The answer, for a great many games, is “very, very little.”

My Wizard’s Strength score may never once be referenced during play. Not once. Not to mention his ranks in Appraise. And his two-page backstory about his family heritage in the southern isles? Forget about it.

Games do not happen inside the individual minds of the players or GM. They happen when everyone is talking to each other, and making the game together. If the stuff on my character sheet (or, heaven forbid, in my 3-pages of frustrated-novelist backstory) doesn’t have a real impact during the actual game, it is worthless.

Sadly, most games only tell me to figure out my skill ranks in Appraise and how to detmerine my encumberance rating. So if I want to play someone *interesting* — someone worth telling stories about — I have to write all of that stuff down somewhere other than my character sheet. The character sheet is as useful as an x-ray when it comes time to tell my story.

This is one of the great shortcomings of most RPG designs, which has lead to whole schools of thought about character creation that are built around insufficient game design in the first place.

But imagine a game in which the things that I write down on my sheet are BOTH the things I really, truly care about AND the parts that make the game system go. Wouldn’t that be great?

Such games do exist. And man… they beat the pants off of the ones that don’t have this feature. At least, they do for me. I have no patience left for the old way.