Been thinking about improv lately…

9 thoughts on “Been thinking about improv lately…”

1. That was a very good article. Write more!

2. Philip Burge Gotcha – I’m curious – how do you feel about combat, and (often times) the rapid turn-around of creative reactions required to consistently keep your players in danger, without it getting stale? Do you do okay there? I know some people can be good at those, but not so much with story elements (and the other way around), but I thought I would ask as that’s the part I think I do okay with, but could be better at, despite my many years of practice (including a lot of improv).

3. William Keller Thanks, I appreciate it! I have a good number of DW-related articles there already, but I will indeed have more to come 😉

4. Great article! I must admit that I used the “skydiving” approach, but not before reading Dungeon World. DW gives us a lot of handy tools for improvising.

   Also, the game forces you to do it a lot…

5. I love DW but I think that whilst it can teach improv, there are better games to do it. If you play Fiasco or The Sundered Land, everyone has to improvise.

   The Sundered Land encouraged one of my shyest friends to take the GMing plunge. In TSL, everyone is a GM really. When this chap did GM,  he did it with Cthulhu Dark which is just about the least structured game you will ever play.  Since playing TSL, everyone has gotten better at improv making our more structured games like DW markedly better. 

6. Kasper Brohus That’s cool, hehe. And yea, it’s a big part of the game.

7. Stuart McDermid Sure, of course I would need to play every game before I could make an argument about which is the best for teaching imrov, which is why this was more about how DW can help get you started vs stating it was the best 😉

8. Philip Burge I see – and yea, sounds about the same on my end – trying to remember that damage isn’t everything. I had considered writing the various GM moves on cards and shuffling them… then drawing each time I needed one and using it if it made sense. Even if not, I could do something else and the idea would simply be to offer myself some moves for situations I may not have initially considered, etc. I thought it might be good practice, but not a long term thing I would do, if you know what I mean.

9. Mike Weem I actually commented about “damage isn’t everything” in my latest blog post. It doesn’t make sense, fictionally, to apply damage and nothing else.

   If an orc slashes your arm and deals damage, then something happened to your arm. I find that it helps picturing what happens in your minds eye. Let your terrible imagination run free 😉

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