I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I made a mistake with limiting players in writing only what could be visibly seen as if we were watching a movie.

My intentions were good. I wanted to avoid distracting personal opinions disrupting the flow of the posts. I wanted to practice the storytelling maxim of ‘show’, don’t ‘tell’. And I have a pet dislike of players having information that they can’t act upon in character. I believe it disrupts the immersive part of roleplaying a character.

The challenge has been handled well by all of you. It’s even worked well for the solo threads, where I can tailor situations to evoke personal disclosure. However, I also believe it has prevented interpersonal relationships between the player characters developing properly. I’ve gone over old correspondence, and realised that each of you have put a great deal of work into developing a character’s feelings and opinions about each of the other characters. Almost none of this has been revealed in game, and this is a great shame. Although these opinions may not have been voiced in character, others might more easily have sensed them.

The big thing that I missed is that this format is different from a movie. A picture can express a thousand words. In a movie, the actor has a huge range of facial expressions, body movement, and emotional presence he can bring to a part, to convey a great deal of what is happening for the character. We don’t have that capability in this format.

I’ve also realised how much as a GM I rely on visual and emotional cues. I’m pretty good at picking up emotional states. This information lets me know what I need to emphasise, what to downplay, and what to change. I can usually pick up emotion in internet chat rooms too, and I thought this would be sufficient. However, the delay time in sending and receiving posts does further hamper my sensitivity.

So we have been missing out one of the biggest advantages of the movie – the full visual picture. We have also been missing out on one of the biggest advantages of the book – that we get to see inside the mindset of one or more of the protagonists.

Several of you have expressed frustration at this limitation before. I’m finally in the space of being able to hear it, understand it, and act on it. I apologise for not having come to this realisation much earlier.

The last round of postings has pretty much convinced me of my error. Karen made a post that ran against the guidelines, giving an emotion about Reyn. And this led to more depth in self disclosure among the other PCs than usually occurs. I want to encourage this kind of roleplaying between players.

I wish to experiment with a change in guidelines. It is now permissible for a post to express a PC’s internal opinions and emotions without needing to translate them all into visual cues.

To give an in-game justification for the likely change of style and tone in character interactions, I am going to rule that sharing in the experience of the Becoming has forged a psychic bond between all the PCs. It is becoming increasingly easy to sense some of the thoughts and emotions of the others in the group. It is still possible for a character to be constantly vigilant, and keep his or her thoughts under strict guard and not psychically ‘leak’ them to the others. In which case, please just don’t post them.