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.