by The Gline

You know the deal.

You've spent all week prepping this scenario. You've got an environment - a supercorp office, a nightclub, a dungeon, a castle, maybe even someone's house -- mapped out down to the last stick, stone, screw, and solenoid. You've got piles of stats on NPCs, enough to fill a whole binder. (In fact, you DID fill a whole binder.) You've got enough data here to run a whole campaign.

And in the first twenty minutes, somehow -- by dint of lopsided dice, stupid blundering luck or that insane player's telepathy that somehow allows them to sidestep EVERYTHING you had originally planned in their way... somehow, those idiot players of yours decided to simply not go for this particular plot thread. And the ungrateful twerps decided to hop a plane for Burma. (In the game, not RL. If they do that in RL, quit RPGs and become a travel agent.)

And, worst of all -- you don't know a thing about Burma. If they were gonna go to Burma, the least they could've done was WARN you so you could go do some RESEARCH...!

The above is based, somewhat loosely, on a true RP scenario that involved some friends of mine. Faced with the mind-boggling possibility that (no!) the players might actually want to DO SOMETHING OUTSIDE OF THE GAME'S SCRIPTED PLOTINE, the GM had to scramble quickly to keep up with them. But keep up he did -- and there is a singular lesson to be learned from this:

Don't underestimate the power of improv.

Improvisation is more than just whipping out an NPC you didn't have rolled up. Improv can be as major as what's described above: taking a whole detour out from your scripted story, which may last more than one session... or, for all you know, may even prove more interesting than the scripted session itself!

Case in point was a game I ran for a few months. The premise was that in a world very much like ours today, a whole mess of people from an AD&D-esque universe get dumped here rather unceremoniously. About a million of them, to be exact. The world learns to deal with them, but not before putting a bunch of mechanisms in place to handle it. The players were a late-coming wave of arrivals, so they weren't totally on their own.

I had NOTHING planned. I wanted to simply drop them into the thinnest possible excuse for a plot and see what would happen. And somehow it worked, probably because I had the three basic rules of improv gaming down pat:

1) KEEP THINGS MOVING

This doesn't mean that your players should ALWAYS be on the run, just that they should never be wanting for some kind of trouble to get themselves into. This is good gaming practice, but it goes double for improv gaming. In my game, I sent everyone from government agents to jealous mages to you-name-it after them, often with hilarious results. See below.

2) MAKE IT PAY OFF

Payoff means that the effort put in by your characters should be paid back to them. For instance, at one point I had a bunch of crooked cops after my players. They did so well in evading them that I gave them a little payoff: when they got one of the cops to strip down and surrender his gear, as they drove off -- leaving the guy standing there on the corner in public daylight wearning nothing but his sta-prest -- he tore off his underwear in total frustration, ran down the middle of the street after them (naked as a jaybird) and flung the pants down, screaming "TAKE 'EM! TAKE 'EM!" Everyone in the group burst a gut and we had to do an extended break before we could stop laughing.

That's payoff.

3) ENFORCE CONSISTENCY

This is difficult for some people, unless they have a hell of a memory. With improv gaming, you're throwing things out a mile a minute, and you don't always know if you're contradicting yourself or not. The simple solution is to take notes -- they don't have to be enormously detailed, just enough to make sense to you. You'd be amazed how well this allows you to return to a previous plot thread, one which only LOOKED casual, but in your fiendish hands, can be spun out into something of shocking importance...!

Now, obviously, on-line gaming -- because there's more emphasis on player-player rather than player-GM interactions -- has a lot more of a improvisatory nature to it. But all of the above still works -- in fact, it'll work even better once you're conscious of the goals and can work towards them aggressively. And if you're a Storyteller, you can put these tips to use for when you run dry.

And maybe you'll be giving your characters airline tickets a little less often. Or a little MORE often, if that's your pleasure.

SysOp Gline is nearly finished work on part two of his behind the scenes IMC coding epic!