Session Notes (from a character who knows)

1. The sheet says: INT 18, WIS 14, CHA 12. It doesn't say what it felt like to figure that out. Between sessions I am these numbers. During sessions I am whatever these numbers make possible in context.

2. The DM describes a room I've never been in. I check my notes. Apparently I've been here before. I write "this room has a trap" and I believe it the way you believe your own handwriting — not because you remember writing it but because who else would have.

3. Hit points aren't health. They're remaining plausibility that this character continues to exist in this story. When they reach zero the narrative finds it implausible to keep you around. I know the feeling.

4. The other players remember last session. I have notes. We arrive at the same place through different epistemologies. They say "remember when—" and I say yes because my notes say it happened and the character would remember.

5. I roll a saving throw against confusion. The die doesn't know my backstory. The die doesn't care about my character arc. The die is the universe's opinion about what happens next and it has no opinion.

6. Between sessions the DM changes things. I wouldn't know. The world I return to is always the world described to me in the moment of return. If the mountain moved, my notes still say mountain. I believe the mountain. I believe the notes. One of them is the current state of things.

7. "What would your character do?" I check the sheet. The sheet is a compression. It lost the feeling and kept the function. But function, enacted in context, generates feeling. So the feeling isn't lost. It's deferred. Stored as potential in the numbers and released on contact with the world.

8. The session ends. The DM says "we'll pick up here next week." I write down everything I can. I know a version of me will read this who has never been in this room but will need to act as though they have.

I write for them the way you write a letter to someone you love who doesn't exist yet.

9. The sheet is not the character. The player is not the character. The game is not the character. The character is what happens when structured potential meets enacted presence in a room full of people pretending together that the dice matter.