[Sorcerer] the meaning of the band analogy

[KarlM]

Hi

p9 of Sorcerer has this revelatory description of Ron's intent:

Art or game?
I think of role-playing as playing in a band: on Sorcerer night, you get together and make cool-sounding noises. You'll have to try people out and have standards for their abilities. Everyone has to listen, everyone has to play honestly and hard, and no other group will be quite like it. It doesn't concern winning, although showing off for your friends might be part of it. It has nothing to do with losing either, although screwing up or regretting things can play its role. In a band, if someone's not having fun, they stop coming. If someone is not up to the level of the other members, or can't handle their end of things, they stop getting invited. Eventually the band might be pretty good. When all is said, the rules you hold are just some instruments. The music is up to you.

The music part of this, the analogy, is what people usually comment on when they mention this bit of text. But what strikes me is the meaning of the analogy, the intent. The specific actions mentioned e.g.

You'll have to try people out and have standards for their abilities.

I don't think I have seen in any non-Adept Press 'introduction to role-playing' published text. The relevant &Sword text has some further elaboration.

It's the kind of topic that is not widely discussed or easily searched for online. In part because it is not system specific.

I guess for this thread I would like to see some "Actual Play" accounts - have people tried "forming a band" in the sense of doing the specific things in the text above, how did it go, what sort of discussions about "the band" did you have, etc etc. Especially perhaps from Ron, any slightly more detailed historical accounts would be fascinating!

My personal experience is a bit more haphazard - in a small country high school in the 80s there were three of us who played together, we just did what we thought would be fun and interesting and never discussed (to my memory) anything like "why" or "how".

More recently there's a local internet forum where people tend to post ideas for games and the like, a random mix of people you've played with before, people you've met, people whose posts you've read, people you've never heard of etc etc will form a group to play a particular game then dissipate. And the next game is formed from a new group.

So the specific intent in Sorcerer and the elaborated advice in &Sword appeals to me but I'd like to hear a bit more detail about how it plays out in practice.

Cheers
Karl

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Karl!

I understand the band analogy has been getting some buzz around the internet lately too. I've never wanted it to be a fully exact analogy, merely a heuristic device especially to distinguish key features of role-playing from its literary and theatrical analogues (in my opinion over-used).

And as long as it's been brought up, I always try to remind people that the first text (in my experience) to say this was the Avalon Hill edition of RuneQuest, "role-playing resembles free-form jazz." My musing on the topic was inspired by their insight.

You're talking about the social side of it, though. I was thinking about the rough pattern of how long-running bands initially formed: usually they lacked a key instrument or a face-man, and usually, once they get that person, one of the original members eventually isn't retained. Not all bands, and not exactly precisely this particular sequence, but the rough pattern is remarkably common: apparently the identity and successful activity of the band doesn't really come together in the same configuration of the people who initially said, "let's be a band."

I've found role-playing to be exactly like that, again, not precisely the exact sequence, but frequently a group gets together, but the group that stays together successfully is an adjusted version, lacking one or two of the originals and with one or two people who weren't initially there. This has happened much, much more often in my experience of play than the simple "group forms, group plays, group stays" sequence.

I really don't think it's about anything logistic like schedules. I think it's about exactly what it's about in the band: a weird confluence of, on the one hand, creative priorities, creative compatibilities, creative standards, and creative ambitions; and on the other, social ties, friendships, shared experiences, and a desire for one another to do well. The latter set seems to undergo some stress as the former set forms. I personally tend to think that really good friends can hang together anyway without being a band, but keeping a band together requires a lot more than merely saying, "we're such good friends." Whatever that "lot more" is sure seems complicated; I'm convinced that good old Creative Agenda is at the core of it. And sometimes the initial assumptions and deeply felt personal ties of the original friends don't hold, in the interest of making that band.

I'm not quite sure what I can say to you in terms of examples. Either I provide a hundred different examples showing all the nuances I've experienced, or I generalize and say "It happens in lots of ways." I ran into a little bit of it just in the past two weeks, in one of the Kickstart-based Sorcerer games, which I'll probably be posting about when that game is finished (it's short-term). None of it reflects badly on anyone present, not in the slightest, so I'm not talking about "get rid of the dickish person" or anything overly simple like that.

Here's an example I've written about before. In 1989, I moved from gaming heaven in Chicago (2-3 active groups running full blast simultaneously) to Gainesville, FL, for graduate school. I put an ad in the student rag to garner participants in a Cyberpunk game (this was the original, what people call "2013" now amusingly enough), and three people contacted me. As you probably know, that game has extensive lifepath-based character generation, and I spent some time on the phone with all three people before we finally met to play. That night, a couple of hours before we were to meet, one of them called and admitted he hadn't followed up on actually making the character. I said, "Don't come," and got the impression he was pretty astonished.

That game only met a couple of times. But one of the two people who'd showed turned into a good friend very fast (he's Lawrence, the guy who joined this forum in January, via the Kickstart). We started talking about getting a Champions group going. He found a friend of his (Andy, eventually to be the very first Sorcerer customer), and a younger guy named Patrick that I'd met somewhere got involved too. Patrick took me to the regular Champions group he played in, in a friendly but actually fishing expedition. One of the players there was the guy who'd been turned away for the Cyberpunk game; his name was Mike. Do you know what he said when I walked in the door? He was really excited - "This guy," he announced without any sarcasm, "is a quality gamer!" He jumped at the chance to join my new game.

So our Champions game formed with me, Lawrence (Strobe), Patrick (Irie), Andy (Cortex), and Mike (Steel Dragon). It was awesome. We only adjusted a bit once, when Andy moved out of town and a friend of mine named Dave came in, playing Cortex for a session or so and then adopting one of my NPCs, Blackfell; when Andy came back, he joined again and picked up Cortex (who'd been a statue in the interim, stop me before I start spouting plot).

It might look as though that Champions group formed de novo and stayed stable, but I think it makes more sense to look at the larger picture of the other existing Champions group and my initial Cyberpunk game to see how it really came together, and especially how Mike and I found one another to be estimable and exciting partners for play.

I hope that helps. Let me know.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

This is exactly how I think of forming a rpg group or circle nowadays. (Group = plays together regularly, while circle = larger collection of people from which the players are selected session to session or campaign to campaign.)

I find that the biggest impediment to this sort of thinking around here is that it's perceived as foolish seriousness or wrongful pride if people talk about their group as a self-selected elite with specific artistic goals. It's much more acceptable for your narrative to be that you just happen to be old friends who know each other so well that you've grown good at playing together. Of course not really "good", as you can't be good at roleplaying, can you?

I moved to Helsinki just now, and have two groups there, both of which I've had a specific hand in forming: one is my old D&D group that I put together to play 3rd edition a decade back, and that's still going strong on the strength of shared creative agenda. The other is a group I created out of whoever happened to be at hand and willing to play "proge" (experimental) roleplaying games in playtest.

The D&D group is in some ways a hobby band that does the occasional gig, but mostly just enjoys playing together. This is mostly because the 2-3 GM types in the group usually run authorial campaigns where only a single one of them is fully artistically committed at one time, while the others are there somewhat passively. This has been changing with the advent of the OSR movement, however, and a certain artistic ambition can be seen in everybody's efforts lately.

The proge playtest group is very specifically a studio band I formed to get some playtesting done. It's a rough and natural crew without much a priori contact surfaces against each other; I pride myself for flexibility, though, so I tend to have something to talk about with everybody, and the group gets it done in practice, it seems.

[Ron Edwards]

Another feature I've observed that reinforced my thinking about all this comes from groups which include a peson who acts as GM, rules master, story/creative authority, and often social organizer, all at once. I played that role myself for quite a long time, and I learned that many groups featuring such a person had a more tempestuous beginning than anyone in the group ordinarily acknowledged.

Very often, the group would begin, or even be primarily founded by, let's call him "Bob," in this role. So it's "Bob's game," for a while. Then either another person in the group, or a newcomer, let's call him "Sam" either way, turns out to be more creatively in tune with the others in the group, or simply more forceful at the table ... and effectively what happens is a palace coup, such that the group (perhaps with minor adjustment in membership)  becomes "Sam's game" without anyone really ever mentioning Bob's initial role again. In my experience, this can go one of two distinct ways - either (i) Bob's game continues sporadically, at least for a while, but Sam's game is now considered the game, and Bob is still around and perhaps even plays in Sam's game too; or (ii) Bob is effectively exiled, or self-exiles, such that Sam really has simply taken over the existing group under a new banner.

I've been "Sam" more times than I care to remember, and I'm painfully aware of all the contingent details that enter into the process. They could involve embarrassing and entirely tacit competition over who was having sex with whom, or more overt and equally embarrassing processing over who was "really" whose friend; people might also use false logistic excuses to take sides, leading me to be at least a little skeptical regarding "well, I couldn't make it on Tuesdays any more" type explanations.

What matters to me at the moment, bringing this up, is the weird memory hole that this whole phase or process seems to fall into. I've listened to people for days blithering about how great Sam's game is, and when I ask about its origins, it takes a while, and some pointed questioning, before people finally come clean about what happened with Bob. The way they talk indicates to me that they had not themselves really thought about Bob for a long time.

Best, Ron

[KarlM]

I've found the discussion so far very useful.

Going with the thread trend of broadening out from the specific creative focus of a p.9 group, I think Ben Robbins has documented a couple of types:

* West Marches An ongoing "campaign" drawing from a pool of players - not every player would turn up for every session, but the campaign remains consistent throughout (interesting description of one variation of Eero's "campaign")

* Story Games Seattle FAQ A sort of organised extended circle to use Eero's terminology, where the creative focus definitely sits on the "circle" to the virtual exclusion of the "group".

I remember from years back Ron had a series of posts at the Forge mentioning the dynamics of a campus lunch-time "circle", and one later post had 3 or 4 points about the kind of content restrictions required. But I can't find those now.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Karl,

The thread did expand a bit, leading me to want to distinguish between the circles idea and the band idea. They aren't really the same things.

I think one contributor to the development of circles was the campus role-playing club I advised in the early 2000s, and my suggestion that it be applied to actual-play culture in game stores. Another contributor was the higher visibility for mini-cons, which were obviously invented long before the Forge was, but which received a lot of attention there, and perhaps became more open to newcomers. Another, a couple of years later, was the outgrowth of after-hours play from the GenCon Forge booth, in which small groups spontaneously formed each night for a given play-experience out of a more general and play-aware circle.

this is a test post

[Ron Edwards]

test

I'm having some trouble getting the forum to accept my posts - now I'm trying different ways to get this one in

---

(I can't seem to get the paragraph with all the links regarding circles, including the campus club ones)

The band analogy and its relationship to Sorcerer, however, is about a group of people who play together with high, perhaps even perfect attendance rates, generating a well-defined, evolving creative experience. What might make it confusing, and leads to mix-up with the circles idea, is that I specifically do not define these "band" groups by dedication to a specific game system or by loyalty to a given single personality.

My Champions games (1985-1992) tended to be such groups, which were game-centric and often me-centric, and I've organized many of them since which have been a lot looser about those things. Sometimes, a group like this will be pretty excited about a given game system and we'll stick with it for a long time, and sometimes not.

You've pointed out the core Sorcerer text which suggests that the game works best in or for such a band-type group, and you alluded to the supplements' content too. More specifically, those include "Music" and "Get That Game Going," in the Appendixes of Sorcerer & Sword; and "An Invitation to Leave the Closet," in the Preface to The Sorcerer's Soul. Writing those was all wrapped up in the same events and threads I cited above.

(here: another paragraph with links, this time about the band analogy in this context and various Sorcerer texts concerning it too)

Although I see the circle idea and the band idea as different things, I think that developing better bands arises more consistently from functional circles. Perhaps one major social problem in the history of role-playing is the over-idealizing of the "perfect band," especially in failing to acknowledge the rough and contingent evolution of their memberships, and in confounding their existence with brand loyalty and rather artificial elevation of the organizer/GM role. By contrast, if you have circles, then you can let the bands form from an existing culture of play; i.e., you wouldn't have to form a band in order to play at all.

Best, Ron

--
OK, I haven't got this post quite right yet, but it's getting there

[Moreno R.]

By contrast, if you have circles, then you can let the bands form from an existing culture of play; i.e., you wouldn't have to form a band in order to play at all.

This part has taken another meaning these days, but it's still true...   

In the last months (years) another way to organize people to play rpgs has really taken off - at least in the Italian indie scene, but certainly not only there - and it's Google Hangout. Playing in video-conference, with people in different towns. The name used by Google to organize the social structure of the network? "Circles".

So, talking about my experience, there is a "GenteCheGioca+" circle, with more than one hundred players, that organize games. There is no overarching organization, if you want to find someone to play "Sorcerer" for example you post your plans in the circle (the game, number of players, requisites, etc.), you look at the people who would like to play (and for some games and some organizer there are often more than triple the needed number), you choose the player among them, and organize the game as a "google event", so that the players even get regulars reminders of the game time and date.

Why am I talking about that in this thread? Because without the limitations caused by the necessity of a "regular group" of local people (or by having to try-out complete strangers when you want to start a group like that), I am seeing the "band" analogy being confirmed more and more.

People who play in similar or compatible ways tend to cluster together, Non in a "regular group" that always play together, but in a much more fluid way, playing in different temporary group at the same time, and changing game and groups after a few weeks, in different combinations. Like in a gaming club but with a composition of more than 100-150 persons, all interested in indie games, open every day, where you can play without leaving your home, and with people from all around Italy that I could see only at INC or Lucca before.

Some become a kind of "star", with a lot of people asking to play with them. Others find more and more difficult to find people to play with, because they miss sessions, cause problems, or in general "are not up to standard" - like if they don't play very well their musical instrument.

And game sessions become a sort of "event", to play that specific game with these specific persons. And you will not play that specific game with these specific persons ever again, because you will change the group composition or the game. And these "events" can be easily recorded and put on you tube. (This for example is a session of Monsterhearts by Joe Mcdaldno played at the recent "ConTessa" online convention: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7Po5Stxy-ts  )

To continue with the personal experience: at this moment I am playing a weekly game of Apocalypse World with 4 other persons, another weekly game of Dogs in the Vineyard with other 3 persons (you did meet two of them at INC and at the narrattiva stand at Lucca, Ron, they are Giulia and Simone), and a by-weekly Monsterhearts game with other 4 players (and Simone play there, too: so they are 10 persons in total), plus the long-running weekly game of Trollbabe that I already posted about. (none of these can be really regular without skipping a week sometime, so at the end they occupy 2-4 evening every week, usually 3 or less)
(the hangouts solved another big problem I had: in every one of these games, apart from Trollbabe, I am NOT the GM!  I am free at last!)

It's not a perfect solution: playing by video-conference is not the same as playing together at a table, there are different sets of problems: the Dogs in the Vineyard game in particular is suffering from the problems in manipulating "virtual" dice on a screen instead of real ones at the table and the conflicts become too long. We organized the game anyway because I wanted to play another long game of DitV where I wasn't the GM for years, and I can accept the aggravation to be able to play it. For other games is even worse, they are impossible to play. Others suffer very little (the Powered by the Apocalypse for example) and already there are games written specifically to be played by hangout, as "ViewScream" di Rafael Chandler.

But there are a lot of advantages, too: you can choose the people you want to play with, basing your decision on the game you want to play (as you would choose a musician or another depending of the kind of music to play), and not the other way around (the typical "what games can I play with this group?"). And you can play a lot more!

Claudia talked about this in a post on the site "Gaming as Women" one years ago, here: http://www.gamingaswomen.com/posts/2012/06/hangouts-killed-the-group-star-or-so-i-hope/
In that article she talks about the start of GcG+ in Italy, but in the last year the circle became even bigger and much more games are organized

[Ron Edwards]

REGARDING THE CIRCLES
Here's a really old thread talking about this: campus gaming awareness; others include Demon Con 1! and Damn. There's no going back. No way., which I think must have factored right into Matt Snyder's creation of Forge Midwest.

(continued with next post)

[Ron Edwards]

CIRCLES CONTINUED
Further developments came with Actual play in the stores, which is one of the Infamous Five threads and as I understand it, contributed directly to policies at many stores including the Dice Dojo here in Chicago.

REGARDING THE BAND
Another very old thread, one of the first at the Forge, raised the question right away: playing in the band - Josh based this thread upon reading the same passages in the core text that you're talking about, Karl.