Heh… Thanks. More thoughts:

Something else that you should keep in mind: everyone has history of some sort with a whole lot of people. I feel like this would be intensely true with something like AW where you (likely) are in a community – there are plenty of npcs (who could become characters, whether they have ever had any screentime or not yet) and it would make tons of sense for characters to have huge lists of Hx as player characters cycled in/out of play. The community aspect though is the thing that makes sense out of the fact that all the PCs have some Hx with this new-to-the-audience character.

This might be harder to have make “sense” in the fiction if you aren’t in some sort of community. It could make sense for one PC to know this new person, but the more people who supposedly have history, the more you tug at the believability of the narrative.

I also want to note, and this is totally just my opinion: I think (as a group) caring about how the whole entire world/story looks is a good thing. I think focusing on that and not just your individual characters can really lead to meaningful stories being created. I think having a rich tapestry built over time not just made up of the stories of three or four characters is beautiful. (I think this is also why we are starting to see games (Urban Shadows and The Watch for example) have built in tooling that eventually retires characters from player use.

The huge long campaign is kind of the Holy Grail of gaming (I can’t even imagine how awesome it would be to play in like a 36+ session game of Burning Wheel), but it seems like it is becoming even more unlikely these days and especially as adults to make something like that happen. And that is okay. There are other beautiful meaningful moving stories to tell but they might be told with a bit more alacrity or by only looking at a brief chunk of time in a character’s life. Though maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll catch them again some other time down the line.