As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently graduated with my Master's in literature, and to mark the occasion, I wanted to try to get my first publication. I found a little outlet that wanted to publish a D&D book and I worked up this piece on how audience dynamics function in TRPGs. Unfortunately for me, that piece was ultimately rejected, but that means I can post it here for you all. So take a look at my old D&D podcast and the ways that each layer of audience participation enriches the others and feel free to apply it to your own understanding of TRPG format. Happy reading!
In the vast majority of media, the matter of audience identity is an obvious question: there is a performer—a text or a live performance which creates content and form—and an audience—the reader/viewer/player/listener who takes in the performance. That question becomes far more complicated when considering Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), a roleplaying game with multiple layers of performer/audience relationships. The Dungeon Master (DM) performs elements of a story for the players, who in turn perform their reactions for the DM. This represents a form of performativity which is only further complicated by the use of pre-written modules, which “perform” elements of the DM role, filtered through the DM’s own performance. Further, the common practice of podcasting roleplaying games makes the module, DM, and players all performances for the podcast audience. These relationships are complex and interdependent—any performer/audience affects and is affected by the other performers and audiences. Using a D&D podcast which this author DMed and recorded (Listen Check), this chapter will explore the ways that people use D&D for collaborative storytelling and how the matter of audience is affected. Further, choices made by various audiences can affect what present and future games will look like for all players. This framework will ultimately explore the ways that our favorite texts can invite us to collaborate rather than simply observe.
Let us begin with the simplest consideration: the DM. It is clear that the DM performs a great deal of the gameplay—they are, after all, in charge of providing the setting, at least the rudiments of plot, and every character the players do not control. The DM may write this content themselves or gather it from a module, but in any case, it is the DM who transforms these narrative details into an inhabitable gameworld. The performance of the DM is core to the D&D experience—without a DM, there would be no one to give form to the world or to adjudicate the outcomes of player choices. The DM performs these tasks in two senses. First is the performance of game information as narrative: a sort of translation of this information into a living, breathing gameworld. Second is the style of the performance: does the DM alter their speech to inhabit a character? Does the DM add drama to narration to spice up the story? Does the DM choose to give the players a challenge or a wealth of allies to rely on? These questions characterize the way the DM performs.
Examples of DM performance are easy to find. In the podcast Listen Check, the author served as DM for three players of varying experience levels: one was a veteran roleplayer (a player who focuses on narrative and player choice), another a veteran combatant (a player who focuses on the rules of the game), and the third a player brand new to the game. In the pilot episode of the podcast, the DM provided a large amount of worldbuilding details—details which sought to create a realistic world that the players could interact with in meaningful ways. To that end, Listen Check’s first episode featured an extended conversation between player characters (PCs) and non-player characters (NPCs); the PCs were characters who had recently joined a criminal gang, and the NPCs were long-standing members of that gang who, during that first episode, explained in detail the ways that the gang had come to be and how the gang fit in the larger ecosystem of the city. This was time that reduced player control of the narrative (the PCs were largely listening rather than acting during this moment) in order to explain the context of the campaign—how the PCs would need to work around police efforts, rival gangs, and city laws. All of this was performed through the DM as dialogue, monologue, and narration. DM performance is the main tool that gives the campaign structure, and so those performances mostly serve to propel the players in particular directions; yet it does not even account for half of the forces of performance that give form to a D&D adventure.
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Players give shape to the other great force in a campaign: what actually happens. Veteran D&D players know that as much as a DM may control the world, the story is about the PCs, and the player choices that are made will be the truest measure of what the story comes to be about. Player performance, like DM performance, can be thought of as both narrative and style performances. When a player shares a bit of their backstory, or describes a PC reaction to a story event, they are describing an element of the world that they have control over. This is narrative performance because it adds to the collaborative story the players are collectively telling. Players can also perform in the style of the character’s personality/linguistic patterns/sense of humor, all of which may be fabricated for the purpose of the campaign (it may also be an extension of the player’s self, but it is being acted out performatively as an element of the character rather than incidentally as part of their normal behavior). This is to say that player performance, like DM performance, is oriented toward narrative creation through the conscious decision to behave in a particular fashion—a strong definition of “performance” in the first place.
Like DM performance, player performance is easy to spot in games. Each of Listen Check’s three players embraced player performance in different ways. Rupert the Wizard, played by the roleplaying veteran, would frequently tell the group about his life before becoming a wizard. As a result, the decisions that Rupert made were frequently directly tied to his backstory. Rupert was performed with a frequent nod to the loss of his young son, a detail exploited by an angry god with the power to give the PCs nightmares; Rupert’s dreams tormented him over his lost child, and Rupert’s subsequent waking hours were spent dourly. This detail, which enriched the narrative and created a unique story beat, was born of Rupert’s player performing his character with fidelity to the person he imagined Rupert to be. Dewey the Monk, played by the combat veteran, was more subdued than Rupert’s blustery persona. Dewey was performed with a calculated sense of where the player ended and the character began (Listen Check was a roleplay-heavy D&D podcast, and the player was in the process of coming in to his own at roleplaying). He relied on his backstory, as did Rupert, but the thing that made Dewey seem the most real was how distinct he seemed from his controlling player. At one point, Dewey was able to face off against the man who had killed his family; the man asked Dewey for a fair fight, and Dewey’s response was a simple but forceful “no,” a decision no one had seen coming, as the player would never have made such a choice. Performing a character with surprising fidelity to their design likewise enriched the campaign. Finally, Soren the Ranger was played by the D&D newbie—who it is worth noting is a creative writer. Soren’s player constructed the character as a detailed and distinct personality, and her interest in minor details made interactions with Soren narratively unpredictable. At one point during the campaign, Soren learned that a young member of the gang was illiterate. Soren’s player decided that Soren would not stand for the young man, Caspian, remaining illiterate, and promptly bought children’s literature to teach him to read. As a result of the performance of Soren’s character, Caspian became a central NPC to the campaign and the inspiration for a great deal of performances that influenced one another. Soren too created meaning and propelled the narrative by remaining true to the fidelity of the character. Player performance is not as wide-reaching as DM performance, but it has more power to control what shape the story takes.
So what happens when these two kinds of performances interact with one another? Simply put, it creates what makes D&D so magical—it results in collaborative storytelling. Let us consider an example related to each player. Rupert responded to punishment from the angry god with more fury than the other players. The vengeful deity had been orchestrating elaborate nightmares for the players for each day they did not pursue his quest. Rupert responded to this prodding, which the DM had meant to propel the party along narrative lines, in a way that was consistent with his character. “I hate bullies,” Rupert said, before committing himself and the rest of the group to slaying the god rather than helping him. Without exaggeration, this transformed a minor quest (kill a lawman responsible for the god’s anger) into a central concern about killing the god and the moral lines that he had crossed. It became the main focus of the campaign, something that could not have happened were it not for Rupert’s refusal to play by the god’s rules. Dewey’s nemesis—the man he did not grant a fair fight—had been an early character model for Dewey himself: his player had been waffling between a dual-shield-wielding berserker and an enlightened monk. When the player chose Dewey the Monk, the DM took that shield-wielder, made him evil, and cast him as one of the key villains in the story. The DM also paid careful attention to what kinds of choices Dewey made and attributed the opposite values to the enemy figure, using the player performance to enrich player experience. Thus, the player performance affected the DM performance, which in turn affected further DM performances, and so on. For Soren, the highly surprising decision to teach Caspian represented a focused player performance. The DM responded to Soren’s drive to teach Caspian by writing a children’s book that incorporated elements of the gang’s history, furthering the characterization of the gang, and illustrating it to provide an authentic sense of a real book. Hence the effect Soren had on the DM’s performance led in turn to the opportunity for further player performances. It is worth noting that the DM makes a habit of adapting player interests into in-game books in order to present a full world to the players, so this illustrated story marked the creation of such a book specifically in line with the idea that a character needed resources to learn to read—by no means a common concern in D&D games.
The ways that the DM performance affects the player performance are similarly characterized by collaboration. Early in the campaign, Rupert the Wizard requested books on spellcasting to increase his magical knowledge. One of the books that the DM wrote on the subject included references to an alternate form of spellcasting called glyphs. Rupert was highly interested in learning more, so he sought further reading. The DM responded by constructing a new language of spellcasting, devising nearly 200 symbols which could be combined to create custom spells. This DM performance had the effect of opening a unique avenue for the player, who proceeded to cast more spells via glyphs than via traditional magic over the course of the campaign. Entire story arcs developed as a result, marking the successes and failures of each spell with narrative consequences.
DM and player performances do not simply have one effect on the other; they create ripple effects that can echo much further through a story than one might anticipate. Further, a DM effect on player performance may double back and cause a player effect on the DM performance. This was observable in Listen Check via the glyph example as well. When Rupert had become a committed glyph user, he began to seek out other glyph users to learn tips and tricks on mastering the challenging discipline. This led to multiple storylines that centered around glyphs, one of which drastically changed the final episode’s narrative. During one storyline in particular, Rupert had a showdown with an evil wizard; after defeating him, Rupert discovered a notebook detailing an alternate way to cast glyph spells. Rupert experimented with this method and ultimately used it to defeat the final boss (the vengeful god who gave them nightmares). It is clear from this example that performances can affect one another in continuous ways: the creation of glyphs led to Rupert’s mastery of glyphs, which led to the creation of new glyph-using NPCs, which in turn led to Rupert’s strategy in the final battle.
It is time to consider another layer of audience in D&D: the module. Modules are discrete units of story, the beginnings, middles, and ends of narratives which a DM can perform for their players. A module takes the form of a series of instructions for the DM that guide the narrative—they can be written by anyone from gaming companies to anyone who can publish their work, including via the internet. DMs can also create their own modules in whatever form they find useful, whether it is a collection of plots, characters, places, or some combination thereof. Module performances are largely narrative, and they can add style depending on how the quests are written; because the module’s performance is complete at the beginning of the quest, only what it includes constitutes its contribution to the game’s narrative. Listen Check did not utilize a published module—it is what D&D players refer to as a homebrew campaign, a narrative constructed by the DM or by another DM who has shared their content with other D&D players. But that does not mean that Listen Check lacked a reference document that contained details about the setting and possible stories. To prepare for Listen Check, the DM wrote the beginning “hooks” of over 30 quests as well as considerable information on the world and characters in it. This collection of information, while more informal than a traditional module, serves the same purpose.
Modules can affect the game and its associated performances in two primary ways. The first is intentional; the second is unintentional. An intentional effect from a module looks a great deal like the narrative that the module prescribes—one might describe it as “going according to plan.” The module might say, “Read this narration, then have your players roll for initiative” or some such direction which is meant to guide the players through an experience. An unintentional effect from a module is far more common in D&D. This describes an instance where the module attempts to guide (using predictions about player behavior), but the players’ actual behavior follows a different narrative. Due to the great degree of choice and narrative freedom in D&D, unintentional effects from the module are common. But with both intentional and unintentional effects, the module’s performance prompts the players and provides them an opportunity to respond with their own performances.
Before naming examples of these, let us consider what it means for a module to perform. After all, unlike the DM and players, the module is a text and not a person. How can it be said to perform? But the reading of the module is indeed a performance in the same way that a novel is its author’s performance. Some may argue that the DM performs the module, which means that the module is not a performance in itself. However, the DM’s role when using a module is to bind the content of the written materials and their own narrative connective tissue into one seamless world. As opposed to the world of acting, “performance” in D&D also means creating the content that is given form. And so a module can be said to perform separately from the DM.
Some examples will clarify these concepts. One of the pre-written quests the DM created as a homebrew module can be shown to have been an intentional performance; the players encountered a drunk man who was stirring up trouble near a dock, and when the players investigated, he fell into the water and needed rescuing or he would drown. The players cooperated to save the drunk man from the water and had a conversation with him about the trouble he was trying to cause. Although the DM makes a policy of not predicting the ends of quests (they neither write endings nor try to guide the narrative to a particular end goal, all of which is done to maximize player control of the narrative), this particular quest went about as much to expectation as possible—the players are confronted with a simple moral choice and must act on it. This is an example of a module performance in that it illustrates how the module’s distinct voice can be dominant in the narrative. An unintentional module performance also reveals the power the module can have. For one of the quests in the DM’s module, the quest simply called for a strange man to want to interview a criminal. As all the party members were in a gang, this quest could be completed in any fashion, but the DM expected a simple conversation followed by the players essentially forgetting the whole thing. Instead, the interviewer met Rupert the Wizard, who decided he did not like the man, and Rupert lied and toyed with the interviewer, telling him that “criminals are magic” and spinning an elaborate and humorous explanation of the intersection of crime and wizardry. Later in the campaign, Rupert dangled the interviewer off a tall building for shorting Rupert his desired cut of the interviewer’s book sales. The simple notion of an interview developed into an elongated narrative with dramatic results—this was the performance of the module, and though the player’s performance was that which gave form to the drama, it was ultimately the module which created the impetus for the narrative.
The interplay between DM performances and module performances, as mentioned above, are separated by only a fine line. Because the DM is the person who filters the module through their own perspective, and because the DM is sometimes the creator of the module itself, distinguishing the effects on each other can be a challenge. The distinction is that when the DM uses material from the module, they are using a tool that guides the players toward a single possible point; when the DM improvises material to fill in gaps or respond to the players steering away from the module, they are allowing the players to gravitate towards whatever goal they please. When a module’s performance affects the performance of a DM, aside from being business-as-usual for a module’s intended purpose, it lends function to the DM’s supplying of form. In Listen Check, the DM frequently used the pre-written quest beginnings to start the players down a certain narrative rabbit hole. The examples mentioned above serve; so does the instance in which the DM wrote a quest beginning in which a powerful wizard develops rabies and wreaks havoc on the countryside. The DM intended for clues about the wizard’s aggression, hydrophobia, and foaming at the mouth to tell the PCs that the wizard was rabid. But the urgency of stopping the wizard was far more pressing to the PCs than figuring out why he was going mad, and so the DM had to develop a sort of epilogue explaining the rabies diagnosis after all was said and done. Module effects on DM performance are often course corrections to account for what the module cannot. When a DM performance affects a module, it is another form of course correction, but done after the fact to adjust future module performances. This can be seen in Listen Check when a module quest called for a charismatic criminal leader to mobilize all the city’s gangs against law enforcement a la the film The Warriors. The module as written months before Listen Check began recording called for a large public meeting with the criminal leader very much mimicking the film’s opening scenes. But the DM had also created a world in which law enforcement had a vise grip on all criminal activities by the time this quest was to be implemented. As a result, the DM altered all details about the leader to make him more subtle and cautious. Not only did this change the manner the quest was conducted in—more stealth and intelligence-gathering than combat—it changed the personality of the leader from an animated and threatening soldier to a quiet and calculating agent. The ripple effects from this change were enormous—that leader became one of the most nefarious enemies in the entire campaign, even though he had been designed to bring together the gangs. DM performances affected by module performances and vice versa can be understood as corrections of the main narration of the campaign. The concept of module as audience is challenging—it must be viewed as a text which can be changed by the performances of others. Considering the module not just as the static text which inspires adventure, it becomes clear that modules are also comprised of the module’s effects within the game—their performances.
Module performances are affected by and affect player performances as well. When players respond to the module, they are able to determine the direction of the story after the module provides its origin. In Listen Check, player actions frequently began with module information. One quest described a corrupt law enforcement officer who cut off a thumb of any suspected criminal; if he found a one-thumbed person, he would kill them. The PCs responded to this in some ways as would be anticipated—they tracked down the corrupt lawman and killed him, saving a one-thumbed man he was threatening. This is straightforward D&D; the players responded as most players might given the context. But what they did next was much different. They took the corpse of the corrupt lawman, hauled him to a public place in the dead of night, and strung up his body with a note threatening other corrupt officers. This grisly action gains narrative weight in context—the PCs were routinely fighting corrupt law enforcers, and the idea to send a public message changed the way that the city’s guards behaved. This is an excellent demonstration of how a module performance (the corrupt lawman’s gruesome methods) led to a player performance (publicizing his death), leading in turn to a DM performance (the guards felt under attack and became more aggressive). Module performances can respond to player performances as well. Of the PCs, Rupert and Soren had some manner of familiar—Rupert an earth elemental and Soren a hawk. These companions were dictated by the game mechanics, the same mechanics that dictate Dewey did not get a companion as a monk. At the same time, the module for Listen Check included a quest wherein a random member of the party was joined by a shapeshifting familiar. The DM had witnessed how close Rupert and Soren were to their creatures, and how Dewey seemed to miss the opportunity for one. As a result, the DM tweaked the wording of the module; rather than a random PC, a friendly deity appeared and awarded the shapeshifter directly to Dewey. Dewey’s familiar became a fan favorite on the podcast, and the whole process illustrates the way that a module may be affected by player performance.
The final element of D&D performances is the podcast audience, which more often includes style performances but can include narrative performances; listeners can easily affect the details of the campaign, but they can also determine the direction of the story should the DM or players adopt their input. This means that the basis of listener performance is collaboration, as between the DM and the players. Some D&D podcasts are heavily interactive with their audiences, and others to a much lesser extent. Because of this, the actions of the DM and players as well as the content in the module often have a greater effect on the podcast audience than vice versa. But this by no means indicates that the podcast audience cannot affect the game. In fact, the same technology that makes a campaign podcastable makes possible communication between the players, the DM, and the podcast audience—because of the internet, podcast audience members can meaningfully communicate with those playing the game. Often, this comes in the form of suggestions and fan theories, both of which can be adopted by the DM or the players; such suggestions can even affect the way that the module is interpreted and implemented. Podcast audience input is performed for the DM and the players as well as the rest of the podcast audience and can even be aimed directly at the contents of the module.
The interplay between DM and podcast audience is the most common of the podcast audience effects. In many D&D podcasts, this takes the form of audience members suggesting plot points, twists, characters, and all other variety of details to add to the story and gameworld. In Listen Check, this was true to an extent—both fan theories and player theories meant to explain some element of the plot were occasionally adopted as canon developments in the story. But such effects on DM performance are not limited to suggestions. Listen Check’s most devoted listener was a talented visual artist, and she contributed a collection of hand-drawn images depicting the PCs and various NPCs. One such image depicted the entirety of the eleven-member gang the PCs belonged to, and, as the DM was not the type to visualize all the details of their appearances, the fan drawing of these characters became the reference point for what those characters looked like. This resulted in richer descriptions of the physical characteristics of these NPCs and even of the PCs—by adding details where the DM had not already developed, the podcast audience determined part of the aesthetic and feel of the campaign.
The DM’s effect on the podcast audience is broad and varied: by merit of being the sole voice of narrative authority, the DM’s actions form a great deal of podcast audience perception of the game from top to bottom. By this logic, the DM by nature affects the podcast audience’s experience of the game. But there are more direct ways that the DM can affect how an audience member perceives the story. During a promotion for Listen Check’s final episodes, the DM announced a contest in which the winner would be rewarded with a character journal for any NPC they chose. The winner of this contest was the same audience member who had illustrated the gang together, leading to increased details about who the NPCs were. She chose a member of the gang—specifically Caspian, the young man who could not read until Soren taught him. So the DM wrote a 100-page journal, representing the entire life of the character, using simple language and a font that looked like shaky handwriting. This journal was then presented as a bound volume to the contest winner. For that audience member, the amount of knowledge of the NPC in question easily tripled over the course of reading the journal, and the DM deliberately included information that would shift the meaning of previously given information throughout the podcast. As a result, the DM’s performance of the NPC’s journal was able to affect the podcast audience perception of a key character in the show. DM performances directly for the audience of the podcast are meant to enrich the gameworld for listeners.
Players and podcast audiences are likewise able to affect one another. As with the DM, the players’ performances form a great deal of the game’s content. Their decisions drive stories from the point of origin in practically any direction imaginable, and that means the players too have great control over the podcast audience’s experience. Likewise, players can be affected by podcast listeners’ suggestions—there were a number of times in Listen Check that players adopted suggestions from listeners, and these had great impacts on the direction of the story. But there are other ways that players and podcast listeners can interact. As promotional events for Listen Check, the DM and players would occasionally run tabletop game events at a local comic shop. The DM in particular would develop one-shots (single session games which players can easily pick up and play) that dealt closely with the gameworld of the podcast. Example sessions included playing as the first members of the gang the PCs belonged to, an origin story for Dewey leaving his last gang, and even a session in which players controlled five of the most powerful NPCs in the story, united under one banner. For one-shots that involved the PCs from the show, the player who controlled that PC in the podcast would play as that character. As a result, fans of the show were able to come and play in the gameworld alongside the characters from the show, exactly as they are on the podcast. This means that the podcast audience of Listen Check was in direct contact with the DM, the gameworld, and the PCs in the most intimate fashion possible, which is to say that the performances of each would greatly impact the experience of the listener. One listener who played through Dewey’s origin story told me that he had not realized the extent to which Dewey had experienced so much betrayal and pain in his life; he said that being a part of that session helped him to put Dewey’s revenge in narrative context. This illustrates the extent to which a player performance is able to impact the experience of the podcast audience.
Podcast listeners are also able to have effects on the players. Suggestions of course make an impact; Listen Check performed a contest to have listeners create their own glyph spells, and the winning spell was to be cast on the show by Rupert himself. But there is also more to the effect the podcast audience can have on the players. During the same Listen Check event mentioned above, when listeners were able to play with the DM and the players, the listeners who participated inhabited the gameworld with the players. This had an effect on the way the players approached the podcast. In the above-mentioned one-shot concerning five highly-powered NPCs, the visiting players who controlled the characters for the game had not listened to Listen Check, and as such, were not familiar with the personalities of those NPCs. The Listen Check players watched in surprise and some degree of horror as the kind-hearted allies of the podcast were transformed into selfish murderers and arguably war criminals. It would have been simple to throw up their hands and call the one-shot a mistake and forget about it since it seemed to contradict the narrative. However, the Listen Check players later approached these NPCs in a new light—these were characters who had been gruesomely violent in their pasts, but had grown beyond that, and the gentle healer among the group of NPCs was, in particular, treated with apprehension as well as tenderness and respect for the rest of the podcast. Even when the audience of a D&D game is unfamiliar with the content they are experiencing, they can affect the performances of players.
Podcast listeners also affect and are affected by module performances. The power of listener suggestion can directly change the way that a quest occurs. It would be quite possible for listener input regarding plot to be incorporated into the module by the DM, or for there to be a contest in which a listener-submitted quest became part of the podcast’s module. In Listen Check, the module’s quest beginnings included a mission regarding an abandoned ship—the module dictated that the ship’s owner would send the party to retrieve ledgers (which he did not tell the party hid evidence of illegal smuggling). As written, the quest called for an abandoned ship; the PCs only had to find the ledgers. But podcast listeners had long been clamoring for a horror-themed quest. The DM altered the quest, and the PCs found the ship’s crew slain and neatly laid out in the cargo hold; as they quickly left the ship, disembodied laughter followed them. Podcast listeners, by performing their desire for more horror quests, led directly to the re-writing of a simple fetch quest into something much larger: the owner of the disembodied laughter was further developed by the DM into a magical serial killer. This NPC was second only to the vengeful god in terms of persistent villains, and multiple episodes of the podcast were spent dealing directly with him. Such a development would not have been possible without listener input steering the module.
Module performances, too, can affect podcast audience performances. Because the module dictates the origin of quests, the beginning of each quest stands to affect the way that the podcast listener perceives the narrative. In Listen Check, the module included directions for a sort of story development which could have become a quest: the chief law enforcer of the city announced that any criminal willing to inform on their former associates and join law enforcement would be offered complete amnesty for all crimes and a hefty monetary bonus. This development was intended to drive a wedge between the PCs and criminal NPCs, any of whom may take the deal and ruin each other. Podcast listeners had theories about which NPCs would capitulate to the side of law, and out of concern for the PCs, warned the players not to trust certain NPCs. In this example, a module performance affects the podcast listener, who in turn performs their concerns for the players, who might act on them in a performance affecting the DM’s experience. Each individual participant in a D&D game affects the others.
When we consider all four elements of a D&D podcast’s audiences and performers, we see that D&D is an inherently collaborative medium. A module without the others is a book; a DM without the others is a monologue; the players without the others are a conversation; a podcast listener without the rest is listening to nothing. None are a game. But when added together and considering the creative input of each, the result is creative collaboration. Because each performance in D&D affects each other performance, it is impossible to effectively separate the actions of one performer from the rest without ending up pointing back at some element of a performance earlier in the game. And so looms the question: what if other media were as collaborative as D&D? There are choice-driven texts which allow the reader to work together with the author—consider the Choose Your Own Adventure novel, or open-ended video games, or all manner of experimental art. Yet a Choose Your Own Adventure novel usually allows only binary choices, where D&D allows the player to do anything they imagine. Video games can only perform what their developers have designed in advance, but D&D contains every choice conceived of by any performer involved. It is undeniable that D&D has superior nuanced manners of interaction, which is why there is such a broad array of effects from each of its layers of audience.
When a game of D&D is played, each layer of performance unlocks possibility for other performances. When the performers of a D&D game or podcast are aware of the fact that they are performing for one another, there can be even greater potential for collaboration. If a DM is mindful of their performance of module materials or the spontaneous connective tissue that forms the bond between narrative moments, they are better able to cater to the players’ interests; they might, for instance, deliberately tailor their performance to what players have shown interest in. For that to happen, the players must perform in a way that reveals their interests, which means that consciousness of performance aids the enjoyment of all involved. If a player is aware that their podcast audience has opinions about how their PC is played, they can choose to embrace those ideas or surprise the audience with something new. Module writers may tune into what players and podcast audiences want and write stories which appeal to what these audiences want from their games. By being aware of audience dynamics in D&D, we can collaboratively create stories that reflect our shared interests, the point at which people truly come together.
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