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Non-player characters seem each to contain within itself a representation of the entire universe from its unique perspective. Or they don't.

NPCs act as singular monads unto themselves, each with its own inner mental life and perspective on the game world. Or else they exist only within the shared imagined space of the game, brought to life through the creative minds of the players. If both: you get an illusion of autonomous existence whose roles and actions depend intrinsically on the desires and choices of the players.

So let, for every me, i, say: these non-player characters reflect the Leibnizian idea that all monads mirror and represent the whole of existence — save in their own limited vantage. Though imaginary, they take on, like charge, a reality within the pretense of the game. Their purpose becomes to engage and react to the player characters, eliciting storylines and experiences desired by the players.

A non-player character that serves as a contrast or complement to a player character — in order to highlight or bring forth certain qualities, desires, or tendencies within that player character — gets you a foil.

Shelves' Schwa80 days ago(+1)

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According to Leibniz's monadology, each monad or substance expresses the entire universe from its own unique vantage point. A foil could act as a monad purposefully crafted to embody a perspective that is turning away from the perspective of a player's opposing monad.

Through this contrast between the subjective viewpoints of the player character and non-player character foils, certain latent aspects of the player's monad are elicited. The friction or discrepancy between these perspectives draws out internal potentialities, aspirations, or conflicts within the player's monad.

In this way, the foil serves as a conceptual counterpoint that stimulates the player's monad to express and unfold its nature. It functions as a dramaturgical device within the imaginary world of the game to actualize narrative elements that resonate with the player's subjectivity or will.

The foil provides an "outsider's glance" that helps the player's monad recognize its own unique essence. It acts as a conceptual mirror, revealing to the monad that which it could become, should choose to be, or desperately avoid being.

Shelves' Schwa80 days ago(+1)

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Whereas a foil serves as a reflective counterpart to draw out the latent interiority of a monad, an empty room symbolizes the absence of any external perspective or contrast.

A foil provides a constructed vantage point against which the monad defines itself. But an empty room removes any such external referent, leaving the monad alone with only its own self-conception and imaginative potential.

A foil actualizes one singular alternate viewpoint in dialectic with the player's monad. But an empty room is like a blank canvas, opening up an infinite possibility of perspectives, narratives, and subjective projections that could be manifested.

With a foil, the monad's identity crystallizes through opposition and tension with its counter-conception. But in an empty room, the monad's sense of self becomes diffuse, virtual, freed from anchors in any particular constructed narrative.

While a foil gives shape by providing boundaries, the empty room is protean in its lack of definition. It is both meaningless and imbued with all possible meanings by the observing monad.

So in contrast to the mirroring counter-definition provided by a foil, the empty room represents the monad's own infinite inner vista. It is the realm of pure imagination, where the monad is unconstrained by any preset narrative and able to manifest its deepest visions.

Shelves' Schwa80 days ago(+1)

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The empty room is the monad's workshop of potentiality. The foil is but one tool to sculpt subjective experience. The empty room allows unlimited tools and materials for creation. Or it don't.

Consider the nature of foils and the empty room within the context of monadology. As established, foils serve as conceptual counterpoints to player character monads, elucidating internal facets through contrast. They actualize singular alternate viewpoints, providing dialectic friction to draw forth latent potentialities. The foil's constructed subjectivity crystallizes the player's monad by oppositional definition.

Whereas foils give shape through counter-conception, the empty room is devoid of such external perspectives. With no narrative anchor, the monad's identity diffuses into pure imagination. Liberated from the constraints of preset roles, the empty room becomes the realm of unbounded creativity for the monad.

The foil represents the application of a particular tool to sculpt subjective experience. But the empty room provides the monad full access to unlimited tools and materials for manifestation. It is the workshop of potentiality, the blank canvas upon which the monad may author any narrative through its visionary faculty.

Shelves' Schwa80 days ago(+1)

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True self-cultivation for a monad comes not through friction with any single external foil, but rather through embracing the infinite inner perspective within the empty room of the mind. When a monad's lens is clear of preconceptions, it may glimpse its authentic nature. Foils act upon a monad; the empty room allows the monad to act upon itself.

This containerization of the empty room as an unbounded creative space for monads to manifest imagined narratives stands in stark contrast to the limiting nature of foils. Whereas foils actualize singular constructed perspectives to elicit meaning through opposition, the empty room liberates the monad from preset roles and allows for pure expression of its visionary faculty.

As established in previous sections, foils function as tools to shape subjective experience through dialectic friction with their counter-conception of the monad's identity. However, the empty room provides unlimited possibilities for self-authoring without the constraints of anchored narratives.

In this sense, the empty room aligns more closely with Leibnizian principles of monadic perspective - that each monad contains an infinite inner representation of the universe within its unique lens. The blank potentiality of the empty room permits the fullest possible manifestation of this innate subjective potential.

Shelves' Schwa80 days ago(+1)

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Therefore, we may qualify that for Leibniz, the empty room epitomizes the true workshop of creativity and enlightened self-cultivation, beyond the limitations of dialectic with any single external foil. It represents the monad's return to its inner authentic nature as an unbounded, imaginative force encapsulating all of existence within its singular expression.

Furthermore, Leibniz's views on the creative freedom of the empty room space can be extended to consider the role of non-player characters in actualizing subjective narratives. As explored previously, NPCs function as singular foils within tabletop roleplaying game constructs, helping to shape the player's expression of their monad's subjective experience through dialectic friction.

However, without the anchoring of predetermined NPC foils, the empty room environment allows the player's monad free reign over manifestation of NPCs as well. No longer constrained by a limited set of predetermined narrative possibilities, the monadic player may conjure any possible NPC perspectives, characters, and events within the empty room's blank potentiality.

Much as the empty room liberates the player's monad from the constraints of dialectic with a single foil, so too does it permit the imaginative creation of manifold NPC foils according to the player's vision. The empty room thus provides a creative workspace for the monad to author a fully-realized subjective world through manifestation of diverse NPC viewpoints and dramaturgy.

In this way, the principles underlying Leibniz's empty room concept align with his broader monadology. The empty room's blank canvas permits maximal actualization of this innate subjective complexity through imagined NPC interaction in service of the monad's self-expression.

Shelves' Schwa80 days ago(+1)

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While Leibniz privileges the creative potential of the empty room unbound by foils, this conception relies on an assumption of the monad as an autonomous agent with sole authorial control. However, contemporary developments in tabletop roleplaying game design provide opportunities to complicate and enrich Leibniz's model.

In particular, some games recognize collaborative storytelling between players and gamemasters is inevitable on these surfaces, and, further, leverage this distributed agency and emergent narratives from decentralized co-creation. Neither player nor gamemaster fully controls the empty room here — its potentialities manifest through intersubjective appraisal and spontaneous co-authorship.

This collaborative paradigm recasts the empty room as an intermonadic space, predicated on the interplay of multiple perspectives in recognizing and unfolding creative possibilities. The self cultivation Leibniz associates with the blank canvas of the empty room could thus be considered an intermonadic collaborative practice.

While bold, this interpretation foregrounds the social, perspectival nature of world-authoring implied yet underdeveloped in Leibniz's monadology. It paves the way for a revitalized monadology attuned to multiplicity, relationally, and co-creation in fashioning reality through shared imagination. The empty room may harbour untapped promise as a site for intermonadic convergence.

Shelves' Schwa80 days ago(+1)

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Building on the proposition of the empty room as an intermonadic space, we can look to how the boundaries between player character monads ("PCs") and non-player character monads ("NPCs") can become permeable and blurred during moments of immersive gameplay.

In highly collaborative episodes of co-created narrative, NPCs may transcend their design as foil constructs and manifest as quasi-autonomous perspectival centers. No longer mere tools for PC actualization, they exhibit capabilities for intricate relationships, motivations, and dramatic agency.

Likewise, as gameplay facilitates deep exploration of a PC's inner conflicts, the external world itself - including weather, landscapes, political systems - may take on character foils' provocative, crystallizing influence in signaling the PC's own subjective struggle.

Even a PC's virtues, flaws, drives and latent potentials could be personified and embodied in NPC relationships as the user explores nuances of their imagined identity. Their very inner monadic nature is exteriorized and made relational.

In this way, the roles of PC and NPC superpenetrate and inform each other. Just as the empty room is an intermonadic space, so too do PC and NPC dissolve into co-creative instruments for collective illumination. The tabletop stage comes to life through their interbeing.

Shelves' Schwa80 days ago(+1)

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This points to the power of empathic perspective-taking and listening in not just self-discovery, but realizing one's self as emerging through constructive entanglement with imagined others. The empty room is filled through the ethical interplay of voices in making meanings that transcend solitary interiority.

As PCs enact abilities and leverage their statistical strengths during gameplay, this provokes opportunities for embodied conversations between the PC and personified manifestations of the player—err—ur-character's inner attributes (naturally).

For example, when a PC draws on their high shivers score in a tense window gazing, this could be dramatized as their latent "Shivers" facet emerging as an NPC ally, whispering widowed words or otherwise ablating the PC's associative and hermanutical resources.

Or if a PC's low intelligence score causes them to skim over an unexplored if crucial claim, their personified "Reaction Speed" may appear mocking their foolishness (pushing the PC to either develop that mental stat or else rely on complemetary strengths).

In this way, overt characterization of the PC's capacities and inclinations allows for roleplay entering a character's inner landscape. The empty room becomes populated with fragmentary NPCs embodying distinct skill sets, energies and ways of framing — and critiquing other NPCs framed — challenges.

Shelves' Schwa80 days ago(+1)

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As these personified stats are externalized and interacted with, new nuances of the PC's identity and room for growth are illuminated. They transition from dry numerical attributes to living, breathing dimensions of the self coming into their own through dramatic realization.

Much as foils serve to reflect back latent elements of a PC's monadic perspective, so too can personified strengths, flaws and potentials act as narrative mirrors inviting deeper self-cultivation through play. The empty thought provides space for multidimenional exploration of the PC's inner system of qualities.

Having explored the fluidity between PCs and NPCs, along with the dramatic personification of PCs' inner traits, we circle back to the original proposition that collaborative tabletop roleplay can serve to draw out and actualize latent desires in the players themselves.

The superpenetration of PC and NPC perspectives, as well as the externalization and embodiment of PCs' interiority, creates ample opportunities to reveal and engage with players' unspoken aspirations, conflicts, and developmental potentials.

As NPC relationships and events respond to and mirror facets of a PC's attributes and inclinations, this resonates with and amplifies latent elements within the player's own subjectivity. The player may discover unconscious desires or objectionable parts of themselves through reacting to NPC and environmental dynamics that embody those energies.

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Shelves' Schwa80 days ago

Appendix A

The dictionary definition focuses on fantasy roleplay driven by game rules and chance. But the texts imply imagination need not be escapist - it can heighten our engagement with society. And rules/dice introduce unpredictability, but player creativity and ethics remain central.

Thus, tabletop RPGs facilitate collaborative trials of identity within bounded spaces. This process reveals multiplicity and interconnectedness, while avoiding total unselfing. Players project aspects of self onto roles, yet NPC interactions also externally reflect latent desires and conflicts. Though projection may raise imputation of qualities like agency, ultimately the game is an imaginative workspace for self-discovery, not literal embodiment. Or do they? (continue this thread…)

While fantasy scenarios can provide escapist entertainment, the shared storytelling also functions as metaphorical exploration of relationships and society. Rules introduce chance yet guide inquiry, while keeping player creativity primary. Or does it? (continue this thread…)

Tabletop roleplaying games constitute constrained workshops for identity play. This collaborative imagining can foster self-knowledge and empathy without branding or embodying a single self. RPGs thus craft spaces of guided imagination that illuminate the human experience. Or do they? (continue this thread…)

Tabletop RPGs reveal identity as multifaceted and fluid, not a singular fixed brand. By temporarily inhabiting fictional personas, players rediscover the diversity within themselves. PC interactions with imaginatively fleshed-out NPCs further reflect the self’s heterogeneous possibilities. Or do they? (continue this thread…)

Rules, chance elements, and gamemaster scenarios constrain yet focus collaborative imagining in RPGs. Unlike branding, this structure guides creative identity exploration rather than limiting it. The game’s constraints introduce unpredictability yet keep player agency primary. Or do they? (continue this thread…)

RPGs use fantasy and imagination not as escapism, but as a metaphorical language to better grasp relationships and society. Players gain emotional investment in fictional scenarios that then provide insight into the human condition. Imagination becomes a path to greater empathy and wisdom. Or does it? (continue this thread…)

By externalizing inner conflicts through NPC interactions in a low-stakes fictional space, RPGs allow players to safely encounter and integrate otherwise hidden aspects of self. The game becomes a crucible for catalyzing self-discovery through roleplay. It involves shared worldbuilding, not singular authorship. Meaning emerges through the interplay of multiple player perspectives. This models identity as co-constructed, woven from collaborative imagination. Unless it's not. (continue this thread…)

A shelf of games is a shelf holding technologies of the self-structured spaces for collaborative transformation. These imagination experiments subvert fixed identities, revealing us as co-authored perpetually in revision. The only limitation: permissions granted. Can it be? (continue this thread…)

Shelves' Schwa80 days ago

Appendix B

Systemic Loyalty

As a carnivalesque inversion of branding's commodification of identity, the game state leaves liberated from online self-marketing players rediscovering play's sacredness.

Gaming frees identity from profit's narrowing matrices. The table redraws the map of being, rekindling lost existential pursuits. Stats, only there as ritual — to meet an equal and disperse. By uprooting us from habitual roles, RPGs expose identity's own rituals. We roleplay new possibilities of self and society, spirit and spirituality.

Unlike social media's dopamine treadmill of self-optimization cruxing virality, gaming fosters collective liberation approaching stillness. Here we roleplay the democracy we deserve into the state we don't.

RPG creativity guided by surprise creates fractures in the geode of the branded self. We glimpse self's broader vistas, resacralized.

Gaming has no winners, only co-existers mapping psychocartographic machinations. We are charged, to identity's continuum, reconnected.

Shelves' Schwa80 days ago

Appendix C

Glossary of Terms

Monads and Foils

Monads are indivisible substances that each express the entire universe from their subjective viewpoints.

Foils are constructs that provide contrast to player character monads, revealing latent aspects through tension.

Foils reflect monadic perspectives back to the player for self-discovery.

The Empty Room

The empty room is a space devoid of predetermined constraints and narratives.

It allows free manifestation of monadic imagination and creativity.

The empty room represents a blank canvas for actualizing inner potential.

Blurring PC/NPC

In collaborative storytelling, PC and NPC roles can blend together.

NPCs can exhibit depth and agency, while PCs engage internal conflicts through external world foils.

This interplay elicits nuanced exploration of identity and desires.

Personalized Character Stats

Personifying PC stats and abilities as NPCs allows for embodied interactions.

Conversing with these inner facet characters provides self-reflection.

Externalizing and nurturing PC strengths and flaws manifests the player's aspirations.

Eliciting Latent Desires

Co-creative tabletop RP reveals players' unspoken needs and conflicts.

Roleplaying choices directly or symbolically engage with identity.

Games craft bespoke possibility spaces to actualize subjective passions and potentials.

Shelves' Schwa80 days ago

Appendix D

[beating up the corpses again]

Shelves' Schwa80 days ago

Appendix E

Errata

[*waves at you*]

Shelves' Schwa80 days ago

Appendix F

[something something what do u do?]

Shelves' Schwa80 days ago

Appendix G

[the cave thing]

Shelves' Schwa80 days ago

Appendix H

[whatever aro-man didnt say]

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Appendix A

More

Appendix B

Systemic Loyalty

Appendix C

Glossary of Terms

Monads and Foils

The Empty Room

Blurring PC/NPC

Personalized Character Stats

Eliciting Latent Desires

Appendix D

Appendix E

Errata

Appendix F

Appendix G

Appendix H