Back in 2002 I met an amazing game designer whose name escapes me, because I only remember his online handle. He was working on a game I’ve still never really seen anything like: a game of competitive storytelling. And look if you know or remember the game, do chime in. Players took on the role of great legendary figures facing terrible crises and would compete in describing how their figure would solve such a thing, and then the facilitating player would literally mark the players for how good their story was.

Now, generally, in games of shared storytelling we’re not here to make it an issue of quality because we’re trying to encourage wild creativity, radical acceptance and strong buy in, so as to create the best shared experiences. But having set up that this was an actual competition, the game was kind of amazing. A bunch of really talented story tellers trying to outdo each other produces incredible effects. But what I also never forgot was that the game had criteria. Of course it did: it wouldn’t be fair to just leave everything up a judge to use their personal opinions. Players deserve to know how they are being judged. The four primary criteria in the game were as follows:

• Tradition, which was about embodying who your legend/god was and their vibe
• Honour, which was about making sure that you showed respect to how big the problem was, not punking it out like it didn’t matter
• Glory, which was being crazy awesome in how you defeated it
• Verve, which was a placeholder for good writing and presentation, but also engagement and intensity.

These are excellent criteria for what makes good roleplaying too.

Much has been written on what makes good improv, of course. I cannot attempt to add to that discourse; I don’t know enough and there are very good books about it. From my brief improv training, finding your voice, trusting it and listening to it, and following others with full buy in were the two things I remember being taught. There wasn’t really a way to evaluate how good the dramatic material the improv was producing though. And again, some might argue there should not be such a thing. RPGs, unlike the game described above, aren’t competitive. And yet, don’t we all want to do them better? And if so, shouldn’t we measure not just enthusiasm, honesty, engagement, collaboration…but also how good our words and stories are? And try to make those things better? If so, then criteria is going to be vital.

Of course, Tradition and Honour overlap a lot with what makes quality improv. I renamed Tradition into Duty because Tradition felt a little bit too much about mythology. The Duty is to the setting, to the character you built and the characters of those around you. You want to not just treat them as real but also that they are consistent. You want the choices the other players have made to matter and leave an impact on the world, so it is your Duty to acknowledge them and be effected by them. That is something you’ll find discussed in improv skills, yes. If someone mimes a car, you can’t just mime riding a horse inside the car. Or walking next to it at walking pace. You kill their established truth. So I’m not really making new ground there.

Honour is also similar. Although good scenes can be built around status reversals and games of hierarchy – classic improv tools – improv also is about recognizing that you can’t just imagine the machine gun to kill the imaginary serial killer. That’s not interesting. Glory I think does come up in improv as well, although I’m not sure it’s quite expressed like that. The idea is the counterpart to Honour: you can’t just imagine a machine gun but you can also imagine anything you want. The right answer is the answer within you, and like any artist the key is listening to yourself and letting it out, as big as you need to be. Some players of course always try to go too big, but a lot of others need help. I built Relics around the idea that you really can be as powerful as a God and run the universe if you want to, and I’ve been interested to see how many folks are reluctant to let loose both on the small scale of their abilities and the large scale of accepting responsibility. We actually expect RPG rules, most of the time, to tell us “no”. That’s what they’ve done for so long, on the assumption that if they didn’t, we’d just go straight to imagining the machine gun. We’re also told not to throw the campaign off. To be so into following tropes we follow the predicted pathway. And that means we have to unlearn the tendency to think small. Being allowed to do things. Which is part of that improv teaching of not feeling judged or constricted by the wrong answer.

And even Verve is part of improv as well, because part of learning improv too, because you learn about how to act, how to impart real meaning and strength behind every action and syllable, how acting is about broadcasting energy, as well as understanding how to use body language and space work to communicate the imagined reality. If you’re using your words to describe things then you do also need verve, and you need to understand that’s got nothing to do with being long-winded or over dramatic.

So I get no points for just rebranding good improv rules. Maybe half a point for expressing things in a way that don’t just feel like improv rules, because these are both good rules for writing as well. Things that your buddy who wouldn’t even think of calling RPGs improv might consider. In writing have a duty to your readers to keep things consistent and treat your art like it matters and the world as if it is real, and you have to honour the conflicts you create and not just flick a switch and solve everything. Bad things have to happen to innocent people in stories, and as much as that’s your fault, it is also your responsibility.

Which brings us, sideways, to that ongoing question of what are we doing when we roleplay? Some are absolutely not intent in making a story, except by accidental by-product; and many who create a story are doing it to live through it, not perform it. And yet, we are saying things that exist in a fictional world. We must therefore work within that sense. We can – and should! – follow the rules, and even consider them the first and most important thing. But we also know, even though it’s not really written down in any part of the rules of DnD, that if the GM says there’s a dragon in front of us, we have to act as if the dragon is there. So we are telling a story, or at least building one. We can’t get away from the fictional nature of it all. Some people prefer story-maker to story-teller. That can take the pressure off. And yet, unless this is purely solo, and even then, the story is being expressed somehow. As we think about the elements, we imagine what they might look like, sound like, feel like – that is communication, that is taking the story and giving it a sense of itself. That is telling the story. So I think it is fair to always bring these elements forward.

As I say, no real points for the new nomenclature (and it’s a very masculine, ancient Rome kind of word choice, I know). But these four things are easy to remember. THAT might be useful. If you don’t have time to read a whole copy of Improv for Roleplayers, or need a quick handy guide, you’ve got these four principles to fall back on. Duty, Honour, Glory, Verve. We could add an mnemonic device, too, like Game Violence Doesn’t Hurt.

Anyway, these four pop up in lots of my games, explicitly or implicitly. Maybe they’ll help you with how you play or how you create games or guide players to doing cool stuff. That is always the goal – and that’s true whether you’re designing RPGs, facilitating them or playing them, your job most of the time is to help everyone be incredibly cool. Maybe these four things will help.