{"id":20655,"date":"2017-05-12T00:45:56","date_gmt":"2017-05-11T14:45:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/?p=20655"},"modified":"2017-05-08T13:13:38","modified_gmt":"2017-05-08T03:13:38","slug":"improvising-an-adventure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/improvising-an-adventure\/","title":{"rendered":"Improvising an Adventure"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jim Brochu and Steve Schalchlin – The Big Voice God or Merman By Bev Sykes from Davis, CA, USA – Flickr, CC BY 2.0, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=409330<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

Things didn’t exactly go according to plan in the Adventurer’s Club campaign this weekend past. Entirely my fault; I was running late and assumed that the adventure that we were about to start had been copied onto a USB stick as is our usual practice. After all, it was finished several months ago.<\/p>\n

On top of that, transport headaches meant that several people arrived late and<\/em> were going to have to finish early, myself included.<\/p>\n

Decision<\/h3>\n

We were faced with three choices: abandon play for the day, despite everyone being there and ready to play; try to run a complex multi-part adventure with strong reliance on visuals with neither the adventure nor the visuals; or for my co-GM and I to put our heads together and improv something pretty much off-the-cuff.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t a hard decision to make. The campaign was in-between adventures, which was why the adventure hadn’t been loaded onto the USB stick, but which is also the perfect time to drop in a ‘filler’ adventure.<\/p>\n

Conceptualizing<\/h3>\n

To start with, we took advantage of the fact that this campaign has two GMs. We stepped outside for five minutes to brainstorm. Initially, Blair focused on what we could do while I thought about the limitations we faced. First up, the timing between the last adventure and the next planned<\/em> adventure is fairly tightly controlled in a number of respects, so there wasn’t going to be enough game time for the PCs to travel anywhere; the adventure was going to have to take place in New York City. Second, this particular combination of PCs haven’t been together for very long, so if we wanted to connect the mini-adventure with their past, we had to work out how to involve everyone. I particularly wanted to avoid a situation in which only a couple of the PCs were involved for any length of time purely because they had been with the campaign the longest.<\/p>\n

Blair’s initial ideas were for the PCs to be gathered somewhere, for something to happen, leading them into a chase situation through the city. Unfortunately, chase scenes are really hard to do well without adequate prep and planning, and the idea seemed a little bland. But, because we had a relatively small window of playable time, I liked the idea of starting off with the PCs already in one place.<\/p>\n

I suggested a mole-men riff, which led to the thought of a ‘land that time forgot’. The very first adventure in the campaign – which predates even my involvement in it in any capacity whatsoever – took place on an island with Killer Apes. The idea was that the PCs had been involved in an incident in the course of that adventure that had been blocked from their memories until now. If the older PCs were to suddenly find themselves reliving that past adventure and acting accordingly, we could turn the dichotomy from a liability into an advantage.<\/p>\n

It also let us pull in an exotic location without having to travel to it. Next, to why the PCs remember the events on the island. Several options commended themselves: the PCs did, and were just having flashbacks to the incident; or something was interfering with their memories now; or something had interfered with their memories back then. Again acting on the principle of turning a potential liability into an asset, I suggested that they discovered a mind-control crystal being used by a local warlord, but ended the threat; this not only made those present more sensitive to the effects of such a crystal showing up nearby, awakening those memories, but awakened a resistance to a ‘cloaking effect’ that prevented NYC locals from noticing the crystal until they were under its’ control.<\/p>\n

With this notion that both sub-groups of PCs were being affected but in different ways, bringing them into conflict as the newer characters sought to protect the older ones from themselves, and the suggestion that one of these older PCs, once freed from the influence of the crystal, could use his defenses against occult evil to ward the PCs, giving them independence of action when all those around them were being controlled, the basic outline of the plot was complete, and we were ready to play.<\/p>\n

Implementation<\/h3>\n

The lack of prep time invested in the adventure showed up almost immediately. One of the PCs assumed that he was hallucinating and tried to snap himself out of it, because we failed to make it clear that for those affected, the last two-and-a-half years hadn’t happened. If we’d invested prep time in the adventure, we would have made certain that our prepared text delivered everything that the PCs needed to know.<\/p>\n

But that was the only real hiccup along the way, and – because they knew that the whole adventure was being improvised – the players cut us a little more slack than they otherwise would have.<\/p>\n

The resulting day’s play wasn’t as polished or nuanced as most adventures in the campaign, but everyone had fun. Since that’s always the primary goal, we would have to rate the day as a success.<\/p>\n

Feedback<\/h3>\n

Midway through, during a break, one of the players indicated that he was surprised that we had even contemplated an improv adventure, because it is the total opposite of the way we – and especially I – usually run games.<\/p>\n

Long-time readers will probably know better; there was a period of time when I had zero time for prep, and had to devise the week’s adventures in the car on the way to gaming – not once, but every week for more than two-and-a-half years.<\/p>\n

Like so many things in life, improv is a compromise with its own pros and cons. Some of those adventures were great, some were a bit so-so. When you improv, there’s no time to ponder, reflect, edit, and censor your ideas to weed out the rubbish. Any flaws or errors are magnified and in-your-face.<\/p>\n

At the same time, though, you give yourself the freedom to throw in twists as they come to you, to extend those plot sequences that are working well, and to cut short those that aren’t.<\/p>\n

That’s a good thing, because you will need<\/em> to take advantage of that flexibility more often when you improv.<\/p>\n

That’s not to say that pre-planning and prep are perfect. As demonstrated by An Experimental Failure – 10 lessons from a train-wreck Session<\/a>, prep-heavy approaches run the risk of getting too close to a flawed idea and finding yourself trapped by it. In a lot of ways, it’s a line-ball judgment between the two. But improv has one final deficiency, and for me, that’s the one that makes the ultimate difference between the two.<\/p>\n

If you have no time for prep, you also have no time for adventure logging. Even if the lack of prep is a choice, and not a necessity, adventure logging after the fact is a lot harder to keep comprehensive and up-to-date. The more that you can cut-and-paste from prepared notes, the better, in terms of having a continuity that you can build on.<\/p>\n

Prep investment, in other words, creates more of a campaign than a series of marginally-connected adventures, and that broader tapestry permits more interesting adventures. Like improv, it makes everything bigger and stronger, emphasizing and building upon the positive aspects of preparing material at an adventure scale.<\/p>\n

Lessons<\/h3>\n

For the right type of campaign, I wouldn’t hesitate to go full-improv, all the time. If the campaign plans are such that the strengths of an improv approach were maximized and the downsides minimized, it would definitely be the way to go.<\/p>\n

Regardless of the adventure style that you choose, there are a number of lessons from this experience to take away for your games.<\/p>\n

    \n
  • Be aware of the plot limitations and plan around them.<\/li>\n
  • Be aware of the strengths you can draw upon and plan to make the most of them.<\/li>\n
  • Be aware of the weaknesses that you have to live with and plan to minimize their importance.<\/li>\n
  • Always look for a way to turn a liability or constraint into an asset.<\/li>\n
  • Both improv and careful planning have their strengths and weaknesses.<\/li>\n
  • The important thing is for everyone to have fun!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Things didn’t exactly go according to plan in the Adventurer’s Club campaign this weekend past. Entirely my fault; I was running late and assumed that the adventure that we were about to start had been copied onto a USB stick as is our usual practice. After all, it was finished several months ago. On top […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[70,74,78],"tags":[237,100,104,109,138],"series":[],"class_list":["post-20655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gm-ing","category-mike","category-adventurers-club","tag-adventure-creation","tag-adventure-prep","tag-behind-the-screen","tag-dm-advice","tag-play"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1toiD-5n9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20655"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20655"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20655\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20658,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20655\/revisions\/20658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20655"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=20655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}