Character persistence between scenes

Many years ago, I belonged to an amateur theater ensemble. Our regular activities involved acting exercises, like rehearsing dialogue, improvising, and reacting to each other. In addition, about once a year or two, the group worked on a complete amateur production, in a real theater, with a paying audience. I took part in two of these.

In the first production, I played a bit part, a character who didn't really go through much change. During the course of the performance, I did have to know my entrance and exit cues, which meant keeping track of where in the script the play was, and I did have to remember the lines relevant to each scene I was in, but otherwise, my character stayed pretty much the same, so delivering my lines was just a matter of keeping a single persona going, and reacting to other characters as they changed - or like mine, remained static.

The second production, on the other hand, involved some development: my character gained confidence from scene to scene, became more and more comfortable with himself, until his final appearance, where he comes back to face his parents, expressing rage at something they did during scenes from which he was absent. This meant that I had to develop a narrative for him that continued offstage. The audience wouldn't see those parts, and possibly wouldn't care about their details, but if I wanted to deliver my lines and react to the other characters properly, I had to maintain this changing element from one scene to another, even through scenes in which I did not participate. So I wrote down narratives to patch my character between scenes, which continued this development, and recited them to myself from memory as I waited for my cues, trying to time my internal monologue so that finishing it would coincide with my next entrance. I think I did a reasonable job. It was definitely more intense than my role in the first production.

In a table-top role-playing game, maintaining character persistence is not as difficult. If you're a player, while you do have a persistent character between sessions, or before and after a break, or before and after a segment where your character is not involved, a lot of change usually hasn't occurred - with the exception of end of adventure book-keeping, like leveling up, or skill improvement, or downtime activities. In the latter case, it's a matter of updating your character sheet at your leisure, to consult it as you start role-playing or otherwise participating in the game once more. At worst, you might need to ask questions, if you suddenly forget where your character ended last session, or is expected to be right now.

It's a bit trickier if you're the gamemaster, as you do need to keep on top of things, including the progress of non-player characters, factions in the world, other world events, and, of course, the PCs. In my campaign, I did find that writing down narratives of what happens between sessions, or in parallel to sessions, was helpful for me to keep myself current for session start. But, as with being a player, since game time isn't usually real time, you can pause, you can ask questions, you can be reminded of things you've forgotten, and rewrite recent "history" when things turn up wrong.