At the heart of every tabletop rpg is improv. There’s that beautiful sweet moment when a player zags when you expected a zig. When the GM sees a window of opportunity to introduce pure unplanned chaos into the situation. When the dice come up snake eyes and leave a player high and dry with no options left. When that crit fells the beast in one shot, cutting short a six hour campaign in twenty minutes.
My dm does about 95% improv, and it’s been so cool to watch him develop that style. He started out obsessively planning for campaigns, and now he basically just picks a map and comes up with a handful of factions/npcs and then lets everything happen from there. Not something you could do easily with writing, but it’s taught me a lot about how to look for plotlines and threads that would be interesting to pull on, that might go unnoticed if there’s too much of a plan.
Love this--very much why I love writing first drafts and find that the most creatively energizing part of the process, because sometimes characters decide to jump out of windows.
I love this perspective. It's one I've been trying to cultivate in my own brain when it comes to my writing. My first drafting is a hot mess right now, full of brackets and plot holes and contradictions. But I remind myself that all I'm doing right now is figuring out the shape of the arcs.
I've fleshed out so much more about the setting in the last couple months writing it than I did during the entirety of my dedicated brainstorming time. The foundation was important, but improvising in that framework is what has gifted me my favorite bits and pieces of this story and its world.
The Writing Game: Play to Find Out What Happens
My dm does about 95% improv, and it’s been so cool to watch him develop that style. He started out obsessively planning for campaigns, and now he basically just picks a map and comes up with a handful of factions/npcs and then lets everything happen from there. Not something you could do easily with writing, but it’s taught me a lot about how to look for plotlines and threads that would be interesting to pull on, that might go unnoticed if there’s too much of a plan.
Good stuff. I've always wondered if I was the outlier here as I tend to outline after I've started writing.
Thank you for this. I can't emphasize enough just how much I needed to hear it today.
Oh. I needed to hear this today. Thank you.
As someone who's been in revision hell for months, I really needed this read! Thank you.
Love this--very much why I love writing first drafts and find that the most creatively energizing part of the process, because sometimes characters decide to jump out of windows.
I love this perspective. It's one I've been trying to cultivate in my own brain when it comes to my writing. My first drafting is a hot mess right now, full of brackets and plot holes and contradictions. But I remind myself that all I'm doing right now is figuring out the shape of the arcs.
I've fleshed out so much more about the setting in the last couple months writing it than I did during the entirety of my dedicated brainstorming time. The foundation was important, but improvising in that framework is what has gifted me my favorite bits and pieces of this story and its world.