Hectic Schedule

[atolnon]

Exalted is tonight, meeting a new player for Changeling tomorrow*, Saturday, and Sunday is Changeling. Saturday is the day for Everything Else, but maybe also recovery. Vi asked why I wasn't going to improv night by myself to meet her in St Louis for a late night of entertainment. The answer is above. That is basically the most exhausting thing I can do with my time, you know? My schedule is already occupied.

I was thinking about the gaming post I wrote last time. It's kind of a no-go. I mean, if  you write out the sessions (or review them in any way), you can treat an RPG character as if they've been 'written', and at that point, I guess it's acceptable to apply death of the author. While I'm still playing, I 'own' that character. It's acceptable to view that situation as a 'death of the player' situation, since it's often bad form to metagame, but I'm the author in this scenerio. You can only read what I do after it's done.

It's weird to see someone else play my character. I feel like I still 'own' Killroy, but I'm not playing that character anymore. Providing I know all the information, I feel like I would be 'more right' then my ST when it comes to what the character would do, but it's a moot point. The character had effectively been read and reinterpreted, so now it's actually someone else's call. Whoever is playing the character becomes 'right'.

And I feel weird writing that out, because I don't know what applications there are to that. It's like those story circles at camp where one person would say a sentence of the story and the next person would say the next. Nobody really owns that story at that point except for who's telling it right at the moment. Afterwards, you can only read the character from the actions, and the intentions of the teller have nothing to do with it any more.

* The Jenna

Comments

[nagarerutenshi.livejournal.com]

It is a complicated form of literature, but literature still. And the death of the player certainly applies, I'd say it's the mark of good roleplayers, as it is of good actors.

While I understand that you don't own a character once someone takes over, there is such thing as being "right" about a character. Considering how he was and what the circumstances are, there are some expected developments, and if a new player strays too far from them, the player is "playing wrong". But of course the notion of playing wrong only makes any sense if we're talking about a player who's interested in the character's development and his relation to the plot in course. I mean, it is possible to be right about a character, but it's not as important as having fun while playing.

Your posts really make me want to play Changeling.

[atolnon.livejournal.com]

This is in the context of Exalted, but I think about it with Changeling, too.

I've also read a lot about gaming as literature, but mostly in the form of argumentation online which, now that I think of it, is not really very rigorous from a scholastic point of view. Still! I'm of the opinion that basically anything that can be read is a form of literature, but the dynamic is all weird. We're basically trying to read it while feeding input in from all directions at the time of writing.

I wonder about the idea of playing wrong. I suppose it's possible, in the sense that it's possible to read something incorrectly. It's also possible to play in bad faith. But if someone was paying attention and 'read', they probably have a reading of that character that's different then mine. Maybe dramatically different.