What if?

It’s probably the most important question ever asked. It’s the spark behind most great ideas, the starting point of legendary books, unforgettable role-playing games, and groundbreaking musical experiments.

What if we could travel backwards in time?

What if Germany had won the Second World War?

What if all of this—everything—was just a simulation inside a computer?

What if we used two bass players?

“What if” is the heart of creativity. It’s the doorway to imagination. Without it, we can’t explore the unknown—or rather, the unknown we create. And that’s a powerful kind of unknown, because in many ways, it doesn’t exist until we dare to imagine it, to go there, to see what’s possible.

What if God was an atheist?

What then?

Think about that.

If you’re a musician playing gigs—whether it’s a bar, a club, or even a friend’s private party—you’re in a business. A contractual business arrangement, in fact, even if it’s informal. If you’re getting paid (and you should be—don’t do this for free, but that’s a whole other post), you’re providing a service.

Yes, rock and roll has always been about sticking it to the man. But which man matters. The venue and the audience? Those aren’t your targets. The venue hired you, and the audience is there to have a good time. If you’re going to “stick it to someone,” there’s no shortage of better targets these days.

The reality is, most venues aren’t patrons of the arts. They don’t care how expensive your gear is. You’re there to enhance their business. If it’s a private party, you’re there to make it better. That’s the job.

Your Role Is Simple:

Attract people, entertain them, and keep them there. If your crowd is aging along with you, maybe you’re not packing the place, but your job is still to keep the people who are there entertained enough that they stay, spend money, and make it worth the venue’s while to have you.

The live band is the hook—but you’ve got to live up to it once the crowd walks through the door. Anything that distracts from that—bad attitudes, bad volume, sloppy sets—makes it harder for you to get booked again.

Honestly, most of this comes down to acting like an adult.

Rock and roll is loud, sure. Angry, rebellious, all that good stuff. But volume has to be appropriate. If you’re driving people out because it’s too loud, if the staff can’t hear orders, you’re not doing your job. If your ego is tied up in cranking your amp past what the room can handle, fix that or stop expecting steady work.

Play what the crowd wants. You’re hired to perform a service, and that means giving the people a show they’ll enjoy—sometimes that means playing songs you don’t love. If you’re in an original band, be upfront about what you do. But most of us are in cover bands, and the more versatile you are, the better off you’ll be.

Have a setlist twice as long as you think you need. Be ready for anything. If you can pull off a request or two, do it—it’s good for the tip jar (yes, you should always bring one) and even better for getting invited back.

And once you start? Play.

Start on time. Keep breaks short—five minutes, ten max—and keep the energy up. Every minute you’re not playing is a minute you’re giving people a reason to leave. That’s not what the venue wants, that’s not what the audience wants, and it sure as hell isn’t what you want.

There will be plenty of time to rest when you get home.

Trust me, I get it. I’m going to be 57 next month. It’s not as easy as it was at 20. But some of the best gigs I’ve played lately were when we just kept going because the crowd was loving it. Yeah, it was exhausting—but we got invited back.

Respect the space you’re taking up.

Every square foot you occupy is a square foot they can’t use for customers. Bring the smallest setup you can get away with. You don’t need a wall of amps or a drum kit the size of Neil Peart’s. PA systems can handle the heavy lifting.

Check your ego at the door.

Be polite. Be professional. It should go without saying, but act like an adult. You don’t have to be a doormat, but there’s no room for rock star attitudes. The people I know who make the most money in this business? They’re the easiest to work with—friendly, professional, and drama-free.

Nobody wants a diva.

I know this might not sound like fun, but here’s the thing: If you handle the business side, you get to have fun. You get to be up on stage, playing music, entertaining people—and doing it often.

And really, that’s why we got into this, right? Not to sit home in the basement playing rock star, but to be out there doing it.

Then—and only then—you can stick it to the man all you want.

Role-playing games are a lot like life.

Or maybe it’s the other way around—life is a lot like a role-playing game.

We make decisions based on our goals and motivations, influenced by our perception of the situation. We build relationships, make discoveries, and solve mysteries. We act upon, react to, and interact with our environment. Along the way, we improve our skills and pick up new ones.

But there’s a key difference between real life and role-playing games: in real life, it’s all too easy to become an NPC—just another non-player character in the background.

We fall into routines, go with the flow, avoid making hard choices, and take the path of least resistance. Before we know it, we’ve become a background player in our own story. In role-playing games, we aren’t always the heroic protagonist either; sometimes, we’re just an agonist, a character caught up in events. But what matters most is that we choose to engage. We take an active role in the experience.

That’s the crucial difference—stepping up instead of sitting back, taking action rather than letting life happen to us.

Sometimes, role-playing games feel more real than our everyday lives precisely because they give us this sense of agency. They train us, in a way, to take charge of our own narrative.

One of my favorite RPGs, Circle of Hands, stands out for this reason. In the game, characters are forced to make difficult decisions and take sides—there’s no external authority handing down orders or moral clarity. The Circle Knights arrive at a situation, realize something’s wrong, and decide to act. Sometimes they win. Sometimes they fail. But they try.

That sticks with me. Too often in real life, we see what needs changing—within ourselves or in the world around us—and we hesitate. We let the moment pass. We stay quiet.

At this point in my life, I want to be more like a Circle Knight. Less of a passive observer. More of an active participant in my own story—and the world’s.

Because in both life and role-playing games, how we approach the experience matters.

We can play to win. We can try to control every aspect of the narrative. Or, we can choose to focus on the experience itself—acting from the authentic motivations of our character or ourselves.

And in the end, the real story—in life or the game—is only fully visible when it’s over.

There’s a time you just have to say fuck it.

Nothing is safe, and nothing is for certain.

I’ve spent way too much of my life not being authentic—hiding in jobs that I hate because they seem to be “secure.”

But experience has shown me that nothing is really secure.

We just got told this morning that my boss no longer works for the company.

I’m not sure, but the evidence points to her being let go.

It came out of left field for everybody.

Nothing is secure.

If there’s risk and uncertainty no matter what, why not go for what I want?

Even when I’m not exactly sure what that is.

I just know that it’s not what I’m doing—working for somebody else in a job that I hate or that doesn’t mean anything to me.

Even if I fail or it takes a long time to succeed, it doesn’t really matter.

There’s a renewed hope in just saying “fuck it” and making the decision to try anyway.

It’s definitely frightening.

I can’t lie and say that I’m full of confidence.

But I am certain about where I don’t want to be and the kind of life that I don’t want.

I’m pretty certain about where I want to be and the kind of life I do want.

But even though that’s not 100% crystal clear, I definitely know what I’m moving away from.

Sometimes, you just have to say fuck it.

As a kid, I often felt like I didn’t quite fit in—like I was doing something wrong without even knowing what it was.

It seemed like I was constantly disappointing my parents or teachers, and the other kids rarely accepted or liked me.

It was confusing—deeply confusing.

I could never figure out what I’d said or done wrong.

Most of the time, it made me want to try harder, to crack the code of what it took to get people’s approval.

But no matter what I tried, it often backfired.

To make things worse, the adults around me were unpredictable. What worked one day might fail the next. Sometimes, they’d just get upset—seemingly out of nowhere, for reasons I couldn’t understand.

Looking back, I can see they had their own issues, and most of it really had nothing to do with me.

But back then, it was impossible to see that.

Somewhere along the way, I became obsessed with being perfect—with getting things right.

It hurt the most when I did something I thought was clever or correct, only to be met with rejection by the adults or kids around me.

Failure quickly became something I feared—something to avoid at all costs.

I learned fast not to do things I wasn’t already good at, because the pain of failure was just too much.

Even when no one else was watching.

Somewhere in that childhood, I also slipped into a lot of magical thinking—which is ironic, because it’s something I’ve always claimed to dislike.

I developed a strong need to be right, to have the kind of knowledge that would make me right.

That need made me vulnerable to believing all kinds of things. I’d cling to ideas, unconsciously avoiding any real examination of them—afraid that if I looked too closely, I’d find out I was wrong.

It’s surprising to look back on now because I value the scientific method and seeking the truth above all else.

But somehow, that mindset followed me into adulthood.

Combined with my deep fear of failure and of looking foolish, it left me stuck in so many areas of life.

Stuck in relationships and jobs long past their expiration date.

Stuck avoiding anything that felt like it might be hard.

The perfect game would be well written. Written in a way that anybody can pick it up and understand it. I understand what they were supposed to do, what the game was about, and what the rules and procedures were. It should be very clear about what you should do and shouldn’t do and what you should expect.

The perfect game would be well designed. It would have a particular genre or feel in mind and should communicate that. The system and mechanics should help reinforce producing that genre and feel. The game should explain that’s what they were designed to do And how they do it. The probabilities should be exposed so you can understand what it will be like. The game should be play tested.

All of that is very objective but what about my subjective requirements for the perfect game?

For me, the perfect game would have a somewhat narrow range of competency. Maybe that’s the wrong way to put it, but you should be able to create the sort of characters that you would like and that fit the genre. You shouldn’t have to create a character and then wait a long time to improve them to the point where they became what the game experience promised or demands.

The perfect game for me would be designed to facilitate an in character as character experience. The game master would have the responsibility of running the world, and the other players would be responsible for their characters and their decisions. That said, the perfect game would allow for player narration and description, especially when they were successful.

Finally, the perfect game would encourage interaction between all the players.

You’ll notice that none of this talked about what genre or what mechanics what system what probabilities… There are lots of perfect games out there. They are all different and they are supposed to be!

This is an easy one. One person in my group has not ran games for us. Well, that’s not true. There are some people in our group that have not run for us either but they are willing to.

You can usually see him playing a Ranger or a facsimile thereof. Sometimes the strong silent type, the cowboy, the person with a strong moral compass who talks softly and carries a big stick. The quiet hero.

When playing with him you notice that he has read the game and has remembered a great deal of it. When you have a rules question you talk to him and he has the answer. He has an intuitive grasp of systems and how they work.

Yes, we are talking about Jose’, and it’s time for him to run a game!

Zyborg Commando Resurrection Overdrive!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/337532

Try it if you dare!

I would have continued to play basic dungeons and dragons alongside advanced dungeons and dragons. I would not have given basic up

I would have played and purchased as many games as possible. It was really hard to get new games and essentially the closest we got the game stores were the music store & the head shop which sometimes carried role-playing materials. I probably would’ve had to buy many of them by mail order sending in a self addressed stamped envelope and money orders.

I would have been more aggressive about joining groups and creating stable game groups. I would have had more people live near me that were willing to play. Not just people my age, but people who had been in the hobby in the seven or so years before I started playing.

I would not have taken a break like I did. I would have continued to play.

When I was younger I fell in love with reading. My parents introduced me to the Lord of the rings and the chronicles of Narnia at a very young age. I also discovered other fantasy and lots of science fiction. Stories like Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss family Robinson also captured my imagination as well as the Greek myths. besides reading there was no shortage of interesting fiction on television and in movies for me to gravitate towards.

Very often when a story was over I would wish that it continued. I wanted to see what happened next. It seemed like there should be more.

Just as often I wondered about the decisions that the characters made in the stories. Why did they do that? Would I have done something different? Why didn’t they do it this way? It was not uncommon for me to imagine myself in those same situations, or imagined myself as some other person with different qualities in those imagined situations. I thought about the decisions I might make and what might have happened as a result.

Like all children I did not have a lot of power or autonomy in my own life. My own childhood was not spectacular, and this only magnified the feeling of powerlessness. It was nice to be able to imagine some ability to make decisions and affect the world around me.

Role-playing games were instantly appealing because in essence they allowed me to do just that. Together my friends and I could share imagined situations and take on the role of characters within them who were able to make their own decisions. No longer would it be a passive experience, we would be able to be active participants in these scenarios.

I don’t believe I had the experience or language to really express why they were so appealing back in the day, but an honest look through time reinforces my belief that this is what made the role-playing experience so appealing to my younger self.