Reboots

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?

What's up with the cover art?

Sometime in the last calendar year I decided to take the list of 98 roleplaying characters I portrayed between 2002 and 2016 (feel free to re-read that until the implications regarding my mentality really sink in), and think about how I would describe the evolution of those characters over the course of the story that was told. In the course of this mental exercise I identified nine personality styles or archetypes (I use the word loosely) to describe the various phases of character development, which I see as naturally fitting into three groups:

Group 1: Defined by conflict

  1. Mercenary - Fights (or steals, or whatever else) for personal enrichment
  2. Warrior - Fights with and/or under the command of others; follows rules of engagement
  3. Champion - Fights for a cause

Group 2: Defined by a relationship to harm

  1. Survivor - Endures harm
  2. Guardian - Prevents harm
  3. Healer - Undoes harm

Group 3: Defined by how they see their "place" in the world

  1. I Just Work Here - Accepts their place, tries to live a normal life
  2. Explorer - Questions their place, inquisitive regarding the world around them
  3. Leader - Defines their place, reshapes the world around them

The three tiers in each group are characterized by the level of influence the character has or tries to have on the events or worlds in which they find themselves. Tier one takes the world as it is; tier two thinks the world could be different; tier three thinks the world should be different.

You may notice that off on the left there's a lonely bubble labeled "Mercenary" that doesn't connect to anything else. I have tried on more than one occasion to play a character with a mercenary mindset. However, these characters never grow, develop, or change in any notable way, no matter how long the story runs. I believe that is because the mercenary mentality does not make sense to me, and I don't have an intuitive grasp of how a person evolves from - or to - that style of being. Or, maybe what I do understand of it frightens me, so I try to steer clear.