What is roleplayable ?

Quote from: Thierry Michel

What does the write-up of an rpg session looks like ?
A fable, a novel, a short-story [...] a movie synopsis or a TV episode?

From the context of this post (is it because a write-up is not representative of what happens in actual play?) I take this to mean the record of what happened in the game.

And my answer is that the record of what happened in the game is not exactly representative of what the game is, but is a distinct medium of expression of the same idea.

The records of my earliest game (in which I was the referee) read like the retroactive work of a later historian piecing together the lives of the characters who, I presumed, would ultimately be heroes worthy of such inclusion in history.

But most of my games through the early years in which I was a player had records in the forms of diaries and journals. My characters told what happened to them on a day-by-day basis, recording their feelings and their expectations and insights along the way. These were sometimes incredibly detailed (including, for example, blow-by-blow combat descriptions) but were also emotional, creating character history (one character, a sort of winged elf, wrote a very emotional piece about being involved in aerobatic competition in his youth, and how his fiancee died in an aerobatic accident in competition, which caused him to turn away from that and instead train in martial arts, thus becoming a kensai--all invented in the diary, but ultimately relevant in play).

In one game, my cavalier was "given" (by my suggestion to the referee) the task of filing regular monthly reports to his distant liege regarding what he found in the field; these became part of the history of that world, although another character was also keeping a diary including his reactions and insights into the various characters.

In my most recent game as a player, the write-up takes the form of letters by my character to his sister, telling of the adventures and essentially letting her know he's all right out here.

The point is that writing up the adventures is an independent art form; it can take a lot of different forms itself. I've recorded some adventures as the writings of non-player characters involved in the events--the log of a ship's captain who carried the PC's, the records of the military patrols surveilling an area (is that a word?), newspaper accounts of their exploits--part of the fun is thinking of ways to record the adventures that will contain sufficient detail and be entertaining and credible at the same time.

I note that you (or someone?) think RPG session write-ups are like TV series because they're episodic. Ours never have been. We play campaigns; they break when someone says, "that's a good place to stop for tonight, it's getting late". Rarely does that happen to be when we're all safely back in camp, or we've rounded out a significant segment of the story, or anything like that. It's just a spot where we can all remember where we were and pick it up next time. In that sense, TV does not fit my experience as a model. There's been nothing episodic about any game I remember playing, unless you count the idea that we were exploring one area for about a year and then moved to another for three months and another for six months--hardly what I'd call "episodes".

--M. J. Young