It’s magic. /thread

Everyone go home! We’re done here!

No but seriously, sometimes it really seems like magic.

Jason Corley said something really smart recently (broken clocks being right 2x/day and all that) about RPGs being, basically, folk music as performed by families and communities when they had to provide their own entertainment. And I think that is a super true and functional model for perhaps the vast majority of actual play. You show up, everyone knows the tunes, you play together for a while, and the pleasure lies in the shared (amateur) experience whether there is an audience present or not. You might be called upon to perform at a wedding or a fair, but you’d get together with your fiddles and drums and whatever else whether there was an audience or not.

So what happens as time goes by and not everyone knows the tunes? Or your kids pick up your instruments and start injecting riffs and structures they’ve picked up from outside your community? They might not even have an especially strong grasp of the tunes their parents taught them, but the underlying pleasure of playing together is still there.