Many years ago when I still had no doubts about my future as a musician, my band The Last Psalm was playing at a local coffeehouse.  I counted off the first song, Love’s the Only Command, and the instruments started perfectly.  Vocalists were stepping up to the mikes getting ready for the first words when something went wrong.

  Thanks to the fact that in those days I taped all our concerts, I was able to confirm what I at that moment suspected.  The bass guitarist had started the pickup riff for the verse a measure early, but the guitars didn’t follow his lead, and the vocalists sort of fell apart when the background was out of sync with itself.  Before the first line of the song had been finished, we had fallen apart completely.

  It comes to me now because tonight I’m in a different band.  Now I am the bass guitarist, but we’re a lot less formal than most bands in which I’ve played.  The pastor’s grown son Tyler leads the singing and plays an acoustic guitar with a built-in pickup, a high school kid named Travis does some phenomenal drumming, sometimes his father whom I know as Jim plays keyboards and electric lead with us, and we’ve got a girl named Becky to sing a third vocal.  Each Wednesday night we open with a song by the band (usually one we’ve written), lead about an hour of songs and prayers, and close with another song by the band.  One night sometime before Wednesday we get together and practice the songs we’re going to do, but we rarely get them completely right at the service, and we don’t really worry about it either.  Tonight we were closing with a song Tyler wrote, and opening with one Becky sings, a D. C. Talk number called What If I Stumble?  What if I fall?  What if I lose my step and I make fools of us all?

  Indeed, we all felt like fools that night, so many years ago, when our bass guitarist jumped the marker and no one followed him.

  I’ve lost count of the number of game players I’ve known who won’t run a game because of exactly that fear:  what if I’m not any good?  What if I make a mistake, and make a fool of myself?  What if I stumble?  It seems that for some it is better never to prove you can do it than to risk the embarrassment of the mistake.  Someone else can run the game; I don’t want to mess up.

  Obviously, those of us who do run games have somehow managed to get past that fear.  If you think, though, that we never make those embarrassing mistakes, you’re embarrassingly mistaken.  No one who has run his share of games has failed to fail at some point.  Mistakes are made.  What is worse, we don’t always learn from them, making the same mistakes multiple times before discovering how to avoid them.

  What we have learned is how to deal with those embarrassing moments; we can make the mistake and go on.  More to the point, we have learned what to do when we do make those mistakes.  Perhaps then there is something that can be taught about what to do when you make an embarrassing mistake, so that when you run games, or even when you play bass guitar before an audience, you aren’t left floundering at that moment.

  That is the point, in fact.  What is most embarrassing about the embarrassing moment is that you don’t know what to do next.  If you knew that, you would do it, and while your cheeks might redden a bit at the knowledge that you messed up, it would quickly pass while you went forward with the next step.

  The first thing you should consider is that your incredibly embarrassing mistakes are not always recognized as such.  I sometimes tell the story of the crock pot full of meatballs my wife made when my parents were coming.  They fell apart, crumbling down from two inch spheres to half inch chunks.  My father complimented her on the clever idea of making meatballs that would stay on the roll.  When she admitted that it was a mistake, he gave her the advice that you should always take credit for the good idea when someone likes the outcome of your mistakes.  There’s a good chance that your players don’t know this isn’t what you had intended, and if so you can probably roll with it and develop it into something better.

  On the other hand, when our bass guitarist missed that line and we fell apart, there was no pretending that this was supposed to happen.  Already the lead guitarist had moaned what happened? into the mike in search of some explanation for the disaster.  I, however, was not going to let the night collapse because one player made one mistake at the beginning.  I quickly said who I thought had thrown us off, and counted out the opening again.  This time we played the song through right, and when the night was over several people commented that they were impressed with our ability to pick up from the mistake and keep going.  The mistake, no matter how serious it appears, no matter how completely it derails what you’re doing, is not fatal, and it need not be embarrassing.  As my brother Roy says about such moments, they can’t take away your birthday, so it’s not that important.  Simply recognize that you made a mistake and pick up from there to keep going.

  Becky didn’t make it tonight.  She was sick.  Travis was playing in a high school concert, and his father wasn’t around.  Tyler and I wound up alone in front, and we couldn’t sing the opener without Becky.  That was all right, though.  Tyler played another one of his songs that we’d been through before, and I managed to follow his lead to fake it.  Such mistakes as I made were easily covered, transformed into passing lines to the right notes.  More importantly, we weren’t really afraid of making mistakes.  If we got it wrong, we would pick up and keep going.  There was no reason to be embarrassed about it.  Everyone does make mistakes, and everyone knows it, so very few people will ever hold it against you.

  Sure, stepping up and running the game is a risk, and you are certain to make a few mistakes.  Get over it; it’s not that bad.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.