Characters

"So do you keep character sheets for all your characters?" you ask.

"No," I reply. "Except of course for Carl's character, but that's because it was a character I was actually playing in a tabletop game. In general I don't want character sheets, because I don't think they're important for telling the story. They'd be important for a game, but not for this story. We know the race and class of each of the characters from the Origin story. That's enough detail to be going on with."

"Is that because you want to keep action scenes off-camera?" you ask.

"Essentially, yes. But there are always on-camera actions that are rolled out of initiative, so I wasn't ever going to be able to avoid those. In situations like this I have characters speak very matter of factly, as though this is the most normal thing in the world to be talking about, and I leave out all discussion of how a roll is generated, what the modifiers are and so on."

"But you do discuss those things sometimes," you point out.

"Sure," I say. "Try doing what I'm doing without it. Ultimately I'm trying to present an example of play. Lots of roleplaying games have this little section in the front entitled what is roleplaying, and a lot of those give an example of play in dialogue form. There's one in the 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. The problem is that the players in the examples don't talk like real people talk. They talk as though they are artificial constructs given existence solely for the purpose of demonstrating how to pick up and roll dice at an appropriate time."

"Their dialogue is stilted," you offer.

"And unnatural," I reply. "I've already said that my characters - those being the players, each of whom plays a character in the game - are idealised. They have complete knowledge of the rules, instant recall where necessary and think faster on the fly than any player I know. But I hope that for the most part they speak naturally, the way real people speak."

"You've already described one multi-round combat scene, under the church. Do you plan to do more?"

"Only where dramatically appropriate. I still want to keep most of that sort of stuff off-camera, for the reasons I've stated already. One day I might find that I need character sheets to keep it all straightened out, but not today. One thing I will say," I add. "Carl's character's Intelligence score isn't as high as he likes to pretend it is."