I haven’t done any acting in years, but I still occasionally get the Actor’s Nightmare. (When I saw the Buffy episode where Willow dreams she’s in the play that doesn’t quite make sense, I sat up and said, “I’ve had that dream!”)
Last night I dreamed I was in a community theater or children’s theater production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It seemed to be only the songs from the movie, not the entire play. It was opening night, and there was a certain lack of sufficient rehearsal.
The canonical actor’s nightmare is like the clasic final exam nightmare—the final exam in the class you never actually attended, for instance. The play makes no sense, you don’t know your lines, you’re not even sure how the scenes go together, but everyone else knows what they’re doing. (I never did figure out what the tanks were doing in Oklahoma in one of my dreams.) This was different: I hadn’t just missed rehearsals, there hadn’t been enough rehearsal. There were scenes we hadn’t even blocked, never mind actually practiced.
So it’s opening night, it’s a makeshift theater (basically a conference room with a pair of doors near one end, one going to the descignated green room and the other outside), and the audience is arriving. We’re all “backstage” (i.e. in the next room), I’m running through songs (OK, we havent rehearsed this part, but I know most of the song anyway…), and for some inexplicable reason I’ve been cast as Gaston (it didn’t make sense in the dream, either), and I’m running through the song, when I realize… who’s playing LeFou? I start asking the other actors, and nobody knows. I ask the stage manager, and he doesn’t know.
Did I mention I have the vague sense throughout that this is the theater troupe from Something Positive?
So the audience is here, the lights (room lights, we don’t have any actual stage lighting) are up, and people are out there starting to sing, and we don’t even have the entire show cast yet, never mind rehearsed! I’m trying to figure out just how much I can muddle through the opening scene without someone to play off of, and I’m not even certain we have anyone playing Belle out on stage…
…and then I woke up with “Going Through the Motions” running through my head.
There are certain of us who have formulated the theory that this is why you don’t find roleplaying games as appealing as some other certain of us — ad libbing is a big part of RPGs (not to mention LARPs, oy), whereas you seem to prefer scripted and (I agree with you totally on this one) well-rehearsed productions.
It’s totally not my intention to further turn you off to RPGs, but I confess that I have been in games that ran a little bit like this — not a whole lot made sense, no two given scenes appeared to connect (sequential or otherwise, this is why many GMs are opposed to splitting the party), and a large section of the cast appeared to be functioning under the effects of a Confusion spell. (That’s a magical compulsion where a character rolls a die to determine randomly what his actions will be for that round. The following actually happened in a recent GURPS game: one round a character was searching a room for shiny objects, and the next round when the GM came around to him again, he lay down on the floor to take a nap. WTF? And these were the player’s own decisions — no imaginary magical compulsions involved. *headsmack*)
I’d like to offer some words of comfort here about how stuff like the example above only happens rarely, but there’s really no guarantee — at least with so-called ‘pick-up’ groups like in the RPG club. Now, Jim’s cadre, we are all reasonable, rational people who have at minimum a grasp of continuity, most of us have some writing experience and thereby an idea of the dramatically appropriate, and best of all we know each other and can make educated guesses about how the others will react to our actions.
… y’know, kinda the way some of the S*P theater troupe members are actually competent. 😉
Anyway, I invite you to comment on this theory here. I’m curious as to what your current view of RPGs is, what with Jim trying to launch v.2.0 of his game and all. You do know that you, alenxa, andrea_wot, and wayens are invited, right? Good.
There are certain of us who have formulated the theory that this is why you don’t find roleplaying games as appealing as some other certain of us — ad libbing is a big part of RPGs (not to mention LARPs, oy), whereas you seem to prefer scripted and (I agree with you totally on this one) well-rehearsed productions.
Yeah, that’s pretty much it. I really don’t like doing improv. LARPing, especially, is not for me.
As for standard RPGs, since I don’t have much experience, I usually want to kind of ease into it a bit by watching the rest of the players for a few sessions. I don’t have the background where I can just roll up a character and dive in. Unfortunately every time I’m ready to jump on board with a game, it dissolves.
So yes, I’m interested in joining this game, but I’m not in a position where I can just whip up a character and toss it in the ring.