A Note About Stories

I’ve been telling a lot of gaming stories here lately. Especially dedicated readers may recall some of these stories from my guest appearances on a local podcast, and especially pedantic readers may note that my retellings here do not exactly match the stories as I told them before. I’m aware. The problem with telling stories years after they’ve occurred is that I don’t fully recall what happened. That’s how we get discrepancies like this:

Those of you with encyclopedic knowledge of D&D 3.5E may recall that gray slaads do not have dimension door at will. But this character was definitely a slaad, and he definitely teleported at will. I don’t know how to reconcile this.

Sometimes the story changes in the telling, so it becomes a more dramatic version of itself. Sometimes I forget a key element and I have to fill it in with guesswork or estimation. Though I can’t think of a specific situation in which I’ve made something up entirely, I can’t be one hundred percent certain I haven’t. My memory is faulty and mostly occupied by encyclopedic knowledge of 16-bit video games. So I think it’s worth noting that any given part of these stories, like any part of any story, may occur on any of the following levels of reality:

(a) what happened
(b) what I believe happened
(c) what I would like to have happened
(d) what I want others to believe happened
(e) what I want others to believe that I believed happened.

I understand this list comes from Yes, Prime Minister, though I came across it by way of a professional wrestling Q&A blog because I am a bard and I only acquire knowledge esoterically. I try to tell stories that exist on level (a), but I can only guarantee level (b). If my stories conflict with something else I’ve said, please feel free to believe whichever version you find most entertaining.

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