To:  minstrel@pbm.com
Subject: Re: minstrel: Bardic, Period, and assorted rantings... 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 04 Oct 1998 11:18:02 EDT."
             <199810041518.LAA15082@xkey.com> 
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OK, you guys, break it up.

Everyone take a long hard think about this:

There's a lot of people, on the one hand, who have a fantasy of being
a "bard" and who want to play it out in the SCA.  They want to get up
and sing and get the adoration of the masses, and generally be as cool
as those performers, like Steeleye Span, they enjoy (a laudible goal).

On the other hand, there's a lot of people who musicians and singers
and who are into either period music per se, or high atmosphere.  They
want not so much to be someone cool as to do something cool (also a
laudible goal).

The people in the first batch like to play one game, and documentation
is not part of that game.  They want to live out a fantasy of being a
bard, and documenting anything is not part of their conception of
being a bard.  Being asked to document is an external imposition, an
intrusion on their dream which seems arbitrary and bureaucratic and
petty and pointless.

The people in the second batch likes to play music, whichever games
they play, and documentation just seems like one tool which they can
use to further doing what they like to do.  It's not necessarily a
tool they all use, but it's widely recognized as a useful one for
certain jobs.

I'd like to point out that this does not describe a problem yet.

The problem is that