What struck me as interesting was this one:
"Gard also warns against the use of 'arbitrary spaces': environmental features that are obviously included for gameplay challenge and serve no purpose in the 'reality' of the setting:
"When a player enters a temple that has no space for worship, or a tomb with no burial chamber nor rhyme nor reason behind its layout, he or she will not be convinced that they are exploring a real place."
Are roles the same as "arbitrary spaces" that "serve no purpose in the 'reality' of the setting" and "he or she will not be convinced that they are exploring a real place"?
Role labels, and the sentences in which they occur, aren't part of the setting - they are statements of guidelines for how PCs might be built and played. They occupy the same functional space as a bit of advice in an older D&D book saying "If you play a magic-user, you will have to work hard to keep out of combat and avoid being killed, due to your poor AC and hit points."
If someone finds the
fiction to which PC builds give rise to be arbitrary or genre-breaking, that would be an example of what you quote. That will vary across players. For me, the idea that a gentle word from a charismatic battle captain can revive the spirits of a comrade reinforces (Tokienesque) genre; likewise, the idea that powerful warriors will find themselves at the centre of the action, being swarmed by their enemies (though here the genre is fantasy more generally, with probably REH's Conan as the core example).
Others might have different genre expectations and preferences, and therefore find their immersion broken by some of this fiction to which the mechanics give rise.
I'm not sure I see the connection.
<snip>
I still don't equate daydreaming as a mode of authorship. For me, daydreaming is a passive activity. I don't feel I'm authoring anything. The process is too passive for me to call it authoring, even if it technically is authoring fictional content.
"Passive", here, describes a psychological experience - a feeling.
In the context of RPG design, what sorts of mechanics create what sorts of feelings? In RPG play, players have to describe what their PCs are doing, sometimes using the technical language of action declaration. Whether or not incorporating into those descriptions references to things that are not the PC, or that - in the fiction - are not under the PC's control will disrupt a certain feeling is not something to be answered by logic. It is an empirical question. And I think it is obvious that these experiences vary across players.
Here are two hypothetical action declarations that might be made when a PC, with a roguish background, is trying to find a shady contact in a city:
Player: Do I have any contacts from my past here?
GM: Yes . . . [fills in some details] . . .
Player: Cool. My Streetwise check is 16 - do I make contact?
GM: [Consults resolution rules and determines whether or not contact is successfully made.]
************
Player: I'm trying to hook up with one of my contacts here from my past,who can put me in touch with the guildmaster. My Streetwise check is 16.
GM: Cool. [Consults resolution rules and determines whether or not contact is successfully made.] You meet . . . [fills in details depending on whether or not check succeeded] . . .
The second example - modelled loosely on Burning Wheel's Circles mechanic - illustrates an instance of player authorship - the player is entitled to author elements of his/her PC's background, including having acquaintances in the city; the resolution mechanics determine whether or not the PC, on this occasion, successfully makes contact with one of those acquaintances.
There is no a priori reason why the second mode of action declaration should spoil immersion in some way that the first is guaranteed not to.
Your case - that you can't find what you call Character Immersion with authoring powers, is based upon the presumption that your mode of experience is universal. Mine, that there are multiple ways and multiple ends is based on the opposite.
<snip>
What I reject isn't your experience, it's where you seek to post hard limits on your experience. When you say you have experience of something you are telling the truth. When you say that something can only work a certain way then one single counter-example (which my experience provides) is sufficient to show you are wrong. You personally can not find flow in an RPG when you have player-authorship powers and responsibilities. This I accept. That because BryonD can not personally find flow when he has player authorship powers means that no human being that is, was, or ever will be is able to do so is something I dismiss as ridiculous.
This. Generalising from one's own psychological experience, to what is possible for other RPGers, is fraught with the risk of error.
To refer to a different medium: I have no trouble becoming immersed in a foreign-language, subtitled film. I know other people who do. All this shows is that the psychological experience of reading the dialogue is different for different film viewers.