pops up in anything by Telltale, or similarly the "This action will have consequences" that pops up in Life is Strange, is immediately what clues you into the fact that you're playing something that's using the great potential of games - to make your actions have consequences (even if they do have to force you down an ultimately-linear path because it's a video game and too much divergence takes years to code), and therefore to let you react to the game and have the game react back.

Tabletop roleplaying games with a DM/GM/ST/Arbiter/Aedial/Whatever take this up to eleven infinity because there is, at least, one thing that humans can (for now) do better than machines (although a recurrent neural network that's halfway between the one that makes Magic cards and a chatbot may eventually be able to run a good RPG session...) and that's come up with appropriate responses in a role-playing game and elsewhere. Even a video game has to have a mostly linear story (unless it's short enough/has a big enough design team that it can easily have a major divergence, I guess). This is, incidentally, also the fundamentals of why railroading is bad, becuase it turns the game into a story.


In any event, enjoy DMing the way you do, even if I don't really understand it.

Well, here's the thing. If I write much more than "This is what this NPC looks like, this is a brief description of their personality, this is what they're intending, and this is what they're capable of" then there are issues because if I narrate what will happen, then a lot of my narration is easily changed depending on the actions of the palyer characters. A good game actually precludes writing more than a little and expecting all of it to be meaningful.

NichG
2017-12-22, 08:12 PM
I think the biggest thing for me is, think in terms of 'why's' rather than 'what's'. Not 'what did this NPC just do here before the PCs arrived' but 'why was this NPC here?'. If you mentally keep on top of the motivations and reasons driving things, it's easy to make lots of self-consistent details even if you forget half of what you actually said.

E.g. if you know that the PCs are traveling through a dry region that had an adamantine mining rush, you can think: the inhabitants needed to supply water, dig up the ore, and transport or process the output of the mines. Someone in the area now is probably looking for old caches, or ancillary things like secrets of people who had been involved in the process, or they want to restore something that the mining boom changed. Given the complexity of mines, it wouldn't be a terrible place to hide if one solved the water problem. So the whys could be wealth-seeking, restoration, justice, temporary safety...

Given those reasons, it's easy to just come up with things that a random structure in the side of a hill could be, end points of a random service road, encounters with dusty travelers, random plotlines or other interactions, etc. And it's also possible to use those underlying 'whys' to connect those random elements together and to map the consequences of events to changes in the situation.

LordEntrails
2017-12-22, 08:45 PM
I'm not sure how mine differs from his, but here's some stream of consciousness:
What does the concept of being surprised by the story you're writing mean? To me(and I suspect some others) it means that you might start with a plan in your mind, an ideal place where you intend to take your story and you need to chart the route there. ...
Nope, I don't chart a route. I know, not how writing teachers say to write.

An example from my past!

I had this idea about a character, a female tiefling thief who grows up in Thay. So I flesh out her background a bit; unknown father, mother works at tavern and is killed by a wealthy 'lover', character survives in the streets with occasional help from tavern keeper. She becomes a thief/rogue and is very good at it.

So I think to myself, what might happen to such a person? Well, if they are good at what they do, and they are attractive, they might draw the attention of some powerful figure. Well, in Thay that may just be a Red Wizard. So the Red Wizard sets her up, through the guild he hires her to rob his own house. Which is a trap. So he captures her and eventually enslaves her and she becomes his 'agent'.

So again I think to myself, what might a Red Wizard want? A thief and assassin. So, ok, he's got some mid-level rival he wants dead, so...

Get it? I didn't start with a plan. I had no idea how the story would evolve. I created a character with a background and motivations and then through a situation at the character. Then I figured out how that situation might resolve and wrote it. Then figured out what they character might do next, and setup a new situation and figured that out, then the next etc.

Eventually, I figured out that she would want to kill the Red Wizard, and when some situation came up that presented an opportunity, she did. And she escaped Thay. Never figured out what happened after that.

So yea, it's kind of like solo-rpg'ing. And yea, it's not random or such, as I do get to decide each situation resolves the way I want it to. But, I don't start with a path or outcome or some saga I want to tell.

Rather I have a character and a situation I want to explore, and I explore each situation and then figure out what (I want to) happens next.

Sure it means sometimes my writing doesn't end with some finale, and often it doesn't coordinate plot, but they tell a story of one or more characters, like a campaign or real-life might unfold.