AN ENWORLDING STATE OF MIND
OR FINDING YOUR BOW GESTE
I’ve played some version of Dungeons & Dragons since I was in sixth grade, forty-four years now and counting. Took a very long break while learning to write (and live) but like many others I picked up the game again during the pandemic and my group has been playing our latest version every week for the past four years.
Anyway, I bring this up not because my nerd bonafides are in need of buffing but because all these years of roleplaying have made me aware of something that’s been helping me with my fiction.
In your standard roleplaying games the players play characters and these characters repeatedly find themselves in a new space (or an old space made new) — a ruin, a jungle, the deck of a ship, an active warehouse — and have to deal with the challenges within. The gamemaster describes the space/peoples/challenges being encountered and the players respond to those descriptions by describing what their characters do and how. That’s roleplaying games in a nutshell — or at least one of their essential game loops.
After playing two hundred plus games these last four years I’ve noticed that players who interact with the setting right away, even if only in a minor fashion — “Gamemaster, I open a window” or “Gamemaster, Jor Lindo throws himself down on the sofa and puts his big ugly boots on the desk” or “Gamemaster, my character swaps his small torch for one of the bigger ones in the bracket” — are almost always looser and more creative — ultimately more effective — at dealing with all the challenges within the space than players who don’t interact with the setting at all.
I suspect it’s because, by interacting with the setting even minimally, the players are