Do you remember when I threatened to teach y’all a bunch of Game Mastering narration protips and secret strats? Well, guess what? I can’t. You ain’t good enough for them. Sorry.

You see, my secret tricks require a Game Master who’s totally in control of what they say. One who picks their words with care. You can’t use my techniques if you just open your noisehole and let random crap pour forth, and that’s exactly what most of you do. Most of you — most people — start sentences with no idea where they’re going and when they’re going to stop. Most people never even think about the sentence that’s coming next.

That’s why folks ramble. That’s why they repeat themselves. That’s why the stall out and trail off and do whole verbal loading bar that is umming, aahing, and weeellllling.

The failure here ain’t about improvisation or creativity, though, and that’s good, because that’s not what this series is about. Creativity comes with practice, and improvisation is just creativity under fire. Neither can exist without space to exist in. I’ll give you a chance to practice creativity, but this series ain’t Verbal Improv 101. In fact, most of you will think it’s the opposite of improvisation, but that’s because you think improvisation is just unrestrained creativity on the fly. Which it isn’t.

I mean, y’all keep telling me the first rule in improvisation is, “Always say, ‘yes, and…’,” but how many of you can tell me when that rule should stop showing up in a scene? Because there is a time to stop making your scene partner say, “yes, and…” in the first place, and it’s earlier than you think.

But I digress…

I ain’t teaching you wild creativity or rampant improvisation here. I’m teaching you the skill of artful narration. I’m teaching you how to deliver your creativity deliberately. To speak with purpose. This is about communicating effectively with the goal of telling an artful story and presiding over an artful game.

But you can’t do it because you’re not in control of your own talkiness.

Speaking Extemporaneously… or Whatever

Disclaimer first…

Some pedantic asshats might argue that I’m conflating the terms ‘extemporaneous’ and ‘impromptu’ here. I kinda am. That’s my bad. I actually just learned the actual, technical difference myself. But I like the word ‘extemporaneous’ more than I care about the comments of pedantic asshats, and this is my website.

Remember, if you have to start what you say with the word, ‘technically,’ you might be correct, but you’re also very likely being an asshole. Just remember that, in social gaming and in most of life, being liked is more important than being right. So let’s have none of that ‘technically’ horseshit. I already admitted my mistake anyway.

Also, technically, Game Mastering has aspects of both extemporaneous speaking and impromptu speaking, so I will be teaching you both, so, technically, Frankenstein is the real monster.

Anyway…

Extemporaneous or impromptu speaking, or whatever you want to call it, is just speaking without a script or notes or a teleprompter and often with only minimal preparation. Sometimes, it’s speaking with no preparation at all. Good extemporaneous speaking is doing that without saying wrong things or sounding like you’re talking out of your ass. Basically, it’s talking without a script while sounding like you’re reading from one. Kind of.

It’s just speaking clearly and coherently and concisely and completely without having to write your speeches first. That’s all. And if that seems to describe basically all of Game Mastering ever, well, now you know why I’m writing this.

Being good at impromptoraneous speaking means being in control of what comes out of your mouth. Every word and every sentence must serve a purpose, and that purpose must be clear in your head. You can’t just talk, you have to communicate.

Sure, Game Masters sometimes fluff up their speech with filler details to bring the world to life, and that’s fine. Those details don’t matter. What does matter is the details that do. For example, in this module I wrote, the shambling, animated corpse of a guardsman had the key to an important door on his belt. It was one of those too important to miss details, and so, I had to mention it multiple times during the heroes’ battle with the zombies. I couldn’t leave it up to chance that the players might skip searching the rotters once they started acting like the corpses they were, but neither could I say, “… also, the key you need is right there on the floor.” I had to leave it up to the players to notice the key in the narration, the way a video game player notices an inconspicuous sparkle in a room’s corner.

That, by the way, is a very simple example of a powerful skill I’ll be teaching you later. One you can use to set up multi-session mysteries, surprises, reversals, and narrative puzzles. But you ain’t ready for it. Not yet.

I have to know I can trust you to be so in control of your Game Mastering narration that, when I say, “Make sure the players know the key is there,” you will weave that key’s presence into your narration throughout the combat naturally and fluidly. Just as I need to know you can weave a particular theme into every bit of scene-setting to make your dungeon feel like it’s supposed to.

Are you that in control? Do you really pay attention to the words you say? Do you choose them with care? If so, great, you can stop reading. But also, you’re a frigging liar, and you disgust me, because even I wouldn’t say that, and I’m absolutely the best. Skills are like saws; they always need sharpening. And, to be honest, I’m feeling a little rusty right now.

What I’m offering you today are six practice drills, plus one bonus game, you can run every day or every other day or whenever you’re in the car or whatever fits your schedule. They’re based on real practice drills real imexpromturaneous talky-talkers use to sharpen their verbal saws, which we in the business call tongues. The whole practice should take up just ten minutes. Fifteen if you count setting up and hemming and hawing before you start.

Not only that, but I’m gonna include recorded examples of me struggling through the drills myself. I’m gonna do it off the cuff with zero preparation and keep whatever take I get. If I’m rusty, be kind to me. My skills have gone to shit. I haven’t been practicing or focusing; I’ve only been running games sporadically and only online. But note that being kind of crap is actually the point of doing drills. You may not even be able to complete some of these drills at first. They’re hard.

That said, you might listen to my deliveries and think you’ll never be able to measure up. Because I am pretty awesome. But I’ve also been practicing this shit for nearly forty years. I’ve been behind the screen since 1988. Moreover, in the last 15 years, I’ve actually been thinking hard about the skills and how to teach them. So don’t measure yourself by my yardstick.

Beyond that, though, I have a few other protips before you get started…

The Angry GM’s Tips for Off-the-Cuff Monolectical Success

Lots of these drills involve picking topics to talk about. So, tip the first is to pick different topics every day. Don’t keep reusing the same ideas. It defeats the purpose of practicing off-the-cuff speech if you’re getting to know your topics too well.

Second, even though this is Game Mastering practice, don’t restrict yourself to Game Mastering and gaming topics. In fact, it’s kind of better if you don’t. At least at first. Pick easy things that you can speak naturally about so you can build your communication skills. They’ll follow you to the game table; I promise.

Tip the third is one that all y’all hate hearing. I don’t know why. Do not record yourself. Do not listen to yourself. Do not evaluate yourself in any way. Conscious evaluation is the death of skill formation. If you absolutely must evaluate yourself, the only proper thing to pay attention to is how much less bad your worst days are getting over time. But, honestly, don’t even do that. Just run the drills, don’t keep score, and trust your brain to do the work it knows how to do.

Drill 1: Lexical Pausing (1 Minute)

Lexical pauses are deliberate beats inserted between thoughts and sentences. You need to practice letting a half-second to a second of silence sit between each thought. It’s harder than it sounds, and it feels totally unnatural. People want to fill silences. We’re afraid of looking dumb. We think people notice our pauses, and we think our pauses are longer than they are. So, we talk as fast as we can and end up talking faster than we can think. We start our next sentence before our brain has figured out what it’s going to be.

This drill will help you slow your verbal roll and convince you that your little verbal rests are totally normal and natural and healthy for a boy or girl your age. It’ll also help you reduce your filled pauses, hesitation markers, reptetitions, false starts, and repairs. Collectively, those are called speech disfluencies, and they include the ‘umms’ and ‘aahs’ and semantically empty filler phrases and mispeaks that require fixing.

But that’s a side effect. People worry way too much about filled pauses and hesitation markers. Don’t sweat them. I don’t. They’re normal. They’re natural. They even serve important social functions. No one really notices them. If you can get rid of them, that’s good, but it’s not an important enough goal to lose sleep over.

The real benefit here is that you’ll start speaking more slowly and giving your brain room to think. That’s the space where creativity and improvisation can happen. Most people who think they can’t speak creatively really just don’t give their brain enough time to come up with shit. They talk too fast. Obviously, that space to think is especially important when you’re using advanced narration tricks like the ones I want to teach you.

The drill goes like this…

First, pick a topic. Pick a process to explain, an object to describe, or a story to tell. The topic literally doesn’t matter here. Anything works.

Now, speak on that topic for one full minute. You can use a timer here, but unlike some of the exercises below, I don’t want you to watch it too closely. The exact amount of time doesn’t matter. Just start speaking out loud. But, at the end of every thought or sentence, deliberately pause for a half-second to a second. Pause for a beat. Again, the exact length of time doesn’t matter. That’s not the point. The point is getting used to pausing between ideas.

That’s it. That’s the drill. Here’s me doing it…

Now you try.

Drill 2: No-Stall Speaking (2 Minutes)

This isn’t a drill, I like, but then, this isn’t a thing I struggle with. As many of you know, my problem ain’t stalling mid-speech. My problem is never shutting the hell up. But some people do struggle with stalling, and this drill is for you.

As above, pick a random topic. Any topic works. Now, speak on that topic for two minutes. You can use a timer, but don’t watch it too closely. Just let it tell you when you’re done. Your goal is to keep talking. Imagine there’s a bomb in your desk that’ll explode if it hears too much silence. If you stall, repeat the last thing you said, then keep going. Or keep repeating over and over until you get unstuck.

This one might be really tricky for some of you. You might feel really stupid repeating yourself over and over. Work through it. That’s what drills are for.

If you find it hard to even get through the Lexical Pausing drill, start with this No-Stall drill and do it just for one minute at a time. Then work up to two minutes. Once you can comfortably speak without stalling, then practice your Lexical Pausing.

If stalling ain’t a problem for you, you can actually skip this drill. Or, you can treat it as an advanced Lexical Pausing drill. Once you get comfortable with the Lexical Pausing drill, expand it to two minutes and combine it with this No-Stall Drill.

Drill 3: Progressive Compression (2 Minutes)

The real Demon’s Souls starts here, folks. This one may be a difficulty spike. It’s also absolutely a vital Game Mastering skill. It’s about building awareness of how much time it takes you to talk, adjusting what you say to the time you want to fill, and identifying and prioritizing the ideas you need to communicate.

It’s basically the Recap Skill. Most of y’all suck at recaps. You ramble on way too long and include way too many useless picayune details.

Enter Progressive Compression.

You’ll need a book and a timer. And you’ll need the timer where you can watch it. You need to see the seconds ticking away.

Find a passage in the book. You’ll need about a quarter page to a half page or a single, long paragraph. After you’ve tried the drill a few times, you’ll get used to what you need.

Set your timer for one minute, stick it in front of your face, and summarize the passage out loud, completely, in exactly one minute. Well, exactly about one minute. It doesn’t have to be precise to the second, but it shouldn’t be more than a second or two off. Your goal is to fill the entire minute with a complete summary of the passage. Leave nothing important unsaid, leave no time on the clock, and don’t go over.

This is hard as balls if you’ve never done it before. If you fail, you’re a normal human person. This one takes practice.

But it gets harder.

Succeed or fail, after you’ve done the one-minute drill, reset your timer for thirty seconds and summarize the same passage again. Same rules, but less time. Complete summary, fill the time, don’t go over.

That sucked more, right?

Now do it again. In fifteen seconds.

This drill is brutal, but it’s doing a lot of important things. It’s letting you practice holding ideas in your head and regurgitating them. It’s also letting you see how quickly you speak and how many ideas fit in a specific period of time. Finally, it’s letting you practice identifying and prioritizing ideas so you know what to communicate and what to jettison when you need to summarize quickly.

Also, as much of a bitch as this drill is, try to practice Lexical Pausing while you do it. But if you can’t even complete the exercise, don’t sweat that. Wait until you can cross the finish line under time.

Here’s my attempt. I have no idea, now, how it’s going to come out, so I’m not going to say anything.

Drill 4: Progressive Expansion (2 Minutes)

Did you enjoy that last drill? No? Great. Here’s the same thing but in reverse.

This drill’s about learning how to expand a topic to fill the right chunk of time. It’s about adding details when you have space for them.

For this, you need to pick a topic, not a passage. While you can do this with a description of something, it’s best to do it with something that has a definite start and end to it. Describing a process is really good here. Explain how to do something.

Start with a timer set to fifteen seconds where you can see it. Now, talk on the subject for fifteen seconds. The goal is the same as above: be complete, fill the entire time, and don’t go over.

Then do it again with thirty seconds on the clock, and then with one minute.

That’s progressive expansion. Here’s mine…

Drill 5: Ass-Pulling Description (1 Minute)

Honestly, I’m only including this bullshit because you’re all gonna bitch and moan if there’s not at least one creativity exercise that looks like actual Game Mastering. But I’m feeling so magnanimous, I’m going to give you a chance for some extra credit by doing this on hard mode, and I’m going to include a free random percentile table you can use in the course handouts.

Oh, yeah, there are handouts below.

Here’s the drill. Set a timer for one minute and describe something that might appear in your game. Describe a character based on a single-word archetype, describe a location, describe a feature, describe an object, whatever you want. Pick a random thing and describe it as you would to your players for one minute. Pause lexically and don’t stall while you do it, obviously.

If you can’t come up with a thing, you’ll find a list of a hundred random things to describe in the handouts. Just roll one, describe it, and cross it off so you don’t reuse it.

There, now this is real gaming shit.

I want to say this is amateur-hour shit, but I’m afraid that, when I record mine, I’m going to humiliate myself, so I won’t. Here’s mine…

Drill 6: Key-Phrase Insertion for Hardcore Game Masters

Can you get through a minute of comfortably pulling a description out of your ass while pausing and without stalling? Have you gotten through a week of that ass-pull drill without breaking a sweat? Do you want to practice a real skill?

There’s another random table in those worksheets. It’s for generating something called a key-phrase. What’s that? It’s a detail you need to emphasize for some Game Mastering reason. Maybe it’s a theme or a mood, or maybe it’s a setup for a later reveal or a clue to a mystery or a pattern you plan to break or some shit like that. Pretend it’s something like that.

Pick a random thing to describe, and now get yourself a random key-phrase. It might be a color, a texture, a mood, or a sensory detail.

Now, ass-pull a description for one minute, but explicitly work the key-phrase detail in there at least once. Your goal is to use the exact word. You can use a very close synonym if there is no natural way to use the exact word, but it’s got to be a close synonym.

For bonus points, try to add an oblique or implicit mention or reference back to the the key-phrase in the description.

Before you start the timer, by the way, you can give yourself a moment to gather your thoughts, but don’t take forever. Thirty seconds is good. A minute is pushing it.

Here’s my attempt…

Angry’s Extemporaneous Skill-Building Worksheet

To help you make a daily practice of this, I’ve created a one-page summary of all the drills, and I’ve attached two random tables to help you decide what to pull out of your ass and what to insert into it. Into the thing you pulled out of there. Not into your ass.

I really hope I didn’t actually need to clarify that.

The Angry GMs Extemporaneous Speaking Skill-Building Worksheet

Now, let’s do a bonus activity!

Pop Quiz: Key-Phrase Insertion in the Trenches

Have you mastered pulling descriptions out of your ass? Have you been consistently shoving key-phrases into your ass-pulls? Are you feeling good? Do you want to try an experiment?

Try this…

Before your next game session, identify a key detail you can feature prominently across several encounters or through the ongoing presence of a particular non-player character or throughout an entire scene of play. For my last session, I chose to emphasize that the walls of a burial mound my players were set to explore for several hours of play time were made of loose, muddy earth grown through with the roots of trees and shrubs that had overgrown the mound.

As my players picked their way through the tunnels and chambers of the burial mound, I referenced those details, explicitly and implicitly, numerous times. Obviously, I called it out in a lot of my scene-setting narrations. But I also referenced it in my transitions. As the characters moved through the tunnels, they frequently knocked dirt loose as they brushed the walls and ceiling, and tendrils of slimy roots clung to their faces and clothes. I also mentioned it during various encounters. For example, when a gunman missed his target, his bullet thudded into the earthen wall, spraying loose dirt everywhere. You get the point.

Pick a detail and pretend it’s like the secret code phrase you’re trying to get your players’ notice without your kidnappers realizing you’re sending a message. You get me?

At the start of the following session, ask your players about the detail. For example, I asked my players, “Do you guys remember exploring that burial mound last week? Do you happen to remember what the walls were made of?”

If they get it right, you get a cookie. Which you have to buy yourself. I’m not buying you all cookies. Do you know how much I just had to drop on desktop publishing software so I could make that handout and other bits of bonus content? I can’t even buy me cookies right now. Buy your own cookies.

If they get it wrong, don’t sweat it. This shit’s hard. Just keep drilling. Which you should do anyway. Remember the ABCs of extemporaneous speaking for Game Mastering excellence.

Always Be doing daily drills and finding other ways to practice your extemporaneous speaking skills unless you want your game mastering to go to Crap.

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Thanks, as always, to my financial supporters, without whom I wouldn’t be able to buy overpriced desktop publishing software so I can build handouts and the upcoming bonus content I’m designing. I’d especially like to thank Chris C. Chris has this whole, big-ass Hodgepocalypse blog-based project thing which involves a hex-crawly map of some post-apocalyptic or alternate-history North America and a lot of world building. You might want to give it a look.