Roleplaying music.

[James]

While browsing through the threads on RPGnet, I saw a topic entitled http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=27227">Role Playing "music", and I said to myself, "I know what that thread is about without having to look, but what if it were about roleplaying music?  As in roleplaying musicality, rather than about what CDs to play in the background during a session?"  By the way, Delerium's Spiritual Archives gets a lot of play during my games.

Anyway, years ago I ran a Shadowrun game that lasted quite a while, and was very popular.  Sometimes I had players who wanted to meet more often than the main group and roleplay side-stories and personalized adventures.  Anyway, one of the players had a character named Pink, an elf rocker with a sideline in shadowrunning, natch.

The player wanted to do more with Pink's rocker background, so I cooked up a couple of adventures involving him, his band, and the tumultuous music scene in Seattle.  These ran fairly well, and we both were happy with the results, but I never got the sense that we captured the essence of playing music in the roleplaying sense.  When it came to actual playtime, when Pink and his band hit the stage, we sort of glossed over what happened up there, and I've always felt as though we missed a great opportunity to up the cool factor.

D&D has bards, Metal Öpera has musical-weapon wielding heroes, every cyberpunk game has its variant on the Pink-style rocker...but who does more with the music?  Or does anyone?  Is this one of those weird roleplaying elements that can't be truly amplified (pun sort of intended) through actual play?

[Sidhain]

I'm not sure, it suspect that it takes something that I don't have--knowledge of what makes great music. I know what I like, and /why/ I like it but I don't know what makes it great for others. For me music has to move my emotions and its much harder to simulate that in a game without me actually /hearing/ the music, and faking it--that is "You do well the music is great" just doesn't have the same oomph that real music has when listened too (which is pretty much true of role-playing, doing well in a game is never quite the same as doing well in real life.)


I might suggest examining Starchildren as it very well may address this--playing the actual music experience (Glam Rock Aliens come to save the Earth from itself.)

[Maurice Forrester]

Good points, Sidhain.  There are a host of bad rock and roll novels that testify to the difficulty of communicating the emotional power of music in prose.  I expect most people would have the same problems in trying to do that within the context of a game.  

I did run one game not too long ago that used music as an important element.  It was a murder mystery set in the 1930s involving the disappearance of a delta blues singer.  One reason it was a successful game is that the music was an important part of the background but the players did not have to take roles as musicians.  They could play musicians, and one player did, but they could also come at this subculture as outsiders who didn't really understand the blues.  The central element of the game was the mystery not the music.  

I'm just thinking out loud here, but it occurs to me that you could do a really cool game that played out the same basic conflict against a series of different musical backgrounds.  Maybe a supernatural theme drawing on the old story of Robert Johnson selling his soul to learn to play guitar and on George R. R. Martin's "Armaggedon Rag."

Edit:  And work in some of those Jack Chick comics about rock music, too.

[Sidhain]

I don't own Sorcerer and am not familiar with it, but the paradigm it operates under would work for this in a way--you could do the music as a summoned "demon" and its power has something to do with how much of yourself you risk--your health, or inverting it your ego--it gets bigger and threatens to consume you and make you crash like many wonderful artists, actors, comedians, and musicians--and so on?


This however is more the career of the artist not the instant performance---although, perhaps that work too somehting along the lines of the more you risk evoking emotional in others the greater risk it will overflow and earn you a stalker? or a crowd gone wild, or whatever?


But I could be way off base.

[Aragorn]

What i have found is that music does give the the player more of a since on how to picture things with the right style of music playing in the backround. Depending on the game, i suggest think about how you want the players playing the RPG to picture the way the emotions are flowing throughout the time. For instance, if there were to be a fight of some sort, use fast, quick beated music. More of an intense part of the RPG like you have a group of people going out on a some sort of sabatoge or information gathering mission, use more of a depp toned type of music, some themes from the LOTR sound track can work well for those types of moments.


Like i said though this is my opinion. I havn't had much expierence in RPGing, but what i have done, music tends to make it better.

[Eric J.]

Well said.

[James]

I might suggest examining Starchildren as it very well may address this--playing the actual music experience (Glam Rock Aliens come to save the Earth from itself.)

You're the second person to mention Starchildren, so I guess I'm going to have a look at it.  To be honest, I'm surprised that there's not any attempt to address this topic in Metal Öpera, which has such a strong musical theme.  There's a hint that it's important, but no real discussion of how to make such a thing work.

[James]

What i have found is that music does give the the player more of a since on how to picture things with the right style of music playing in the backround.

This is true in my experience, as well, but I'm referring to the act of roleplaying the performance of music as opposed to playing music in the background.  Thanks, though.

[Aragorn]

ah ok i wasn't sure. I had forgotten to write at the end of my post:

"I wasn't sure if this is what you wanted to hear from people, but if it isn't it can still be helpful."

[Thierry Michel]

I'm referring to the act of roleplaying the performance of music

While an appropriate music is playing or not ?

I ask because a way to do it would be to ask the player to choose the actual music playing, as close as possible as the type of thing he's supposed to play in the game.

[Edited for clarity]

[James]

I'm referring to the act of roleplaying the performance of music

While an appropriate music is playing or not ?

That's the question, isn't it?  It seems to me that we, as roleplayers have a fairly sophisticated language for dealing with things like combat, but we lack a vocabulary that allows us to portray musical performance directly, rather than indirectly.

I ask because a way to do it would be to ask the player to choose the actual music playing, as close as possible as the type of thing he's supposed to play in the game.

Would there be a level of interactivity?  Lip-synching, or air-instrument playing?  I've had this suggested to me, and though it sounds kind of...odd, I wonder if it might not work.  After all, players pantomime the killing actions of their characters all of the time.

[Thierry Michel]

Would there be a level of interactivity?

Well, I envisioned the "bard" player carefully choosing his tapes before coming to the session and when "performing" just picking one and playing it on the stereo. The adequacy of the music with the intended effect would be used as a modifier to the result.  Not unlike the spell memorizing system of a certain game, come to think of it.

Isn't that close enough to "pretending" to perform ?

[Michael S. Miller]

Perhaps RPGs have not modeled the playing of music (and like art forms) particularly well or often because there is no conflict there. I'm not saying that music itself doesn't have conflict within it -- I know that tension & release is at least one model of musical structure. I mean that since RPGs are concerned with creating stories (in the sense of "fictional series of events") they are therefore wrapped up in the need to resolve conflict. While in certain exceptional instances, the playing of music might resolve conflict (a "Battle of the Bands" or the like) the actual act of playing music is not about resolving conflict and unrelated to concepts of "victory" and "defeat" that are deeply embedded in RPGs and games in general. I am no musician, but it seems that the playing of music is more about preverbal, intuitive expression than "getting something done."

Thinking about it, it seems to me that other media that are good at conveying stories, like film, for instance, also miss the mark when it comes to portraying music. Sure, they have the build-up to the big concert, the strain of being on the road, the frustrated need to hit it big, but then when there's the actual musical scene, it's closer to a concert documentary than a concert itself.

I dunno, maybe it has something to do with RPGs' (and film's) traditional trouble with portraying the inner experiences of characters. Maybe I just haven't watched any good music movies. Maybe I don't know enough about music.

Suffice it to say, I, for one, am very excited about the suggestions already put forward on this thread, like lip-synching or even (Ron forbid) karaoke. I'm really interested in games that address the physical experience of play and speech, like octaNe's "Rule of Rock'n'Roll" and particularly Puppetland's dictum that "You must speak as if the story is being told to an invisible listener."

[Malchiah]

Perhaps RPGs have not modeled the playing of music (and like art forms) particularly well or often because there is no conflict there.

It's interesting really, because there is an emotional element there, both for the performer and for the audience.  That emotional element is hard to describe, but anyone who has been to a GOOD concert will know that it feeds both ways.  The audience feels good, and so does the performer.

Sometimes, the performer can get so carried away by the feeling of it all, that they can do things they normally wouldn't (much like being drunk or high on drugs) which can have an equal reaction in the crowd.  If the concert is going particularly well, you might see the performer jump off stage into the crowd, or anything else for that matter.

Crowds can spontaneously build mosh pits, or can build to a breaking point, such as climbing over railings and rushing the stage.  (Not necessarily in a violent means, but it can always cause problems if people get hurt or if security tries to stop it.)  The best and most memorable concerts over the years have been the ones where the crowd was worked into a frenzy.

Roleplaying that could be very interesting!  If I was playing a rocker, I'd like to see my crowd go nuts, and perhaps I'll do things I shouldn't... and just to know the power of my voice could set the crowd off (good or bad) - that can be such a great feeling.

Maybe these elements would help to fill in the roleplaying gap you're feeling.

[clehrich]

Hi.

Seems to me a big problem here is that the players need to act out something that they may very well be rotten at.  As has been pointed out several times, describing music in words is exceedingly difficult to begin with, and asking a player to do it well on the fly is asking too much --- and if the player's PC is supposed to be good at it, you've got a disconnect.

One possibility would be to use a parallel skill, i.e. where the player has to do something that is not in itself music but which represents music in the game world.  This is likely to get a bit crunchy and mechanical unless the task is some sort of acting thing, though.

Just to throw a hand grenade into this, though, what about rap?  Seems to me that part of the attraction of the form is that it seems as though it's something anyone could do (although actually it's quite difficult).  Your most tone-deaf player can improvise bad rap on the fly, if he or she has some practice doing it in the game.  

A version of this could work for any vocal music, really: you ask the player to come up with situation-appropriate lyrics on the fly.  For example, your character is supposed to be a nightclub torch singer, and the concert begins.  Your goal is to seduce the rich guy in the back row, wearing the pink tie.  Okay, so you improvise (bad, probably) torch-song lyrics to fit, touching on the pink tie and the money.

Actually, come to think of it, I could also see players getting into doing a little drum-beat thing on the table to go along with their improvised lyrics, and also coming up with some lyric bits ahead of time as a kind of stock repertoire.  You'd end up with the PC doing something like "Fever" (Peggy Lee made this famous, but Rita Moreno did it on the Muppet Show with Animal), where there's just a drumbeat and a sexy voice.  Sounds like fun to me, but your players would have to be willing to work for it.

Now if it's instrumental music, you may be out of luck.