Passing thought

[kilroy]

Roleplaying is a weird creative pass-time because it's so ephemeral. You can spend hundreds of hours over a period of years building a world and performing stories in it, but there are usually no artifacts to show for it. Even live theater frequently has videos, but we get nothing-- at best some records that are about as useful as the liner notes on an album but without the album itself.

I suppose another way of looking at it is that roleplaying is an internal thing. We don't do it because we want to show it to anyone else, so why create artifacts? But sitting here tonight and thinking about ten years of campaigns run, I wish there were. My memory is insufficient to hold the stories, or the moments, or even the names.

Comments

[skywind8.livejournal.com]

You make a really good point. And this is a piece of why, after days/months/years of doing corporate software development, I come home... and crochet. And cook. And learn musical instruments. And make art with my hands. It's tangible.

I have wanted a "historian" for some of the RPGs I've attended as an audience member. So many of them make excellent stories. But they make excellent stories in part because they happen so fast, one thing on top of another... There isn't really time "in game" for bardic practice and story creation with everything live and fresh. We already speed up the story for purposes of real life.

I agree with you though... I wish there were memoirs too.

[kelaino_kalos]

Last night I was going through all the papers I've ever saved from grade school on, and that included various item cards and printouts of character sheets from years and years of live-action and tabletop Vampire. Most of them went in the recycling bins, but I saved a few.

What's more important to me are the physical props that went with each character. Miriam had her skewed glasses and her crib sheet (a Malkavian with amnesia, poor thing). Alicia, the Toreador, had her sketchbook. Those are the two characters that I played for the longest time and remember best. Just picking up the prop reinvokes the character.