Staycation, All I Ever Wanted

This week, I not only have another free Friday, but most of my family has buggered off to go to aquariums and, eventually, cabins in the woods far, far away, while I stay home and take a week off from $work.  So I’m just catching up on all my outstanding stuff: gonna work on my Todo spreadsheet, put some work into my D&D campaigns, maybe do some light programming I’ve been putting off, and not write a blog post.  So far, so good.

Improv at the (D&D) Table

Sometimes, when people try to explain what D&D is (or any TTRPG, for that matter ... despite the title, this post applies to all roleplaying games), they try to describe it as basically fantasy improv.  Which, in some ways, it is.  But also, it’s not, which is why I started pondering this post many moons ago, and now it’s percolated long enough.

See, I think that the big problem with thinking of RPGs as improv is the whole concept of “yes and.” As almost everyone knows nowadays, the number one rule of improv is that you always go along with whatever reality your scene partners want to create.  No matter what they say, you respond with “yes, and ...” Meaning that, you must never contradict what they’ve established; you can only add on to it.  For improv, this is a brilliant rule, which leads to some great comedy.  I personally think improv is almost entirely suited for comedy above all other forms of entertainment, and I think it’s because “yes and” leads inevitably to surrealism, and it’s difficult to take that seriously.  Because when anyone is allowed to say that anything is now real, and everyone else just has to roll with it, sooner or later shit is going to get strange.  So improv works for comedy.  Does it also work for RPGs?

Well, sort of.  Many TTRPGs—and D&D in particular—have a foundation in fantasy, so they don’t mind a little surrealism.  But, at the same time, while it might be fun to play in a game where literally anything can happen for a short time, it’s difficult to sustain over the course of a campaign.  Remember: roleplaying is storytelling.  And, in the best stories, even ones of highly fantastical worlds, there are rules.  There’s an internal logic: a sort of fantasy physics.  It’s not our physics, of course, but there is a system and magic or whatever has to follow the rules of that system.  Besides, what kind of hero’s journey are you going to get if the hero has no limitations?  If the hero can just wave their arms and achieve their goals instantaneously, there’s no tension in the story, no obstacles to overcome.  Gets boring after a while, and defeats character growth.  So, RPGs can’t work solely on the impetus of “yes and.”

But that doesn’t mean we can’t draw analogues.  If you already understand how improv works, this is how I would describe the differences between improv and D&D.  As a player in a TTRPG, you have relationships with 3 primary different classes of participants:

Other Players

As a player, your relationship with other players is absolutely “yes and.” The only caveat here is that you must always remember to make a distinction between you (the player) and your character.  Your character is certainly not obliged to “yes and” the other characters.  In fact, sometimes it can be fun for your characters to have conflicts ... but only if you remember that you are not obstructing your fellow player’s desires.  In the short run, it’s perfectly fine for your character to object—even to strenuously object—to another character’s plan.  In the long run, you the player are obliged to find a way for your character to get on board with what the rest of the group wants to do.

This ties in with a common objection of RPG players: the obstructive player who ruins the game because “that’s what my character would do!” You, the player, knows what your character wants, what they’re willing to tolerate, and where they draw the lines.  But you the player also know that you’re all trying to tell a story together, and you’re playing the game to have fun.  So “yes and” your fellow players, and then figure out why your character is, in the end, going to do what everyone wants to do.  Maybe they’re succumbing to peer pressure.  Maybe they’re being blackmailed.  Maybe they decide to play the long game and acquiesce now to get something they want later.  Doesn’t matter.  Have your character bitch and moan now, if you feel that’s appropriate, but figure out how to fall in line, because you need to “yes and.” The time will come when your fellow players will reciprocate your largesse.

The GM

However, your relationship as a player with me, your GM, is entirely different.  As far as I’m concerned, my job is not to “yes and”: it’s more like “yes, but.” The most common “but” involves rolling dice: you say your character is going to jump up and use the chandelier to swing across the room; I say “yes, but you’re going to have to roll an Acrobatics check, and it’s going to be a high difficulty.” Other times it might relate to how much you can do at a time.  For instance, you say your character jumps up on the table, kicks away the centerpiece in your way, grabs the chandelier, swings across to the person attacking your ally, lands right beside them, then stabs them.  I respond “yes, but doing all is going to take you two turns—you just don’t have enough actions to do it all in one turn.” During character creation, a “yes but” is most likely to take the form of notifying you that you’re going to have to work harder at your backstory.  For instance, I once ran a game in a world of my own devising where all dwarves were afraid of water.  Not cups of water, of course, but any body of water larger than a stream, they avoided like the plague.  If you were playing in that world and you wanted to play a dwarven pirate, I would say “yes, but dwarves don’t get on ships, so how did you get to be a pirate?”

The most important thing to remember about “yes but” is that it’s still a “yes” ... no matter how much it sounds like a “no.” In the dwarven pirate example, I’m not telling you you can’t play the character you want.  I’m just telling you you’ve got to come up with a reason to explain where it comes from.  Maybe your dwarf was raised by elves and never learned that fear of water.  Maybe someone put them under a spell once and it somehow erased their aquaphobia.  Maybe there’s some water elemental in your family bloodline somewhere far back in antiquity.  Be creative: the awesome thing about a fantasy game is that you can come up with just about anything and it can sound reasonable.  So I’m not saying “no,” I’m just asking you to respect my worldbuilding by coming up with a reason why your character doesn’t conform to my rules.

When I (the GM) say “yes but” to you (the player), you have basically 3 options for a response: “never mind,” “fuck you,” and “yes but” in return.

The first option is just to change your mind about what you wanted to do.  This is not a game like chess; you’re not committed to a course of action just because you said it out loud, thus taking your virtual finger off your virtual piece.  If I tell you that what you want to do is going to take two turns, you’re perfectly justified to say “well, no, I don’t want to take that long before I get to attack.” This just represents your chacter considering, and then rejecting, a course of action.

The “fuck you” option is you telling me that you don’t care what the downsides are, you’re going to do it anyway.  You’ll accept the difficult roll, you’ll take the extra turn to complete the action, you’ll figure out how to work something extra into your backstory.  When you tell me you want to jump off the cliff, and I respond with “yes, but it’s 100 feet down: you’re going to die if you do that,” you’re perfectly within your rights to say “fuck you, I can jump off the cliff if I want to.” And you can.  My job as your friendly neighborhood GM ends at the point where I’ve advised you of the consequences of your actions; if you want to damn the consequences and full speed ahead, who am I to stand in your way?

But just like I can “yes but” you, you can “yes but” me in return.  I can’t possibly know everything that’s on your character sheet.  You may have to tell me: “yes, but I have a class feature called ‘chandelier swing’ that lets me swing on chandeliers without needing to make an Acrobatics check.” Or “yes, but I cast the fly spell as I’m jumping off the cliff, so I’m not going to die after all.” Now, I can “yes but” you a second time—perhaps “yes, but you’re out of spell slots, remember?”—and then you can “yes but” me back again, and so on until we finally come to an agreement.

Just like when you’re interacting with other players, the main thing to remember when interacting with your GM is that you’re telling a story together.  There’s a certain amount of back-and-forth that may be necessary to get you where you want to be, but at the end of the day I’m on your side: I want you succeed, if you can.  But, like we said up at the top, I don’t want to make it too easy.  Overcoming the obstacles is what allows your character to be heroic.

The Dice

The dice are actually the only participants in the game that should ever say, just flat out, “no.” If you listen to folks talk about playing D&D and other RPGs online, you’ll often hear them talk about “failing forward,” or saying “it’s fun to fail.” What they mean is, when you roll the dice (often in response to your GM’s “yes but”) and your roll comes up short, suddenly you’ve got to figure out what to do.  How do you recover from the failure?  Have things gone from bad to worse as a result?  That often happens in fantasy stories, and sometimes those are the best parts of the story.  Do your friends have to change their plans to help out now?  There are all sorts of storytelling opportunities that derive from a failure to achieve a goal on the first attempt.

One important thing to remember is that when we talk about “failure,” we mean that your character has failed to accomplish a thing.  That’s not the same thing as saying your character had a personal failure.  Often, it doesn’t make any sense for your (possibly very accomplished) character to fail to do something they do all the time, like pick a lock, or hit someone with a sword.  But it’s not always about your character’s ability: a good GM will sometimes describe a failure as fate intervening in a way that’s entirely outside your character’s control.  Perhaps a sudden gust of wind blows some dust into your eyes at just the wrong time; perhaps someone accidentally jostles your arm; perhaps that god you offended last adventure now has it in for you and is taking a personal hand in things just to mess with you.  The dice are telling a story with you just like the GM and the other players.  Sometimes the dice tells you that do an amazing thing; sometimes they tell you you fall on your face.  Your failure isn’t the story; how you deal with the failure may well be.

So the tenets of improv have something to teach us about how to play TTRPGs, but we have to be cognizant of the differences as well.  All the participants have different roles to play, but they all work together to weave the tale.  And, at the end of the day, an awesome story is what makes it fun for everyone.

A name by any other name would still be a day off

You know, my $work refers to this every-other-Friday-off plan as “Summer Fridays.” Despite that, it’s going to continue until September 24th.  Not that I’m complaining, of course ... I just like my designation of “free Fridays” instead.

All of which is to say, another free Friday weekend means no real post for you again.  One would think you’d be getting used to it at this point.  But, cheer up, faithful reader: next week will be better.  Surely ‘twill be so.

Gramophonic Skullduggery I

"White Spats and Lots of Dollars"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

I think the first song I can really remember hearing that used filters to make a modern song sound like it was being played off a scratchy 78 was “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” by the enigmatically named Taco.  Born in Indonesia, educated in Belgium, Dutch citizen who started performing in Germany, Taco (yep, that’s his actual given name) was primarily doing a synthpop version of an ancient (originally released in 1929) Irving Berlin tune.  The voice filtering is light; most of the old-timey vibe of the song is provided by its just being an old-timey song.  Production has been used in other songs since then to give them a patina of age, and it has gotten much more obvious through the years.  There are almost certainly examples that predate Taco too; I’m just not familiar with any of them.  I always thought it was a nifty technique, if not overdone, and there have been several radio-friendly examples that I can recall, such as Space’s “The Female of the Species,” or White Town’s “Your Woman,” where the vocals sound less like they’re coming off an old phonograph and more like they’re being delivered over an old analog telephone line with a bad connection.  I’m not sure when I decided to gather such songs and turn them into a mix, but of course all 3 of these examples had to feature heavily, which is why you see them back-to-back as the first vocal tracks on this volume (and why Taco gets the honor of providing the volume title).

Of course, “scratchy record” songs, as I referred to them before deciding that they all had in common a mischeivous sense of shenanigans in addition to the sound of the old Victrola, are not sufficient for a mix.  Not due to lack of examples, of course—I’m sure I could fill a mix with only such songs—but more because I think the gimmick would get old after a while.  “If not overdone,” you may recall from the preceding paragraph.  But what would make a natural pairing with songs like this?  Why, the other half of what makes “Puttin’ on the Ritz” work, of course: songs that are just structured similarly to those songs from the 20s, 30s, and so forth that epitomize the era of the old gramophones.

Sometimes these are new songs dressed up to be reminiscent of those classics.  Squirrel Nut Zippers are excellent at this, as they prove with “Prince Nez” (among many others).  The arrangement, including banjo, muted trumpet, and Hawaiian-style steel guitar bending, gives it that old-time feeling.  Britain’s Electric Swing Circus¹ is not so bad at it either, but they have a tendency to add some modern fluorishes (like buzzing synth chords and a touch of that voice filtration again).  “The Penniless Optimist” is the best example of this, but the much softer “Put Your Smile On,” which is little more than the scratchy record filter and an accompanying ukelele, is a nice little track to help us wind down to the close.  Fellow Euro-electro-swing practitioners (this time from France) Caravan Palace are not known for this style, but their not-quite-instrumental “Panic” somehow still manages to evoke the frenetic pace of 20s and 30s music while maintaining the strong electronic feel.  But the all-time best practitioners of this style have to be the Red Sea Pedestrians.  We’ve seen RSP before, most notably on Porchwell Firetime,² but you’d have to guess that a band consisting of a guitar, banjo, stand-up bass, fiddle, clarinet, and percussion, and who self-describes as “a warped and beautiful blend of American Roots, Rock, Klezmer, Gypsy, Classical and Jazz”, would certainly fit the bill here.  “Sleepwalk Dreamin’” is an amazing tune that manages to sound both indeliby modern and also comfortably at home in the 30s or 40s, and it’s pretty pitch-perfect for this mix.  Their ”[Untitled]” is the closer for their first album, and I liked so much in that capacity that I made it the closer here as well.

Of course, the other way to do it is to emulate Taco and take an actual old-timey song and update the arrangement, but not too much.  “Going Up to the Country, Paint My Mailbox Blue” is not quite as old as I am, but I was in fact only 2 years old when the great blues musician Taj Mahal first recorded it.  The version here, by Austin eclectics the Asylum Street Spankers, is given the same trappings that SNZ used on “Prince Nez”: banjo, clarinet, fiddle, and brushes on the snare instead of the standard drumsticks, and I have to say I like it better than the original, although I am admittedly a blues illiterate.  Or take Lee Press-On and the Nails’ take on the 1939 classic “Brazil”, which also uses a touch of filtered vocals and theremin-like synths to spruce up a very 40s-style song.  (The interlude tacked on at the end was so perfect when recontextualized that I just kept it for fun.)

Alternatively, you can do it the other way round: take a modern song and recast it with a 30s or 40s style of instrumentation.  And no one does that better than Scott Bradlee & Postmodern Jukebox.  Here I’ve chosen to showcase their version of “Hey There Delilah,” originally by the Plain White T’s.  By adding a banjo and some honkytonk-style piano, giving vocal duties to Joey Cook doing an able imitation of a flapper,³ and speeding up the tempo considerably (and most likely taking it out of the minor key of the original, though I confess I’m not musically knowledgeable enough to say that for sure), Bradlee turns it into a whole different song.  The original would have been weirdly out of place here; this version is perfect.  And, while it’s tough to beat Bradlee, I have to give a shout out to Orkestra Obsolete, who redid the New Order classic “Blue Monday” “using only instruments available in the 1930s.” In order to reproduce the very synth-heavy song, they used a number of techniques, including a theremin, a musical saw, and even a glass harp, which is basically just running your fingers around the rims of wine glasses filled to different levels with water.  Although you can certainly appreciate just the audio, this is one instance where you should really check out the video (linked below), and maybe even the accompanying article.  There was never any doubt that this song would end up here: it opens with the playing of an actual scratchy record!  Tough to beat that for fitness for a particular purpose.

Of course, there’s also no shortage of tunes that actually use vocoders or other filtration techniques to give songs that old-timey feel.  Many artists like to use such things as little bridges or interludes.  Cyndi Lauper stuck “He’s So Unusual” in just before the closing song on her debut album; it’s actually pulling double duty here, as it’s an update of a 20s song sung by Helen Kane (the inspiriation for Betty Boop).  Twice as long and still under two minutes, “Wet My Bed” is (according to Wikipedia) the first song recorded by the Stone Temple Pilots; it’s a surreal, stream-of-consciousness track, improvised by Scott Weiland and Robert DeLeo⁴ and then later stuck on their debut album two songs from the end, where I would eventually hear it and go “what the fuck was that??” But it stuck with me, and here it is again.  And the “Intro” of Michelle Branch’s Hotel Paper is a mere 11 seconds, but it’s just as good an intro to this volume.

Of course, the scratchy record effect is beloved of some downtempo artists, particularly those looking for that “lo-fi” feel.  For instance, Monster Rally⁵ employs it a bit in the opening of “Orchids,” and even more so in “Lovely You.” Both songs have a bit of an old-timey feel above and beyond just that though, which is also the case with “Smoke from the Attic” by Smokey Bandits.  All three instrumental pieces somehow manage to evoke the early part of the 20th century even while being pretty firmly grounded in the early years of the 21st.⁶  On the other hand, “Slow Serenade” by German electro-swing artist Tape Five⁷ is also an instrumental, and also released in the first 20 years of this century, but has zero modern concessions.  It could have easily been pulled from an episode of The Lawrence Welk Show that my grandparents watched when I was a child.  Despite that not-particularly-glowing assessment, it’s a sweet tune that probably wouldn’t work anywhere else in my mix universe.

Meanwhile, applying a filter to vocals to make them sound tinny or far away is not that uncommon either.  Besides some of the aforementioned examples, there is of course the ultra-classic “One Night in Bangkok,” from the musical Chess.  Now, I am definitely no fan of opera, and not even particularly a fan of ABBA,⁸ but for some reason I just adored this song when it appeared on the radio during my freshman year in college.  Many reviewers describe Murray Head’s “rap” as a bit lame, and I’ll admit that, as a rap, it leaves a lot to be desired.  But if you think of it as a poem that happens to have some music playing in the background, I think it’s pretty awesome.⁹  That is, judging it only on the basis of its wordplay, it has a lot to recommend it to an English major such as myself.  Plus it’s just fun.  For a couple of more obscure picks, I went with De-Phazz and Trost.  De-Phazz is known—insofar as it is known at all¹⁰—for a sort of soul-inflected, neoclassical adjacent, jazzy downtempo electronica ... imagine you could fuze Morcheeba with Koop and drop them into the middle of a decently sized string section.¹¹  But Days of Twang is atypical for them: it’s still downtempo, but this time there’s a lot of retro-rockabilly, as if you were trying to recreate the Brian Setzer Orchestra using only robots.¹²  “Rock ‘n’ Roll Dude” is that rarest of songs, a track under two minutes which is not a bridge, but rather a standalone song—just a very brief one.¹³  And it’s a perfect little encapsulation of electro-rockabilly, heavily processed and filtered, and just a delight.  Trost, meanwhile, I’m going to say does meet my defniition of a moderately obscure artist: on AllMusic, she has both a (very short) bio with no discography and a discography with no bio, and Wikipedia has no clue who she is at all.  Apparently, who she is is a Berlin native who’s been involved in the music industry since she was 20 and has produced a wide variety of music.  But her solo efforts are echoey, vaguely creepy affairs which have a distinctive sound, and “Even Sparrows Don’t Like to Stay” is all that, plus the obligatory scratchy record filter.  It’s the centerpiece of the much slower back third of the mix.

Gramophonic Skullduggery I
[ White Spats and Lots of Dollars ]

“Intro” by Michelle Branch, off Hotel Paper
“Orchids” by Monster Rally, off Return to Paradise
“Female of the Species” by Space, off Spiders
“Puttin' on the Ritz [single version]” by Taco [Single]
“Your Woman” by White Town, off Women in Technology
“Prince Nez” by Squirrel Nut Zippers, off Hot
“Going Up to the Country, Paint My Mailbox Blue” by Asylum Street Spankers, off Mercurial
“Sleepwalk Dreamin'” by the Red Sea Pedestrians, off See Through the Eyes of Osiris!
“Hey There Delilah” by Scott Bradlee & Postmodern Jukebox, off Top Hat on Fleek
“Smoke from the Attic” by Smokey Bandits, off Debut
“One Night in Bangkok” by Murray Head [Single]¹⁴
“He's So Unusual” by Cyndi Lauper, off She's So Unusual
“The Penniless Optimist” by the Electric Swing Circus, off The Electric Swing Circus
“Dr. Wanna Do” by Caro Emerald, off Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor
“Wet My Bed” by Stone Temple Pilots, off Core
“Rock 'n' Roll Dude” by De-Phazz, off Days of Twang
“Lovely You” by Monster Rally, off Return to Paradise
“Feel Good Inc.” by Gorillaz, off Demon Days
“Panic” by Caravan Palace, off Panic
“Blue Monday” by Orkestra Obsolete [Single]¹⁵
“Brazil” by Lee Press-On and the Nails, off El Bando en Fuego!
“Slow Serenade” by Tape Five, off Swing Patrol
“Even Sparrows Don't Like to Stay” by Trost, off Trust Me
“Put Your Smile On” by the Electric Swing Circus, off The Electric Swing Circus
“Remember Me” by Bella Ruse, off Bella Ruse [EP]
“[Untitled]” by the Red Sea Pedestrians, off A Lesson in Cartography

Total:  26 tracks,  77:09

For the last few, less obvious choices, I went with Bella Ruse, whom you may recall from Sirenexiv Cola, to close the volume (not counting the super-brief outro from RSP).  Honestly, the vast majority of Kay Gillette’s vocals sound like they belong on an old 78 ... their website describes it as an “antique voice.” “Remember Me” is another short song that isn’t a bridge:¹⁶ just a sweet, simple acoutic-guitar-driven ballad.  It honestly just doesn’t need the filter to sound old-timey.

Next there’s “Dr. Wanna Do” from Caro Emerald.  You may recall we first ran into this Dutch purveyor of electro-swing on Salsatic Vibrato III, but we seen her since on several other volumes.¹⁷  That’s because she’s awesome.  And honestly a lot of her music is reminiscnent of interwar Europe, such as was portrayed in Stephen Fry’s excellent Bright Young Things.  This track uses the muted trumpet, a stand-up bass, some voice-filtered scatting, and a breakdown that triplicates Emerald’s voice to make her a one-woman Andrews Sisters.  The result is a typically captivating Emerald outing.

Finally, the most off-beat choice is probably “Feel Good Inc.” by Gorillaz.  While the heavy voice filtering is an obvious qualifier, nothing else about this song gives off any kind of old-timey vibe.  Still, it’s an amazing track with a great (and proper) rap from De La Soul, and I would’ve felt weird not including it here.

Next time, let’s get dreamy.

__________

1 Known primarily for their upbeat retro-swing tunes such as can be found on Salsatic Vibrato VII, but also for the occasional surreal tune such as the one I used on Bleeding Salvador II.

2 But also on Bleeding Salvador II and Wisty Mysteria II.

3 Wikipedia tells me that Cook was on American Idol.  I’ve never watched it personally, but perhaps you remember her.

4 Apparently the “all right, now what?” at the end is producer Brendan O’Brien wondering where the hell they were going to go from there.

5 We first heard from them on Apparently World I, but also on Paradoxically Sized World V.

6 Debut by Smokey Bandits was released in 2010; Monster Rally’s Return to Paradise came out in 2013.

7 We were introduced to Tape Five on Salsatic Vibrato VII.

8 In case you didn’t know (or perhaps had forgotten), Chess was written by the two male members of ABBA—that is, the two “B"s.

9 To be clear, proper rap is much more than that.

10 Which I suspect is not much: AllMusic knows who they are, so they don’t quite meet my defniition of moderately obscure band, but Wikipedia is definitely a bit hazy on them, so they’re close.

11 Although I suppose that only works if you know who both Koop and Morcheeba are, and, if you knew that, you’d have a decent shot of knowing who De-Phazz is anyhow.  I should probably work on my descriptions.

12 There: better?

13 The other classic example being the Smiths’ “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want.”

14 Linking you to YouTube because it’s really the only place you can get the full extended version.  You can find shorter versions on Amazon, but, if you’re like me, only the 1984 radio edit will really scratch this itch.

15 This one, on the other hand, is not available anywhere other than YouTube, as far as I know.

16 This mix seems to attract such; perhaps it’s an unconscious callback to those early days when songs were in general much shorter.

17 Specifically, Salsatic Vibrato VI, Salsatic Vibrato VII, and Moonside by Riverlight II.

Groovin', on a Sunday afternoon ...

Another free Friday from the good folks at my $work, and another week of not much here for you to look at.  Just trust me that I’m making good use of the extra time to get some family stuff caught up.  And come back next week for a better post.