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Punggung

Turning rpg:s into improv games?

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Hiya guys!

 

I'm a lover of all forms of interactive entertainmen: video games, rpg:s and theatre. I'm going to hold an improv exercise with a gaming and competitive mechanics theme at my local theatre club, so I'm thinking of various ways of converting the systems of 'game' games into faster and looser improv games. Often the rewards in improv are simple, the laughter of the audience, getting to stay up on stage, guiding the direction of the story. In order to make challenges or settings a bit more rule-bound I think I could try to constrain the reward systems.

 

One exercise could be: three persons on stage, they have a character weakness each, there is a challenge in the scene such that only a strong effort of one or many players can clear it, as reward the players who cleared the challenge gets to overcome their weakness, they end the scene when the outcome is obvious.

A variant can use status as the placeholder for other weaknesses, letting them go from low to high or vice versa.

 

How could we gamify this a bit more? One way is to force a ranking, let the players feel who weighed in the most vs least and let their transformation be the most or least. Another can be to add some kind of points that they have to bet on their actions. We could also try to qualify the challenge somewhat more, like having a series of distinct requirements for it to be cleared.

 

Another exercise: three persons on stage, one is a game master and does not control a character but have the power to define the setting or outcomes of actions, the others are actors who only author their own characters, the GM defines some challenge and narrates the outcomes of the players actions, the scene ends when the challenge is cleared or they fail.

 

A gamification here could be that the players both win if they work together, but if one of them clears the challenge alone then s/he and the GM wins.

 

What do you think of ways to merge rpg mechanics with improv? Any input on my examples?

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A popular mechanic in tabletop games is to have one 'real' answer amongst a sea of 'fake' answers. Dixit has a robust implementation of this: in Dixit, a player describes a card they have with a surrealist picture on it, and every other player chooses a card they think will match the description. The cards are shuffled, and players vote on which they think is the 'real' one. The player who gave the real answer doesn't vote; they earn points if some, but not all, of the players chose their card, while other players get points only if they managed to choose the correct card, while others chose theirs.

 

You could do something like this on stage: for example, the players are given a series of prompts, for a scene, which they all share, and for elements of the scene. One player is secretly trying to do something different to the rest; maybe they're avoiding a particular prompt, or maybe they have an additional prompt that only they know about that they're trying to work in. At the end, either the players, or the audience, judges who they think that player was.

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Most tabletop mechanics lend themselves to interesting improv storytelling, but I'm not sure how you'd translate it to stage. Combining yes and's with any of the randomizing of a rolling system would be awkward, and that's where the interesting parts of tabletop RPGs comes from -- some unpredictability in how events turn out and how the players as a group react to the challenges that presents. The best I can think of is having a troupe on stage and leaving it to the lighting/sound improviser to do some rolling and inform the people on stage that they've failed or succeeded at something, or giving them more complex setups/repercussions, and I'm not a huge fan of that idea. If you want something to pull from maybe try and listen to a few episodes of the One Shot podcast. It's a podcast where improv artists from Chicago play tabletop games and, just by virtue of playing a bunch of different games, they explore different systems and mechanics.

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Is this larp? I think you just invented larp.

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Damnit, I'm really busy right now and I don't have time to write up a big post, but you should google "Theatre of the Oppressed". It's not exactly what you're asking for, but it's a form of theatre where a problem is posed via a scenario performed by actors and the audience is involved in the decision making to find a solution.

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Hey guys and gals!

 

Thanks for the suggestions. The exercise went off without a hitch, but I think we won't retry the RPG-style games I had designed. On the other hand we still regularly play the other new games I used as templates for them. We're setting up an RPG group now, and we have found the perfect game to kick it off with: Fiasco. It's like a mix of RPG and longform improv. 

 

Merus: Ever played Balderdash? Seems very similar to its main mechanic, guessing the correct meaning of an obscure word among one correct and several written by players. 

 

In general I tried to introduce competition elements but aside from overt contests the players simply didn't play along with them, instead feeling more comfortable resolving scenes more traditionally. What did work somewhat was to introduce special powers, like one player being able to at will initiate flashback scenes, and character development, where characters started being defined by a weakness but by overcoming an obstacle instead came to have the opposite strength. Shy to assertive, hydrophobic to hydrophilic, controlling to openminded.

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Another thing that might work is a mechanic like one in Heroine. There is no real fail state, but you have to resolve a situation in a certain way. It can be mandated that they resolve the problem in a scene by coming together or by noticing something vital or remembering something from their past or whatever else you want.

Games like Heroine would be better to adapt improv rules from, probably. Story games more than role playing games.

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