When We Improvise Ourselves Into A Corner

“How do I get these 13 things I dropped into the game because I thought they’d be fun to now integrate and make sense?”

That question came up in July’s GM Q&A call.

Gameplay takes us in a direction where we start improvising, and afterwards we’re left with square pegs that need to fit the round holes of our world, campaign, and adventures.

We get NPCs invented under spotlight heat, hooks and rumours that don’t lead anywhere yet, and treasure dropped in from a table roll.

Usually, we just keep going when this happens. We improvise forward and then try to make it make sense backward. We add more details in play, then attempt to connect things after the session.

But the problem is, each detail we add is a connection, constraint, or dependency to other details.

Three new game pieces give us a few things to integrate with what’s gone on before. Thirteen gives us dozens! Each new improvised piece becomes more difficult to integrate. So we try to improvise our way out. And that just digs our GM pit trap deeper.

The other common advice is to let players solve it. Listen to their theories, use their ideas. This is usually great advice, but not in this case, alas.

Player Fog of War is always tighter than GM Fog of War. Their ideas aren’t informed by our goals, the world as we know it, or what our plot actually needs. So we end up with even more untethered NPCs, locations, items, and details instead of an integrated solution.

A 4-Step Approach

The problem as I see it is we’ve got a bunch of broken egg pieces on our hands, and we’re trying to put the egg back together. That’s ass-backwards. And worse, some pieces aren’t even from the same egg.

So, if this is your campaign right now, where you’ve got a bunch of loose ends from session improv that you need to tie together, here’s what you can do:

  1. List out your improvised pieces. NPCs, locations, objects, rumours, clues, hooks that don’t make sense or connect yet.
  2. Review your list and ask: What past event could I create that connects all of these things together?
  3. Give this event a name.
  4. Connect each piece back to that event.

I call this an Origin Event. Your game pieces and details stop contradicting or repelling each other because they now share a root source.

This works because connecting a bunch of improvised things to one known event is a lot easier than connecting them to each other. The historical Origin Event is what makes things make sense today.

My Riddleport Near-Disaster

This exact situation came up in my Riddleport campaign. I remember it well because it’s burned into my brain from the panic and embarrassment I felt at the time.

The characters owned an inn, The Silver Chalice. A barmaid was murdered. Players went into investigation mode, asking the typical who, what, when, where, and how questions.

I started improvising like a fiend.

But each NPC, location, and object I improv’d sunk me deeper in the pit trap because I had no central event and its details as a foundation. I just kept making up more stuff, hoping a player’s idea or a strike of inspiration behind the screen would magically make the pieces fit.

The players called my bluff and complained that nothing made sense. And, alas, they were right.

So I begged a break. I said, paraphrasing, “Sorry, guys. Yeah, there’s a solution here. Let me call a short break so I can check my notes, and then we’ll get back at it.”

Then I ducked behind my screen, took a deep breath, and started writing while the group plotted their next moves.

I pinned down the murder event, the murderer, and the motive. That was my egg. I’d already improvised the method, location, and time. So with egg in hand (and a bit on my face), it became easy to slot the clues and details in so they started making sense.

Ten minutes later we picked up again, and soon the murder was solved and tied back to my BBEG, a vampire mob boss.

Whew.

A caveat here though about what an Origin Event does. It fixes disconnected improvisation but doesn’t prevent it.

Also, it can only stretch so far. 13 pieces would probably overwhelm me. So we’ve got to hop on the problem as soon as we notice threads and pieces that don’t connect. A stitch in time saves d9, as they say.

And, it only fixes one mess at a time. If we conjure multiple orphan Origin Events to explain things, we’ve fallen into the same trap, one onion layer higher.

This is why our actual fix must come from a single source or unifying origin. We must build the event first, before the session, and then spawn our game pieces from it.

That’s what GM’s Log #12: Big Bang Events covers. In four steps you’ll build the event and a starting chain of game pieces from it.

This ensures your campaign makes logical sense, and everything prepped and improvised off the Big Bang effortlessly connects, with no logic bombs or pit traps to encounter later.

Use Origin Events as first-aid to fix disconnected game pieces you improvise. And use Big Bang Events to avoid GM pit traps from the start.

Join CampaignCraft today to get GM’s Log #12, plus the full GM’s Log library.

Cheers,
Johnn
roleplayingtips.com
https://discord.gg/6MxTRAqQ76
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