Improv at the (D&D) Table

Sometimes, when people try to explain what D&D is (or any TTRPG, for that matter ... despite the title, this post applies to all roleplaying games), they try to describe it as basically fantasy improv.  Which, in some ways, it is.  But also, it’s not, which is why I started pondering this post many moons ago, and now it’s percolated long enough.

See, I think that the big problem with thinking of RPGs as improv is the whole concept of “yes and.” As almost everyone knows nowadays, the number one rule of improv is that you always go along with whatever reality your scene partners want to create.  No matter what they say, you respond with “yes, and ...” Meaning that, you must never contradict what they’ve established; you can only add on to it.  For improv, this is a brilliant rule, which leads to some great comedy.  I personally think improv is almost entirely suited for comedy above all other forms of entertainment, and I think it’s because “yes and” leads inevitably to surrealism, and it’s difficult to take that seriously.  Because when anyone is allowed to say that anything is now real, and everyone else just has to roll with it, sooner or later shit is going to get strange.  So improv works for comedy.  Does it also work for RPGs?

Well, sort of.  Many TTRPGs—and D&D in particular—have a foundation in fantasy, so they don’t mind a little surrealism.  But, at the same time, while it might be fun to play in a game where literally anything can happen for a short time, it’s difficult to sustain over the course of a campaign.  Remember: roleplaying is storytelling.  And, in the best stories, even ones of highly fantastical worlds, there are rules.  There’s an internal logic: a sort of fantasy physics.  It’s not our physics, of course, but there is a system and magic or whatever has to follow the rules of that system.  Besides, what kind of hero’s journey are you going to get if the hero has no limitations?  If the hero can just wave their arms and achieve their goals instantaneously, there’s no tension in the story, no obstacles to overcome.  Gets boring after a while, and defeats character growth.  So, RPGs can’t work solely on the impetus of “yes and.”

But that doesn’t mean we can’t draw analogues.  If you already understand how improv works, this is how I would describe the differences between improv and D&D.  As a player in a TTRPG, you have relationships with 3 primary different classes of participants:

Other Players

As a player, your relationship with other players is absolutely “yes and.” The only caveat here is that you must always remember to make a distinction between you (the player) and your character.  Your character is certainly not obliged to “yes and” the other characters.  In fact, sometimes it can be fun for your characters to have conflicts ... but only if you remember that you are not obstructing your fellow player’s desires.  In the short run, it’s perfectly fine for your character to object—even to strenuously object—to another character’s plan.  In the long run, you the player are obliged to find a way for your character to get on board with what the rest of the group wants to do.

This ties in with a common objection of RPG players: the obstructive player who ruins the game because “that’s what my character would do!” You, the player, knows what your character wants, what they’re willing to tolerate, and where they draw the lines.  But you the player also know that you’re all trying to tell a story together, and you’re playing the game to have fun.  So “yes and” your fellow players, and then figure out why your character is, in the end, going to do what everyone wants to do.  Maybe they’re succumbing to peer pressure.  Maybe they’re being blackmailed.  Maybe they decide to play the long game and acquiesce now to get something they want later.  Doesn’t matter.  Have your character bitch and moan now, if you feel that’s appropriate, but figure out how to fall in line, because you need to “yes and.” The time will come when your fellow players will reciprocate your largesse.

The GM

However, your relationship as a player with me, your GM, is entirely different.  As far as I’m concerned, my job is not to “yes and”: it’s more like “yes, but.” The most common “but” involves rolling dice: you say your character is going to jump up and use the chandelier to swing across the room; I say “yes, but you’re going to have to roll an Acrobatics check, and it’s going to be a high difficulty.” Other times it might relate to how much you can do at a time.  For instance, you say your character jumps up on the table, kicks away the centerpiece in your way, grabs the chandelier, swings across to the person attacking your ally, lands right beside them, then stabs them.  I respond “yes, but doing all is going to take you two turns—you just don’t have enough actions to do it all in one turn.” During character creation, a “yes but” is most likely to take the form of notifying you that you’re going to have to work harder at your backstory.  For instance, I once ran a game in a world of my own devising where all dwarves were afraid of water.  Not cups of water, of course, but any body of water larger than a stream, they avoided like the plague.  If you were playing in that world and you wanted to play a dwarven pirate, I would say “yes, but dwarves don’t get on ships, so how did you get to be a pirate?”

The most important thing to remember about “yes but” is that it’s still a “yes” ... no matter how much it sounds like a “no.” In the dwarven pirate example, I’m not telling you you can’t play the character you want.  I’m just telling you you’ve got to come up with a reason to explain where it comes from.  Maybe your dwarf was raised by elves and never learned that fear of water.  Maybe someone put them under a spell once and it somehow erased their aquaphobia.  Maybe there’s some water elemental in your family bloodline somewhere far back in antiquity.  Be creative: the awesome thing about a fantasy game is that you can come up with just about anything and it can sound reasonable.  So I’m not saying “no,” I’m just asking you to respect my worldbuilding by coming up with a reason why your character doesn’t conform to my rules.

When I (the GM) say “yes but” to you (the player), you have basically 3 options for a response: “never mind,” “fuck you,” and “yes but” in return.

The first option is just to change your mind about what you wanted to do.  This is not a game like chess; you’re not committed to a course of action just because you said it out loud, thus taking your virtual finger off your virtual piece.  If I tell you that what you want to do is going to take two turns, you’re perfectly justified to say “well, no, I don’t want to take that long before I get to attack.” This just represents your chacter considering, and then rejecting, a course of action.

The “fuck you” option is you telling me that you don’t care what the downsides are, you’re going to do it anyway.  You’ll accept the difficult roll, you’ll take the extra turn to complete the action, you’ll figure out how to work something extra into your backstory.  When you tell me you want to jump off the cliff, and I respond with “yes, but it’s 100 feet down: you’re going to die if you do that,” you’re perfectly within your rights to say “fuck you, I can jump off the cliff if I want to.” And you can.  My job as your friendly neighborhood GM ends at the point where I’ve advised you of the consequences of your actions; if you want to damn the consequences and full speed ahead, who am I to stand in your way?

But just like I can “yes but” you, you can “yes but” me in return.  I can’t possibly know everything that’s on your character sheet.  You may have to tell me: “yes, but I have a class feature called ‘chandelier swing’ that lets me swing on chandeliers without needing to make an Acrobatics check.” Or “yes, but I cast the fly spell as I’m jumping off the cliff, so I’m not going to die after all.” Now, I can “yes but” you a second time—perhaps “yes, but you’re out of spell slots, remember?”—and then you can “yes but” me back again, and so on until we finally come to an agreement.

Just like when you’re interacting with other players, the main thing to remember when interacting with your GM is that you’re telling a story together.  There’s a certain amount of back-and-forth that may be necessary to get you where you want to be, but at the end of the day I’m on your side: I want you succeed, if you can.  But, like we said up at the top, I don’t want to make it too easy.  Overcoming the obstacles is what allows your character to be heroic.

The Dice

The dice are actually the only participants in the game that should ever say, just flat out, “no.” If you listen to folks talk about playing D&D and other RPGs online, you’ll often hear them talk about “failing forward,” or saying “it’s fun to fail.” What they mean is, when you roll the dice (often in response to your GM’s “yes but”) and your roll comes up short, suddenly you’ve got to figure out what to do.  How do you recover from the failure?  Have things gone from bad to worse as a result?  That often happens in fantasy stories, and sometimes those are the best parts of the story.  Do your friends have to change their plans to help out now?  There are all sorts of storytelling opportunities that derive from a failure to achieve a goal on the first attempt.

One important thing to remember is that when we talk about “failure,” we mean that your character has failed to accomplish a thing.  That’s not the same thing as saying your character had a personal failure.  Often, it doesn’t make any sense for your (possibly very accomplished) character to fail to do something they do all the time, like pick a lock, or hit someone with a sword.  But it’s not always about your character’s ability: a good GM will sometimes describe a failure as fate intervening in a way that’s entirely outside your character’s control.  Perhaps a sudden gust of wind blows some dust into your eyes at just the wrong time; perhaps someone accidentally jostles your arm; perhaps that god you offended last adventure now has it in for you and is taking a personal hand in things just to mess with you.  The dice are telling a story with you just like the GM and the other players.  Sometimes the dice tells you that do an amazing thing; sometimes they tell you you fall on your face.  Your failure isn’t the story; how you deal with the failure may well be.

So the tenets of improv have something to teach us about how to play TTRPGs, but we have to be cognizant of the differences as well.  All the participants have different roles to play, but they all work together to weave the tale.  And, at the end of the day, an awesome story is what makes it fun for everyone.