Mindful Imagination and Roleplaying

I was listening to Runehammer, and episode 41 is called “The Three Exercises”. It’s a fantastic episode, go listen to it now and then come back. Back already? You’re quick.

My big takeaway was about the intersection of mindfulness and the shared imagination space in a roleplaying game. I’m gonna talk about that for a bit, and I may meander into the realms of deliberate practice and cultural shame. I hope you find it coherent at the end.

Mindfulness and Imagination

I never really put two and two together on these two concepts until I listened to this podcast episode. Imagination, to the degree that we might aspire in our tabletop games, requires mindfulness. In order to fully immerse yourself in the fiction, to improvisationally weave the moment out of the aether, and to experience the idea so deeply you swear you can actually smell it, you must achieve a state of mindfulness.

The world pulls us out of our imagination, for all the obvious reasons. Everything demands our attention at all times, so it’s nearly impossible to suspend that attention and allow your mind and body to feel something that isn’t even there. In order to reach those lofty heights, you have to let go of the things begging for your attention much in the same way that someone who meditates will allow their thoughts to appear and fade from their mind without dwelling on them.

The Three Exercises from the podcast are a lesson in mindfulness framed by a metanarrative of a student learning from a wizard how to achieve some heightened state of power, and that’s exactly what mindfulness can deliver. That loose gripped control over your thoughts is the same soft touch you need with your senses when you’re imagining. Yes, your arm is cold but in this forest, the air is warm and damp. You smell beer - then you let that sense go and focus on the smell of the smoke from the fire burning in a small stone pit. The GM delivers a line of dialogue, but what you hear is the gravelly voice of the mysterious Deorling sitting at the fire, the sound of the strop against his blade.

A Fourth Exercise, Altogether Now

I immediately began imagining a roleplaying, improv exercise that I could do at the table with my group of friends. Maybe this is something you wouldn’t do with your table. My table would enjoy it, and find it valuable, but I can see why other tables, especially those rooted in the older school philosophies, would roll their eyes at it. Nevertheless, here it is.

Everyone at the table closes their eyes. Maybe a little guided mindfulness here - just a minute or two of becoming aware of the space, letting go of stray thoughts and distrations, and relaxing. The GM (or anyone else, really) starts by describing a quiet scene - nothing too bombastic that excites and pulls at our attention, but something mundane and straight forward, but potentially mysterious and evocative. The example of the hooded, mysterious Deorling from before is perfect. Night has fallen and as you creep through the brush searching a safe place to shelter, you come upon a campfire. Seated on a log, honing a blade with a strop, is a Deorling male, wearing a cloak of an indistinguishable dark color.

Then you take turns around the table, discussing what you sense in that fiction, and more importantly, adding to the fiction with what they imagine. Your first player suggests the sting of the smoke in their eyes when the wind shifts and blows it in their direction. They hear wind, but only from the canopies of the trees. The next player observes the Deorling’s pack, open on the ground. It’s made of a quality fabric, but the color is fading and it is stained with dirt. The next player remarks that the air is so humid, skin almost beads with condensation. We circle back to the GM who feels hypnotized by the rhythmic nature of the stropping, and the lithe grace with which the Deorling works the blade.

As you go around the table, you’re building shared fiction, and by focusing on the mindful aspects of it (noticing the body, noticing the surroundings, not fixating on anything), I think you can get a whole lot more out of it.

Emphasize with your crew the fact that they are also building the scene. They shouldn’t just observe what you mentioned - they should declare what else is in the scene. If you are sharing an imagination space, it’ll come out shockingly consistent, yet everyone will be a little bit surprised at how it plays out. That spot, between concrete and not yet invoked, is what I call wonder.

But Our Shame Gets In The Way

The best part of our hobby is that it’s imagination play. The worst part of our hobby is how childish it is.

I long for the day that all my players, who are wonderful, miraculous, lovely people who I have the privilege of spending so much time with, can set aside the fear of embarrassment and shame that comes with playing like children.

It’s so cultural though - childlike is immature, and at some point in our cultural history, that word became a dire insult. How tragic.

Imagination is completely wasted on children, too. They don’t know what the hell they are doing with it. They’ll just go bananas and then see a cool rock and everything they just imagined is gone and now they’re fighting over the Capri Sun and god damnit, just get along, would you? Like summer camps. Kids don’t know how good they have it with summer camps and sleep away camps. My son did a hobby camp, and they did like twenty different awesome things, and he, being ten years old, won’t appreciate it the way an adult would. Make adult summer camps a thing.

But I digress. If players could set aside their fear of looking silly, of looking immature, of looking childish, what heights could they achieve with their imagination and roleplaying? Every GM has, at some point, dreamed a sweet little dream about their players going all in on their character, standing and making a decree. I have the aspiration of causing a little “character bleed” in my characters - tragedy that makes my players feel something, joy that makes their heart race, fear that makes them have to walk away from the table for a moment out of the sheer stress their character is in.

Stupid culture.

Two for One Special

So just… do your roleplaying with some mindfulness. You can practice this on your own, obviously. Give yourself a little prompt, then do a little mindfulness meditation, get your mind and body on the same page. Then imagine the sensory things of that prompt.

I think it’s helpful. I think I get better ideas, I am able to describe them better. And I can let go of the shame when I do a funny voice and it comes out sounding like Kermit the Frog.