Five or So Questions on Improv for Gamers

I’ve always been excited about giving people a practice space to try out this improv stuff they’ve been hearing so much about. I’ve been playing tabletop rpgs since high school, and when I took my first improv class back in 2008, I was stunned by the obvious skill overlap. And also surprised that there weren’t more improv classes for roleplayers, especially being taught outside of conventions. It’s been super fun and rewarding to teach the Improv for Gamers workshops and give people some ideas and tools they can take back to their games. But what I’m most excited about right now is coming out with this book, because it gives people a bunch of exercises they can just pick up and play with friends in their living room.

What are a few of the skills you’ve picked up in improv and cover in the book that serve you the most often in gaming?

In both improv and gaming, you need to pay attention to what your fellow players are contributing to the story. If you’re not listening to how the story is shaping around you, you’re going to have a hard time navigating through it–to mix metaphors, all your subsequent ideas will be off-key. Active listening is required in order to say “Yes, and” to your partner, which is the act of honoring someone’s ideas and building on them. (There’s more to unpack with “Yes, and” about it not being a blank check, and nobody is actually beholden to accept every offer, so I prefer phrasing it as “Consider yes, and.”) But to build off an idea, you need to have actually heard it first. This is just as important in a game that weaves a narrative between characters as it is in a fight sequence where you’d want to keep tabs on what everyone is doing on their turn. So the book has a lot of great exercises that specifically practice paying attention to and acknowledging your partner. You might copy someone’s movements, repeat what they said, add a line to a shared story, create a cast of characters, or communicate through eye contact. But at the heart of all collaborative storytelling, you need to be listening.

A skill that I really love is handling invisible objects. You may have imaginary items in a larp, and you can also embody your character a bit at the table. Maybe you just mime your character polishing their glasses, or drinking a coffee. It’s a lot of fun. The book contains exercises that practice holding and using invisible objects, and it’s something that I still practice a lot in my improv troupes. It definitely came in handy during a larp where my healer character was asked to remove an invisible spear from someone’s leg and patch up the wound, and we had zero props.

How do you make this content approachable for new people and people not into the gaming scenes that favor improv?

When I teach the workshops I always stress that I’m not expecting anybody to be actors. It’s a practice space, so things might feel weird or be a little rough and that’s okay. Nobody’s going to walk out thinking “Cool, I’m perfect at this now!” And I repeat that a lot in the book–that the focus isn’t to be perfect, or funny, or entertaining, but to just try stretching this one specific muscle that the exercise is highlighting. There’s only a few exercises that are actually “scenes,” the majority are group games, so there’s less pressure to perform. There’s also some things that speak to GMs, like identifying when to switch from one scene to another, or how to quickly come up with some specific voices so your NPCs sound different. And that thread of “listen to each other and make people feel included” runs throughout all of it, which is a life skill, not an improv skill. But you can practice it through some fun improv exercises!