Thursday 7 March 2019

Just Do It Well

Age, fatherhood, meditation and alcohol have had their effects on me: I am a much mellower person than I once was. In particular, I increasingly look on prescriptiveness as one of the worst of all evils. I could pick on a lot of other people for being prescriptive about how to play D&D, what an OSR game should look like, what the assumptions of "old school" play should be, what to avoid (railroading, quantum ogres, etc.) and so on and so forth, but it's more honest to hold up myself as the example: I once wrote this post, angrily making the case that the enemy of good gaming was the advice that you should just do "what works for you and your group". Those familiar with this blog will be able to cite other similar examples of prescriptiveness, I am sure.

I now look on the advise to just do "what works for you and your group" as the most profound and important advice there is, and the most difficult to carry out. People who play RPGs are human beings, and there is very little in the universe that is more complex than human beings - except the relationships between human beings in the context of a group. Navigating in that space is hard. Achieving satisfaction for everybody within it is harder still. It is not just the highest priority - it should really be the only priority.

Let's watch some YouTube videos. Some people will cite chapter and verse regarding the nature of songwriting: what works and what doesn't; what you should or shouldn't do; how long a song should be; when there should be a chorus; when you should go to the bridge, and so on and so forth.

But then think about "Where Did Our Love Go?" by The Supremes.


Where is the chorus in "Where Did Our Love Go?" How many rules of songwriting thumb does it actually follow? Not many. But who cares? It does what it does well: the ineffable and ridiculously soulful vocals of Diana Ross; the beautiful plaintive simplicity of lyrics that anybody who has ever broken up with anyone immediately feels and knows deep in the guts; that sax solo delivered with the most impeccable taste; the studied minimalism of the entire thing.

And think about "Maggie May".


What a strange piece of music, when you break it down to its elements: a rambling, repetitive, shambles of a melody that never seems to resolve into anything - again, it breaks more rules than it follows, but, again again, who cares?

And then there's "Hummer". 7 minutes long. Doesn't have a chorus (like with a lot of Pumpkins song, the chorus, if there is one, is a riff). It's got a melody, but you can't really sing along to it. And the structure is bizarre, starting off high, building to a crescendo, and then ending with a long and vague diminuendo with a thoughtful, almost pensive, end - to what is ostensibly a hard rock song.


And last but not least, just to prove a point - here's "Alone Again (Naturally)", which is about as perfectly-crafted a pop song as you can think of, obeying all of the conventions...except the lyrics, which are about as unusual as it gets in that context - opening with thoughts of suicide and ending with contemplation of death.


What am I trying to suggest? Whatever you do, just do it well.

13 comments:

  1. There's still plenty of truth in your blogpiece that you castigate, even if the tone is lacking. What you might now say: "of course you have to do what works for your group; but your group may vary widely over time, and being adaptable to that probably includes having certain principles, ideas, and skills that allow you to offer a good game; these are learned over time and through reflection, and show fruit in knowing what will work for this specific group on this specific night"

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  2. You have to know the rules to know when to break the rules.

    But once you do, go break them.

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  3. I still think that it's a terrible idea to use this line as an answer when someone asks for specific advice, because this person obviously hasn't figured out what works for them yet. But on the other hand, there's more than one solution to a specific problem most of the time, so yes, in the end everyone has to decide for themselves which solution works best and which probably doesn't for their game.

    On a personal level, I have held the opinion like forever that rules have a bad tendency to transform into dogma over time. So regarding the song examples, I don't think that they break any rules, they just break with the dogma that narrow-minded people have made out of those rules. It's something Gygax himself already knew: "The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules."

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    1. Yes, it's bad advice when given to a specific question but terribly good advice in general!

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  4. What's best for your group might not be what's best for my group. But since it works for someone, it's probably a good starting point.

    Over the years I've read a lot of blogs and watched a lot of DM advice videos and the advice found within varies wildly. I've found some useful stuff in most of them. Acting like your way is The One True Way is unnecessary IMO. We can all learn from someone else's game, and it doesn't have to be more than that

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  5. Ah, Smashing Pumpkins... :)

    And yes, age mellows things...

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  7. Do whatever you do well but learn the basics first.

    To give an analogy to homebrewing (I seem to do that a lot) learn to make a fucking pale ale before you make a chocolate pepper Belgian stout. Homebrewing communities are full of newbies with ludicrously complicated recipes who haven't nailed the basics yet.

    Sure, a lot of weird beers are great and a lot of games in which the GM focuses on what works the best for his group are wonderful, but to figure out what works the best for you you really need to have a good grounding in the basics or you get people who decide that dungeon crawls/sandboxes/investigative CoC games suck for their group because they haven't learned how to run those basic game times competently.

    Often what's good advice for experts is wildly different from what's good advice for newbies. In my last job before I opened my own business I had to follow a canned routine that I hated and mostly ignored because I knew how to do my own thing, but it was enormously helpful for the newbies to help get their feet under them.

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    1. I am also a big proponent of fundamentals (having a solid plan/grasp of the basics helps you improvise later), but I think a lot of people who are new at and excited about something jump into it with both feet and then backfill the fundamentals later, and when I don't think that's a problem. I think that's especially true for hobbies, but it's also how I got into my art career. It would probably have been helpful for me to spend my teenage years doing nothing but figure drawing and life studies rather than over-ambitious personal projects, but I don't think I would have actually stuck with it long term had that been the case. People can make a lot of interesting stuff by harnessing that initial burst of young dumb energy - sometimes it works, sometimes it's interesting but flawed in a way that germinates a seed for future work, and sometimes it's a failure that you learn from. Having your reach exceed your grasp is a good way of identifying your weaknesses.


      A friend of mine makes a lot of terrible overcomplicated coffee beers for fun, but he's enjoying the process, and it's not like I have to drink the stuff.

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    2. Yeah, I think a lot of the time people who really succeed do it because of their enthusiasm for hugely ambitious projects rather than starting off just getting the basics right. Just getting the basics right doesn't excite anybody, and excitement is often what you really need.

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  8. I love how, as you grow, you find deeper meaning in seemingly unassuming statements.

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  9. Alone again, naturally. Perhaps the most depressing song lyrics written in the pop era. I love it. On my playlist. My boys think it's amazing that such a song was not just written, but was popular. I told them it was a 70s thing.

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