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cptapathy · 2 months

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Do you feel your theatre experience impacts your d&d experience and vice versa? If so how?

An intricate one

I think poem first then full answer under the cut. It's long and indepth.

Does a shoe influence a dance?

Will the thread effect the weave?

Do I age with time?

Or does it age with me?

So, to try and determine how theatre has influenced anything in my life is incredibly difficult. But the biggest thing is helping to sus out when audiences may lose focus.

I have been in professional theatre since I was 7/8 I think, amateur theatre since I was about 6 maybe it's real hard to remember. So naturally everything I do is influenced by it.

My background varies from acting to dircting and lighting design so how theatre impacts is more identifiable.

Part 1 acting

So I was a good actor but not a great one and I think if a great actor were to play a ttrpg they wouldn't do well at it if they approached it how they approach acting.

When I would perform a role I would be thinking constantly about what my character would do right now, how I'm meant to move to this position, the next thing is a big moment so I need to prepare for it etc.

A great actor doesn't do that, they just do the stuff they don't think about it. It does mean that great actors can be terrible fits if the character I too different from them but if it's the right character it's seamless.

However the tendency to think in depth about each action is incredibly useful in ttrpgs especially combat focused ones like dnd or PF as the alienation of the mechanics fits nicely with the alienation of thinking though each action and intention.

Although apparently everyone does improv and everyone recommends improv I've never had a great experience with it and that is entirely because most aee comedic. I can't help but find it funny and feel the pressure to be funny.

However the few times I've done dramatic improv it's been brilliant and I've been able to hone that to a T in TTRPGs I've never before had the scope to perform dramatic improv like that before.

The final acting thing I can think of is my voices, I hated my voice after it broke for some reason, can't possibly imagine what would make me, a trans girl, hate her deep voice.

But because I hated my voice I inhabited a number of different voices and accents and would spend hours in the playground making weird noises just to stretch and flex my vocal skills. To this day it's really difficult for me to not slip into the accent of people talking to me.

Doing lost of different voices helped immensely with acting and has been invaluable in TTRPGs as a player and gm. Obviously no one needs to do a voice for TTRPGs but I can separate characters in my head by their voice and the wild thing is that similar characters will accidentally slip into each others voices more than similar voices do.

Part 2 Directing

This is easy, directing and GMing are almost a 121 parallel.

1. Organising a group of disorganised performers/players

2. Ensuring the table/rehearsal is safe and comfortable

3. Steering said disorganised group towards a conclusion, theme or ending that aligns with the script/adventure and each other

Like, running rpgs is how I get my theatre fix during the slow times.

There are a number of things that I have learnt from directing which I tend to apply in rpgs. A lot seem obvious but common sense ain't so common.

Dramatic irony: incredibly useful to engage the audience/player. Obviously this requires a game where secrets are a thing but if that is the case having some information that others don't can pull players in especially if they hold only a part of the puzzle and are trying to figure out the rest

I am a creative editor not dictator: in theatre there are directors who accept no challenges to their vision. I am not one of them, I believe in the inherent nature of actors/writers/designers as creative and that when we collaborate we make something better than we could have made alone. So when I GM or play I take that attitude with me. There is no right answer, most of the time I will have a number of idea of how to solve things but whatever the players suggest I am more inclined to enact that what my original plan may have been.

Part 3 theatrics/design

When I run in person games, I will narrate an opening cinematic, think game of thrones/civ 5 openings with camera cuts and transitions focusing on actions the characters have done in the last session and giving hints to what may come up in the story.

I will plot this narration to music, try my best to time it correctly, and spotlight moments from each character to make them all seem badass. Sometimes I will incorporate character backstory scenes to give background if we are going to be focusing on one characters arc over others for the session.

I think this has become my signature style as a GM and, personally, it makes for an epic opening. It also is a clear indication of "the game has begun" which is an issue I see with a lot of GMs where there isn't a hard start to the game and it can get a bit meandering and slow to start.

Another related element which is tough to enact in game is the rule of inverse (I just made up that phrase)

The rule of inverse is if you have slow slow fade to black or snap to black transitions through the entire play you maintain the one you use until THE MOMENT, the moment when everything changes, the tonal shift, the revelation, the denouement/climax etc. At that point you change how transitions happen snap transitions if you were fading or slow fades if you were snapping to black.

This highlights the "everything has changed" sense and sets the audience on edge.

In TTRPGs its very helpful to have a sudden shift in energy to let players know something has happened or changed, that we are now in another phase. This is generally changing the frequency of rolls and opportunities to act drastically.

If speeding things up it may result in limiting player agency in the moment if they are unsure of what to do but you can mitigate this by either adding an IRL timer and/or taking a moment to tell the players things are different now, (you can stop this being jarring and pulling players out of immersion by setting a key phrase to indicate that this is happening)

Anywho that's how I approach TTRPGs with a theatre background.

#jess answers #poetry #poem #long post #ttrpg #dnd #theatre #@serotoninswitch

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