Part 4: Projecting Engagement
All this delivers what the DM wants: a frictionless, low-effort experience where the players get what they want. It succeeds because no one at the table cares or expects continuity. The goal is immediate entertainment, power fantasy, casual group fun — where the absence of agency, sense or causality isn't a flaw. The setting doesn't need to make sense because that's not the game being run.
This correlates with the over time diminishment in the game's experience. Ideals of a deeper, more resilient world faded away in the decades after the game's inception. The cause was not, however, attributed to a fault of the setting, but to faults in the game's rules and interpretation. This led to new rules — which didn't and still haven't solved the problem — and inevitably to a growing expansion of game role-performance, in an effort to provide depth the setting does not possess. Since, the misdiagnosis has led to an ever more accommodating and permissive effort to keep the players engaged through every means possible except a correction of the setting's now intrinsically hollow structure. Dungeon masters, lacking a structural setting, have been forced to replace it with elaborate character arcs and exaggerated emotional performances, like circuses or theatres have to do nowadays, in an ever more desperate quest to put bottoms in seats. Because an intense, immersive setting proved too difficult to provide logistically, and could not easily be created from scratch, the community simply "gave up" on it — and now, what has been steadily built up to replace it is proving to be un-runnable and staggeringly disjointed.
To be specific, efforts taken to provide massive tomes dedicated towards "worldbuilding," have proved to be little more than travel brochures designed to entice the players to go there, while providing little value upon arrival. We have drama without weight. The game's trajectory over decades reflects a culture-wide capitulation: because the setting proved too hard to build and too complex to sustain, it's been replaced with an overwhelming sprawl of systems, sourcebooks and advice trying to reverse-engineer depth from the outside in. As a result, we have massive worldbuilding guides full of page count and vocabulary which, once read, prove to be all hat and no cow. There's no machinery behind the façade. It's assumed the DM will simply provide it, on demand — but no tools, no handbook, no defined methodology has ever been provided to make this possible.
An immersive setting assumes the reverse of this. The dungeon master provides the world's setting and no more. Like those in the real world, the people in the imagined setting are assumed to have intentions, aspirations, loyalties and troubles that have nothing whatsoever to do with the player character's arrival or appearance. They do not exist to provide anything for the party. Their exposition, when it's given, reflects what these people might normally speak about regardless of the players. If asked to provide a "rumour," these people have no idea what the player is talking about. The word "lore," a game-industry term, is anachronistic and has no meaning. There are no "arcs," because unlike a story and like the real world, things just happen and don't have to fit into a pre-modelled construction. Events occur because the residents, whomever they might be, sleep, wake, eat, hunt, search and carry forth an agenda that sometimes supports and sometimes threatens the players, depending on what the players want and where they happen to go. No one is "evil" or "good." Everyone is an amalgam of indifferent motivations, gained through their childhood, their personal experience, their allegiances and their concern for one another.
Interactions are not devices to move a plot forward but windows into a complex, autonomous structure. The complexity doesn't need to be flaunted. Initially, the surface of a village's daily life might appear to be staid and uninteresting — but as with the Village of Hommlet, the truth, whatever it may happen to be, emerges piece by piece, through player choices, interactions, the decision to remain or the decision to investigate deeper into puzzling behaviours. Unlike Hommlet, the truth might be anything, it doesn't need to be hidden evil; but it exists not because the players are there, but because intelligent beings pursue both positive and negative compulsions that lead to things they have every reason to keep hidden. The division supplies the dual-narrative: the place as it appears to be, and the place as it really is.
With the players, the DM's first responsibility is to define what the player's characters already know. Characters do not start the game at birth; they have already lived 15 or more years in the setting, so we must assume they have knowledge that we would automatically ascribe to people of their age. They don't need "rumours" to tell them about dangerous places nearby — they have been hearing stories about these places since infancy. They understand the structure of human habitations, who is in authority and what that authority allows. Because they are educated and proficient in weapons, spells, skills and the possession of natural advantages, they have likely visited nearby towns and cities, or crisscrossed the local realm by a number of its roads. They know the names of every important person in the locality, and most likely which groups oppose the general welfare of the realm and themselves. Asking questions about these things shouldn't be interactions between the players and non-player characters, but between the players and the DM, assuming the characters already know what the DM is now telling them.
More than this, characters are products of their world. They have learned not to behave sociopathically. While a player might perceive that there's nothing to lose by burning down the tavern (because the character isn't "real" anyway), the characters themselves would be inhibited by years of indoctrination and upbringing. They would not be able to set the tavern aflame because they could not, by virtue of having dwelt in the game world to this date. In like fashion, the characters have been socialised, trained and shaped by their geography, politics and customs. It's completely natural that they should believe in monarchy as the "correct" form of government; that they should hate the residents of another realm that has fought four wars in the last century with their realm. That the presence of slaves, if the setting permits it, is simply how things are. If the setting is based on a pre-Industrial world, then the ideologies, doctrines and egalitarianism of their industrially-built sentimentality have no place in the setting.
The advantage of this is self-evident: the players are free from an assumption that they're here to sustain social justice. The "justice" of their world already exists as it should be. They don't perceive themselves to be outsiders who have just arrived, with none of the characteristics of these other, alien people. In turn, the DM is freed from having to explain patterns of behaviour in terms of present-day beliefs or morality. We can, of course — if the players decide they want to eliminate slavery as a social construct, they're perfectly free to do so, though they might pause and think about the enormity of this task as it would have been, say, in the 14th century. But realistically, it shouldn't occur to them to do so, any more than it should ever occur to anyone to spontaneously, for giggles, to burn down an establishment. Because of this, as the governing body of the game, it's in our rights to demand that players recognise these restrictions, and hold them to it. We are here to play in another space and time, not to impune these fine people with their lives through disdain and contempt for something they thought, at the time, was perfectly right. Just as we assume we're perfectly right now.
This is what it means to roleplay in another time and place. Not to carry present righteousness as a badge, but to live honestly in the assumptions of the age. The justice of that world is not ours, and it doesn't need to be. That difference is not something to correct — it is something to play.
Traditionally, information in a bare-bones setting has to be carefully hoarded, because there is so little of it. Since every bit of knowledge the DM has about the keep or the caves the players will adventure into is critical to the game experience, DMs are naturally reticent to give out anything beyond what is strictly allowed, given where the players are or what questions they ask. In the more immersive setting, however, knowledge ceases to be at a premium. Like with the real world, it's impossible for the players to know everything — more and more information only invites more questions. Therefore, we need only decide what a player's character should logically know according to their past and their present skill-set... and give this information freely. Everything else, we simply say to the player, "You don't know." Eventually, once the player understands enough about the world to feel comfortable acting in it, we can move onto the next setting knowledge we're meant to provide as dungeon master.
At all times, we must have an accurate, solid idea of where the players are in the immediate moment — and we must be able to communicate the sensory and positional information about this location exactly enough that what we see in our minds is what the players see in theirs. It cannot be a game of telephone, where the message is garbled or convoluted. As such, we need to habitually check the players' knowledge: the wall is on their left, the open space sweeps out to their right, the tower is 200 yards away, the copse of trees is behind them and to their right, the wall is 15 feet high and made of granite, the ground has surface cover, wild grass mixed with small shrubs that do not block line-of-sight... and so on. The space must have dimension, the players must be able to orient themselves... and most of all, the space must be concretely navigable in some degree. The players must be able to say, "We go across the grass," "we climb the wall" or "we travel along the wall away from the tower," with a surety that as the dungeon master we're prepared for this, whatever choice they make. Any object in the space, whether it's a shrub or a coin sitting on the ground, must include a capacity to be interacted with — remembering that, in most cases in the real world, interacting with a plant or a found coin is unlikely to have much import. Nonetheless, the potential must exist.
This is difficult to accomplish for the new DM not versed in making declarative statements. Our statements about the location of the tower cannot be vague or stated without rigidity. Once named as a "tower" it cannot be lazily referred to as a keep or an outpost. It must have clear attributes in our mind from the moment we've declared its existence — and we must accept its existence ourselves as a responsibility, so that if the players go there, it is made of definable things, it has a logical entranceway, a floorplan, a reason for it having been built, a builder, a resident or a reason why there are no residents. Because the purpose of the tower is not to "give the players a place to adventure," but because "someone wanted a tower there," we must give the tower causality as well as existence. And we must do so unreservedly and responsibly, embracing the tower's existence ourselves, as something we're proud of, not something we regret adding.
It is likewise necessary that we possess an instinctive visual awareness. This describes an ability to imagine a space or object in spatial terms, enabling us not only to describe the dimension of things, but to see past the physical into the lived experience of the residents. If we imagine a village, we don't just see the buildings and the pathways: we automatically see the people, and in seeing them, we grasp automatically that they are about their purpose, moving this way and that, interacting, looking at ease, concerned, happy or whatnot. Each expression, in our imagination, immediately suggests a reason: at ease because all is going well, concerned because of a family member's health, happy because the day is nice. We see the residents as people — because in our everyday life in the place where we live, we're forever conscious that there are others around us, who have trials, urges, hopes, expectations and emotional weights that they're carrying. Many DMs come to the game without this reflective capacity. They travel through their real world with blinders on, never having thought to look into the faces of others, or note daily changes in their environment, or even care if the day is sunny or not. Such persons lack many of the basic skills necessary to make a world "come alive," because their own world isn't.
These are both learnable skills. We return again to the concept of mindfulness, which we earlier described as a contemplative process by which we "thought" at length about our game setting. The process directs us to deliberately walk around a space, starting with our own, looking over and gazing thoughtfully at objects that we ourselves keep. This bit of chintz here, this tapestry, this collection of cups we gather over the space of years... and puzzle out the manner in which each thing we own has come into our possession. We take a walk around our neighbourhood, reflecting on memories we have of the residents in other houses, now and in the past... and consider those places where we grew up, or where we visited, and remark in our thoughts how we would describe those to other people. From here, we give the same substance to imaginary things in our game's setting, reviewing how large things ought to be, how certain races come to have certain viewpoints on the world, why rivers flow as they do. As a body, this knowledge is shored up by reading about the fabrication of things like metal and ceramic objects, how things are constructed, the descriptive nature of personal histories, anthropology, sociology, geography — literally anything that can inform us more about the real world, so we can make our fictional world more real. The effective fallout of this isn't just that we become better DMs... we also become better read and more fashionably interesting as human beings.
The riddle of how we come to see the shape of the village is solved through lived attentiveness: not just observation but participation in the experience of others. This is extremely difficult for one kind of role-player... the kind that retreats to RPG gaming in order to have a social experience, having failed nearly everywhere else due to their demanding behaviour and lack of empathy. Such persons must embrace the flat, featureless game world, because they cannot begin to comprehend a world with residents that are both imaginary AND worthy of consideration.
For everyone else, however, this cohesiveness is a must — and it is learned through sharing the expressions, moods and subtle shifts of other people, not just in personal relationships but always and everywhere. Readers are invited to deliberately seek out places with lots of people and just watch... not just one time, but often, especially since many of us must be with other people a lot of the time. Time on the bus, time eating outside in the office mall, time attending a sports event or seeing a child's play are opportunities to watch and self-query about other people. We don't need to be right in our guesses. We only need to develop the skill that allows us to guess, and thus activate that visual awareness we can use when we make our guesses "real" for the player characters.
This is probably enough for now; the second part will have to be filled out with another post.
Part 3: Cognitive Load & Information Filtering
Part 2c: Governing the Game
Part 1: Introduction to Session ManagementPart 2c: Governing the Game
Part 2b: Setting Player Boundaries
Part 2a: The DM's Mental Toolbox
The easiest setting for a DM to run is one that merely frames the players' actions and serves as scenery. This demands very little of us beyond surface description. We need no internal logic — the monsters are here to contend with the players, the residents of the town exist to give the players the information they need, especially for the next adventure. Apart from that, the village or town exists to supply the players' needs. This might be things to buy, special magical gifts granted by non-player characters, a safe place to sleep, healing or recreation. Like a theme park, these NPCs function like workers behind the scenes of the players' experience. They have no lives; their aspiration is to wait for and serve the party when they arrive. Their morality or behaviour is whatever the adventure needs it to be. Some are good, some are moustache-twirling evil, but none need depth because either they exist as the party's allies or their enemies. When they perform, it's role-play theatre, the purpose of which is to provide colour, not consequence. Nuance isn't necessary, as that wouldn't help the players gain experience, become wealthier and more powerful, or feel important as heroes.
Because the NPCs and monsters have no agency, there's no need to think through the logic of their statements or the convenience of their appearing at a specific place or time. Because they're just props, they can present themselves spontaneously as a danger — and when their usefulness in that is done, they can blip out of existence without another thought. Causality does not need to be tracked. Shopkeepers have no accounts to keep, no families to feed, no deliveries to receive. Stuff in their places is just there, ready to be picked off the shelf, apparently without limitation. And the player characters, too, have no real history; a player is asked to write out a few pages to explain the character's "motivations," but there's no concrete idea of childhood, accident, regret, time lived or experience gained in the time between their birth and the moment they enter the campaign. They are blank slates, with no awareness or memory of the world they grew up in.
The simplicity of all this is seductive because it's mechanically easy for the DM to maintain, precisely because it's not a world in any true sense. Everything is a stage set. Empires are borders on a map, which the players enter and leave, dressed up so as to appear marginally different — but in reality, each is just a different land of hats. Every day in this empire versus that kingdom is the same. There are always farmers, always wagons rolling over roads, always the same villages, always the same medieval political structure, etcetera. There are no seasons to keep track of: every day is a California 72-degrees, where the farmers endlessly plough the fields, in the same way, for 183 days of the year — whereupon they change over to harvesting. Because ploughing and harvesting is all farmers do.
Because the NPCs and monsters have no agency, there's no need to think through the logic of their statements or the convenience of their appearing at a specific place or time. Because they're just props, they can present themselves spontaneously as a danger — and when their usefulness in that is done, they can blip out of existence without another thought. Causality does not need to be tracked. Shopkeepers have no accounts to keep, no families to feed, no deliveries to receive. Stuff in their places is just there, ready to be picked off the shelf, apparently without limitation. And the player characters, too, have no real history; a player is asked to write out a few pages to explain the character's "motivations," but there's no concrete idea of childhood, accident, regret, time lived or experience gained in the time between their birth and the moment they enter the campaign. They are blank slates, with no awareness or memory of the world they grew up in.
The simplicity of all this is seductive because it's mechanically easy for the DM to maintain, precisely because it's not a world in any true sense. Everything is a stage set. Empires are borders on a map, which the players enter and leave, dressed up so as to appear marginally different — but in reality, each is just a different land of hats. Every day in this empire versus that kingdom is the same. There are always farmers, always wagons rolling over roads, always the same villages, always the same medieval political structure, etcetera. There are no seasons to keep track of: every day is a California 72-degrees, where the farmers endlessly plough the fields, in the same way, for 183 days of the year — whereupon they change over to harvesting. Because ploughing and harvesting is all farmers do.
All this delivers what the DM wants: a frictionless, low-effort experience where the players get what they want. It succeeds because no one at the table cares or expects continuity. The goal is immediate entertainment, power fantasy, casual group fun — where the absence of agency, sense or causality isn't a flaw. The setting doesn't need to make sense because that's not the game being run.
This correlates with the over time diminishment in the game's experience. Ideals of a deeper, more resilient world faded away in the decades after the game's inception. The cause was not, however, attributed to a fault of the setting, but to faults in the game's rules and interpretation. This led to new rules — which didn't and still haven't solved the problem — and inevitably to a growing expansion of game role-performance, in an effort to provide depth the setting does not possess. Since, the misdiagnosis has led to an ever more accommodating and permissive effort to keep the players engaged through every means possible except a correction of the setting's now intrinsically hollow structure. Dungeon masters, lacking a structural setting, have been forced to replace it with elaborate character arcs and exaggerated emotional performances, like circuses or theatres have to do nowadays, in an ever more desperate quest to put bottoms in seats. Because an intense, immersive setting proved too difficult to provide logistically, and could not easily be created from scratch, the community simply "gave up" on it — and now, what has been steadily built up to replace it is proving to be un-runnable and staggeringly disjointed.
To be specific, efforts taken to provide massive tomes dedicated towards "worldbuilding," have proved to be little more than travel brochures designed to entice the players to go there, while providing little value upon arrival. We have drama without weight. The game's trajectory over decades reflects a culture-wide capitulation: because the setting proved too hard to build and too complex to sustain, it's been replaced with an overwhelming sprawl of systems, sourcebooks and advice trying to reverse-engineer depth from the outside in. As a result, we have massive worldbuilding guides full of page count and vocabulary which, once read, prove to be all hat and no cow. There's no machinery behind the façade. It's assumed the DM will simply provide it, on demand — but no tools, no handbook, no defined methodology has ever been provided to make this possible.
An immersive setting assumes the reverse of this. The dungeon master provides the world's setting and no more. Like those in the real world, the people in the imagined setting are assumed to have intentions, aspirations, loyalties and troubles that have nothing whatsoever to do with the player character's arrival or appearance. They do not exist to provide anything for the party. Their exposition, when it's given, reflects what these people might normally speak about regardless of the players. If asked to provide a "rumour," these people have no idea what the player is talking about. The word "lore," a game-industry term, is anachronistic and has no meaning. There are no "arcs," because unlike a story and like the real world, things just happen and don't have to fit into a pre-modelled construction. Events occur because the residents, whomever they might be, sleep, wake, eat, hunt, search and carry forth an agenda that sometimes supports and sometimes threatens the players, depending on what the players want and where they happen to go. No one is "evil" or "good." Everyone is an amalgam of indifferent motivations, gained through their childhood, their personal experience, their allegiances and their concern for one another.
Interactions are not devices to move a plot forward but windows into a complex, autonomous structure. The complexity doesn't need to be flaunted. Initially, the surface of a village's daily life might appear to be staid and uninteresting — but as with the Village of Hommlet, the truth, whatever it may happen to be, emerges piece by piece, through player choices, interactions, the decision to remain or the decision to investigate deeper into puzzling behaviours. Unlike Hommlet, the truth might be anything, it doesn't need to be hidden evil; but it exists not because the players are there, but because intelligent beings pursue both positive and negative compulsions that lead to things they have every reason to keep hidden. The division supplies the dual-narrative: the place as it appears to be, and the place as it really is.
With the players, the DM's first responsibility is to define what the player's characters already know. Characters do not start the game at birth; they have already lived 15 or more years in the setting, so we must assume they have knowledge that we would automatically ascribe to people of their age. They don't need "rumours" to tell them about dangerous places nearby — they have been hearing stories about these places since infancy. They understand the structure of human habitations, who is in authority and what that authority allows. Because they are educated and proficient in weapons, spells, skills and the possession of natural advantages, they have likely visited nearby towns and cities, or crisscrossed the local realm by a number of its roads. They know the names of every important person in the locality, and most likely which groups oppose the general welfare of the realm and themselves. Asking questions about these things shouldn't be interactions between the players and non-player characters, but between the players and the DM, assuming the characters already know what the DM is now telling them.
More than this, characters are products of their world. They have learned not to behave sociopathically. While a player might perceive that there's nothing to lose by burning down the tavern (because the character isn't "real" anyway), the characters themselves would be inhibited by years of indoctrination and upbringing. They would not be able to set the tavern aflame because they could not, by virtue of having dwelt in the game world to this date. In like fashion, the characters have been socialised, trained and shaped by their geography, politics and customs. It's completely natural that they should believe in monarchy as the "correct" form of government; that they should hate the residents of another realm that has fought four wars in the last century with their realm. That the presence of slaves, if the setting permits it, is simply how things are. If the setting is based on a pre-Industrial world, then the ideologies, doctrines and egalitarianism of their industrially-built sentimentality have no place in the setting.
The advantage of this is self-evident: the players are free from an assumption that they're here to sustain social justice. The "justice" of their world already exists as it should be. They don't perceive themselves to be outsiders who have just arrived, with none of the characteristics of these other, alien people. In turn, the DM is freed from having to explain patterns of behaviour in terms of present-day beliefs or morality. We can, of course — if the players decide they want to eliminate slavery as a social construct, they're perfectly free to do so, though they might pause and think about the enormity of this task as it would have been, say, in the 14th century. But realistically, it shouldn't occur to them to do so, any more than it should ever occur to anyone to spontaneously, for giggles, to burn down an establishment. Because of this, as the governing body of the game, it's in our rights to demand that players recognise these restrictions, and hold them to it. We are here to play in another space and time, not to impune these fine people with their lives through disdain and contempt for something they thought, at the time, was perfectly right. Just as we assume we're perfectly right now.
This is what it means to roleplay in another time and place. Not to carry present righteousness as a badge, but to live honestly in the assumptions of the age. The justice of that world is not ours, and it doesn't need to be. That difference is not something to correct — it is something to play.
Traditionally, information in a bare-bones setting has to be carefully hoarded, because there is so little of it. Since every bit of knowledge the DM has about the keep or the caves the players will adventure into is critical to the game experience, DMs are naturally reticent to give out anything beyond what is strictly allowed, given where the players are or what questions they ask. In the more immersive setting, however, knowledge ceases to be at a premium. Like with the real world, it's impossible for the players to know everything — more and more information only invites more questions. Therefore, we need only decide what a player's character should logically know according to their past and their present skill-set... and give this information freely. Everything else, we simply say to the player, "You don't know." Eventually, once the player understands enough about the world to feel comfortable acting in it, we can move onto the next setting knowledge we're meant to provide as dungeon master.
At all times, we must have an accurate, solid idea of where the players are in the immediate moment — and we must be able to communicate the sensory and positional information about this location exactly enough that what we see in our minds is what the players see in theirs. It cannot be a game of telephone, where the message is garbled or convoluted. As such, we need to habitually check the players' knowledge: the wall is on their left, the open space sweeps out to their right, the tower is 200 yards away, the copse of trees is behind them and to their right, the wall is 15 feet high and made of granite, the ground has surface cover, wild grass mixed with small shrubs that do not block line-of-sight... and so on. The space must have dimension, the players must be able to orient themselves... and most of all, the space must be concretely navigable in some degree. The players must be able to say, "We go across the grass," "we climb the wall" or "we travel along the wall away from the tower," with a surety that as the dungeon master we're prepared for this, whatever choice they make. Any object in the space, whether it's a shrub or a coin sitting on the ground, must include a capacity to be interacted with — remembering that, in most cases in the real world, interacting with a plant or a found coin is unlikely to have much import. Nonetheless, the potential must exist.
This is difficult to accomplish for the new DM not versed in making declarative statements. Our statements about the location of the tower cannot be vague or stated without rigidity. Once named as a "tower" it cannot be lazily referred to as a keep or an outpost. It must have clear attributes in our mind from the moment we've declared its existence — and we must accept its existence ourselves as a responsibility, so that if the players go there, it is made of definable things, it has a logical entranceway, a floorplan, a reason for it having been built, a builder, a resident or a reason why there are no residents. Because the purpose of the tower is not to "give the players a place to adventure," but because "someone wanted a tower there," we must give the tower causality as well as existence. And we must do so unreservedly and responsibly, embracing the tower's existence ourselves, as something we're proud of, not something we regret adding.
It is likewise necessary that we possess an instinctive visual awareness. This describes an ability to imagine a space or object in spatial terms, enabling us not only to describe the dimension of things, but to see past the physical into the lived experience of the residents. If we imagine a village, we don't just see the buildings and the pathways: we automatically see the people, and in seeing them, we grasp automatically that they are about their purpose, moving this way and that, interacting, looking at ease, concerned, happy or whatnot. Each expression, in our imagination, immediately suggests a reason: at ease because all is going well, concerned because of a family member's health, happy because the day is nice. We see the residents as people — because in our everyday life in the place where we live, we're forever conscious that there are others around us, who have trials, urges, hopes, expectations and emotional weights that they're carrying. Many DMs come to the game without this reflective capacity. They travel through their real world with blinders on, never having thought to look into the faces of others, or note daily changes in their environment, or even care if the day is sunny or not. Such persons lack many of the basic skills necessary to make a world "come alive," because their own world isn't.
These are both learnable skills. We return again to the concept of mindfulness, which we earlier described as a contemplative process by which we "thought" at length about our game setting. The process directs us to deliberately walk around a space, starting with our own, looking over and gazing thoughtfully at objects that we ourselves keep. This bit of chintz here, this tapestry, this collection of cups we gather over the space of years... and puzzle out the manner in which each thing we own has come into our possession. We take a walk around our neighbourhood, reflecting on memories we have of the residents in other houses, now and in the past... and consider those places where we grew up, or where we visited, and remark in our thoughts how we would describe those to other people. From here, we give the same substance to imaginary things in our game's setting, reviewing how large things ought to be, how certain races come to have certain viewpoints on the world, why rivers flow as they do. As a body, this knowledge is shored up by reading about the fabrication of things like metal and ceramic objects, how things are constructed, the descriptive nature of personal histories, anthropology, sociology, geography — literally anything that can inform us more about the real world, so we can make our fictional world more real. The effective fallout of this isn't just that we become better DMs... we also become better read and more fashionably interesting as human beings.
The riddle of how we come to see the shape of the village is solved through lived attentiveness: not just observation but participation in the experience of others. This is extremely difficult for one kind of role-player... the kind that retreats to RPG gaming in order to have a social experience, having failed nearly everywhere else due to their demanding behaviour and lack of empathy. Such persons must embrace the flat, featureless game world, because they cannot begin to comprehend a world with residents that are both imaginary AND worthy of consideration.
For everyone else, however, this cohesiveness is a must — and it is learned through sharing the expressions, moods and subtle shifts of other people, not just in personal relationships but always and everywhere. Readers are invited to deliberately seek out places with lots of people and just watch... not just one time, but often, especially since many of us must be with other people a lot of the time. Time on the bus, time eating outside in the office mall, time attending a sports event or seeing a child's play are opportunities to watch and self-query about other people. We don't need to be right in our guesses. We only need to develop the skill that allows us to guess, and thus activate that visual awareness we can use when we make our guesses "real" for the player characters.
This is probably enough for now; the second part will have to be filled out with another post.
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