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WHAT IF?
If I had to think about few words to introduce a roleplaying game I couldn’t think about anything else. What If?
I think these two words describe what, in its essence, a RPG is.
“What if” applied to what?
Well, easy answer. STORIES! A roleplaying game is indeed a “what if story”.
We need to write some forewords down in order to explain and understand what is improvisation and why it is important.
We’ll explain improvisation by analyzing what is the lack of improvisation when we talk about stories.
It seems that human being has a sort of “compulsion” to write stories. We started to draw stories on caves even before developing writing.
Storytelling is very important for the homo sapiens. No one can’t deny this. Actually, we are fond of stories.
Things became interesting when we developed complex writings.
Things became even more interesting when the Greeks began to write stories.
The Greeks indeed made it even more interesting, because they wrote stories and brought them to life to what we know today as theater.
Books and Theater
You, as the reader, can only open the tome and read it. You can imagine yourself as one of the protagonist and nothing else. As a reader you can not interfere in the story.
Stories written by the ancients however were not roleplaying games. They were just stories, passive stories.
The same was for the theater. It was a bit different from a story written on a book, because you could actually see and listen the characters as a spectator.
Books and theater are both passive tools to live a story. You can’t interact and you can’t change the course of the story.
Do you need improvisation? Of course not.
At best you could speculate what could have happened if the character (or characters) had made a different decision, but nothing else.
We must wait the coming of what we know as canovaccio to observe some improvisation in theater. We are in the 17th century however and yet the only players involved are the actors, not the spectators.
Roleplaying game does a different thing. It tries to merge the figures of actors and spectators.
We have never seen, at least to this day, a theater show where the actors call some of the spectators to take their place or to contribute to the stories adding something unexpected.
Well, to be honest a first attempt was made in 1936, by the writer Ayn Rand. The show was Night of January 16th.
However the interaction between the actors and the active spectator was very soft.
Some spectator were called to form the jury and their interaction defined the ending, where they had to emit a sentence.
Here we observe how a passive story tries to introduce more than one possible ending, where the ending is actually made by the spectator.
Now, let’s go to the next step.
Gamebooks
This category of stories introduce a whole new philosophy of storytelling. The possibility to make your pick on what the characters are going to do.
We can call this a passive-active story.
It is passive because you can’t actually define the character, neither you can pick any path of your own creation.
It is active because you can pick different paths presented to you by the author. It’s not just about choosing which endings you would like to read, you can actually make choices during the story.
If you think about this, it’s quite revolutionary compared to how books were written in the past.
If I’m not wrong the first gamebook date 1930. The title was Consider the consequences, written by Doris Webster. It is available on Amazon if you are interested.
However it is highly possible other attempts were made but for unknown reason we don’t have any data about them. We can’t say.
Who knows if even in the past some ancient author thought about writing a story using the gamebook structure. Maybe yes, maybe not.
Let’s state that 40 years before the appearance of the first roleplaying game ruleset, someone tried to give a push to what we know as classical stories.
That was the embryo of ropleplaying games.
Something was growing in the dark.
This take us to our next step.
Roleplaying games or RPG
I’ll spare you the story of roleplaying games and Gary Gygax.
What does a RPG do in few words?
It merges the author, the actors and the spectators into one figure.
The Players are authors, because they contribute to the story, and they do it heavily. We don’t want to talk about if they do it good or bad, but they do it.
The Game Master is the author, because he or she gives the incipit and at the same time is the scenographer.
The Players and the Game Master are the spectators, because none of them is able to know one-hundred percent what is going to happen next exactly.
With RPG the what if story reach its apices.
Improvisation becomes a must.
Like the canovaccio, as presented above, improvisation is a trait that Game Masters and Players learn with experience.
There is no other way. You can’t write a manual about something that is di per se unpredictable. It would not be honest.
But it’s honest to state that improvisation is something to take in high consideration when you decide to play a RPG session.
Is improvisation a trait that goes against planning?
I know we have not talked about planning yet, but we’ll do later.
I do not consider planning as a Game Master trait however. In my opinion its a technique to be used in adventure/campaign building.
We were saying…is improvisation a trait that goes againts planning?
I wouldn’t say so. Planning help me set up the scenography of my adventure/campaign, nothing else.
When things take life the outcome is all in your hands.
Don’t forget that RPG admits an event that other kind of stories do not. The characters may die or they may fail.
WHAT IF!
An example of improvisation – alternative use of a fireball.
A classical encounter against a creature that is immune to fire.
The mage in your party memorized fireballs, because it is the better spell he possesses to overcome any tough foe.
Is the mage “out of order”?
An unexperienced player would probably say yes, I’m out because I can’t help the party.
An experienced player would probably say no, I can still use fireball to kick the ass of the enemy.
Here comes improvisation.
At this point, the player ask details about the environment that sorrounds them. Why? Because he wants to use the fireball as an indirect weapon.
Let’s imagine you are fighting close to a rocky formation and let’s imagine that you enemy is close enough to them.
The experienced player explains to the Game Master that he’s not going to use the fireball against the target, because he knows it would be useless.
The experienced player declares that he’s going to launch the fireball against the rocky formation in order to overheat the rocks and have them explode.
The purpose is to invest the enemy with a rain of rocky fragments.
Improvisation.
You won’t find these in the rulebooks for example. Because rulebooks can’t logically include any possible variation in the gameplay.
This is an outcome that requires the action of a player and the careful listening of the Game Master.
It’s a fact that if you overheat rocks they can explode due to the very rocks heterogeneous composition. You won’t find on your rulebook what temperature a fireball has of course, but you can assume that yes, a overheated rock can explode.
Another example – alternative use of magic missile
This example can sound weird. However the alternative use I’m proposing was allowed in the AD&D ruleset. I think it was described in the Complete Book of Fighters or the Complete Book of Wizards. I can’t remember honestly.
As we know the target of a magic missile is a creature and it doesn’t require any attack roll. So, for this spell, we have this balance that has to be respected:
The target is a creature and no attack roll required.
Magic missile is universally considered a force effect, no matter the ruleset.
However, let’s say that I want to direct this force effect against something that is not a creature, but instead is a non-living object.
After all I can target a golem, which is not exactly a living creature, it is a construct.
Now we start speculating.
Instead of targeting a creature I want to target a door, a lever or a weapon held by an enemy.
What do I do?
I have two choices to make.
The first, as a Game Master, I simply state that no, magic missile can’t be used against something that is not a creature described in the Monster Manual.
The second choice is yes, with a big BUT.
Yes, you can target an object BUT you have to roll the attack for the action to be successful.
In AD&D this optional rule was introduced for the wizard who wanted to disarm the opponent. We all know that AD&D was many thing except a balanced game, but I don’t think that classes should be balanced after all.
Balance depends mostly on environment and context. We’ll talk about environment and context in another article.
So, if I push the rules I can achieve unpredictable results. I can use a magic missile to damage the weapon of an opponent, or to make holes in a door…or whatever my imagination dictate me.
See you soon for the next articles.
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