[Drill] Boris

[Graham W]

This is an improv game, by Keith Johnstone. It's great.

One player mimes being hauled in by an invisible monster. The "monster" (who is called Boris) forces him into a chair to be interrogated.

The other players are the interrogators. They must fire random questions at the victim about his crime. It's important that these are completely random questions - "What about the goldfish?" or "Why was there a jar of Marmite at the scene?" - and they're fired really, really fast. The job of the victim is to answer all these questions and try to make sense of them.

Interrogator: "Where is the money?"
Victim: "It's at the train station."
Interrogator: "What about the goldfish?"
Victim: "He helped me steal it. He swam into the bank vault."
Interrogator: "And the blue trousers?"
Victim: "Camoflage, so no-one could see me when the vault was flooded with water."
Interrogator: "Who is 'Paul'?"
Victim: "The bank manager."
Interrogator: "And the number 9556?"
Victim: "His phone number."

If the Interrogators are dissatisfied with the Victim's answers, they should tell Boris to help 'persuade' the victim.

Interrogator: "Boris, help him!"
Victim: "Aaaargh!" [mimes Boris twisting his arm]

Finally, the Interrogators should summarise the Victim's story.

Interrogator: "So, you're telling me that you called the bank manager, Paul. You threatened to kill his pet budgie, Gerald, unless he opened the vault. Once open, goblins armed with water pistols flooded the vault. You waded in, in blue trousers, and released the safe-cracking goldfish, who opened the safety deposit box. You fled with the Diamonds of Bulgar."
Victim: "It's the truth, I swear."
Interrogator: "All right. You may go."

The story produced will usually be fantastical, and perhaps childish, but will make some logical sense.

The point of this game, in case you're wondering, is to get the Victim into a creative mindset. It doesn't matter if the story makes any sense, as long as the Victim is responding immediately, without thinking, giving the first answer that occurs to him. Often, these "obvious" answers will appear to be amazingly creative, even though the Victim didn't put any conscious thought into them. The quickfire questioning, and the torture of "Boris", are designed to stop the Victim thinking about his answers.

Graham

[Jason Morningstar]

Building situation through torture since 2006!  You coul totally build a "usual suspects" flashback game building off this technique.

I'm super excited about what improv has to teach us - I wasn't aware that there was a whole body of theory behind it, or that there was such an enormous library of exercises.  In our first class Clinton, Remi and I were all nodding sagely to one another every few minutes - "Oh hells yeah, I am so stealing that"...

[timfire]

That's actually the way Mexican Standoff works, more or less. Players basically accuse one another of doing something wrong on the heist, and the answering player must make up some reason for why what happened happened, before doing the same to someone else.

Player A: "B, why wasn't the car at the pick-up point, it was your job to drive the car to the spot?!?"

Player B: "Why are you blaming me? I was there, you all were late! Then the cops showed up and I had to split. I called C, and he told me to head for the corner of 5th and central. C?"

Player C: "And we could have all gotten away, if D, hadn't stop for that damn hotdog!..."

And so on...

[Marc Majcher]

Building situation through torture since 2006!  You coul totally build a "usual suspects" flashback game building off this technique.

I'm super excited about what improv has to teach us - I wasn't aware that there was a whole body of theory behind it, or that there was such an enormous library of exercises.  In our first class Clinton, Remi and I were all nodding sagely to one another every few minutes - "Oh hells yeah, I am so stealing that"...

I've been taking classes and doing improv here in Austin for almost a year now (Johnstone-style) and I absolutely concur.  In fact, I've stolen bunches of improv games and theory stuff to be incorporated in the two-three RPGs that I've got simmering.  I've been trying to slowing infect some of my fellow improvisors with a few of my favorite games, as well; a group here did a show called The Great Mundane, which was "serial improv" - six or seven "episodes" that took place in the same world, with the same characters every week.  Of course, I had to point out the parallel to PTA, and lent out my copy - I don't know that anything was picked up from it, but, same idea, only without the structure and the conflict resolution and whatnot.  (It turned out awesome, by the way...)

The upshot is that my improv experience has informed my role-playing in two very strong directions, one that it looks like has surfaced here while I've not been paying attention - the need for these "drills" - and another which is fairly guaranteed to deeply offend almost everyone who reads this, so I'll leave that sit for a while.  The drills, I think are very important in a couple of ways, as discussed here - both as "warm-ups" before a game, and as teaching/learning tools for those who want to improve their role-playing, or learn how to do it well in the first place, without suffering through dozens (or years!) of painful or mediocre sessions before figuring it out.  I really like the idea that someone mentioned about publishing a small book of exercises.  I'd also love to see the practice of doing short warmup exercises before a game become more prevalent - we wouldn't dream of going out on stage without getting our energy up and working at putting the group-mind together and whatnot, why should building characters, relationships, settings and stories without doing the same thing? 

Anyway.  This may be off-topic here.  I'd love to continue the Improv/RPG discussion in a more appropriate forum.