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I’ve been watching a bit of Patrick Bartley recently , who is a saxophonist, composer, and band leader from in the Jazz community. There are jazz concepts that I’m interested in exploring within the tabletop space and I guess like the creative space in general. Just from my base knowledge and inclination of how ideas are formed and whatnot. One of those things that I have brought up before is being original and also giving proper attribution to your sources when you’re making a thing.

I’ve made a whole post about how in social media, a lot of people don’t properly attribute ideas to their original posters. Maybe that’s because there is no regulation around plagiarism and whatnot in social media (the social media platform will take on the brunt of ensuring that you simply will not get paid for plagiarized content…at least, for Youtube). But in jazz, a lick or a riff is used to reference another musician to honor them.

In terms of sampling, copying, and using others for inspiration, I want to talk about those sorts of things from a jazz standpoint.

Copying to Learn the Language

I’m going to be heavily discussing Patrick Bartley’s video. The video talks about copying and finding your own voice, your own identity. Bartley talks about how as a jazz musician you learn by copying. You learn by sampling and transcribing performances of the greats and from music that you like….and you play until you get good.

You get good by emulating other people. It doesn’t matter if you’re copying them. Authenticity isn’t something you have to worry about. Your uniqueness comes from yourself whenever you do anything. When you make a sound on an instrument for the first time, you have created a sound that only you could make. Once you’ve started making music, you already sound like yourself. Say that you’re trying to express the idea of “frustration”. If you don’t have the words, acting ability or the emotive ability to express that…how are you supposed to get that idea across? In jazz, you have a musical language that you speak to communicate your ideas. What about tabletop RPGs (TTRPGs)?

In TTRPGs, there’s a different language that you speak when you want to narrate impending doom or the fact that something in a room is interesting, or the fact that your character’s feeling or thinking a certain way. There are different ways to communicate your character’s feelings: you can act it out, you can narrate it, you can draw some pictures, you can play some music, and you can reference scenes from books or movies! But, until you practice those methods of expression, or until you recognize those ways of telling that story of your character either in other people’s games or from other people that you’re playing with, you can’t get any better.

Yeah, you’re allowed to copy people. We can steal from each other all the time and that doesn’t mean that you’re not original. It’s just that you’re trying to become better and more equipped to communicate that story that’s inside of you. A big part about staying original and staying true to yourself is finding the delivery system or language that speaks to you. By using the tools that move you, that combination of skills can dress up your story in a much more beautiful way than it would have existed as someone new to the medium.

Gaining Recognition for Your Work

You take on a hobby because you enjoyed a feeling you got. You’re chasing that feeling. Was it seeing Daigo’s full parry from a pixel of health to make a comeback? Was it Maynard Ferguson’s opening to Birdland? Was it Scanlan’s 9^th level counterspell? Until you better understand what that feeling is, where it came from, and how to express it in that way, you won’t get any better within your medium and craft…and people won’t recognize your own skill or your unique self-expression within that sport or that art.

One of my hobbies is bowling. I’ve been bowling for about a year now. For me, it is this thing of like, man, it feels really good to get strikes. That’s mostly a muscle memory skill. So, until I lock in that motion into muscle memory, I can’t consistently get strikes. Until I get that skill to a certain level, people won’t recognize me. They’ll stereotype me as “oh, this guy is just a hobbyist bowler”. In a field, it’s easier to abstract a person to a label or category until they have obtained a level of skill that sets them apart from that label which describes millions of people, to a label that describes a few hundred people. This can be a step from amateur to professional, or…pop musician to jazz cat.

In the TTRPG space, until you obtain and refine your skills you will not stand out against other people. Until you get better at utilizing your variety of skills to contribute to a game, people will only enjoy those strongest aspects that you hone. Maybe they only enjoy your jokes. Maybe they only enjoy that you as a person is pretty chill. Maybe they only enjoy that you’ve mastered the game mechanically and have made it tactically challenging. Until you gain a certain level of mastery and become good (either as a GM or as a player) in that multitude of skills, it can be hard to see how unique you are in that game.

In actual play, differentiating yourself from others is a big hump to getting an audience. The actual play space is very saturated. There are all sorts of performers, and genres being explored in the actual play space. If you can’t distinguish your Call of Cthulhu game from another Call of Cthulhu game, you won’t find an audience. You may be authentic throughout all of your games, but it does not necessarily mean that you’ll gain an audience, become super famous, or become a professional actual play performer for it. That requires intentional practice to hone your craft, and a little luck.

Let’s Get Better!

Copying people is good and it’s a part of the learning process, so keep emulating people to get better. Here’s to all of you trying to put on your best Matt Mercer impression, and I will put on my best Aabria Iyengar impression. Find stuff that speaks to you, that touches you, and that moves you. Emulate it until it becomes a part of you.

And just you wait, you beautiful monster. You’ll be the best stir fry you can possibly be.