Continuing Mission

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Riffing: What Years of Improvising Star Trek Stories Taught Me About Human Creativity. And I Emphasize “Human”.

Michael Dismuke
5–8 minutes
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Some of the best storytelling education I ever got didn’t happen at a writing desk. It happened live, on camera, with a random paragraph, a pair of dice, and a group of friends who refused to let a bad idea die.

On Continuing Conversations, we call it riffing. The format is simple. Take a random prompt — a paragraph from a Star Trek Adventures book, a roll on a random table, a character nobody asked for — and build a story out of it on the spot, together, in real time. No preparation. No safety net. Just imagination, out loud.

I’ve been doing it for years now, and it has quietly become one of the most important tools in my creative life. Here’s what it taught me.

Constraints make you creative, not the other way around

The blank page is a myth. Nobody does their best work staring at infinity. Riffing works because it starts with a constraint: a random paragraph, a dice roll, a villain nobody thinks can be redeemed.

In our second “Riff Challenge“, the game was this: pick a random paragraph from any Star Trek Adventures product, deliver an on-the-spot pitch for a story based on that paragraph, and then everyone jumps in to build the plot, the conflicts, and the big wow moments together. You don’t get to choose your starting point. That’s the point.

Random tables — we call them probability matrixes in Captain’s Log — work the same way. A lot of people misunderstand them. They think the table tells you what happens. It doesn’t. The table gives you raw material: a strange combination of elements you’d never have chosen on your own. The creativity isn’t in the roll. It’s in what you do with the roll. The dice hand you something unexpected, and your imagination has to rise to meet it.

That gap — between what the dice say and what the story needs — is where the art lives.

Yes, and is a technology

Improv’s oldest rule is “yes, and.” Accept what your partner gives you, then add to it. It sounds simple. Doing it live, in front of an audience, with writers as sharp as Al Spader, Jim Johnson, Aaron Pollyea, and the rest of our regular crew, will rewire your brain.

Here’s what yes-and actually trains: the ability to treat every idea as raw material instead of judging it on arrival. In a writers’ room, the instinct is to evaluate — is this good, does this work, is this canon? Riffing forces you to defer all of that. Someone throws out something wild, and instead of explaining why it won’t work, you ask what would have to be true for it to work. That one shift — from evaluation to construction — is the whole game.

We once took Kai Winn and Gul Dukat, two of the most irredeemable villains in Star Trek, and riffed our way toward making them sympathetic. I won’t spoil the episode. The point is that the exercise only works if everyone commits to building instead of blocking. Cynicism is easy. Construction is the skill.

The dice are a scene partner

One of the strangest and most wonderful things about Captain’s Log, the solo RPG I had the privilege of leading, is that it formalizes riffing for one player. The probability matrixes become your scene partner. You roll, you interpret, you roll again. It’s improvisation with an unpredictable collaborator that never gets tired and never repeats itself.

That taught me something I didn’t expect: spontaneity can be structured. You don’t need chaos to be creative. You need a system that regularly surprises you, plus the discipline to honor the surprise instead of rerolling until you get the answer you wanted. The rule at our table, spoken or not, is that you play the roll you’re given. Working writers know this feeling — the note from the editor you didn’t want, the constraint from the licensor, the story breaking in a direction you didn’t plan. Riffing is rehearsal for all of it.

Nobody riffs alone, and that’s the point

Every episode listed below has one thing in common: more than one imagination in the room. The crossover episode where Dune’s Great Houses collided with Klingon Houses worked because Andrew Peregrine, Kelli Fitzpatrick, and Derek Attico each brought a completely different creative engine to the table. The mission-building sessions worked because dice rolls became the foundation and five people built the house together.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to, especially now: this can’t be automated. A machine can generate text. It can even simulate a writers’ room. But it can’t reproduce the moment someone says the unexpected thing and the whole room lights up — the laughter, the pivot, the idea that’s better than anything anyone walked in with. (Yet.)Riffing is live. It’s social. It’s gloriously, inefficiently human.

In an age where anyone can generate a thousand words in ten seconds, the scarce resource isn’t content. It’s the spark — the human moment where imagination catches fire between people. Random tables and improv didn’t become less relevant when the machines showed up. They became the whole point. The dice give you the prompt. Only a person can make it mean something.

Try it

You don’t need a podcast. Grab a friend, a random table, or just a random page from any book on your shelf. Point at a paragraph. Pitch a story. Let them build on it. Say yes, and mean it.

Your storytelling will get better. I know, because mine did — one riff at a time.

Resource: Every Continuing Conversations Riffing Episode (newest to oldest)

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