My husband Tim and I are avid gamers. For at least the last ten years we have taken turns running one-on-one games for each other, and in that time we have built up quite a wealth of settings. Many of them are located in the same plane of reality, others stretch into different 'verses which may or may not be connected.

We went into a sort of gaming paralysis between November and February, in part because inventing perils paled as a pastime next to perceived precariousness in reality. What jogged us out of it was the idea of reboots.

We are each taking a beloved character in a well-developed world and rebooting the story. In the case of the tale I am GMing, I'm changing the interstellar settlement backstory of my first gaming world and seeing what that does to the fabric of the first story I ever told for Tim. In the case of the story he is running for me, he is retelling the story of one of my most high-powered characters (a full-blown telekinetic) with what seems to be a time travel styled twist.

In both of our stories, the reboot is built into the world. We're not actually taking back anything that happened before. The new version of my world exists in a spin-off 'verse, so it's not actually the exact same place, just a close resemblance. Tim's character, for in-world justified reasons, has the same name and the same soul as before. In Tim's world the reboot is part of the plot: some enemy of the interstellar Federation changed something (I don't know what exactly, we haven't gotten that far), and now the Federation has never met one of their craziest and most powerful allies in the nigh-perpetual war against demonkind. But some people in the world have a periodic gut feeling that "this is not the life I was supposed to live," or "it's not supposed to be this way." (I think Tim has currently won the prize for therapeutic gaming).

Anyone have experiences with rebooting old worlds and characters? Was it fun?