atolnon: (Default)
( Mar. 11th, 2010 04:10 pm)
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
I live with my ST, which is awkward sometimes since we'll often spontaneously break into discussion about what's going on in games we're either playing or running. I don't get as heated about what actually happens as how it's perceived.

I hadn't intended to drink last night, but The J-Man spontaneously dropped by* with three 40s of Cobra, and I was assigned one, which I dutifully consumed. Perhaps that's the reason I became so irate about the opinion of my character's playing, which I have a totally different idea of then my ST. Without getting to in-depth on the specifics, I view his actions as the actions of someone who's had his worldview shaken to the core then put in a series of increasingly difficult, life-threatening decisions. The ST considers him to be 'flaky' and acting like a petulant child.

These things aren't, by definition, conflicting but that's really not the point. I guess what I'm getting at is that I have a very detailed idea of why my character does what he does, but nobody can see in to my head, so the character just looks indecisive or flaky. I tried to explain why he acted like he did, and got the brush off.

"Frankly, I think you're kind of acting like a jackass." I said. This was improper, of course, but I guess I should mention that we take our Exalted pretty seriously though I wasn't really angry though I was extremely frustrated to explain something and actually be told I was incorrect about my own characters motivations.
"I'm just telling you what it looks like when you play." he said.
"But you don't even believe in the death of the author!" I exclaimed, exasperated at that point.
"I don't even know what death of the author is."

Which is a good retort, by the by. But I realized that if I died, there'd only be records of my play to inform the other players, but they wouldn't have perfect insight into my actions. This is something I realized when my ST played a previous character of mine and asserted that, off-stage, he would act in a certain manner. I had a minor objection to it, and he asserted that his 'reading' of the character is more legitimate in the context of the game then my own. It sounded a bit like megalomania at the time, and maybe it is, because I believe the act of play has significant differences then the act of reading a character, but I'm not totally sure.


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