OK, this just occurred to me. When I write Actual Play reports, they are usually written two to three days after the session. During the session I take notes, but I rarely look at them after the game has concluded.
This has let me to to describe the adventures as I will remember them, even though that might not exactly be the way they went down.
I don’t think it’s a problem at all, actually I think it’s great, because the way you remember the game is much more important than what actually happened.
The strange thing though; when I remember the battle at the top of the tower against those demons, it comes alive in my head, like a favorite movie you have seen so many times. I’m pretty sure a lot of the details were never mentioned, but they are there anyway.
This is very true for me, too. I was tasked with writing up a “debrief” for an Airsoft skirmish the other day (this is related, I promise… Bear with me..!). Airsoft is a bit like paintball, and the debrief could be likened to an actual play. Anyway, the way I remembered the day and the way it actually happened were so different that I got called up on several key facts (small things like which team actually won…). In my head, it was so awesome that it didn’t matter which team won, only that awesome stuff happened, everywhere. This wasn’t so much true for my readers… I guess the moral of the story is that the importance of facts vs. fiction varies from person to person.
I say keep being awesome.
That’s a really cool way of looking at it I’ve never thought about game fiction in those specific terms — the idea that the only thing that happened during the game is collectively what people remember as entertaining after some time has passed. That’s pretty neat, given the idea of using only that information as future backstory, forgotten details aren’t important enough to matter.
As long as we are the victors, we get to write the history! (well, perhaps with the exception of Oliver Clare , who gets to write it anyway!)
Richard Robertson lol 🙂
Richard Robertson lol! Just to clarify, our team won, but in my mind the epic death scenes all around me took precedence… I wrote history that we lost, even though we actually won… I’m still unsure whether George Orwell would’ve been proud…