On Role Playing, Literature, and Acting

[benlehman]

This was an essay, but I realized that it can be trimmed to one line:

The only similarity between acting, literature, and role-playing games is that they all use words and, sometimes, plot arcs.

Relvevant Forge thread:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=12711&highlight=

Anyone else have thoughts?

Comments

[wirednavi.livejournal.com]

I think where I'm coming from with that is that I get a lot of joy from creating new aspects of a character, as well as changing old aspects. For instance, there's a sardine-eating plot in Aralis. Until then, I hadn't thought that Marric had any opinion one way or another about sardines, but now I decide that to make things more interesting he really, really hates sardines.

Obviously, this is a deliberately stupid example, but that kind of thing happens, and I have a lot of fun with it. You can say on the one hand that that aspect of Marric's character was 'already there', and that I'm revealing it, but at least to me it _is_ character development. In fact, I can work backwards from it and create entire chunks of backstory, other personality traits, etc. etc. I'm not sure quite where the divide is in roleplaying between 'changing a character' and 'creating new facets of the character', as long as neither one contradicts events which have been shared with others and thus can't be redacted. They seem like aspects of the same thing.