All the Blasted Details

So you and your friends form a band.  You've got Jerry on bass and Nick on piano, with Clarissa rocking the drums and you've spent three years forcing yourself to learn guitar and practice songs you're able to sing.  It's been 16 months of singing on Zoom but starting a month ago when you all got your shots you started practicing for real, four hours a day, every day, sometimes six or eight or ten.  Every one of you cares about this band more than anything and if there's anything Covid taught you, its that life is shit if you're not doing what you want.

Great.  You gotta play somewhere, right?  True enough, the garage is great and you can play loud, but it's not an audience and none of you know how that even works.  Unfortunately, you don't have an uncle or a cousin in the music business, so ... one of you will have to learn something about arranging gigs.  And maybe you don't live in New York or Los Angeles, so there aren't a million bars to play at.  Maybe you live in Omaha or Albuquerque; or maybe it's Hamilton or Akron.  Okay.  You don't have to limit yourself to anywhere, right?  There's the internet, there's making youtube videos, maybe you can blog and talk about your band ... hm ... guess one of you needs some skills will social media, yeah?  And if you're gonna play on the 'net, it'd be good if you didn't sound like shit, so maybe recording is a skill you want to have.  And you are in Omaha and you get a gig in Des Moines, you'll have to get there.  And take your instruments, sound equipment and whatever ... who knows what that bar in Des Moines has?  This isn't going to fit in Nick's car, is it?  Now there's gas for two cars and two people not drinking during the gig because nobody's paying money to stay overnight in Des Moines when Omaha's so close.  That's two cars driving back at 3 a.m.  Maybe you can borrow a van.  Maybe you could buy a van.  How much is a van?  Holy fuck.

Welcome to the ordinary, everyday hassles involved in doing anything on your own, where the organisation isn't built for you.  All we need are some monsters between Omaha and Des Moines and to put the Des Moines bar on a dungeon's third level down and we've got a D&D campaign.  It isn't just knowing your instruments and liking music.  It isn't just practice.  It's a dozen stupid, pissy hassles that maybe you don't really care about, that are just in the way, but probably they're just enough in the way that you don't get to Des Moines on time and you lose the gig, which gets Jerry pissed at Clarissa and Clarissa pissed at Nick, and everyone pissed at you.  Details are fiddly and exhausting but they matter; not that anyone wants them to matter, except that when you get them right it makes everything 20 times better than it would have been if you sluffed through and actually played Des Moines.

It's the details that challenge; it's having the right weapon in hand so you can kill that monster outside of Shelby, or remembering to get off the interstate at Valley West Drive, turning right after the mall and figuring out where the address is on University Avenue somewhere next to the Ocha Bubble Tea and Dessert Cafe on 73rd.  Details suck.  Especially when you've never been there and you find yourself sitting outside some place called Papa Murphy's Take 'N' Bake Pizza asking each other, "Is this where the gig is?"

As a DM, do not remove the details.  Do not snap your fingers and replace the food the party needs to take along with insta-bite nourish bars.  Do not let the band get all their shit in one car.  Do not eliminate the directions and just assume the band gets there.  Do not have the first post the band makes on facebook go viral.  Do not, do not, do not guarantee than when the party finds the right bar and gets their shit loaded onto the stage in time, that the audience will love them.  Have some blasted sense.  It's the hard that makes things great.  And since the party is getting their abilities, their hit points and their spells, their weapons and their blasted magic shit free of fucking charge, for the love of Halsey's Teeth, make the party earn something they receive, so they can appreciate it.

Don't take that away.

There is much to be said for Halsey's Teeth.