I find your blog to be excellent!. I enjoyed this post enough to comment, and not just because it is a topic that matters to me as a player. I am particularly interested in how the terms we use, such as story, affect how we think about the experience we are trying to describe, label, and share. For instance, ‘a storytelling mindset’ occupies an interesting space between actually and not actually storytelling, so your choice of words made me smile in appreciation. It is so good, that it makes me wonder why you did not step more completely away from the notion of storytelling – being willing to jettison the whole family of story-related terms (because stories ≠ games ≠ stories). This whole post is about character transformation (including the transformations which are not lasting) and somehow I bet there is a more communicative term for how to arrive at a stance or mindset that draws on that more than the notion that as players our authorship is more than a by-product of what we sat down to do~

As an aside, in regard to Circle of Hands, I am not sure if this was a result of a typographical incident when you wrote that section or something else, but the game’s rule on playing characters is not that you cannot play one twice, but rather that you cannot play one twice in a row. You can alternate between two of the characters in the pool as each Venture is played, or you could cycle in some way through all of them. Over long-form play, the nature of the character is revealed across all of the Ventures in which it appears – not just from one player. We can discover what the character is like overall as well as presenting what the character is like in this moment.