How I Role-Play

Now, shrewd readers who have played with E or read Masonry's blog will already have caught a number of elements of E's backstory in the previous posts. Some of the differences should also be obvious, although some are more obvious than others.

I feel like it's relevant to mention here that I tend to role-play "from the hip". Whether I'm Game Mastering, storytelling, or playing a character, I usually have general ideas of what I want a character or the story to be like, and then I sit down at the table or the keyboard and let things fly. I like my players and fellow characters to take a significant role in the development of plot and character, and so I often make things up as I go. Inspiration strikes me randomly and frequently. Things sometimes come up that call for me to make spot decisions, and I do. People that I game with have complimented me frequently on my ability to just come up with stuff, and sometimes, the spur-of-the-moment stuff becomes the best-remembered moment or the key element of a plot I hadn't considered until then. But I don't always get it right.

Let me say that again: I don't always get it right.

Sometimes I'll come up with something off the top of my head and spend the rest of my life kicking myself for coming up with something so stupid. Sometimes something that seems like a great idea clashes with what's going on or requires more effort, more thought, more... something than it would have if the idea had never seen the light of day. Sometimes, my memory will fail me and something I just came up with clashes with something that already happened. So suddenly I have to reconcile the two things.

But even with that danger, I still love the improv of it all. I tend not to write stories: I sketch outlines and see what it turns into. I might have an idea of what I want the story to be about, but within that framework, I just like to see what happens. And I almost never write an ending ahead of time.

Almost never.