User blog:Faeyrin/On the concept of character pages.

I've realized something about roleplay.

Roleplay within the context of genuine and good textplay, is an awesome hybrid of collaborative fiction and a choose your own adventure story. This is why some of us stick here through thick and thin. We absolutely love the suspense, mystery, intrigue, and interactivity that comes from a very good session. Essentially, we feel the emotions our characters do. Is the character legitimately dying to know about another's past? Chances are that you are too! So long as you don't already know. It's just how it goes, because sometimes it can be so immersive.

That's not what I realized, though! I've known that for a while.

What I have just realized is this;

All the abundance of information found on these character sheets can downright destroy the immersion and wonder of the spectacle. No more wondering why a character's past is so mysterious, no more wondering what makes them tick. You can just read all about it on the wiki.

And that, friends, takes away half the fun. It kills the 'choose your own adventure' part. At least, the immersion of it. You just read about the character you're interacting with, and sure, you feel 'satisfied' at that moment because you're familiar now. Yet, now you can't learn all of that in the most stimulating method. The method being, through actual roleplay. Not to mention there is a large risk of people meta gaming once they know all about your character(s). It may be on purpose or by accident. It can happen on accident. At least, I'VE accidentally done it because I knew all about a character.

And thus I decided to do away with my pages. Detailed character pages and notebooks and all the like actually inhibit the fun of roleplay in the grand scheme of things.

I actually thought long and hard about this. Because there's a literary aspect about detailed character biographies and writing all of that out. Unfortunately, the present community seems to lean more to the art of treating it like a text based adventure game, rather than an art of actual atory craft. This isn't bad or good, but it negates the literary aspect of detailed character write ups.

I will still be active on this wiki, and without pages of my own to really tend to, at least not character pages, I will probably be helping with other wiki things. Such as writing guides, or randomly correcting spelling and grammar on pages, so on and so forth. I can definitely tell you that I won't be reading much into character pages, though. I don't want to inhibit my own fun.