The descriptive paragraph goes beyond what I'd do all at once: instead I'd spread it out a little to give the players time to interrupt or ask questions. I'd also probably intersperse information about other patrons to make the establishment seem more fluid, rather than forcing the focus on the newcomer.
But no, I'd never ask my players to tell me who the newcomer was. Honestly, it never would have even occurred to me to do so until reading this thread--that question is completely outside anything I've ever encountered in an RPG. Learning that there is much greater diversity in GMing styles that I ever knew about is part of what makes this thread so interesting.
That said, I think the giant gulf between the preferred styles of many of the posters is making communication difficult. When two games are so radically qualitatively-different, I'm not sure it's meaningful to try to measure them on the same axis. For example, I don't think it means much to say that [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s or [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s style is more "player-driven" than the other, because I'm not sure that there is a definition of "player-driven" that makes sense in both contexts simultaneously. Their games are just too different.
Returning to the concept of "ask questions and use the answers", I think the very premise isn't compatible with my GMing style's emphasis on immersion and verisimilitude. And as a player, I don't see how I could maintain my IC focus when I'm confronted with an OOC request from the GM to add an element to the game world. I consider myself pretty good at switching back and forth quickly (I have to do it all the time as a GM), but what you're describing sounds extremely jarring--especially the part where after adding the element OOC, I'd need to immediately interact with the element I'd just created, this time from my character's perspective and while trying to forget about the OOC motives underlying my choice of what to add.
Are your players simply phenomenal at flipping back and forth from thinking as their characters to thinking as themselves? Or, alternatively, do your players add the requested elements in-character (i.e. the character, rather than the player, is choosing how the character knows the newcomer)? Or maybe roleplaying at your table means something different than it does at mine, in a way that makes the transition easier?
I've posted many times over the course of the last few years about developed mental frameworks and cognitive biases being the source of much of the incredulity and mismatched expectations in these discussions.
Here is a quick example (I'll talk about a few other components of inhabitation and mental frameworks in a follow-up, but let us start with this):
D&D 4e has rife Martial Forced Movement inherent to the combat engine. This almost always (but not always) comes in the form of a rider to an attack in which that rider doesn't require discrete resolution unto itself. This concept was a problem for many players coming from 3.x that were expecting a process-sim resolution chassis. For them, as you say above, this draws them out of inhabitation of their PC (Actor Stance), forcing them to engage the situation from either Pawn Stance or Director Stance. So they're either:
(a) relating to their character as if they are controlling a piece on a game board
or
(b) they have a mismatched expectation of what is happening (and what their character is capable of) in the fiction because they conceive this sort of Martial Forced Movement (without discrete mechanical resolution) on an NPC as having the mandate of a director rather than "organically" (I use that term very loosely, because we are, of course, talking about a thing that doesn't actually exist) interacting with the components of our shared imagined space.
Why is this not a problem for any of the participants in my 4e games?
All of us have been lifelong athletes with two of us playing collegiate sports (and continuing afterward). When you have that sort of exposure to combat/contact sports, you develop both an instinctual and empirically-driven awareness that the concept of "autonomy" is very different in that arena than what most folks consider (either as their level of autonomy in day to day affairs or how they erroneously extrapolate and map that to "what they think" happens in martial exchanges...think, rather than know, because of lack of intimate exposure). The significant majority of the micro-exchanges that take place are driven by the subconscious permutations of the martial actor's honed OODA Loop. The locus of control is indeed internal to the martial actor (they are actually doing the Observation, Orientation, Decision, and Action). However, due to the nature of the processing (the speed with which it must take place, the muscle memory, the honed instinct, and the inherent gravity/consequence of each decision to be made) that is taking place, it is, for all intents and purposes, automated.
So, for instance, when the ball is snapped, an American Football Linebacker has (a) a suite of assignments, (b) physical keys to read, (c) tons of spatial information to incorporate into his instantaneous decision-making (including not just where objects are, but where s/he is, and relative velocities/angles), (d) and the fact that the mind fundamentally knows that the activity it is engaging in is extremely dangerous.
So all of the myriad of information processing, decisions, and actions that take place in the next few seconds are going to be more the product of automated response to stimuli than shrewd, cognizant-in-the-moment, deliberation. The Quarterback performs a play-action-fake to the Running Back. The Linebacker automatically takes a step or two toward the Line of Scrimmage. The Quarterback pulls it out of the Running Back's belly and drops back to pass. The Linebacker automatically scrambles back to drop into the Zone coverage assignment it has. A receiver runs a shallow cross in front of the LB though his zone. The LB automatically moves forward to a point of contact intercept should the pass go there. But oh no. There is another crossing route behind the LB and now they're out of position to contest the pass. 12 yard completion. This collection of sensory information and route combination is designed precisely to manipulate the LB and achieve this outcome.
This is but one example in a never-ending deluge of them. Automated Martial Forced Movement happens constantly in contact/physical sports (actual combat sports are even more automated in the moment of action) so 4e's rampant Forced Movement is intuitive to them. Simultaneously, it also plays to their sense of genre logic (where dynamic movement, forced or otherwise, and battlefield interaction is also rife; be it Wesley and Inigo's famous duel, Pirates of the Caribbean, LotR/Hobbit fights, or Avengers/X-Men).
So, because of this, the phenomenon of Martial Forced Movement in 4e (and active melee control effects like Marking) actually
improves (considerably so) the capacity for my table's participants to inhabit their characters (because the OODA Loop dynamics are considerably closer to what they've experienced in contact sports/physical martial contests). The character build mechanics (such as a character being more adept at deploying Forced Movement or having some level of passive resistance to it or ability to actively mitigate/negate it) and the resolution mechanics enhance their conception of archetype and their immersion.
Meanwhile, folks who have a different developed mental framework and different cognitive biases feel...well...very differently about it.
Thoughts on that before we move to other aspects of this component of the conversation?
