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MrSandman
2019-06-28, 02:01 PM
Over the last few months, in these forums I have read people talk about this thing called immersion. People say things like:
- People playing characters of the other gender breaks my immersion.
- Things that remind me that we're playing a game break my immersion.
- Talking about the game at a metagame level breaks my immersion.
But the experience they seem to refer by "immersion" eludes me.

The closest I can get to this immersion, I think, is what I'd call a state of focus on the game to the exclusion of most other things. That is, there is an experience in which I am so absorbed in the game that I hardly pay attention to things outside of the game.

In this experience, things that would "break my immersion", would be things that claim my focus outside of the game. So it would be stuff like receiving a phone call, someone coming and turning on the TV or asking what we want for supper, even a long-winded discussion about rules. However, as soon as the distraction disappears I can focus back on the game without much trouble. So I wouldn't really understand people's extreme aversion to breaking immersion. Things like rolling dice, talking at the metagame level, or even stopping the game to discuss how to go about a particular scene are examples of things that wouldn't divert my focus and therefore wouldn't "break my immersion."

So, in order to better understand what people mean by "immersion," I'd like you to describe how you experience it, what sort of things do and do not break it, and the relationship between these things and immersion.

Thanks in advance for your input.

Altheus
2019-06-28, 02:28 PM
I think immersion is feeling intensly involved in the game. I've had sweat rolling down my head in an iaijitsu duel in L5R (I was the gm but I always roll duels openly).

Or, getting your players so involved they have nightmares afterwards.

Psyren
2019-06-28, 02:45 PM
I'd say it's less about simply denying the world around you - after all, ARG games like Pokemon Go can be immersive even while they force you to actually pay more attention to your surroundings.

Rather, immersion is the ability to accept the fiction of the world the game is taking you to. Deep down you know the events aren't actually possible or probable, and you also know the activity of gaming itself doesn't really fulfill any of your fundamental needs, like food or shelter. But immersion lets you find value in that anyway.

This video sums it up well for me:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ-EY9gTsgU

Some of the specific techniques for crossing that threshold are unique to videogames, but (a) a surprising number can work for tableop (e.g. music) and (b) the actual definitions of what constitutes immersion are applicable to the question in this thread.

Segev
2019-06-28, 03:15 PM
Psyren has it right, I think. Immersion is the ability to suspend disbelief. It's acceptance of the fiction you're being presented as "real" for the purposes of engaging with it on its level. So, for example, when I say, "I don't play female characters in games that aren't text-based because hearing my deep voice come out of my mouth when speaking for her breaks my immersion," what I mean is, I am immediately reminded, upon hearing not a female voice, but my own baritone, that I am not a convincing girl. It doesn't match my mental image, and does so in a way that calls attention to itself in my own mind.

It also tends to be subjective. I am not torn out of it by jokes at the table, OOC or otherwise, in the same way, because in the moment of the joke, it's not simultaneously trying to get me to think of things as this character acting this way.

Zakhara
2019-06-28, 03:18 PM
Immersion is when you don't question it.

MrSandman
2019-06-28, 04:06 PM
Psyren has it right, I think. Immersion is the ability to suspend disbelief. It's acceptance of the fiction you're being presented as "real" for the purposes of engaging with it on its level. So, for example, when I say, "I don't play female characters in games that aren't text-based because hearing my deep voice come out of my mouth when speaking for her breaks my immersion," what I mean is, I am immediately reminded, upon hearing not a female voice, but my own baritone, that I am not a convincing girl. It doesn't match my mental image, and does so in a way that calls attention to itself in my own mind.

It also tends to be subjective. I am not torn out of it by jokes at the table, OOC or otherwise, in the same way, because in the moment of the joke, it's not simultaneously trying to get me to think of things as this character acting this way.

How does the female thing change or stay the same when you GM? Or when another GM portrays male characters with a female voice?


Immersion is when you don't question it.

When you don't question what? Immersion itself? The game? The world being portrayed?



Rather, immersion is the ability to accept the fiction of the world the game is taking you to. Deep down you know the events aren't actually possible or probable, and you also know the activity of gaming itself doesn't really fulfill any of your fundamental needs, like food or shelter. But immersion lets you find value in that anyway.

So what sorts of things break immersion, then? Or do they? I don't see anything in your definition that would lead to the conclusion that somethings do break it.

Segev
2019-06-28, 04:30 PM
How does the female thing change or stay the same when you GM? Or when another GM portrays male characters with a female voice?

Like I said, it's subjective. There's a difference, to my mind and perception, between running an NPC as a GM and playing a PC as a player.

But in general, "immersion" is just how easy it is to keep taking the game seriously in the moment.

ErdrickOfAliaha
2019-06-28, 04:39 PM
"immersion" is "being completely surrounded (in all 3{4?} Dimensions)" in our physical world, it exists as a state for solid objects to be in relation to liquids.

Transposing into mental, we can use the following analogy: our perception is that solid object, and the game world has replaced the liquid of the physical world.

My eyes are looking at the room my body is in, but I'm 'seeing' the cold, stone masonry of the dungeon. I 'smell' the musty corridor, and when I look at my companions, there's a transparent overlay of their character in my mind's eye.

For vocals, this is why specific accents or peculiar turns of phrase are helpful additions to an "in character" voice.

Historically, my most immersive moments are when, as a group, we're plotting or strategizing, prior to an infiltration or a foreseen combat.

Things that break it are the things that point out that the game world IS a game. Just like so many other forms of storytelling, it is the "suspension of disbelief" that makes it work.

Zakhara
2019-06-28, 04:53 PM
When you don't question what? Immersion itself? The game? The world being portrayed?

Yes.

For some, just one will suffice. For others, most or all.

Koo Rehtorb
2019-06-28, 04:57 PM
Immersion isn't real.

Mordar
2019-06-28, 04:59 PM
For me immersion is something like being deep in the role of the character I am playing and the scene/story I/we are experiencing. Being able to visualize, to process and react as the character would/should/could and having the others at the table do the same.

It doesn't apply, for me, to anything other than in-person games. It doesn't apply, for me, to the more "gamist" games (I'm not a GNS proponent or expert, I just know what I think I mean by gamist) and isn't even a goal in such games. But it does apply, it seems, to my favorite game experiences.

As such, I do have the metagame immersion break, and the external devices/distractions immersion break. The gender thing doesn't seem to impact me. Generally a little bit of die rolling isn't an immersion break, but that depends.

So...I guess that means for me it is "immersion in the character and setting, achieving a more first-person perspective, and interacting with others as characters, not players".

- M

Tajerio
2019-06-28, 05:26 PM
Immersion isn't real.

Though I don't quite agree, I also don't have a ton of use for the word, mostly because I think it has been used as a stick to beat games with for too long now.

I prefer "verisimilitude," but even then I'm not a huge stickler for it. As long as NPCs in the game act in ways I can conceive of intelligent entities acting, and gravity doesn't work backwards unless someone casts a spell, I tend to be fine.

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-28, 05:28 PM
Though I don't quite agree, I also don't have a ton of use for the word, mostly because I think it has been used as a stick to beat games with for too long now.

I prefer "verisimilitude," but even then I'm not a huge stickler for it. As long as NPCs in the game act in ways I can conceive of intelligent entities acting, and gravity doesn't work backwards unless someone casts a spell, I tend to be fine.

"Immersion doesn't exist" said by a gamer is usually underpinned by an exaggerated/distorted "definition" of what other gamers actually mean by "immersion" anyway. If someone raises the bar for immersion really high, then of course nothing ever gets over that bar.

The Library DM
2019-06-28, 05:33 PM
In the context of a role-playing game, immersion is indeed related to the suspension of disbelief which all fiction demands in order to be effective. As with reading a novel or watching a movie, play, or television show, the sense of immersion is the sense that one accepts that the imagined reality of the story being told is effectively real to you, to the extent that on some level you are more than willing to ignore all the clues and evidence that the setting, characters, plot and situations are entirely imaginary and even highly improbable, if not impossible. A role-playing game takes this even further, with the players themselves willing to fully imagine that they are heroes in a fantasy world on a dangerous and even deadly adventure, facing hazards and foes that are utterly fantastic (and in fact impossible)— “You are there,” as the old books and tv show used to say.

Given the above, whatever “breaks the immersion” is an element that takes the individual out of that imaginary world— as if a prop wall has fallen over in the middle of a Star Trek episode, revealing the various studio personnel running around behind it all. In the examples you give, it’s a bit more subtle than that— more like if Gimli greeted Legolas with “How y’all doin’ up there in Mirkwood way?” (Well, okay, that’s not exactly subtle...) But the idea is that some element of the moment has reminded the player that he is not an elven prince of the woodlands, but a guy from Detroit sitting at a kitchen table rolling dice with his friends and their cousin visiting from Georgia.

To some extent, the loss of immersion is dependent upon the suspension of belief which has already been established by your group as a baseline for the game. If you regularly play with friends of various accents, and your DM uses a baritone voice because he can’t really do anything else, then you will likely not “lose immersion” from these factors— you already have set those bits of actual reality aside to achieve immersion in the first place. So it’s more likely that the “breaking” element will be whatever is new and unusual to you, than anything others necessarily mention here. Different people have different triggers.

KineticDiplomat
2019-06-28, 05:57 PM
Segev has the right of it. While there are no doubt higher and lower orders of immersion, for an RPG the baseline for being immersed is the ability to act as a character in the world without the real world intruding to the point where the role-playing aspect is completely lost. Like watching a movie, it may be utmost fiction and you may be in an air conditioned theater, but you want to be able to focus on the enjoyable story at hand without Keanu Reeves turning to the camera and pointing out he is not, in fact Neo, he is Keanu Reeves and you should call this all hogwash because it's obviously not true.

No one expects players to have graduated Julliard and take up method acting. In general, if asking about immersion, it is enough not to blatantly and openly remind people of the real world. Which is harder than you might think; I believe most people feel in some way shamed and humiliated by acting in character - particularly people without A class social skills.

Hence why you can find a player who loves fantasy, sci-fi, what have you. Who is unrepentantly nerdy. Who really, above all else thinks these worlds and characters are just that cool. And he'll make sure to let everyone know he's real life cool right - the monty python jokes, the 'wacky-go-nutz" playstyles of less mature players. All some desperate way to say "nuh, uh, I'm not actually playing an elf mage. That'd be dorky or a dram nerd or whatever." Which is typically what ends up breaking immersion.

Now, if you enter a purely sophist debate where you peel back layer after layer of meaning and try to poke holes in it, you will inevitably be able to do so far longer than people will answer the question, modify, and refine. And ultimately we will admit we are people sitting at a table at which point you can throw your hands in the air and declare it is all a lie. Though since you inevitably have enjoyed some form of fiction, and apparently enjoy the fantasy setting of games when there are strictly speaking more mechanically well done games, I would ask about how honestly you carry that conviction to real life. None the less, you can grasp the essence of what immersion is if you can think of all the behaviors players do to prove to themselves they aren't playing a role-playing game. if you have those behaviors, you're probably breaking immersion.

Mechalich
2019-06-28, 06:27 PM
I prefer "verisimilitude," but even then I'm not a huge stickler for it. As long as NPCs in the game act in ways I can conceive of intelligent entities acting, and gravity doesn't work backwards unless someone casts a spell, I tend to be fine.

Immersion and verisimilitude are two quite different things. Verisimilitude is a property of a fiction - it's the ability of a fictional framework (whether a world, plotline, character, or other element) to present a convincing appearance of truth to an outside observer. Immersion is, in the context of people relating to fiction, a state of mind. It represents the ability of a person to subsume their awareness of the physical world and enter into an at least partly imagined fictional world.

A world can be highly immersive while being extremely low in verisimilitude, Harry Potter being a very good example in modern popular culture. Conversely a world can have high verisimilitude but lack immersion, often because something that appears truthful may disrupt the flow of storytelling. Translation is a great example - it happens all the time in the real world, but almost never in movies, because it breaks up conversation structure.

Jay R
2019-06-28, 06:56 PM
It's hard to give a clear, unambiguous definition of immersion, because the difference between immersion and non-immersion is neither clear nor unambiguous.

Let me start with an analogy. If I'm watching a movie, immersion is thinking about Thor's hammer or Iron Man's suit. Non-immersion is thinking about special effects. Obviously, making either the suit or the hammer work requires special effects, but I'd rather be thinking, "Oh, that's cool! Captain America can lift the hammer because he's worthy," rather than, "What a seamless effect of the hammer flying from Cap to Thor and back."

Similarly, immersion in D&D is thinking about my gnome illusionist and the illusion he's trying to cast. Non-immersion is thinking about the rules for casting illusions. Obviously, I have to go through the mechanics. But Ideally, I come up with a great idea for an illusion, and I'm thinking about it. The DM asks me what the DC of the illusion is, I quickly look at my character sheet, the DM rolls the die, and we are quickly thinking about how the owlbear saw through the illusion, or how he's fooled by it, rather than the mechanics that made it happen.

That's why I think a Diplomacy roll should happen only after the PC has described what arguments he is using and what he hopes to accomplish. I want to think about how he convinced the king, not what number he had to roll to do it.

To the extent possible, I want the mechanics to be used as quickly as possible, so I can think about a Guisarme of Thundering, or the illusion of a black dragon, rather than BAB or spell DCs.

Since I actually have to use the mechanics to have a story, the crucial immersion skill is not staying immersed, but re-immersing into the fantasy.

Imbalance
2019-06-28, 08:45 PM
I'm immersed right now. I'm playing the internet.

Inchhighguy
2019-06-28, 09:30 PM
I get the feeling that most posters above are not immersion type gamers.....

I think Immersion is three basic things:

1.Not bringing real life to the game. You don't like Player Clyde, so in the game you have your chatacter attack his....only because you don't like the player. Or the classic ''flirt with the pretty woman player"...constantly...in the game.

2.Playing the game mostly as a free form role play and not constantly using the rules to play the boring mechanical game. Role-Playing your character in the game as much as possible, and only breaking into light Out of Character occasinaly.

3.And not Metagaming, really out right exploting or cheating the fact that you know your playing in a fictional reality.

Two and three really go together.


A lot of games have very little immersion, and the game is played as a strightforward mechnical rule based game. In this game ''character 1" can move X, as per the rules, and do X per the rules. Exactly.

Metagaming is knowing that the game will end at 11 pm real time...so ''amazingly" the DM will have the Big Monster show up at about 10:30...and then the player saying ''oh, my character readys and action to do X" to take advantage of that real world knowladge.


A great example of immersion vs mechanincal is he simple pit to jump across:

In the mechanincal game, the DM will either freely give the players ALL the game related mechanincal information (the pit is exactly 10 feet wide, you need a DC of 20 to jump across, etc.) or the players will bully and demand such information from the DM(this player would say something like thier character is such an expert on pits and jumpping that they would actomataicly ''know" hard hard the jump was AND they would know what to do...and that because of this the DM MUST tell the player the mechanical details).

Then, once the player has all the mechnicnal details, the player plays the mechanincal game: They want thier character to do X, so they look through the rules to find a way to do exactly X. So a player might have the character use a spell or skill or ability to exactly ''get a 20" or over to beat the set DC, to jump across the pit.

In the immersion game, the DM will only describe things TO THE CHARACTER ''in game", and will avoid any and all OOC rules or mechanincs unless needed. So the DM would say ''your character see a wide pit, at least as wide as your character is tall..and a couple more feet. The immersed player will stay in character as thier character, and again not bother with rules or mechanics, and simply say ''A pit? Bjorn the Brave will get a running start and attempt to leap across. The DM would ask for a roll/check(using the rules and mechanincs for a split second), and then describe the result. In the most pure immersion, the player does not even need to worry about or even know the rules...the DM will take care of the behind the screen.

NOt, please don't take anything above as ''one way is better". They are just diffrent.

NichG
2019-06-29, 02:41 AM
Immersion and metagaming have a funny relationship for me. One of the most immersed experiences I had with a tabletop game was in a setting/system that took the constraints of 'this is a tabletop RPG' and not only explained them within the fiction, but allowed those factors to be interactive and actually part of how to understand and take control of the characters' situation. On the other hand, something like drown healing or other meta-constraints like 'the PCs have to always go everywhere together' does break immersion for me.

What I mean by immersion is the feeling of being able to react in the moment to the world presented to me as if that situation were actually real and I, as my character, were actually in it. That's opposed to acting as if I were controlling my character, who is in it while I was separate and not. So being able to feel that it's not just my character acting afraid because I'm deciding for them to do so, but that 'yeah, this is scary', and such.

So things that are presented in a way that is in conflict with how they will actually proceed tend to break immersion for me. If the fiction and the metagame are in conflict with each-other, then metagaming can break immersion. But if the fiction embraces the metagame as an inevitable truth about the world and plays into it, then metagaming doesn't actually break immersion for me, or could even enhance it. But for that to work, the way that the fiction embraces the metagame has to make sense for the fiction itself - if its default fantasy world, but there's a 'god' called the 'DM' for unknown reasons who 'sets arbitrary rules just because' then even if that's acknowledging the metagame, its doing so in a way that makes the default fantasy world obviously a false image. Whereas, if the twist is that the campaign takes place in the characters' shared afterlife and all of the weirdness of the metagame is essentially external interference trying to guide them out of a torment that the characters' souls have imposed on themselves, or cement them deeper, then somehow that sounds more like something that would let me be immersed.

Other peoples' characters tend not to have nearly as much effect on my immersion as how the DM portrays things. If talking to the baker next door and talking to the judge of the courts and talking to the 10000 year old deity who shaped a continent all feel like just talking to palette swapped versions of a similar set of life experiences for example, then that can sort of sour things.

Kaptin Keen
2019-06-29, 02:52 AM
I don't even like immersion. I like to play the game like a game - not like a theatrical performance. Even worse, I don't like playing with anyone (IRL at least) who get's into the actual role-play too deeply. There was this one guy who was just amazingly insistent on everyone around the table knowing and relating to his characters angry, lesbian, latino ex-cop background - made me quit the group, actually, because I just didn't care about his backstory. Or mine, or anyone else's for that matter.

But what is immersion? Well, it could be that guy. He had an enormously detailed backstory - unpleasant too, drugs and abuse and beatings and rape - fitting, honestly, quite well with the personality he had assumed for her. He was deeply immersed. It just isn't my kind of thing.

Tajerio
2019-06-29, 02:56 AM
Immersion and verisimilitude are two quite different things. Verisimilitude is a property of a fiction - it's the ability of a fictional framework (whether a world, plotline, character, or other element) to present a convincing appearance of truth to an outside observer. Immersion is, in the context of people relating to fiction, a state of mind. It represents the ability of a person to subsume their awareness of the physical world and enter into an at least partly imagined fictional world.

A world can be highly immersive while being extremely low in verisimilitude, Harry Potter being a very good example in modern popular culture. Conversely a world can have high verisimilitude but lack immersion, often because something that appears truthful may disrupt the flow of storytelling. Translation is a great example - it happens all the time in the real world, but almost never in movies, because it breaks up conversation structure.

Fair enough. A better phrasing of my point would have been that the extremely limited amount of verisimilitude I require is an absolute precondition for the similarly limited amount of immersion I experience, on the rare occasions I do experience it.

MoiMagnus
2019-06-29, 03:34 AM
Over the last few months, in these forums I have read people talk about this thing called immersion. People say things like:
- People playing characters of the other gender breaks my immersion.
- Things that remind me that we're playing a game break my immersion.
- Talking about the game at a metagame level breaks my immersion.
But the experience they seem to refer by "immersion" eludes me.

The closest I can get to this immersion, I think, is what I'd call a state of focus on the game to the exclusion of most other things. That is, there is an experience in which I am so absorbed in the game that I hardly pay attention to things outside of the game.

In this experience, things that would "break my immersion", would be things that claim my focus outside of the game. So it would be stuff like receiving a phone call, someone coming and turning on the TV or asking what we want for supper, even a long-winded discussion about rules. However, as soon as the distraction disappears I can focus back on the game without much trouble. So I wouldn't really understand people's extreme aversion to breaking immersion. Things like rolling dice, talking at the metagame level, or even stopping the game to discuss how to go about a particular scene are examples of things that wouldn't divert my focus and therefore wouldn't "break my immersion."

So, in order to better understand what people mean by "immersion," I'd like you to describe how you experience it, what sort of things do and do not break it, and the relationship between these things and immersion.

Thanks in advance for your input.

A lot of good answer before, but here are my 2 cents.

Immersion is a lot things mixed up, because everybody care about different things in different intensities.
I would personally split immersion in those different points:

1) The mood. For example, if you're playing a dark horror game, and you see a looney toon, it will feel out of place. It just does not match the mood around the table. That's like saying a joke at a funeral, it might fall flat, and peoples might even "hate" it because it interferes with the emotion they were experiencing. [Note that well done, you can change the mood instead of breaking it]

2) The identification/bleed. If is how much the character you're playing feel like "yourself", and how much their emotional state "bleed" to your emotional state. Different peoples have more of less ease to identify with peoples of different gender, or different personality than them, or different informations level than them.

3) The theatrical game. Simultaneously to you "tabletop RPG", you might be playing a "role playing game" (in its original meaning). As every game, it has rules, which are here implicit, fuzzy, and dependent on each table. If you break those rules, you're breaking the "theatrical game".

4) The internal consistency/suspension of disbelief. Universes have rules. Having "soft and changing" rules in not a problem (if well done), but presenting something as an "hard rule" and latter making something inconsistent with it is. It break the mental image of "how the world works" of your players, and prevent them to guess "what will reasonably happen if I do this action?".


Now, on the subject of metagaming (and "out-of-the-game" behaviours):

Metagaming breaks the mood, unless the mood is a "gamer mood" (metagaming is at the core of this mood). Some tables have no problem changing mood back and forth between a "gamer mood" and another mood, but it need to be clearly done.
Metagaming breaks the identification of peoples that have problems "thinking without this information". If you (the player) know a secret of another character, that your character do not know, then it might be more difficult to identify with him/her. Or maybe you're good as "forgetting" informations and you have no problem with it. EDIT: moreover, the more time you take metagaming, the less time you take trying to immerse in the character, to the less you identify with it.
Some theatrical styles hate meta. Other love breaking the 4th wall.
Metagaming can improve suspension of disbelieve, as it allows for the DM to communicate "how the universe works" without having to rely on indirect communication that might be misunderstood.

MrSandman
2019-06-29, 03:42 AM
So, it seems from what most of you are saying that we could define immersion as a subjective experience of engagement with and focus on the game in which one feels part of the fantasy world portrayed. Or something along those lines, I'm not particularly concerned with coming up with a perfect definition, but I think we all can agree it's a subjective experience, it relates to being engaged with the game and it tends to shift the focus from the self to the imaginary world.

I find interesting that most people seem to derive a sense of immersion from two things:

1) A certain coherence and internal consistency in the imaginary world. Things that make the fantasy seem unreal/arbitrary tend to work against the feel of immersion.

2) A certain neglect for things outside of the imaginary world. That which reminds you of the external reality breaks the illusion of being immersed.
2b) Including those elements which help in creating and shaping the imaginary world, such as game rules, metagame information and other such things.

I have to say that 1) resonates with my experience a lot more than 2) (and especially 2b), which I have hardly experienced as a hindrance). But hey, that's just my subjective experience.

Feel free to keep bringing your points and expand or challenge my conclusions so far. But this has been an enriching discussion. Thanks for that.

Inchhighguy
2019-06-29, 12:31 PM
I find interesting that most people seem to derive a sense of immersion from two things:

1) A certain coherence and internal consistency in the imaginary world. Things that make the fantasy seem unreal/arbitrary tend to work against the feel of immersion.

As an Immersive Gamer, I think very, very few immersive gamers care about this. The whole coherence and internal consistency of a game world is a thing, but it's not ''immersion". Even more so Immersion is Rules Lite type play......and the players that care about coherence and internal consistency are the hard core rule gamers.

After all...how do you make fantasy feel unreal?




2) A certain neglect for things outside of the imaginary world. That which reminds you of the external reality breaks the illusion of being immersed.
2b) Including those elements which help in creating and shaping the imaginary world, such as game rules, metagame information and other such things.


Defentaitly.

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-29, 01:11 PM
As an Immersive Gamer, I think very, very few immersive gamers care about this. The whole coherence and internal consistency of a game world is a thing, but it's not ''immersion". Even more so Immersion is Rules Lite type play......and the players that care about coherence and internal consistency are the hard core rule gamers.

After all...how do you make fantasy feel unreal?


Inconsistency and incoherence and contradiction in the setting... one of the fastest ways to knock me out of being engrossed in the character-level goings on (that is, "ruin my immersion").

Mechalich
2019-06-29, 03:25 PM
After all...how do you make fantasy feel unreal?

I think you're confusing traditional fantasy, which tends to rely upon detail (or at least borrowing detail through use of classic archetypes like in LotR or Star Wars) and verisimilitude in order to support drama, with Magical Realism, in which things just happen. Magical realism is inherently unreal, and thereby always fantastical, even if there are no overt fantasy elements (in something like Twin Peaks, for example), and largely disregards any idea of verisimilitude as desirable. It is possible, and in fact may even be useful, to play tabletop RPGs as magical realism rather than high fantasy. There are certainly games and settings that are pretty much explicitly this. Planescape, for instance, approaches D&D from what is essentially a magical realism perspective and makes no apologies for being totally gonzo. However, this is uncommon, as most RPGs and the settings within them at least pretend to have setting rules that strongly hold and generally hew very hard to the 'Like Reality Unless Noted' trope. This isn't surprising, since embracing the weird and glorious surrealist glory of magical realism requires a particular mindset at a table and a GM willing to roll with ever changing concepts. it has high trust barriers to entry to work well, even though it may often be very low immersion. This is the same sort of barrier required for high immersion games, even though those might be firmly grounded and very gritty.

Inchhighguy
2019-06-29, 05:27 PM
I think you're confusing traditional fantasy, which tends to rely upon detail (or at least borrowing detail through use of classic archetypes like in LotR or Star Wars) and verisimilitude in order to support drama, with Magical Realism, in which things just happen.

I'm not sure we are talking about the same thing.

Most players that complain about a certain coherence and internal consistency in the imaginary world fall into two big groups:

The Rule Watchers-Their idea of fun in to crazy watch the DM for any rule mistakes or slip ups...or, of course, anything ''against" the rules.

The World Watchers-This player asks for a huge ''handout" that details EVERYTHING possible in the world. Then much like the above they have fun watching if the DM uses anything not in the handout.

Most of the rest are just mosly disruptive types.

Again, unless you are taking about something else.

Though how do you say ''like reality...but with tech/magic/fantasy/fiction" with any sort of meaning? How do you say ''oh except the 1,000 things"..and list them somehow?

Mechalich
2019-06-29, 06:21 PM
Though how do you say ''like reality...but with tech/magic/fantasy/fiction" with any sort of meaning? How do you say ''oh except the 1,000 things"..and list them somehow?

Most fantasy settings have a discrete set of systems in play, usually no more than a handful, often only one. Those systems are usually positioned as explicitly violating the laws of physics in discrete ways, such that when the powers are not active everything is otherwise assumed to function as it does in normal reality. Depending on how prevalent magic is, most people in a given setting might function under otherwise normal constraints the overwhelming majority of the time. For example, in the Wheel of Time, almost everything fantastical can be traced to the One Power (the few other abilities are much more marginal), but when no one is actively channeling anything, or no artifacts are in use, the universe operates according to the same physical laws that reality does. Since most people in that world have very little contact with the One Power because Channelers are quite rare (at least at the beginning of the storyline) their lives correspond in almost all the important ways with ordinary medieval peasants or urban dwellers.

In general this is by far the most common world-building framework for fantasy: the author or authors formulate a generic medieval world and then add in permutations according to whatever mystic elements they choose to include. Now this does run into problems if you include too much and that's why D&D settings, which are overstuffed fantasy kitchen sinks, are incoherent babble and fundamentally do not work (which is why Planescape eventually said 'screw it' and embraced magical realism).

High technology settings are different, since technology is, by its very nature, far more pervasive than magic or superpowers. However, there are actually very few truly high tech RPG settings (Star Wars, Warhammer 40K, and their kin are space fantasies wherein technology is deployed as magic its implications are largely deliberately overlooked) and those that do embrace their concepts - like Eclipse Phase - offer serious barriers to actually conducting gameplay because players and GMs will regularly struggle to get a handle on how different life is like for citizens in any sort of detailed vision of the future.

Inchhighguy
2019-06-29, 06:37 PM
Most fantasy settings have a discrete set of systems in play, usually no more than a handful, often only one.

The thing is here your talking about things way beyond Immersion.

That there are very low fantasy/tech/fiction games made for the people that want a very ''just like real life...with one or two offical set twists'' really is a whole other topic.

The other settings, like D&D or any Star Wars or Star Trek based setting really do have an ''anything goes" clause bulit right into the game.

But again, this is not really ''immersion" as it's more ''some players don't like supprises" or even more ''some players don't like things they can't immedeatly explain".

And the rest you are talking about is more world bulding.

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-29, 07:46 PM
The thing is here your talking about things way beyond Immersion.

That there are very low fantasy/tech/fiction games made for the people that want a very ''just like real life...with one or two offical set twists'' really is a whole other topic.

The other settings, like D&D or any Star Wars or Star Trek based setting really do have an ''anything goes" clause bulit right into the game.

But again, this is not really ''immersion" as it's more ''some players don't like supprises" or even more ''some players don't like things they can't immedeatly explain".

And the rest you are talking about is more world bulding.


What you mean here is that for you it has nothing to do with immersion.

For others, "anything goes" gonzo settings that barrage them with repeated inconsistency and incoherence and contradiction are actively detrimental to their immersion.

You can keep blowing it off as supposedly "not liking surprises" or being "rules-based", but that doesn't make your dismissals any more true.

Inchhighguy
2019-06-29, 08:04 PM
What you mean here is that for you it has nothing to do with immersion.

For others, "anything goes" gonzo settings that barrage them with repeated inconsistency and incoherence and contradiction are actively detrimental to their immersion.

You can keep blowing it off as supposedly "not liking surprises" or being "rules-based", but that doesn't make your dismissals any more true.

Immersion is deep role playing without worring about rules, mechanincs and other such metagame stuff.

It does seem like you are talking about something else. Your talking about the ''agreement'' that everyone play a sepicific type of game that you and everyone else in the group approve of. That is not ''immersion".

Unless your just saying "repeated inconsistency and incoherence and contradiction" is just something that happens in the game you don't like.

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-29, 08:07 PM
Immersion is deep role playing without worring about rules, mechanincs and other such metagame stuff.

Immersion is subjective. Yours is just one understanding, on experience, of the thing.

Other people experience it differently, and their experience of it is fostered or hindered by different things than yours is.

As for the rest, you need to stop telling other people what they mean and what they're thinking/feeling.

Inchhighguy
2019-06-29, 08:16 PM
Immersion is subjective. Yours is just one understanding, on experience, of the thing.

Other people experience it differently, and their experience of it is fostered or hindered by different things than yours is.

As for the rest, you need to stop telling other people what they mean and what they're thinking/feeling.

Um, sure ''everything is subjective" so no two people can EVER talk (or post) about anything ever.

But sure I'm ONLY talking about Role Playing Immersion, where the players all most totaly role play in character for the whole game and only occasinaly use rules and mechanincs when needed, and then only breifly.

You are talking about Max Immersion(or whatever name you'd like to give it)....that is...well, something else. It's your immersion, so you need to define it.

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-29, 08:24 PM
Um, sure ''everything is subjective" so no two people can EVER talk (or post) about anything ever.

But sure I'm ONLY talking about Role Playing Immersion, where the players all most totaly role play in character for the whole game and only occasinaly use rules and mechanincs when needed, and then only breifly.

That's your subjective experience of a purely experiential phenomenon. Your definition is counter to several other definitions given by other gamers on this thread based on their own internal experience of the mental state.

We're not talking about something objective that can be given a true/false definition.

You're conflating the activity that creates the experience for you -- "the players all most totaly role play in character for the whole game and only occasinaly use rules and mechanincs when needed, and then only breifly" -- with the experience itself.

Inchhighguy
2019-06-29, 08:40 PM
That's your subjective experience of a purely experiential phenomenon. Your definition is counter to several other definitions given by other gamers on this thread based on their own internal experience of the mental state.

We're not talking about something objective that can be given a true/false definition.

You're conflating the activity that creates the experience for you -- "the players all most totaly role play in character for the whole game and only occasinaly use rules and mechanincs when needed, and then only breifly" -- with the experience itself.

Um, ok?

I posted my answer to what is immersion, and I'm out.

Mechalich
2019-06-29, 09:28 PM
That there are very low fantasy/tech/fiction games made for the people that want a very ''just like real life...with one or two offical set twists'' really is a whole other topic.

The VtM, which is only the second most popular RPG ever, is exactly this (or at least started this way, it got out of hand after a while), and was specifically intended to foster a higher immersion experience than D&D and it's various imitators. It even managed to succeed, in a sense, at least as far as the LARP world went.

D&D, by contrast, was never intended to be a particularly high immersion game, growing out of wargames as it did and with the initial expectation that characters were unlikely to survive more than a few sessions. D&D is generally played at very low immersion levels, and this influence is all over the material (even the novels often got rather campy) and written material often reflects this. Though not always, in particular, later era 2e AD&D got overly in depth at many points, especially in many of its little read passion project obscure splatbooks, but considering said splatbooks drove TSR to bankruptcy, I think that says something about the intent of the playerbase.

Immersion is generally difficult to produce in a collaborative setting like tabletop role-playing, because you need multiple people to agree on parameters and interpretations, as opposed to narrative works were you're only trying to immerse one person, since no matter how massive your audience everyone is experiencing the work primarily on their own. This is one of the reasons why improv acting - which is essentially freeform roleplaying - tends to focus on comedy, the format is simply ill-suited to hitting dramatic beats. We can see this in video games as well, the deepest and most complex dramatic narratives are always found in single-player games, and even then are often forced to use scripted events and/or cutscenes to make them work and to prevent the player from screwing them up, which is why games like Fallout have invincible NPCs. As a result, it's debatable whether trying to promote immersion is even a worthwhile goal in most tabletop game systems.

Segev
2019-06-29, 09:32 PM
It's not even "about" Role Playing. I mean, don't get me wrong: RP can contribute to immersion. But you can be immersed in anything, not just an RPG. In terms of tabletop gaming - particularly RPGs - immersion tends to be about being able to take the game seriously, on whatever level you care about it.

I mean, you can be immersed in a game of chess, for crying out loud. But if you keep having more interesting conversations come up, or somebody spends too much effort giving "character" and "story" to the pieces based on their names, moves, and actions, it can take you right out of the strategy element and into an exasperated state of frustration.

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-29, 09:47 PM
Um, ok?

I posted my answer to what is immersion, and I'm out.

That was fine, until you started telling other people that their own experience of immersion was "wrong".

Cluedrew
2019-06-30, 08:56 AM
"immersion" is "being completely surrounded (in all 3{4?} Dimensions)" in our physical world, it exists as a state for solid objects to be in relation to liquids.

Transposing into mental, we can use the following analogy: our perception is that solid object, and the game world has replaced the liquid of the physical world.I like this language/metaphor analysis, it is the type of thing I do. I got slightly different answers when I did though.

The best way I have to describe immersion is emotional engagement. A connection across the fiction that you feel like it is real. Which I don't mean you forget the rules or that you are sitting around a table, but that you get emotionally invested. You know you start referring to your character as "I" and in-character decisions start flowing more naturally. This part is pretty standard if worded differently. The part I seem to disagree with a lot of people on is it doesn't run counter to meta-gaming or mechanical engagement. You can be engaged with any part of the game and although immersion refers to engagement with the fiction level, I don't think you have to stopped being engaged with the fiction to engage with the rules or vice versa, not in a well designed system at least.

On the other hand I also feel immersion is one of those buzz words people though out when they can't quite put their finger on what it is (or can't be bother to figure it out).

Jay R
2019-07-01, 08:10 AM
Getting back to the topic as brought up and defined by the original question:


The closest I can get to this immersion, I think, is what I'd call a state of focus on the game to the exclusion of most other things. That is, there is an experience in which I am so absorbed in the game that I hardly pay attention to things outside of the game.

I think that's a good definition for immersion in general. But we aren't necessarily going to agree on what aspects we want to be absorbed in and what aspects are distractions

Three days before the game, I can be deeply immersed in the mechanics of the game, trying to find the ideal build to match the idea of a new PC I'm designing. The morning before the game, I might be deeply immersed in setting up my living room for the game. These are both "a state of focus on the game to the exclusion of most other things."

But I think most people are thinking about immersion in the game itself, during play.


So, in order to better understand what people mean by "immersion," I'd like you to describe how you experience it, what sort of things do and do not break it, and the relationship between these things and immersion.

For me, immersion is thinking about my gnome illusionist, with the mechanics merely tools to run that simulation. [This can be a focus on the character, or the tactics, or the locals, or the quest, but I feel immersed in the game when I'm imagining being a fantasy character rather than a gamer. Certainly I'm rolling dice, and comparing rolls to opponents' AC or DCs of saving throw, so the ideal of immersion is to be able to do those sufficiently automatically that I can get right back to imagining the fantasy situation, not the details of the simulation.

[In my Mathematical Simulations class, the professor pointed out that if the simulation doesn't make you think of the action being simulated, then you aren't really simulating it.]

Other people might be immersed in the look of the miniatures, and be knocked out of it whenever you don't have the right figure and use something else. Another player might be immersed in the tactical situation, while yet another is immersed in the character role.

In any case, it is usually impossible to stay focused that deeply for that long, when surrounded by lots of stimuli, so the most important tool for immersion isn't staying there, but getting back there quickly and easily.

Talakeal
2019-07-01, 09:42 AM
Immersion isn't real.

Maybe not for you, but I can certainly verify that it is a real experience.

The best example is probably when someone is watching a movie, and if they are truly immersed in it, they are no longer aware that they are sitting in a theatre looking at a screen, but rather simply watching the events of the film unfold as if they were directly observing them.
This is really hard if you have a crying baby sitting next to you, or the theatre forgot to turn down the house lights, or if your seatback is broken, because these keep taking your mind out of the filmand back into the theatre.

RedMage125
2019-07-01, 04:37 PM
To me, immersion is when the players are into the game and immersed in the narrative. Sometimes immersion can be evidenced when they get really into what their character is doing or have intuitive responses to in-game information, reacting as if it were real.

Example: I had one of my players put together clues, all gathered from in-game information, to determine that the Alliance they were working for had a traitor in their midst. Short version is, they'd been sent to a dungeon to uncover an artifact that was supposed to aid the Alliance, fought through some diabolists in the dungeon to get it, and when the Alliance used it, the effect was terrible, and a huge loss for the Alliance. Kind of a downer end of the session, but as we packed up and started leaving, he started piecing together things from one of the diabolist's journals from two weeks before...realized that the artifact had worked as intended, and that the entire group of diabolists was basically meat for the grinder, and the whole thing had been a set-up. Watching the light of realization dawn in his eyes, as he pieced together clues that were only dropped off-handedly in a journal they had read in a previous session was amazing for me, as a DM. I really felt like at least one of my players had connected with my world as was thinking like an actual denizen of it.

Sometimes, there are behaviors at the table that "break immersion". One thing I have noticed that does this is discussion of hit point totals, especially in combat. To that end, I use the "bloodied" condition from 4e (50% or less of max hp). Mind you, I also let players know when a monster is bloodied as well, and it is the only thing I will tell them about it's status. I also try to insert some narration for hp loss when thematically or cinematically appropriate. But generally, above 50%, an individual has not taken much in the way of physical damage. There may have been narrow misses, strikes against armor/shield, or glancing blows off of scales or hide. At 50%, some wear is starting to show, so maybe some light scrapes, bruises or cuts. One exception is that I always narrate a crit as some kind of "meat strike". Also, certain hits demand at least minor contact, such as a venomous creature or poisoned weapon. Now, how this is pursuant to immersion is that when a cleric/druid/bard's player looks around the table and says "who needs healing?", I ask that my players do not give hp totals. Things like "I was bloodied 2 hits ago, I am not okay" is fine. As is "I'm not bloodied yet, but I'm getting there", or "I'm bloodied, but I'll be okay". These are acceptable narrative answers. Because the cleric is only going to be able to tell if someone is obviously injured.

That I do in the name of keeping immersion. I don't punish players if they discuss hp totals in combat, they just get the Stern Look of DM Disapproval +2. Out of combat, I relax that standard, because that's the time for dealing with minor injuries and fatigue.

Slipperychicken
2019-07-02, 11:47 AM
I consider immersion to be a combination of engagement, emotional investment, and suspension-of-disbelief.

Some things which damage it for me

Engaging directly with game-mechanics instead of in-universe constructs (i.e. "I roll perception" instead of "I examine my surroundings"). Game mechanics should support the resolution of in-universe actions and constructs, not replace them entirely. That said you can still use them to inform the players' understanding of the world and its happenings. "The pit being 15 feet across makes it DC 20 for jumping" tells the player that his character is unlikely to make it across were he to simply jump it unassisted. Likewise "the fire seared the flesh about your forearms and cost you twenty hit points" tells the player precisely how injurious the fire was.
Making character choices based entirely on narrative tropes, metagame currency, or GM action, rather than plausible in-universe observations (i.e. "we can take this obviously suicidal action, the GM won't kill us for it, let's go!" or "ehh I have six edge, I can dodge bullets for a bit"). This is pretty easily resolved by having characters who are perennial risk-takers, or who simply feel overly confident in that moment, or whose players have contrived some in-character reason for the behavior.
Egregious metagaming; being suspicious of party members because they described doing something sketchy OOC and not IC
Characters and actions which do not fit the game-world, genre, or tone of the game.
Broadly speaking, violating the game-world's internal consistency.
Poor or inconsistent characterization. I myself am often guilty of forgetting a character trait or rule when mentally exhausted, and breaking it, which results in behavior which is totally inconsistent or unbelievable.


That said, simply talking about game-mechanics out of character is fine. Same deal with being reminded that the game isn't real. I can step out of the game for a moment, look up rules or discuss balance or eat some snacks, and come back in. I don't need to literally fool myself into thinking that I'm in the game-world, I just need to feel that it's internally consistent and somewhat believable.

Particle_Man
2019-07-02, 11:59 AM
If you act like Tom Hanks’ character in Mazes and Monstets that is too much immersion. :smalleek:

MrSandman
2019-07-02, 12:21 PM
You said several good things. There are two that I'd like to pursue a bit further (and this is open to Slipperychicken and everyone who holds similar views.)



Engaging directly with game-mechanics instead of in-universe constructs (i.e. "I roll perception" instead of "I examine my surroundings"). Game mechanics should support the resolution of in-universe actions and constructs, not replace them entirely. That said you can still use them to inform the players' understanding of the world and its happenings. "The pit being 15 feet across makes it DC 20 for jumping" tells the player that his character is unlikely to make it across were he to simply jump it unassisted. Likewise "the fire seared the flesh about your forearms and cost you twenty hit points" tells the player precisely how injurious the fire was.

From what you say, it seems that you're okay if description of game mechanics and description of the imagined world go together. Is that so?

If so, would a game where the mechanics are named to sound more "immersive" (for lack of a better term) help in that regard? That is, would you prefer a game that had the skill "examine one's surroundings"?



Making character choices based entirely on narrative tropes, metagame currency, or GM action, rather than plausible in-universe observations (i.e. "we can take this obviously suicidal action, the GM won't kill us for it, let's go!" or "ehh I have six edge, I can dodge bullets for a bit"). This is pretty easily resolved by having characters who are perennial risk-takers, or who simply feel overly confident in that moment, or whose players have contrived some in-character reason for the behavior.

How about when this reason is clearly an excuse to disguise metagaming? (And I mean when you can clearly see that the in-character reason is an afterthought to justify an action taken by metagame reasons)

What about when the game forces you to narratively justify your spending of metagame currency? (e.g. My character has the aspect "Been to all corners of Equestria", so it makes sense that she's been here before and knows somepony in town. She probably passed through a few moons ago and, although she was just visiting, she befriended the inkeeper. Here's my fate point)

Max_Killjoy
2019-07-02, 12:41 PM
On the mechanics, that's one of the reasons I want the mechanics to be "in sync" with the fiction layer. The more I have to stop and translate between mechanics and fiction that don't tell me the same thing, that don't work the same way, the less I can get engrossed in what's going on with the characters inside the fictional world.


("Fiction", not "story".)

Cluedrew
2019-07-02, 01:04 PM
From what you say, it seems that you're okay if description of game mechanics and description of the imagined world go together. Is that so?That is in fact the ideal. When in-world and out-of-world reasons for things line up (really simple example, a tough person having lots of HP) then engaging with one brings you closer to the other. The Stormwind Fallacy (is that what the mechanics vs. narrative effect is called right?) is not only wrong, but inverted that energy put to one area improves both and then the game as a whole.


How about when this reason is clearly an excuse to disguise metagaming? (And I mean when you can clearly see that the in-character reason is an afterthought to justify an action taken by metagame reasons)Well here is the thing: I don't want people to match stupid out-of-character choices either. Its called "My Guy", doing what your character would do even when it hurts the campaign over all. In that case, yes think of a flimsy excuse over doing something that is decidedly un-fun. But usually I should hope the in-character decision is fun and then it becomes the right choice.


("Fiction", not "story".)What is the difference? Is this fallout from all those complaints you have about people saying "it makes a better story" while actually only helping one scene while putting holes into the foundation of the rest of the story?

Max_Killjoy
2019-07-02, 01:20 PM
What is the difference? Is this fallout from all those complaints you have about people saying "it makes a better story" while actually only helping one scene while putting holes into the foundation of the rest of the story?


This has been gone over before, so I'll keep it quick and hopefully we can avoid derailing.

"Fiction layer" -- the setting, the characters, the NPCs, the strange species and fantastic monsters and the spaceships and alien worlds and so on, distinct from any planned plot, any deliberate narrative, or adherence to any narrative tropes.

Ironically, I only put the "fiction, not story" parenthetical there so that we could avoid any confusion or derailing. E: too often, when I use the term "fiction layer", there's a debate about story vs not story, which everyone hates... the debate, not the story, so I wanted to avoid that.

RedMage125
2019-07-02, 02:40 PM
On the mechanics, that's one of the reasons I want the mechanics to be "in sync" with the fiction layer. The more I have to stop and translate between mechanics and fiction that don't tell me the same thing, that don't work the same way, the less I can get engrossed in what's going on with the characters inside the fictional world.


I see why you feel that way, but for a game designed to accomodate a lot of people's play styles and preferences, it works to have the fiction layer be ephemeral and malleable enough that several different ways of narrative following the mechanics can exist. So the "fiction layer" can be whatever is appropriate for that situation, rather than being forced to only be one, concrete thing. The synchronicity between mechanics and fiction layer is up to the individual table or DM. Concrete bi-directionality is actually restrictive, then, in that regard.

Example: Warduke hits a PC with his sword. He beats their AC, and does 14 damage. How this is narrated in the fiction layer depends on a number of factors, from what the PC in question is wearing as far as armor, to what their HP total is, both before and after. So he hits a level 12 S&B Paladin in full plate, who is at learly full HP. 14 HP is an almost insignificant, his ability to continue fighting has not been diminished. It could be narrated that the blow struck the Paladin's shield, and he felt the shock from it, but is otherwise not injured. The Rogue, wearing leather armor, was already at 45/70 HP before the hit, now she's at 31/70. She's below 50% of her max. The narration works as a near-miss. She was only grazed by the attack, but now has a shallow bleeding cut on her upper arm. The druid, wearing Hide armor, was really beat up before Warduke hit him. He was at 12/72 HP before the hit. Since it drops him to 0, it was a solid blow. Narratively, Warduke's sword bites into his side, blood flows from the wound and from the druid's mouth. He collapses, and will need healing immediately.

This method is supported by 5e's PHB, page 197:"Dungeon Masters describe the loss of hit points in different ways. When your current hit point total is half or more of your hit point maximum, you typically show no signs of injury. When you drop below half your hit point maximum, you show signs of wear, such as cuts and bruises. An attack that reduces you to 0 hit points strikes you directly, leaving a bleeding injury or other trauma, or it simply knocks you unconscious."

Having some kind of concrete, bi-directional synchronicity between the mechanics and the fiction layer (in this example, saying "hit point loss always means X narratively"), means that it isn't free to be narrated in dozens of ways. Which would be like saying "I don't want individual DMs to be able to do this. I want a 'right answer' to exist."

The fiction layer absolutely must follow the mechanics. Otherwise, every archer would one-shot monsters by well-placed shots into the target's eye simply describing their shot as such. No PC would ever miss an attack. The fiction layer MUST follow the mechanics in order to avoid the game becoming 5-year old playing Cops and Robbers:
Kid1: I shot you, you're dead.
Kid2: Nuh-uh, you missed, I just shot you.
Kid 1: You just got my in my arm, I'm not dead.

To bring it back to the topic: Immersion comes from the fiction layer, on that we agree. One of the greatest things about this game is that the fiction layer is so malleable in regards to the mechanics. When we, as DMs, can craft the fiction layer well, we aid the players' immersion into that layer, and thus the game world itself.

Slipperychicken
2019-07-02, 03:01 PM
From what you say, it seems that you're okay if description of game mechanics and description of the imagined world go together. Is that so?

If so, would a game where the mechanics are named to sound more "immersive" (for lack of a better term) help in that regard? That is, would you prefer a game that had the skill "examine one's surroundings"?

What matters to me is that interactions within the universe are being described in play, regardless of how much game-jargon is involved. Players could even say "I want to look around for anything of interest, which should trigger a perception check. This place seems like a cave, so would my racial bonus add to that?". That doesn't break immersion for me, because even though someone's invoking game-rules and keywords it's still fairly clear what's happening in the world: the PC is searching his surroundings for anything of interest.

Basically it's the difference between "I beseech the king for funds and equipment to aid our quest" and "I roll diplomacy on the king". Tying game-rules closer to specific in-universe events and circumstances is certainly a good direction to tackle it from, but I consider it primarily a matter of roleplaying etiquette.



How about when this reason is clearly an excuse to disguise metagaming? (And I mean when you can clearly see that the in-character reason is an afterthought to justify an action taken by metagame reasons)

What about when the game forces you to narratively justify your spending of metagame currency? (e.g. My character has the aspect "Been to all corners of Equestria", so it makes sense that she's been here before and knows somepony in town. She probably passed through a few moons ago and, although she was just visiting, she befriended the inkeeper. Here's my fate point)

It's not the worst type of metagaming ever. If it's really egregious, then it can hurt immersion, but I don't recall specific cases where it was quite that terrible. As long as they're doing something basically consistent with the character, world, or genre, then it's going to be good enough for me.

The example you mentioned is quite immersion-friendly. Ultimately it does fall on the people at the table to dress up their use of flexible rules-constructs with appropriate lore, though a good ruleset will either come with some pre-configured lore or nudge roleplayers in that direction.

Cluedrew
2019-07-02, 04:53 PM
Ironically, I only put the "fiction, not story" parenthetical there so that we could avoid any confusion or derailing.Ironic indeed especially since I still don't get what the difference is. I've got a couple ideas but we can come back to this topic another time.

woweedd
2019-07-02, 08:05 PM
Um, sure ''everything is subjective" so no two people can EVER talk (or post) about anything ever.

But sure I'm ONLY talking about Role Playing Immersion, where the players all most totaly role play in character for the whole game and only occasinaly use rules and mechanincs when needed, and then only breifly.

You are talking about Max Immersion(or whatever name you'd like to give it)....that is...well, something else. It's your immersion, so you need to define it.
You know, if you're into that...Why not freeform RP? The lowest amount of rules is none.

Psyren
2019-07-03, 10:13 AM
Guess I probably should have stuck around to answer some questions:


How does the female thing change or stay the same when you GM? Or when another GM portrays male characters with a female voice?

I'd personally prefer they don't try to do falsetto or anything like that, I'm fine visualizing the character as a different gender than the player without any affects (especially ill-fitting or stereotypical ones.)


So what sorts of things break immersion, then? Or do they? I don't see anything in your definition that would lead to the conclusion that somethings do break it.

As mentioned, this is highly subjective - the boundary of the Circle for each player is going to be specific to them. The best a game designer can do (which is the GM in this case) is to try to create conditions that foster it, like the ones in the video. Some players need a visual (like minis, a map, or even just character and monster portraits) while some can achieve that headspace purely using theater of the mind. Others get there via sound, whether that is a background track from Tabletop Audio or a jaunty medieval tune, or even something as small as the GM using different voices/accents for different NPCs. The more of these you hit in a given campaign, the more likely that you'll get everyone inside, but if you're looking for some kind of objective standard or consensu then you're probably going to be disappointed.

MrSandman
2019-07-03, 01:09 PM
...if you're looking for some kind of objective standard or consensu then you're probably going to be disappointed.

Actually, I couldn't care less about supposedly objective standards for this topic. What I'm interested on is personal experiences and approaches.

Psyren
2019-07-03, 08:46 PM
Actually, I couldn't care less about supposedly objective standards for this topic. What I'm interested on is personal experiences and approaches.

That's good, because there isn't one :smalltongue: But yeah, if it's personal approaches you want, there's plenty here!

For me, the threshold is pretty low; I don't need music, nobody has to use accents, I don't even need physical dice. Minis/pictures are definitely nice but not required. The big one for me is found early in the video I linked, the shared compact - if nobody else is into this world or at least attempting to take it seriously (most of the time) then I won't either.

False God
2019-07-03, 10:09 PM
I find immersion to personally be a focus on the game above all else. You're in character, you're on-task, you're actively taking part in what your character is doing, what other characters are doing and what the DM is presenting before you.

Immersion breaking things are...taking calls during the game, interrupting others to share memes or out-of-game content (though making IRL references in-game is not) and generally doing things that are not game-related (such as a side-conversation about cars).

Though many games allow PvP, I tend to find it immersion breaking, or at least a boring distraction from the potentially cool and exciting "adventure" the DM is usually attempting to present to us.

MrSandman
2019-07-04, 03:46 AM
Though many games allow PvP, I tend to find it immersion breaking, or at least a boring distraction from the potentially cool and exciting "adventure" the DM is usually attempting to present to us.

Huh, that's an interesting one! Would you say that's because PvP makes it feel less real somehow, or because you don't like it and it works against your engagement with the game?

False God
2019-07-04, 10:49 AM
Huh, that's an interesting one! Would you say that's because PvP makes it feel less real somehow, or because you don't like it and it works against your engagement with the game?

Because IME it's typically metagaming. It's not Bob the Barbarian taking issue with Mike the Rogue stealing stuff. It's Bob's player taking issue with Mike's player. Or it's Mike's player trolling Bob.

When it happens the game often grinds down to "how did Bob know Mike did that?" or "how did Mike know Bob didn't see that?" and then a bunch of obnoxious meta-retcon-rolls get thrown around, basically two players throwing dice at each other to justify their personal conflict in-character.

Or worse: it's just that one guy who rolled up the CE/CN character being a jerk to everyone.

It just forces everyone else to the sidelines while one or more people have a pissing match. It makes the game feel both "less real" and pulls me out of my engagement of the game. So, both.

Matinta
2019-07-04, 12:45 PM
Immersion is the lack of contraction in well defined and established setting rules.

Psyren
2019-07-04, 09:35 PM
Huh, that's an interesting one! Would you say that's because PvP makes it feel less real somehow, or because you don't like it and it works against your engagement with the game?

Other games might have actual mechanics for PvP, but D&D really doesn't, and the lack of such ruins immersion because you have to jam their square peg mechanics into the round hole.

Tanarii
2019-07-04, 11:16 PM
The closest I can get to this immersion, I think, is what I'd call a state of focus on the game to the exclusion of most other things. That is, there is an experience in which I am so absorbed in the game that I hardly pay attention to things outside of the game.

In this experience, things that would "break my immersion", would be things that claim my focus outside of the game. So it would be stuff like receiving a phone call, someone coming and turning on the TV or asking what we want for supper, even a long-winded discussion about rules. However, as soon as the distraction disappears I can focus back on the game without much trouble. So I wouldn't really understand people's extreme aversion to breaking immersion. Things like rolling dice, talking at the metagame level, or even stopping the game to discuss how to go about a particular scene are examples of things that wouldn't divert my focus and therefore wouldn't "break my immersion."Generally speaking, agreed.

Things I find break my immersion the most, both in TRPGs and Board Games are people playing with their phones instead of paying attention, cracking a cultural reference joke that has nothing to do with the game (looking at you Monty Python jokers), arguing about the rules at length, dithering over deciding the perfect move, or smoke/restroom breaks.

That said, I think some things are more engrossing in a TRPG, and thus more immersive. The more a player can think of themselves as a character, the more immersive*. In some situations, the more they can think of the other players as their characters, or the DM as the NPC, the better. If a player or DM uses a baritone or falsetto or accent for a different race or gender, it can help others get in the right mindset. The reason funny voices became a thing in roleplaying is if done right, they work. Of course if done poorly they're just terrible ... because they make things less immersive, not more. :smallamused:

*It also has the added benefit that it starts players making decisions for their character in the fantasy environment as if they're a person, instead of just rules. Which is what separates roleplaying games from just games.

username1
2019-07-06, 10:02 AM
Immersion in my opinion is being able to handle things seriously in character. If one character learns his brother is the BBEG that player should react in character, not breakout in laughter with the irony.

False God
2019-07-06, 05:38 PM
Immersion in my opinion is being able to handle things seriously in character. If one character learns his brother is the BBEG that player should react in character, not breakout in laughter with the irony.

Porque no los dos?

Obviously, the answer is: if it would be appropriate to do so in character.

Mordaedil
2019-07-08, 04:50 AM
When we all sit down to play at the table, I like to think we all make a social contract to not ridicule eachother for playing specific ways. We don't laugh at the barbarian player for trying to smoothly pick up the nymph, we don't make fun of the girl at the table trying her best to roleplay a gay guy and we respect the cleric trying to jump at 15 feet gorge with a -8 modifier to jump. Ahem. That is, laughing at the table is fine, but we allow them to play these things too and don't have a problem with that affecting our immersion.

What bothers me at the table is when the DM decides to forego explaining why certain things happen just to bring us together and without affording any reasoning for it, despite having multiple possible ways of doing it. That hurts my immersion. Say your party splits up during downtime to go shopping in different cities and it is clear that it should take each group a different set amount of days to reconvene. Suddenly the DM just has you meet up at the same time at the same day, despite this. And when we ask why this happens, he just says "because I said so".

That is what breaks my immersion, way more than two dwarves kissing.

kyoryu
2019-07-11, 03:48 PM
A mental state brought on by focus on the fictional world (over props, game pieces, etc) combined with a flow state by using rules that you have high levels of unconscious competence with.

Max_Killjoy
2019-07-11, 04:14 PM
A mental state brought on by focus on the fictional world (over props, game pieces, etc) combined with a flow state by using rules that you have high levels of unconscious competence with.

I would add that this ties into why I prefer rules that don't heavily conflict with the "fiction layer" -- the moments of disconnect disturb the above.