As I move a little further away from having posted anything other than Sessions and transition more fully into a rpg apfic blog, I want to take a second and explain my approach.
Sessions are records of TTRPG playthroughs. I post these for public consumption because I hope anyone who comes across them will be inspired by something within them and that it will aid in their own games somehow. Or even just that someone should find them entertaining to read.
I record both the mechanical and the narrative but I understand that not everyone is interested in reading both. So I have them separated, with the mechanical stuff (as much as I can manage) placed in spoilers. Spoilers can be inherently collapsed, which also lets me save some space on the actual scrollthrough. What's more, the text style is different, which makes keeping track of either easier.
Why keep the mechanical stuff at all? I believe it's important. The mechanical stuff tells a parallel narrative. It's about what I'm doing and thinking and saying as a Player of the game. It's inclusion is what separates a short story or some other fiction writing from a gameplay record. Even aside from the story of what I'm doing, it serves a pure informational purpose, enlightening the reader on the whys of the sometimes radical change in story direction on the narrative end of things.
RPGs are not like fiction stories in a few different ways. Their goals are different, which means their methodologies may differ. Stories are overwhelmingly often planned and RPGs just aren't structured like that because of their much stronger improvisational nature. There might even be something to be said for how rpgs, as games, are for having fun, whereas fiction stories are to entertain others. Clearly, there is crossover here. And it's not like either one can't ascend to higher purpose and discuss important matters. But I do think they are structured differently and, even if they're both telling stories, they rarely do so in the same way.
The vast majority of the Sessions I post will be Solo Experiences. I didn't have a lot of friends growing up to get a big dnd group together. I roped a couple of people into a session or two here and there and I did an absolute metric load of worldbuilding. I read the books cover to cover. I did a lot of daydreaming and imagining. But I never really did any solo play because anything I could find on it was either boring or dungeons (which are just a different kind of boring to me after about 10 minutes). Games like Ironsworn, which I obviously didn't find until well into adulthood, were a revelation to me. Not just oracles and random tables...but good and useful oracles. Inspiring oracles. Not a d100 table of slop chucked in a bowl. So I gave solo roleplaying a chance. I like it, though recording the experiences is challenging and so my output in this regard is (as I say in the About This Blog post) glacial.
In any case, as a result, some of the commentary in the mechanical parts of the posts include my thoughts about solo play and what I think of it both from a design perspective and from the perspective of a burgeoning solo player.
Some rare games will be duo or group text based games I've played with friends who I have obtained permission from to post our experience together. Those will be formatted like a chat log, with each player's name listed before their post.
Some of either type of game (solo or not) will be simple playtests of systems. Those will obviously contain much heavier discussion on the system and my experience playing it. I do the playtests because I'm interested in trying a wide variety of systems. If I like them enough, in my own slow way, I'll turn them into proper games later on.
As a final note, I have a title card labeled "Sessions" which depicts me traveling from world to world and I'll use that as a placeholder card until such time as I can create a proper title card for whatever game I'm using it for. Every game (except playtests usually) gets its own unique card to help differentiate it but that can sometimes take a little bit of time and effort.
I hope this post adequately explains my approach and reasoning to posting TTRPG actual play fiction.
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