I answered the below indirectly in my last post with a focus on mental frameworks and cognitive bias. I'm going to answer this a little more directly now.
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?
My regular players have played a considerable cross-section of games with different demands on them mentally and emotionally. I've run all of the following for them in either one/two-shot, short-term (few months), to long term (campaign):
1) B/X
2) AD&D
3) 3.x
4) 4e
5) 5e
6) Torchbearer
7) Dungeon World
8) 13th Age
9) Strike! (Star Wars hack)
10) SW Edge of the Empire
11) Cortex+ (Marvel Heroic, Fantasy Heroic, Leverage)
12) Apocalypse World
13) Mouse Guard
14) The One Ring
15) Dread
16) My Life With Master
17) Sorcerer
18) Dogs in the Vineyard
19) Fiasco
20) Fate Core
Some stuff I'm probably forgetting. My take on this is simple. Diversification and malleability of mental framework is an inevitable outcome of exposure to (a) varying thematic premises to be addressed, (b) varying types of play paradigms/priorities, (c) varying types of system agency, (d) varying types of player responsibility and agency, (e) varying qualities of PC inhabitation (typically achieved by a combination of a - d). Playing more games, playing more types of games gives rise to a more wieldy, more seamless "cognitive toggle", let us call it. I'm certain my players feel enriched for it (regardless of the game they're presently playing) even if it isn't something we discuss with any level of deep analysis (though it is overtly addressed from time to time).
Pulling a piece from the Jenga tower in Dread when something is at stake engenders a sense of ominous foreboding. As the fiction escalates and the tower becomes more unstable, the players feel the dreadful weight of momentous inevitability as their PCs navigate the horror that is closing in on them.
A player in a Dogs game has to confront a good man ruined by a major sin against the Faith (say, the infidelity of his wife with his own brother). Maybe he's a retired Dog (gun-toting Paladin in a wild-west that never was) himself, a legend who now has dedicated himself to a life of service as a minister to at-risk youth. Meanwhile, his famous gun has kept the peace in the small town of Big Water even though he doesn't serve in any official capacity and hasn't had to draw it in a decade. Well, he's been drinking himself into a stupor day, noon, and night for weeks now (a sin against the Faith)...inconsolably grieving and embittered. His state is such that he has people not only fearing that he might take his own life...but maybe he is a risk to others as well?
Well, when words don't work and I escalate the situation straight from words...past fists/knives...and I pull out that trusty Colt with a "back the hell up son...God ain't payin' attention and I ain't playin' "...(and a whole new and very dangerous/lethal dice pool), what are you going to do? He's drunk as a skunk (a trait that will affect his dice pool) but he's still a better shot than you (will also affect his dice pool). You're proud of the Dogs's legacy (will affect your dice pool). But something has to give here. No one is above the law, above The Faith. The small sins lead to the bigger ones. The bigger ones lead to the actual invitation of the supernatural to corrupt the soul and everything the soul touches. Is this the blustery cycle of grief by a hero so profoundly betrayed...or is this the actual dissolution of what he has always stood for, making him the perfect tool for the wicked, malign forces of this world?
And Dog's aren't a dime-a-dozen...and a dead Dog doesn't serve so well, so what good are you as a meal for the worms and the carrion birds?
All of those games demand different things (mentally, emotionally, from a cognitive workload perspective, from a responsibility perspective) from the players, have very different resolution mechanics and play paradigms. While AD&D, 3.x, and 5e have a healthy market share of the overall TTRPG player-base (with extreme overlap in their advocates), their own shared paradigm doesn't remotely encapsulate the means to PC inhabitation.
[MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION],
When you "ask questions and use the answers", how do you decide which player(s) get(s) to provide the answer? Is it first-come-first-serve? Round robin? Collaborative?
Also, what criteria do you expect the players to use when coming up with their answer? What they would find fun individually? What the other players would find fun? Free association with the current storyline? Logicial inference? Whimsy? I'm having hard time figuring out how I would begin to answer such a question as a player. This is in part because I don't understand which OOC GM responsibilities (if any) implictly attach to such on-the-spot delegation of content creation from the GM to the players.
I suspect this was probably meant for me so I'm going to go ahead and answer. There is subtle nuance to this depending upon the game, but since we're talking about Dungeon World, I'll use that (but this same thing could apply to a myriad of the above games).
1) Say something interesting or cede the play back to me (eg "I don't know this guy" etc).
2) Respect the integrity of the prior-established fiction.
3) Heed genre logic.
4) This is a game about action/adventure, discovery, snowballing danger, and relationships (with others and with what you believe in). I'm giving you an opportunity to advance one or more of those, so do it.
5) If this isn't initial scene framing and its the product of a 7-9 outcome on a Contacts (ish) move, the complication/cost I am telegraphing should be clear. This guy clearly isn't subtle. Maybe you don't want to draw attention to yourself. Oops. Or maybe he isn't fully reliable. Or maybe he's good at what he does, but he's classically in debt to the wrong people and using him as a hireling may introduce some guilt by association. If I'm giving you the opportunity to tell us a little bit about the world here and pick your poison...then do it with integrity...then put the ball back in my court and I'll run with it.
Make sense?