If you didn’t catch it last time, I’m making a solo Actual Play using Legend in the Mist as an experiment for myself in various aspects of the form that I’ve been curious about… and this week, I pretty immediately crashed into the difference between solo play and group play in ways I didn’t quite expect.
Like, obviously they are different. But I hadn’t realised quite the extent to which my fundamental assumptions about actual play, liveness, and improvisation are so utterly rooted in the dynamic of a table and a collaborative group building a story together. There are so many things I’m simply not going to be able to investigate in this form… but that realisation also opened up a lot of other ideas.
As I discuss at the beginning of the episode, I recorded about half of an episode using a new plan that I mentioned last time: I outlined a little bit. I pre-rolled some things, both to spare myself some editing headaches but also to give myself a little more time to think about ideas. In more action-based sequences or challenges with a lot of consecutive rolls, I was spending a lot of time between each move thinking anyway, so it seemed fair enough to just do that thinking in advance so that I could focus on improvisation and trying to narrate a compelling story based on the rolls.
Improv felt important. Even as much outlining as I did felt a little bit like cheating as I was doing it. I made some connections and had some ideas come up while I was pre-planning, and I wondered if I should try to ‘perform’ spontaneity and act like I came up with them in the moment. But as I was recording, even when I did actually spontaneously make things up that I found to be cool, or made an unexpected and exciting connection between things from different scenes or different rolls on the tables, I found it difficult to organically indicate that. But why did I feel like I even had to?
Having been thinking about skill in Actual Play… it’s partly that it felt like one of the skills I needed to try and demonstrate to make the story worthy of an audience’s attention was my quick thinking, my ability to build a story on the fly from random rolls.
But it was also because I think that sensation of ‘liveness’ is so essential, to me, to the experience of listening to an Actual Play. It’s the ‘actual’ part of the name! You’re hearing the reactions, the mistakes, the emergent storytelling all as it’s happening. When someone misses a crucial roll and everyone yells, or when somebody makes a brilliant connection and can’t contain their excitement. Only… there was nobody to do that gasping or to share that excitement. I realised, as I was sitting there trying to figure out if I should put on some performance of discovery, that that felt completely stupid when there was nobody (except the invisible and hypothetical listener) that I was performing for. I suppose I could have imagined myself as a storyteller sitting and telling this story to the listener, really try to build up a sense of parasociality, but that somehow feels like an even less ‘actual’ game experience.
I realised that this wasn’t going to work if I tried to replicate the experience of a group table. And as an experiment, what’s the point if I’m not going to lean into the specifics of the form I’m playing with? I needed to embrace solo-ness.
I’ve made jokes about the dice being your collaborator in TTRPG storytelling, but I stopped to really sincerely think about that idea. Could something still feel like an Actual Play to me if I focused not on the liveness or the at-the-table collaboration, but on the dynamic between person and dice? Is a prose story shaped and informed by rolls and mechanics still an Actual Play?
Let’s hope so, since that’s what I’m doing. And I’m not claiming to be the first to do it, to be clear. But it was so clarifying to reach this idea through trial and error, and to embrace that this experiment isn’t going to be testing the form of AP that I expected it to—the only form of AP that I’d really given much thought to.
I still really want to test ideas about collaboration, improv, liveness, and other things that come with group play, but I’m looking forward to seeing what I find through this experiment now that I better understand what I’m trying to do with it. I’m happier with the results than before, though I had some issues with the graphics so I had to listen to it 1000 times in a row and am very aware of its flaws.
Give the episode a listen if you’d like, and if you do, I’d love to discuss it more with you.