Pathfinder 1E How do you make your game world more immersive?

[Reverend47]

I've been thinking of new ways to immerse my players into my game. I already use random non-combat encounters, city events, things like black markets where magic items and goods are at a decreased price, but come with a random chance of defects.

What methods do you guys use?

 

[S'mon]

News reports are good, whether local or from faraway lands.
Rumours that may not be directly relevant to the PCs.
The changing seasons, with some evocative description of weather and scenery.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Definitely used those first 2 to great effect. I also tried to listen to my players' table talk to see if there are any of their guesses I can incorporate into the campaign.

 

[Derren]

For me a game gets more immersive when it steps away from a romantic version of the middle ages or, worse, modern times with swords, and lean more towards realism. People are uneducated and are serfs to the local lord with practically no rights, including the right to leave the town they live in. The streets of cities are dirty, mostly unpaved and stink (sanitation is for pussies) and advanced crafts are only found in big population centers (crossbows and advanced weapons and armor, etc.) and news travel slowly, if at all.
Another point are taxes normally using a road, crossing a bridge or entering a city requires a tax payment. Depending on the status of adventurers that might be higher or lower than normal.
And as it was mentioned, seasons and weather. But only if they really matter (Crossing the mountains in winter is suicide and after heavy rain it takes 3 days before the road becomes usable again).

 

[S'mon]

For me a game gets more immersive when it steps away from a romantic version of the middle ages or, worse, modern times with swords, and lean more towards realism. People are uneducated and are serfs to the local lord with practically no rights, including the right to leave the town they live in. The streets of cities are dirty, mostly unpaved and stink (sanitation is for pussies) and advanced crafts are only found in big population centers (crossbows and advanced weapons and armor, etc.) and news travel slowly, if at all..

I guess you're not much into Paladins & Princessses play, then?

Personally I don't find the Grimdark/Crapsack-iness level of a setting affects my immersion at all, unless it doesn't tally with some other major trope of the campaign.

Edit: Eg your description tallies with medieval and early modern Europe, where disease was the main limiter on population size, keeping living standards high.
Medieval Japan or China were far cleaner, meaning there was less disease, more people, less land, and thus the population was much poorer and often went hungry.

 

[Empirate]

I think the DM has three tools at his disposal to further immersion:

The first thing you need to do is creating a world that is interesting and just begs interaction. Even on a pre-created adventure path, you can introduce a lot of sandbox elements - and even in a pure sandbox campaign, your goal should be to have powerful story emerge from the seeming randomness. Make sure the individual elements of your world don't only function on their own. The key to successful world-building is interconnecting the various bits and pieces into a collective whole. The more interconnections you weave between the phenomenons, structure, and actors in your world, the more your players will feel as if they're just a part of something bigger. I have a looong post here where I detail how this can be done. It's concerned with somebody's asking about the 3E Red Hand of Doom campaign, but I think you might find something interesting there for other campaigns, too.

The second part is making sure you do good descriptions. Remember that PCs only interact with the game world via your describing it. So working on evocative detail, getting the words just right etc. are important. Moreover, you can use a variety of simple tricks to give the impression that there's more, everywhere around the PCs, than you have time to describe right now - but if they go off and explore, there'd be a living, breathing, ready-made world just at their fingertips. I discuss a few techniques here, if you're interested. These are mostly limited to making a city come alive, but can easily be adapted to other settings, as well.

The third bit is populating the world, i.e. the skill of inventing and impersonating interesting NPCs. This really comes down to your acting skills and your empathic creativity, and others have been over this time and again, better than I could break it down. Have a look here, for example, but searching this board should turn up a lot of good threads as well.

 

[steenan]

In my experience, the most crucial element in creating an immersive game world is giving players things to care for. It may be done by building on PC backgrounds, it may be done by hooking PCs into GM-created plots and it works best when both approaches are used. The key here is knowing what the players want, what they are interested in. That's something that GM learns from asking them, reading PC backgrounds and, most importantly, observing what they do and how they react in play. Some games use explicit character hooks as a part of character creation - it may be good to steal some of that, because it really helps in getting player buy-in.

Another, but equally important trait of the game world is consistency. The setting must fit together in a logical way in all aspects that your players are interested in and/or that will be explored in play. Even a single thing that makes your players think "it makes no sense!" kills immersion. Fortunately, most people don't really think much about how various things work, so you don't need absolute consistency in everything. Unfortunately, the areas of interest may differ for different players, so it's much better to err on the side of having more consistency than necessary, not less.
Focusing the setting on a single genre that all players know and like a be a big help here. A genre naturally comes with a set of assumptions and deciding on a genre means accepting them. This way, you clearly know what you can safely hand-wave and what you need to detail.

The third aspect of the game world that affects immersion is the degree of complication. If players feel that they are overloaded with a lot of facts to learn and a lot of answers to figure out, many may either tune out mentally or switch into a data-processing, analytical mode. That pulls them out from the imagined world and ruins immersion.
On the other hand, if the game does not introduce interesting facts, twists and surprises, it won't give players' minds enough to focus on, so they will drift to OOG things. It is as likely to destroy immersion as overloading. In other words - make your setting interesting, but don't overdo world building.

 

[ForeverSlayer]

What get's my player's more immersed is when I completely open the world up to them. I plop them down in a village or town and tell them to pick where they want to go. I always have multiple plots and stories going on all over the world and not just one railroaded plot where the PC's go in one direction and don't get to experience the rest of the world. I also encourage them to create back stories associated with world they are in.

 

[Manbearcat]

We play underwater and communicate by sign language. Dice rolling is an adventure; a poorly paced one.

 

[howandwhy99]

Rather than literally submerging my players (as Manbearcat apparently does) I go more for the 1st Person perspective in every case possible.

The positive way to do this is to focus on relaying everything to the players as if they are their characters. You tell them what they see, they hear, they feel, smell, taste, touch, disorientation, weight, everything. That's how you not only describe your world to your players, that's how you define your world as those are the elements they are going to explore.

The limitations on this however are removing metagaming when possible, metagame mechanics like action dice, or abstractions the characters don't understand themselves. In part this means anything you use in the game has an in-game world understanding and that's what you relate it as.

If you can wed player knowledge and character knowledge about the world together, than you're allowing the player to be in the world as who they are first - immersed. Know what your game is challenging though. Originally D&D challenge the Players' intelligence, wisdom and, to some degree, charisma because it required the players to remember, make decision based on past experience, and engage with each other, while each had individual goals & plans and paths for exploration & (character statistical) improvement. In other words, know how your game challenges your players first and make those challenge be of the fantasy game world, not the (known) rules.