The question of improvisation has yet again opened the floodgates to a torrent of bad faith arguments, hidden agendas, ludicrous claims, and every other nuisance plaguing my daily stroll through tabletop Twitter. Hence I feel the urge to write and deal yet again with perhaps the worst nuisance of all: game masters who are too smart for their own good. The specific and selective stupidity we'll be dealing with today is centered around whether games need or even benefit from players having access to modifying abilities (like maneuvers, meta-magic etc.), or whether that stuff can all (or should only) just be improvised by the players at their leisure. Let's begin with the game master’s specific blind spot as it relates to this question.

The GM (often times) has access to an entire book of challenges designed to oppose their players.

The GM can switch between these challenges at will, deploy them at will, and enjoy them at will. They have access to a much broader range of experiences within the game at their fingertips at most conceivable times with very limitations imposed by the game. For the GM, the only real barrier to improvisation is willpower. That is their only obstacle. The fail state of their improvisation is composed of glares or groans from the players, maybe somebody takes him aside in particularly egregious circumstances. All of this is (of course) no real obstacle at all. Folks are usually forgiving when it comes to GM mistakes, and so the GM is free to fail forward. Consequently, the GM has no need to systematize their own improvisation, and the failure to recognize this unique situation at the table is what often leads otherwise intelligent GMs to believe systems wouldn't benefit their players.

Social Formulae

I'm a designer first, a player second, and a GM last. I enjoy beating my head against the brick wall of rules and designs, and only recently did my primary outlet for that become designing rules rather than playing through them. As a designer, my job is to translate player feedback into actionable data, then sorting through the mess and deciding what takes priority and what needs to be ignored.

Most GM feedback is to be ignored.

But the point is, across the course of developing this skill set I've been able to condense more general feelings and player behaviors into something that can be identified and even actively tracked. I've done this here because a common accusation of the ostensibly pro-improv DM is how mechanically diverse games are wasting both ink and time; the players could just make that stuff up. It's on the players to be creative rather than the game to cater to them. This is completely absurd and false on the face of things to anybody except people who've been a game master for at least a decade, but it's often difficult to verbalize why this is the case (as is common with any accusation so foundationally mistaken).

To help, I've begun listing obstacles to player improvisation which have nothing to do with player creativity. These alternatives are wrapped up in self-evaluation, an aversion to being disruptive, or even meta-reasons around GM behavior and the specific game folks sat down to play. Let's take the example below;

Carol’s table has decided to switch from 4th Edition to 5th Edition, at Carol’s request. She says players are looking at their character sheets too often, and solve too many problems with their abilities. As they start this new game, Carol says her players can ask to do the things they did in 4th Edition, rather than make a declaration. How do her players react?

If the leading parties at the table wished to reliably include those elements which are now only accessible via improv, they could/should/would play games which included them.
If the player were to engage in constant improvisation for the sake of accessing those elements, this would be met with irritation, disapproval, or failure.
Therefore, those elements are a source of annoyance rather than enjoyment for the party who wants them struck from the game’s structure.

As you can see, the thought process you just read has nothing to do with player creativity. It instead has everything to do with the fact Carol has explicitly stated she dislikes the maneuvers and tricks and companions of the party’s characters. Asking Carol to simulate those elements of the new game would be a guaranteed no and waste of time at best, or an exercise in self humiliation at worst.

Let's walk through another alternative.

We turn again to Carol's table, still playing fifth edition. She set her party against a tough but simple encounter. The enemy is largely big bags of hit points with respectably high armor classes. Her players are reasonably confident they can beat this encounter through sheer stubbornness. All they really have to lose is their hit points, and they have ways of getting that back. But while they play, her player Dutch notes one of the particularly nasty bad guys is positioned under what you might call an environmental hazard. He thinks to mention it when his turn comes up, but decides against it and rolls a regular attack instead. What was going through Dutch's head?

The game’s methods of action resolution are likely sufficient to overcome the obstacle or encounter.
Improvising outside the game’s structure relies on both the GM’s successful interpretation and the action succeeding.
Furthermore, the GM faces several obstacles to successfully interpreting the improvisation even if they agree to it. The set DC could be too high, the additional penalties or resource cost too extreme, the resulting damage too low, the final outcome a waste of a turn.
Because improvisation is unlikely to change the final outcome positively, but has a good chance of prolonging the inevitable, the player correctly deduces the cost of committing to unknown and out-of-favor variables is too high for the likely mediocre benefit.

Clearly Dutch made the right choice here. Even if we forget Carol's hostility towards abilities which modify player activities (most of which simulate the first and second levels of what players would come up with on their own, were they inclined to improvised), why pointlessly stretch out a likely victory? Dutch is being considerate of the other players at the table here, including the GM. Alternatively, he has little to no confidence in Carol's ability to properly adjudicate his attempt to improvise.

In either case, this has absolutely nothing to do with creativity on the part of the player, and we can safely put that irredeemably stupid argument to rest. Removing what players knew was possible in the context of game mechanics has created an exclusively chilling effect in these scenarios.

The “Improv” Problem

As with most online TRPG discourse, people obfuscate their hostility to fleshed out New-School systems (like maneuver selections, feats, and other modifications to “standard” actions and abilities) behind seemingly well meaning desires. Have you heard any of the following?

“I miss the days when the majority of cool stuff you could do came from loot, not your character sheet.”

“The game doesn’t need to be so complex, the players can ask to do a trip attack whenever they want.”
“I wish players didn’t think of their characters as a series of buttons to mash.”
“I want the players to come up with their own cool things to do, not look at a system.”

If you have, my condolences. You've run into the regrettably disingenuous people this essay is intended to rebuff.

Let's make the simple. I’m not sitting at the table so I can have a more boring experience than what’s possible with video games. Granted, the fact I’m sitting with friends can alleviate the sensation of boredom with anemic systems. Even then, whether it’s front and center or in the back of my mind, a little thought nags at me and says “Couldn’t this be so much better?” I have no interest in RPG systems which fail to (adjusting for the medium) keep up with video games in meaningful options and variety, just as I wouldn’t have interest in an RPG which failed to permit improvisation. I’m sure you could find an exception if you locked me in a room and forced me to play hundreds of games, but that’s besides the point.

The whole genesis of new school design was the intersection of two ideas:

A variety of options can enhance the play experience, add replay value, and provide new layers to modes of play.
A profound majority of improvised actions can be categorized and consolidated to provide option variety. This allows new improvisations to use the old as force multipliers for creativity and effectiveness alike.

Getting a displacer beast at level 1 in 4th Edition was awesome, and I rarely (if ever) experience anything like that in 5th. Not only was the displacer beast cool on its own, I started improvising uses for it with little to no mechanical precedent. My go-to example is a crafty solution to an encounter we wanted to stealth past. I had my displacer beast climb up a wall to reach a landing two flights up from the stairs we were on. A guard was posted there, so I had the displacer beast grapple the guard’s neck and drag him over the side. The choking guard was unable to call for help and hung there, a convenient biological ladder for the rest of the party to climb up and bypass several other guards. This is something I probably never would have done in TSR D&D, and I owe it to the designers trusting players to generate new levels of improvisation. I owe that experience to the new school of design, and I want people in this era of design to follow it.

I dislike the notion we can’t tell people what they can or should do when designing TRPGs. It’s a medium of entertainment, with its own unique combination of quirks and conceits. You can do things in TRPGS which you can’t do elsewhere. I expect those things to appear in TRPGs, just as I expect the movies to feature moving pictures, and a painting gallery to include images which were painted and sufficient means to perceive them. My default reaction to something not utilizing its medium is disinterest at best, and disgust at worst. Don’t worry about the exceptions, they can probably stand on their own two feet.

So when it comes to TRPGs developed today, I expect them to include variety without losing the capacity to improvise. I’m not going to throw out the massive library of video game mechanics and only use the base set of TRPG mechanics. The decisions and improvisation of people who already have more mechanics than they know what to do with is what interests me.

90% of the actions and abilities people invented on the fly over the past 50 years of tabletop gaming can be consolidated into standard abilities. I'm sorry, you will not experience the feeling of cool the first time one of your players asked to trip somebody in combat and it worked. Trip attacks can just be a maneuver now. But you can experience that same feeling of cool with your players today; it's just that the creative ideas they will come up with today will incorporate the trip attack they know they can perform in order to do something you have to resolve.

Solving Improv for New School

This deserves its own post, frankly. It will get its own post, certainly. In spite of my desire to make essays like this overly hostile, cranky, and condescending to people I see as keeping the hobby mired in bottom rung of tabletop discussions, I have a solution to this.

The simple answer is to explicitly gatekeep readily identifiable bonuses, abilities, rewards, and events behind improvisation. Tell the player they can only play this card which grants them extra damage or a bonus skill check when they improvise an action. Tell the player they can only get an ability from this magic item by coming up with one and practicing with it. Tell the player they can only survive the room filling with water if they come up with something, because you sure as hell don't know what the right answer is.

Perhaps paradoxically, these rewards must have a loose or ephemeral quality to them; they can't be achieved through the lowest levels of player improvisation. They can't be things the players shouldn't need to improvise, things everyone knows how to adjudicate (like trip attacks).

Like I said, this will get its own, much larger post where I will be happy to go in-depth on this discussion. I'd prefer not to kill the naturally elated mood of my benevolent revelations with the dour purpose of this essay (among other things).

The beatings must continue until GMs improve.

Improv, Summarized

Frankly, the GM shouldn’t need to know why improvisational tools and resources exist. It has little bearing on whether they can execute on the task set before them, which is to provide as little friction between my design and my players as possible. They are not to be tinkered with unless the GM has an absolute understanding of their purpose within the game (and perhaps not even then). Under no circumstances are they to be discouraged or removed.

Improvisational tools are for me to develop and for you to play along with.

Lucky me, I just read an article by the Angry GM in which he shits all over the idea of called shots, why can’t GMs just do things on the fly, isn’t Angry special for doing things on the fly, insert self aggrandizing BS. Angry goes on to explain how he actually does have a called shots rule (not system), and it sees use at his table! See, Angry cleverly introduces specially designed monsters which are practically begging to have called shots used against them. They have special attacks connected to weak points in their anatomy, in his example. I’m not being sarcastic when I call this clever by the way, it’s the product of a smart person generating a specific opportunity for players to engage with something outside the rules.

Do you understand that? The called shot table isn’t for the GM. The cards that let you make a free skill check when you improvise to play them aren’t for the GM. Any modifying system meant to simulate or advance improvisation isn’t for the GM.

They’re present for the players. The players. Not for you. The players. That’s who these things are present for. The improvisational elements specifically made for the players. The players’ improv. I know GMs could handle all that stuff on the fly. I also know GMs could decide attacks hit or miss by fiat alone. Aren’t we so smart for figuring this out? No, because the maneuvers or trip attacks or metamagics or whatever aren’t here for the GM. They’re here to cover the next base of actions players were likely to attempt, just like the first actions in the first system were.

I’m not interested in whether GMs can make clever monsters and setpieces or are good enough at telegraphing and making on the fly rulings for players to try improvising. Pat yourself on the back if you need to GMs, I’m sure you’re all smart enough to deal with your players if they come up with something outside the rules. Have a cookie from the bottom shelf. I’m interested in whether it’s worth it for players to attempt the kind of swing-on-the-chandelier-and-kick-the-orc-off-the-balcony shenanigans improvisation generates in the base game.

I’m interested in making sure the shenanigans come up. And I’m especially interested in keeping you from sabotaging them. Remember: this is not your game. These are not your players. This is my game. These are my players. The rulebook is a holy text, a work of divine artifice designed to impart knowledge and fun in the form of superior gaming to my players. Take careful note of the TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT sign above the “Edit” column of your preferred word processor.

And keep your unclean hands away from my trip attacks.