I’ve had Pandora for several years. I’ll have days at works where I have Pandora on pretty much straight through. It’s single-handedly responsible for most of my metal playlist, and thus for my collection of Iron Savior songs, and thus for the longest-running plot in my longest-running campaign. I’m a fan.*
But I’ve noticed a curious tendency I have when I’m using it. Consider my a cappella playlist, where I gave Pandora a series of all-vocal songs to use as seeds. I’ve made sure to only thumbs-up similar vocals-only songs (okay, and one or two by Van Canto), and for the most part I’ve gotten what I wanted. The biggest outliers are comedy tracks. A few of my initial seeds were comedy songs, so Pandora assumed I wanted comedy songs as much as I wanted a capella. Especially comedy songs in a country music style. Especially political comedy songs in a country music style. This was wrong.
Faced with this attack on my intentions, I rejected every song that didn’t meet my criteria hoping to goad Pandora more into the style I wanted. Eventually it worked, and I now have a mostly valid playlist…except for the longest time there were a few a cappella songs I didn’t really like that nonetheless appeared in heavy rotation. This is because I didn’t dare thumb them down. I consider my playlist a delicate house of cards where removing any a capella song, no matter how little I liked it, could convince Pandora to return to the post-apocalyptic days of guitars, drawls, and words that only rhyme with “Obama” is you squint really hard.
I don’t know if Pandora started figuring things out or just expanded their songlist, because in the last nine months a glut of new, good songs have appeared, and approving them finally gave me enough purchase to feel comfortable kicking out the worst offenders. But the point isn’t how amazing my mixtape is and how you totally have to listen to it. It’s that I engineered, in my own mind, a situation where the fear of change paralyzed me into sticking with something I didn’t actually like in case its presence was saving me from a worse fate.
Speaking of which, my current gaming groups.
I’m currently involved in three campaigns, one of which is with a group that has been meeting more or less consistently for ten years. We’ve had people duck in for a campaign here and there, but they’re more like guest stars. Our five man band has a lot of shared history that I imagine is intimidating to anybody trying to elbow their way into one of our games. More than that, we’re fairly comfortable with each other and more than a little reluctant to allow somebody new. This is despite the fact that every new person we’ve had, barring one, has been a joy to have at the table and worked their way in almost seamlessly, inside jokes notwithstanding.
But still, even after far more good than bad when it comes to new players, we’re still a little gun-shy about fresh blood. Almost as gun-shy as we are about new games, which if you think about it is even more ridiculous. If somebody joins a campaign and we don’t work out, we have to go through the “it’s not you, it’s all of us, independently, somehow” conversation. If we don’t like a game, we just have to say “it occurs to me that none of us like GURPS and we should try something else next week”. The barriers to entry for trying a new gaming system are ridiculously low, but we still never do it.
Part of that is a comfort level thing. We like knowing how common rules work without looking them up, we like knowing our macros more or less function as intended, we like knowing that if we have a really sticky question we have three DMs in the room who can piece it together, etc. But I think more of it is the nagging question, “what if we don’t like it?” Which, all told, is a pretty trash argument. We’re talking about giving a roleplaying system a spin. It’s not a skydiving course.
There’s so much out there I want to do that I haven’t. I want to get back into Fate. I liked ICONS. I’ve dipped my toes into a Powered by the Apocalypse game. I’ve been wanting to try Savage Worlds and Big Eyes, Small Mouth for years. But whenever we bring it up, we agree that it’s a neat idea and then don’t do anything about it, because we’re already playing D&D or Pathfinder, and why would we do something different if what we’re doing works?
It’s not like I’m suddenly going to drop everything to go on an RPG system world tour. In one group we’re running a Pathfinder campaign during the break of a different Pathfinder campaign. In the other we’re coming to the end of a 4E campaign, and it will be followed by a Pathfinder campaign because I’ve had a key player threaten to quit if I try running it in a different system. I’m also not going to abandon either group if they’re not interested in trying something new. But the next time the opportunity arises I’m going to push it pretty hard, and this post serves as my declaration of intent.
…I’ll probably keep the same blog name, though.
* — I am aware of Google Play, and I have thought about it. But when I looked at it today the first thing it recommended to me was Green Day, then Red Hot Chili Peppers. I don’t think Google Play and I will be friends.