Like Stradivarius

It think it was Ron Edwards that started the analogy of role-playing to musical jam session. It’s not a perfect analogy (none of them are), but thinking about it can help us learn to be better game designers.

When musicians get together and jam, they have a few things: an instrument (voice counts, of course), skill with the instrument, understanding of the part that the instrument plays in the style of music being created. That is to say that musicians who seriously jam are prepared for the experience. Even then, being as prepared as they can be, a really good jam session is hard work for all involved.

Now look at role-playing. The majority of the role-playing rules written assume that the players come together prepared, as if it were a jam session. But people are very ill prepared for roleplaying. No one has taught players the correct method for contributing to a collaborative story. No one has told them what their parts are. No one has taught them to trust their secret, creative selves to others. No, the opposites of these things are true. Our society (I speak for Americans here, but I’m guessing for most others as well) beats the creative urge out of kids by the time they get to high school. Kids who tell stories are geeky or nerdy and condemned to a life of ridicule. Even those that manage to keep in touch with the creative forces within are taught to keep it to themselves. They’re trained to trust no one with their ideas and vision. We also teach our children to be competitive. To strive for dominance. To collaborate only as far as it gets them ahead.

The current state of the role-playing industry is essentially telling a group of average folks to have a jam session without any instruments or instruction.

So what do game designers do to help? Generally, they provide lots of information about the one thing that players don’t need help with: imagined people and places. Instead of giving people tools and instruction to help them make stories together, they give them homework. They vent their frustrated novelist urges into encyclopedic sourcebooks and charge people through the nose for them. Those untrained jamming musicians without instruments? We’ve just told them that they have to make do without, and that they can only “jam” to a single tune.

In short, designers of games are going about the process all wrong. If we want players to jam, to improvise using their own creativity, we need to show them how to imagine with a group of other creators. We need to teach them how to share the limelight. We need to teach them what to contribute and when. We need the rules we write to be the like their instruments: that make clear their parts and enable creativity to flow.

My suggestion is that we should change the way we think about rules. If something is in the game that doesn’t help players jam, it doesn’t belong. Don't try to tell people what to imagine. Tell them how to imagine better together, no matter what the subject. Give them a well crafted instrument and the training to use it and they'll make the music all on their own.