“In Play” Life Story Mode
I have exactly one RP table top game I play. It’s a solo game based in Star Trek’s universe. Even then I did not start until last year when I got the guide for Christmas.
Love it, for any number of reasons. But, I have learned a lesson from it I did not expect to learn.
In short, one can create a character to play in the game in one of two ways. One, the longer more detailed way. Schooling, upbringing, species, health, memories, age, all of that determined via rolls of dice and other things. This creates the backstory of the character which you then use on the various adventures.
Then there is a shorter way to create a new character. It’s an “in-play” mode.
In it, only a few basics are established at creation. The rest of the character’s life, interests, skills, are brought out during gameplay itself. One uses only what is needed at the time, and when something else is needed, they assign the strength or weakness of the character to the task at hand. By the time the first full session is complete, a full background of the character has emerged, as a result of decisions and smaller reveals as one plays.
I am experiencing a version of this in real life as I write a soon-to-be-available memoir of my Autistic experiences.
It will be an in-play building of my character in some ways. I do not call it a full memoir, but rather a collection of brief but deep looks at moments in my life that relate to the subject matter of my Autism experience. Through these periodic explorations, I feel I am connecting certain dots in my larger story that were not as clearly connected before I started this project.
But more than that, I at last feel that a large portion of my story, my struggles, are being told to the “world.” Or at least those readers I am targeting–otjhers with ASD.
It has been a labor intensive project to be certain. But now that I can see how these nuggets, these moments of my life, these individual stories create touchstones from which a fuller picture of me can emerge later, a satisfaction I did not expect at first comes with nearly completing this work.
I am of course not an RPG character, I am a person. Like any person, my full story cannot be known through one book, with a particular focus. Yet as it nears publication I now see how people that read this book can establish “in play” more about who I am and what I represent than perhaps ever they could by passing observation of larger aspects of myself.
Will it work that way? Who can really say. But if the book is anything like the game, there may at last be a more fully formed picture of the real Ty available to the world than has ever been before.
That alone will, if it happened, make the effort worth it to me.
- Posted in: Miscellany
Ty Unglebower 