If you like music, you really ought to be listening to the podcast Sodajerker. I've been catching up on old episodes, and yesterday listened to the one featuring Jimmy Webb. It's well worth hearing. Not only is Jimmy completely charming and compelling to listen to (and inclined to ramble very amusingly), he also reveals himself to be a fan of Robert Heinlein ("The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" - I guess I'm pretty thick not to have ever picked up on that) and SF in general.
He also very interestingly and eloquently discusses the importance of surprising the listener in a song - what he calls "benign dissonance". You have to meet the listener's expectations to a certain degree - atonality is a dead end. But without a little bit of dissonance, without at the same time defying his expectations also, you're on a hiding to nothing. You produce very dull and repetitive work. I agree with this. The example the interviewer uses is instructive: in the song "Up, Up and Away", which I'm sure you're all familiar with, there's a very obvious point at which an inferior songwriter would have written "Up, up and away in my beautiful balloon..." and the song would have been adequate. But Jimmy throws your ear off by including an extra "beautiful" in there, so it goes "Up, up and away in my beautiful...my beautiful... balloon". This, to my ear (nobody mentions this in the podcast) gives the song a strange tinge of melancholy that it wouldn't otherwise have. A sort of dreamy wistfulness.
Anyway, this concept of "benign dissonance" got me thinking about doing the same things in games - striking the balance between dissonance and being also pleasing is difficult, but important.
Think about an encounter with a medusa. A bog-standard medusa is just that: bog-standard. The players will know what it is as soon as they see the statues and the woman with snakes for hair. A good DM will make a good encounter anyway, but the potential for an "Oh, it's just a medusa" reaction from the players is obvious.
Now think about an encounter with a medusa which is too dissonant. You can have fun trying to think up your own example, but let's say that instead of turning people to stone, she turns them into carrots. Okay, it surprises the expectations of the players but it is the non-musical equivalent of atonality. It's not interesting.
But approaching a medusa encounter from a "benign dissonance" perspective results in productive outcomes. The medusa wants to be "cured". The medusa has a husband who always goes blindfold. The medusa doesn't turn people to stone - she turns them into amethysts which explode when touched. The medusa is just a child. And so on. You have to turn the dissonance knob to a 5, not to an 11.
It should go without saying that practice and intuition play a big role in how dissonant you should get with your benign DMing dissonance. But it is a persuasive way to conceptualise what it is that makes RPG material good, rather than mediocre.
Interestingly this also seems to be the basis of most humor. Finding the unexpected in the familiar, in a way that seems both contradictory but also logically sound.
ReplyDeleteYes, definitely. Scott Adams wrote a great book about how humour works. I'll have to dig that out from whatever cardboard box it's buried in.
DeleteInteresting stuff. I found Snakepipe Hollow (the old Runequest scenario/campaign setting) for a couple of quid on DriveThru RPG at the weekend and read through it. One of the things that I'd forgotten about Runequest is how well it provided "benign dissonance" through the chaos features that many of its monsters have. So, you might fight a dragonsnail only to have it explode when it dies. Or you might attack a broo that takes no apparent damage from weapons (you only find out that it has actually been wounded if and when it dies). Or a human-appearing ogre might be able to spit acid. And so on. I suspect the original lists in RQ2 would need expansion after a while, but I can recall how effective it was when PCs encountered an apparently run-of-the-mill broo that was radically different from its kin in some unexpected way - whether because it was highly intelligent, overwhelmingly charismatic or just extremely flammable.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that sort of thing is really important and very effective.
DeleteAlso, the dissonance level can be effective if set to, say, 2 or 3. There's a great example in LotR, in "The Uruk-hai". The hobbits are captured by orcs, and you expect them to be awful. They are, of course, but there's also a slight departure from orcish encounters before. In The Hobbit and Moria, the orcs are, respectively, cruel and obnoxious and terrifying. In 'The Uruk-hai", they're all of those things, but they're also admirable in a number of ways: determined, stoical, brave and resourceful (especially the Isengard goblins). And because of that, there's part of you that wants them to get away from the Riders of Rohan - a sort of Stockholm syndrome by proxy. And of course the Isengarders almost do.
DeleteIt's a relatively subtle twist, but it has abundant applications in games, providing little bits of pathos in encounters with even the fiercest foes. Maybe the dead gnoll has whittled a carving of its mate and brood from the shinbone of an elf. As the hobgoblins form up to defend the door of their master, perhaps one or two young warriors are pale with fear and muttering prayers. Or perhaps the adventurers hear the cornered kobolds weeping and praying (think Gollum) as they prepare to make their last stand.
Dissonance is an important element I have been trying to capture in our games, and believe it is tied to our sense of wonder, which can be a fragile thing. When fully explored and mapped out, fantasy ceases to be; it is inherently self-consuming, since it relies on the distance it keeps from us.
ReplyDeleteThe small oddities, things which don't fit entirely comfortably, leads which don't lead to satisfying conclusions and mysteries that remain mysterious are an important counterbalance to exploring and interacting with a fantastic world. There is no good victory without a hint of sadness, no satisfying conclusion without a sense of loss, a lingering questioning of what else could have been. "Dreamy wistfulness", indeed.
Curiously, I was unfamiliar with the song, but checked it after reading this post, and I agree with your assessment. Good stuff.
Yes, you are absolutely right. That's another aspect of it. It is important that players get the chance for PCs to experience victory and conclusions and so forth, but if there is none of the dissonance you describe the campaign will feel thin. What I try to do to achieve this is just throw in as many rumours and mysteries as I can - sometimes without any clear idea where they lead myself - so that the players get a sense that there is a world there which is too big and complex to ever truly be explored.
DeleteIf anyone is looking for any "benign dissonance" in some music, you should check out some of Nick Drake's songs, especially "From the Morning" and "Place to Be". Drake used a lot of minor chords and alternate tunings, but played in upbeat rhythms, which sounds really impressive.
ReplyDeleteThis perfectly encapsulates everything I've been trying to articulate recently about the ideal response of a genre writer to that genre's cliches.
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