the zero reader

 so a lot of my posts here get 0 comments and its been that way sort of the whole time

this doesnt bother me terribly because i dont really care to read comments and enjoy talking to myself, ive run various potemkin blogs on all parts of the internet for something like 20 years now, and wouldnt know what to do with comments if i did have them, but it leads me to that perennial question of who the thing is for, the essential question of what to optimise for

for example when you write a thing, what should you assume the reader is familiar with, like for this blog...

should you assume theyre familiar with fifth edition dungeons and dragons? should you assume theyre familiar with basic/expert dungeons dragons? should you assume theyre familiar with the post you just read on a more-widely-read blog, or the post you wrote on this blog last week? should you assume theyre familiar with a sort of greatest hits of whatever you think are the dnd ideas of the past while? the greatest hits of the blog youre posting on? 

and like its the internet, so the real answer is, you can put hyperlinks and whatever but i think there are various approaches to consider

ASSUME THEY KNOW EVERYTHING

like they read everything i’ve read and everything i haven’t, and can supply all the same information im familiar with and even fill in the blanks where i’m pretending to know thing i don’t. this is nice because you can take on the role of the know-it-all dm and spew out apocryphal nonsense with the assumption that they know and can use all of the stuff you can put down, which is a very self-assured style and lends itself a certain brevity. But if the reader knows everything theres really no reason to tell them anything because they know it all already.The other problem with this style is even i dont know what i know, so its a style of writing that doesnt even work for a reader who is me.

ASSUME THEY KNOW NOTHING

so the best dnd player, it's someone that hasnt heard of dnd before. you're introducing them to the game, to the concept of roleplaying, this is someone who doesnt know the tropes, who doesnt have an existing edition that they prefer, so you can map your image of dnd right onto their brain, and then they'll have to like it. give me a child up to the age of four and i'll something soemthing whatever that quote is. but you can't really imagine that this person is an ideal reader of your dnd blog, because that person does not read dnd blogs. but similarly the best ideallest reader of your dnd blog might be someone who reads your blog only and absorbs the ideas presented therein as though in a vacuum. i dont think anyone is this reader. but this mode of writing can be more like fiction where you construct the world and need never refer to any other text from outside it. and it would be internally consistent, and scopable. but for each post to work in a vacuum without the entire corpus of all other writing youd have to do a pretty bloody good job of explaining the thing you're talking about and that requires i guess either incredible skill at explaining things in the space allotted or exhaustive definitions of everything which either way seems a bit shit

ASSUME THEY KNOW JUST ENOUGH

so this is the right way to do it, i don't know what this would mean exactly. but it's a little from either column, assuming the things that feel safe to assume and explaining the things that want explanation, putting hyperlinks to cover your ass, but getting it exactly right. just get it exactly right, its easy.

ASSUME COMPATIBILITY

that is, assume there's some version of the game that is 100% compatible with all other texts no matter how obtuse. then your text is compatible with that version of the game. The only problem with this style is that the game is not compatible with itself and you're only pretending it is. And the version of the game youre imagining will drift over time and fail to match the version the reader is assuming. So you ask the reader to do the work. And I'm not super comfortable with that because i've been that reader and I'm not really sure if 've comprehended those texts or not.

ASSUME INCOMPATIBILITY

I don't know what this one would mean, seems like nonsense. Who's writing this garbage. I guess you could try to catch incompatible cases and incorporate them back in, but there are so many versions of the game that it seems silly to extend the text so far.  You'd lose your own intention. so really you gotta work within the game you are imagining and not some hypothetical allgames however tempting that might be.

THE ZERO READER

anyway the point i think is if there are no notes you can operate in any or all of these modes at different times, the advantage of having a blog that noone reads, or perhaps noone reads, is it doesnt matter who the reader is and they can be whoever you wish them to be and think whatever you wish them to think (although admittedly you still have to imagine them as someone who does not respond). Until the reader reveals themselves to have some idea or think some thing they can exist in the superposition of knowing whatever you need them to know at the time, and this makes no demand on you whatsoever