The Other Side Of The Camera: Depth in RPGs

‘Narcisismo’ by FreeImages.com / Frederico Harald Ganss
I was watching an episode of “Who Do You Think You Are?” (a show that has inspired other articles here at Campaign Mastery) in which a number of photographs featuring the grandmother of the central focus* of the episode were presented, with the observation that his grandfather appeared in none of them (* I watched a lot of episodes at the same time, so I’m not sure which one this was).
That, in turn, reminded me of the key personal revelation for Téa Leoni’s character, Jenny Lerner, in Deep Impact – in which she and her character’s father appeared in all the photos and home movies but her mother was never in any of them, because she was always the person behind the camera, taking the pictures.
And it struck me that there are always two parties to any record, visual or narrative – those portrayed, and the witness documenting the scene – and that it seemed to me that people, perhaps distracted by the content of what they could see, didn’t pay enough attention to the second of these, to the person on the other side of the camera, be it real or metaphoric.
That’s both a phenomenon that the GM should be aware of, and one that he can sometimes take advantage of. So, today I’m going to examine as many aspects of this phenomenon (or should that be ‘these phenomena?’) as I can come up with, in the context of gaming.
The Camera Of Self: A presented image
The most obvious application of the principle is showing the players a photograph or image and telling them, “this is what your character sees.” This seems completely objective at first glance, with no relevance to the principle that we are examining.
Deeper consideration renders this simple premise quite a but murkier. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

Image obtained from sxc before they became FreeImages.com, photographer unknown
The Camera Of Implication: A witness statement
A witness describes a scene, while those hearing the story mentally construct the image that they are describing. The result is a ‘virtual’ photograph, one that is sure to have several gaps containing lots of missing detail, and even the occasional error. In fact, the unreliability of witnesses is now beginning to change the legal system itself. To quote from Wikipedia’s page on Eyewitness Testimony, “Memory recall has been considered a credible source in the past, but has recently come under attack as forensics can now support psychologists in their claim that memories and individual perceptions can be unreliable, manipulated, and biased. Due to this, many countries and states within the US are now attempting to make changes in how eyewitness testimony is presented in court.” In fact, the whole article, and several of those linked to at the end of it, make fascinating reading.
But the fact is: any witness will inadvertently color his recollections somewhat, and it takes expert training in logic and cognition to avoid this. Few witnesses in an RPG will have had such training, so the default assumption has to be that there will be some unintended errors in any testimony. The issue is one of determining the extent of such error, and whether or not it is significant in terms of evaluating the situation being described. If two witnesses describe identical scenes except that one remembers one gas station chain being on the corner and the other, a different one, and the specifics about the gas station are not relevant to the events that they are relating, their stories are identical in every key respect, and both would have to be evaluated as reliable eyewitnesses to the events being described.
A shortcut to trouble
Things grow even more confused when the GM seeks to shortcut this rather dry element of the game (especially if the witness is an NPC describing what he saw to a PC) by simply showing the players a photograph. Is this image a reasonably accurate depiction of what the witness saw, or has the GM chosen an image that deliberately includes errors on the part of the eyewitness? In other words, is the image objective, or subjective?
The GM can seek to make this explicit by “painting out” parts of the image using Photoshop, leaving them an appropriately neutral color, or by some other technique that is obviously visually-representative of details being left out; clearly, if the image were objective, that information would be present. It isn’t, and so the image has to be considered subjective, and unreliable to at least some degree.
The problem with this technique is that players don’t know that this is what you (as GM) are trying to communicate, and – what’s more – even if they did, the GM would then face pressure to be consistent in the degree and subject of the distortion.
Some may seek to get around this by presenting an image as seemingly objective and then giving the PCs a roll of some kind to evaluate the testimony, but this seems entirely too random; it does nothing but tell the players that they can’t trust what the GM is telling them, which has all sorts of repercussions, none of them all that productive.
Solutions that work
In my experience, there are only two solutions: Make the depictions as objective as possible, and have the players safely assume that they are objective except in any areas that the GM chooses to highlight or that are entirely implausible (such as the presence of a completely inappropriate late 20th century vehicle, or the occasional air conditioner, or telephone line, or TV antenna); or emphasize an awareness of the unreliability of eyewitness testimony while presenting an apparently objective view with characters with appropriate expertise able to identify (without rolling) parts of the testimony that they consider potentially inaccurate. In fact, the GM should determine such areas of potential inaccuracy based on what the characters can identify, i.e. their relevant skill levels.
Either way, it’s then up to the players to speculate on, make assumptions about, the errors and possible omissions and plan accordingly. To me, this puts the onus where it should be: on the players interpreting the game world presented to them by the GM through the eyes of their characters.
The solo PC: All bets are off
All that said, when only ONE PC is to hear the report, there are occasions when all bets are off. Players have to evaluate any information they are given, from any source, for plausibility – even if that source is the GM via another player. On some rare occasions, I will present one player with a radically different or amended image – such as was the case when one of the PCs in the Zenith-3 campaign began subconsciously seeing eyes watching her and inadvertently painted the same onto a picture of a bowl of fruit that she was working on, and then onto a recalled mental image being relayed telepathically, and then a third time onto an image being ‘live shared’ in the same manner. In all cases, it was seconds or minutes before the character in question was even consciously aware of the eyes – which was the hook connecting an incidental encounter (in plot terms) with the main plot of the adventure.
The bottom line
The bottom line, then, is that the observer cannot always describe accurately what they have seen, and the person behind the “virtual” camera will always influence any report of what they saw. Even if it’s only because they are more aware of the things that they have been trained to observe, this will be true. To get a military assessment, you send a military-trained scout – and take any mentions of anything else with a grain of salt. Players and PCs should always assume that there may be an unnoticed elephant in the room, and the GM should both be aware of this, and take advantage of it when it suits his adventure needs.

Image obtained from sxc before they became FreeImages.com, photographer unknown
Now, back to the presented image question
All this makes very murky the validity of any image presented to the players with the statement by the GM that “this is what you see’ – because what was being described as a completely objective representation is, in fact, potentially subjective. Most of the time, such presentations should be reliable, perhaps omitting something, or taking into account an appropriate like-for-like substitution – ignore the Mitsubishi parked in front of the house, its’ actually a Ford, or a camel, or whatever is appropriate to the genre and time period of the campaign/adventure – unless the GM goes out of his way to point out the anachronism.
The witness always misreports the totality of a scene, despite their best efforts, even when that witness is a PC and the witness ‘report’ is being delivered first-hand and concurrently with the event being witnessed.
The Camera Of Reflection: The outside looking in
This same line of thought also offers a potential insight into self-portraits, both verbal and image-based.
Verbal self-descriptions are obviously susceptible to distortion by self-perception and psychology, so much so that they can be diagnostic. An obviously-thin person describing themselves as chubby or overweight clearly suffers from an eating disorder, to choose an obvious example. GMs and players are usually well aware of this factor, and usually ‘tweak’ such descriptions according to the self-image of the subject.
Verbal descriptions of someone else often fly under the radar, but these are also subject to the same effect, thought often to a lesser degree. A character who is racially prejudiced will ‘edit’ descriptions of Asian people to make them just a little shorter than they really are, quite subconsciously, unless the person being described is extremely, unusually, tall – in which case the opposite effect will usually take place, and their size will be exaggerated. I am always careful to apply the same effect whenever a member of one race describes a member of another – and make a point of noting the differences when a more objective observer encounters someone they have heard described.
But none of that applies when an objective image of a character is provided, right?
I don’t particularly like the shape of my chin, so I wear a beard that I carefully trim to give the impression that my chin is a completely different shape to the reality. I’m not particularly bothered about other aspects of my appearance, so I dress for comfort, not style – but other people I know think carefully about what they wear, and what goes well with their skin tones, and whether or not their clothes will go with a new hairdo or hair tint…
Appearance is something that all characters have some influence over – the amount varying with circumstances, culture, and setting – and from whatever starting position they have from those factors, the psychology and the image that they want to project are then applied as a modifier. I always try to think about what self-image the character has, and how that might influence his appearance. But it also works in the other direction – whenever I provide an image of a character, it will be chosen to reflect one or more characteristics that I know the character needs to convey, but beyond that, I always ask “what else does this image say about the character?”

Image obtained from sxc before they became FreeImages.com, photographer unknown
The Camera Of The World: The inside looking out at the world looking in
One of the most complicated questions I’ve ever seen on an employment application was “If he were here, what would your previous manager say about you behind your back?” It’s such a loaded question in terms of assumptions that you have to make. You have to assess your own situation in the previous job you held, your manager’s expectations, his or her personality, the way you and he or she interacted, whether or not anything that was said to you was between clenched teeth or unsaid. And, at the same time, there’s the matter of whether or not you answer truthfully, or gild the lily, or try to evade the question. I could certainly see why it was asked – it was so open-ended that no matter how you responded, the interviewer would learn something; they simply needed to employ other responses to place that information into context. At the very least, how you answered said something about your personality – and how you responded under pressure!
The question, “How do you think others see you” is always revealing, for the same reason. It’s not just about how the world really does see you, it’s how you want them to see you, and how effective you think your efforts in that respect are, and how you think, period.
An RPG Interpretation
Once again, in terms of the perspective being examined within this article, we’re talking about a virtual image being conjured by the words that the speaker employs in response. But the question is probably a bit esoteric for direct use in play within an RPG.
In order to answer it, though, you have to be able to get pretty deep inside the head of a character. That makes it a useful self-administered test for a GM to determine just how well he understands the personality of a character that he is about to depict in play. It’s similarly useful for a player to use, though they live in their characters’ “skins” so much more that it should be relatively easy for them to answer. Early in a campaign, when you are still getting a handle on your new PC, it might be a bit more useful.
When you get really familiar with the way your character thinks, and what they feel, you can kind of relax and simply ‘react’ appropriately to whatever the situation is; when you don’t have that immersive depth at your disposal, you have to pause and ponder everything – or occasionally fail to actually play your character. And, arguably, the early phase of a campaign is when it is most important to play your character well; as a character gains in experience, they gain in abilities and power and expertise. That means that in the early phase of a campaign, personality forms a larger part of the definition of who the character is than at any other time. Abilities can’t overshadow the personality, and who they are should shine forth a bit more clearly.
Then, too, this is the period when the other players are getting to know your character. Again, the clearer your understanding of that character, the more clearly you can convey that to them. Having a test of the depth of your immersion in the character can therefore be very useful in determining how hard the character should assert his personality.
A useful tool, that. On both sides of the GM screen.

‘Camera’ by Mustafa Pi?irici courtesy freeimages.com
The Modern Spin: The selfie
Some social phenomena are so new that we’re still figuring out what they mean. Two of these seem relevant – the first of which is the selfie. While the term appears to be Aussie in origin, at least according to Wikipedia, self-portraits go all the way back to the invention of photography. However, the concept of uploading such photographs to the internet also appears to be an Australian invention in the form of a website for the purpose that came online in September 2001. Hand-in-hand with the rise of social media, the concept grew and took hold as a social phenomenon, a response to the ease with which changes in technology enabled the pictures to be taken and shared. In more modern times, the concept has become a focal point for more important issues such as body image, gender issues and stereotypes, censorship, and privacy.
But the primary purpose remains one of taking (shared) ownership of an event by proving that you were a participant or witness. This function is absolutely predicated on the speed with which the images can be shared; any sort of delay mitigates or denigrates the value of the image for the purpose, because the technology has rendered such delays unnecessary, and therefore tinged with suspicion, in an age in which a photographic record is so easily tampered with.
The current wave of opposition to the photoshopping of celebrity images in magazines etc has its roots in the selfie and the demand for authenticity in order for the selfie to have its social currency. As photo-manipulation has become easier and slicker, people have come to distrust what they are shown, another social development whose ultimate effects are still to be recognized. It’s simply a trend in the world that we now live in; like all such, no-one can tell where it will lead in the long run.
Ancient Analogues
In the absence of such technology, one finds, with only a little thought, analogies in historic practices. In the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, people claimed ownership of an event with a photograph of the event that had not been printed, or with a first-hand account. The first was considered objective, and the publicly-perceived ambition of the second was to achieve the same standards of objectivity and accuracy; this is why phenomena and concepts such as the Potemkin Village, and other forms of falsification of image, were so shocking and fascinating when they were first revealed. Manipulating what was there to be seen, fooling the eye, was fascinating, politically revolting, or entertaining – or some combination.
Such practices can be logically followed back to the fascination held by optical illusions and stage magicians from the time of the ancient Romans, if not even earlier.
The Impact of the Fantastic
The more fantastic the world that a character lives in, the more likely a character is to accept any event in a story or narrative, especially one packaged as a first-hand account, no matter how extraordinary. In the real world, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, evidence of the highest standards of verisimilitude. It is usually in the smallest of details being depicted inaccurately that falsification can be detected (whether present or not) – my mind keeps flashing back to the Mythbusters episode disproving the conspiracy theories regarding the falsification of the moon landings. It is in this context that the claim that a “big lie” is more easily accepted finds some explanation; a concept of Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, and probably the Nazi ruler’s most substantial positive contribution to world society, he described it as a lie so ‘colossal’ that no one would believe that someone ‘could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously’. The distortion of the big lie is so egregious that the listener has no referent for what the ‘small details’ should be, countering the listener’s capacity for critical appraisal of what they are hearing.
In order to be effective, however, the big lie must be internally consistent and swarm with small details that support the primary distortion; the listener would be aware of their absence.
Application to gaming
All this has relevance to gaming in terms of the achievement of a suspension of disbelief sufficient for players and GM to respond to the game world as though it existed in actuality. The GM, like the novelist, movie-maker, and play producer, is aided by a willingness to be ‘seduced’ into the plausibility of the scenario being depicted by the GM, provided that there are no jarring failures of logical inconsistency to jerk them out of the shared suspension of disbelief.
At the same time, the divide between player and character is enough to keep the fantasy world of the adventures at arms’ length, permitting their critical faculties to appraise what they are told their characters see, hear, and otherwise experience. It becomes more important that the GM achieve a reasonable standard of verisimilitude in gaming than in any other medium, and this is at its most important when the events being described are fantastic.
The smart GM, being aware of this, is able to draw upon other elements of popular culture to present their scene more vividly. A character name may invoke recollections of a movie or television experience, bringing associations of personality and nuance into the minds of the players, and wrapping the events in a cloak of derived verisimilitude by bringing small details into play that the GM himself never has to impart personally. “Picture John Wayne as the Lieutenant” produces a congruous association that makes the character of “the Lieutenant” more credible; “Picture John Wayne as King Henry” produces an incongruous association that makes the character of “King Henry” seem less believable.
Images, illustrations, photographs, and recognizable sounds all function in the same way, adding credibility and immediacy to the events being described – or subtracting from them. This is a tool that the GM can exploit. Heck, even humming a few bars of music from a movie can create manipulable associations – most people can manage the theme from Jaws and Darth Vader’s theme, for example.

Sometimes, people seem to come out of nowhere.
Image courtesy of and copyright Free Range Stock, www.freerangestock.com – photographer Unsplash
The Modern Spin II: The Photo-bomb
It was probably an inevitability – the rise of the selfie in turn gave rise to the practice of someone inserting themselves into the background of someone else’s selfie.
In the old days, this was so much simpler – one simply had to assert that “I was there, I saw it all” – and unless there is some logical barrier to credibility, the statement has to be taken at face value. If I state that I was present at a fundraising effort aimed at fighting the University Of New South Wale’s attempts to reduce the power of the student union, you would have no trouble accepting it, especially if you knew that I had attended that institution. On the other hand, if I state that I was a first-hand witness to the lunar landing, you make the immediate assumption that I am speaking of the images televised around the world – and if I attempt to convince you otherwise, the logical barrier to credibility becomes insuperable (unless my name is Buzz Aldrin, of course) – but it isn’t.
There is a psychological need in many people to conform with the group mindset to at least some extent that can lead people to genuinely believe that they saw something that they didn’t, and couldn’t possibly, have seen. Consider this report of an air disaster in Amsterdam which took place on October 4th, 1992. According to the Wikipedia article on Eyewitness Testimony that I linked to earlier,
“Though no cameras caught the moment of impact on film, many news stations covered the tragedy with footage taken after impact. Ten months after the event, the researchers interviewed people about the crash. According to theories about flashbulb memory, the intense shock of the event should have made the memory of the event incredibly accurate. This same logic is often applied to those who witness a criminal act. To test this assumption, participants were asked questions that planted false information about the event” [in the minds of those interviewed]. “Fifty-five percent of subjects reported having watched the moment of impact on television, and recalled the moment the plane broke out in flames – even though it was impossible for them to have seen either of these occurrences.”
While a first impression of the practice of the Photo-bomb does nothing but reveal the immaturity of the photo-bomber, these lines of thought reveal a deeper value to the practice. First, it increases the immediacy of the image being photo-bombed, and second, it adds to the occasion a correlationary witness who was not intended to be one of the subjects of the image, enhancing the credibility of the event as a true record.
For a while there in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, there was a social trend in some circles of photoshopping yourself (or someone or something else) into a historical record – a photograph. The ultimate expression of this technique and technology remains Forest Gump, but long before that movie came along, this was a sure sign of a nerd.
Now, apply all of these to a fantasy milieu. A sufficiently vivid first-hand description of events can be enough for listeners to connect the events described with some similar experience of their own, leading them to falsely believe that they too experienced the events. This is especially the case when the person would have been a small child at the time, whose memories are fragmented by time and youth.
My earliest recollection is from a time when I was no more than two or three, possibly even younger, when the steering wheel of my father’s car came off in his hands. I once mentioned that to my mother, and she had no recollection of the event at all – yet it was something that she should recall vividly. I can only conclude that it was probably a nightmare experienced while driving – we lived, at the time, quite some distance out of town, and on one such trip I must have drifted off. Yet it remains a vivid recollection in my mind, even today, and absolutely real – even if it never happened.
The more dramatic a recent but somewhat distant-in-time event, the more people will remember having seen it, even if it is completely impossible for them to have done so. The more people remember an event, the more real that event will be – even if it never actually occurred. Experienced propaganda plays into this duality to distort the attitudes of people, magnifying in significance incidents that correlate with the propaganda while diminishing and obscuring those that do not. That’s why propaganda works. These facts can be manipulated by the GM in his storytelling efforts.

Image obtained from sxc before they became FreeImages.com, photographer unknown
Reflections Of Cultural Change: Presented images with implied content
Another way that the GM can take advantage of these phenomena is when presenting photographs as illustrations within his campaigns, because every period image carries with it implied cultural baggage. The image can thus convey more than the information content for which it was chosen. Where this subtext conforms with the expectations of the viewer of the period, it reinforces the verisimilitude of the entire campaign, not just the immediate scene being illustrated; where there is a clash, it doesn’t just undermine the image being presented, it undermines the entire campaign to a certain extent.
Most of the campaigns that I run or co-run are affected by this phenomena, but in quite different (and yet strangely similar) ways.
The Adventurer’s Club
It is for that reason that even though players are willing to forgive the occasional anachronism in an image, I still work hard in the Adventurer’s Club campaign at erasing them from visual existence. Painting out telephone lines and TV antennas; copying and pasting an empty window to hide the air conditioning units, and so on. I can’t always get rid of cars, though.
The practicalities of what photo-manipulation may be required and what can practically be achieved in satisfying that requirement (in a reasonable time-frame) is always a consideration when selecting an image to represent some aspect of the campaign.
Zenith-3
Half of this campaign takes place in an alternate world in which the date is 2056. But this isn’t any 2056 – it’s a technologically advanced 2056, closer to 2100AD in technological terms. The usual problem is that most images aren’t futuristic enough in content. There are some areas that retain a 2016 look, but many don’t. One of the smartest things I ever did was set the primary location for the team in a city that values its’ history, and that has experienced substantial rebuilding in recent times, New Orleans. This gives me a wide palette to draw upon is sourcing images to illustrate the stories. Telephone lines are tolerable in an image for this campaign, as are air conditioning units. But television antennas? Domestic satellite dishes? No, to both – everything is carried by the internet. The phone lines are really fiber-optic cables.
It’s relatively easy to choose images without people (“anachronistic” clothing would be a dead giveaway). But its a lot harder finding images without inappropriate advertising and without cars that look too “now”. Fortunately, there have been lots of sci-fi movies over the years – stills and excerpts from those can often be doctored to produce the imagery that I want.
Fumanor/fantasy
Most images of castles and the like either have too much in the way of “modern” incidentals, or are too ruined in appearance, but persistent searching has produced results over time. But there are lots of wilderness photos available, and these have proven quite useful. The occasional “modern” element has to be removed, especially hikers and climbers, but that’s usually manageable. One of my favorite tricks is to take such an image and slice it in two, vertically. I then add a castle or whatever into the background of one half, using the vegetation to hide anything that’s unacceptable (damage or anachronistic); this gives me one image to use before the ‘destination’ comes into view and a clearly-related image to use when it does.
In fact, I’ve used a number of such images to illustrate this article.

‘D20’ by janet galore from seattle – licensed under CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37141270
The map is not the country: Character Sheets as ‘images’
When I was making a list of all the possible interpretations of the the phenomena to be discussed, one somewhat inobvious notion came to me – and yet, on reflection, the same thought will probably have occurred to many readers, so I don’t intend to get into too deeply.
Perhaps the ultimate (in RPG terms) expression of forgetting the person behind the camera because you are distracted by the image on display – speaking metaphorical – is the player-PC-GM relationship, or its’ converse, the GM-NPC-player relationship.
The player: the ultimate face behind the camera (PCs)
A character, especially a PC, is shown to the world through its character sheet, the dry facts and game mechanical numbers that are used to define it – and yet, that is the barest fraction of the reality. It leaves out the contribution of the player, the perception of personality, the reaction to and interaction with the world.
I never forget this because I have seen the changes in a character when it is yielded by one player and another takes control – but that’s hardly a commonplace situation, so I doubt too many others have experienced it. Analogous to that is something that might have been experienced however – running the same adventure with the same fixed PCs for multiple groups at a convention, permitting a direct comparison of the differing interpretations of a character at the hands of different players.
When a GM is planning, all too often his planning focuses entirely on the character as presented. If the GM is a good one, he or she might go so far as to make allowances for the character that has been experienced in roleplay – its reactions, priorities, and psychology. The best GMs will also think about how the person behind the “camera” thinks and reacts, what they like and what they don’t. Aiming your adventure at the PC alone yields a workable campaign, which aiming exclusively at the player does not; aiming to satisfy both is far harder, people don’t come with character sheets and (in some game systems) psychological profiles, and are infinitely more complex than a PC, but the yield is a far better adventure, and a far better campaign.
The GM: the ultimate face behind the camera (NPCs)
Players face the opposite problem: they never get to see a character sheet for the NPCs that the GM depicts, if one has even been generated. Instead, they only get to see the mental image that they synthesize from the compounding of all the elements that the GM depicts – which at best will be a visual representation, a description, some personality traits, some dialogue, and a little narrative.
Just as the PC is more than just the character sheet, so the NPC is more than the sum of these parts, or should be; each of these is a reflection of a more complete entity, chosen by the GM because they reflect that aspect of the NPC (given the circumstances in-game). Too often, players assume that what they can experience through these channels is all there is, forgetting that not only will these fit together coherently and still be an incomplete representation, but that there is a central conception of the NPC which has been used to select those aspects that are on display.
This leads to NPCs being treated like cardboard cutouts by the players when they can be as dynamic and complex as any PC. Again, the better the GM, the richer these NPCs tend to be. In the case of a casual encounter, they might not be as complicated as a full PC, but they will still be something more than a wooden dummy draped with appropriate clothing.
In both cases, there is more to the characters than can be perceived on the surface.
And yes, this is another aspect of the reality of the game experience that the GM can manipulate so as to enhance the entertainment and enjoyment produced by his campaign.
Final Reflections
In this article, I’ve considered a diverse group of phenomena for which the “person behind the camera” is either a direct reference or a metaphor. What they all have in common is that they all say, one way or another, that there depth to any game than is superficially apparent from examining the ingredients and components that are the interface through which the campaign is experienced; and that the better the GM is at his ‘job’, the greater will be that depth. It will show in all aspects of his campaigns – from depth of personality to depth of plot – in varying degrees, depending on the individual.
If you want to improve as a GM, if you want to deliver more entertainment from, and generate more interest in, the games you run, that’s the takeaway message. No matter how deeply the players look, there should always be more depth, more thought, more to experience. Like the person on the other side of the camera, they won’t always be aware of what those depths contain – but their mere existence will add form and substance to the experience of playing the game.
All else is merely technique, which can vary from one GM to another, and which can change and evolve from time to time. And, while improvement in technique can be a laudable goal in and of itself, technique alone is shallow and superficial. It is never enough.
A GM who is aware of depth, and where he can most profitably create it, exploit it, and display it within his games, will always run a better game – so always remember the principle of the person on the far side of the camera, in all its gaming permutations.
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