Yes, that's pretty much the essence of it.
So, here comes the stickler. I'm not really interested in arguing the qualitative. I'm arguing for essentially the quantitative. In other words, whether or not the DM is roleplaying isn't really an interesting contention. While I might agree that there is some diminishing point at which the GM is not roleplaying at all, that's not to me the essence of the issue. The point is that he is roleplaying "less well"/"more badly" than the first GM. And as a mature form of art, we ought to be pushing toward the skillful play of the GM who brings the gnoll more to life and creates the more interesting characterization.
I do think it is essential to roleplaying, and that a game in which it is not essential at all to be immersive isn't a RPG. Thus, you can speak in character in the game of monopoly, but doing so is no part of the game. Thus, it's not a roleplaying game. I'm not going to argue at what point immersion so disappears from play that it isn't an RPG any more, but I will argue that less important it is to your process of play, the less of a RPG you are playing, and the more you are moving toward playing a wargame or some sort of board game.
But I'm contesting that whether it is essential or not, by the definition I outlined I can objectively show that it is the more cinematic experience.
Combat certainly can be non-cinematic, and often is non-cinematic. To understand how it does not have to be non-cinematic, you have to go back to my definition of cinematic which is, "Creates a shared imaginary space which the participants can each concretely imagine what is going on and will each imagine much the same thing." So consider the common rules proposition, "I [try to] attack." This is a very uncinematic and unimmersive proposition. The participants are given little sense of what to imagine by such an abstract proposition, and neither are required to imagine what happens nor are prompted to imagine what happens. Likely all that will be mentally considered by the participants is some mechanical result, such as the deduction of abstract hit points from a pool of hit points to be abraded away. But now consider the following rules propositions:
"I step to the side and attempt to cleave the legs out from under the orc with my battle axe."
"I trust my shield into the orcs face and attempt to hurl him backwards over the cliff."
"With my blade locked with the orc, I attempt to hook my leg around his, and trip him over backward."
"I leap up on to the altar, and with an overhead smash, bring it down on the orcs helm."
"Stepping back from the fray, I cast a spray of magic missiles into orc horde."
These are all highly cinematic rules propositions. Everyone participating in the game is prompted to imagine something concrete by such propositions, and each is likely to produce a transcript of their play experience that is similar because they all imagined nearly the same thing. Whereas with something abstract like, "I attack.", who knows.
My contention is that a game system is improved if it tends to encourage more cinematic propositions because there is an onto mapping between cinematic propositions and the rules systems that adjudicate those propositions. In other words, it matters if you leap onto the alter, or step to the side, or whatever because it changes the outcome or at least the odds in the outcomes.
Now of course, we don't live in a perfect world. In an idealized system such highly cinematic propositions are well and good, but as a practical matter in the real world highly cinematic systems tend to be granular by definition and granular systems tend to have high complexity and slower resolution of play. So in a real system, you have to make a trade off in cinematic versus speed of play. But in a hypothetical system where everything was equally simple and equally fast, we'd always tend to prefer the more cinematic system because having a shared imaginary reality filled with concrete actions always ALWAYS produces the more exciting transcript of play (essentially, what you remember of the game) than merely abstractly whittling down a pool of hit points by rote action.
There are of course techniques for turning abstract declarations into more cinematic resolutions, but the problem with that process is that the player's choice matters less to the outcome, which over time reduces player interest in the game.
They can, if they encourage people to substitute more abstract metagame declarations for more concrete in game declarations. If for example, the mechanics encourage you to simply state your social move as a metagame classification, without ever providing some idea as to what actually happened in the game when you performed that move, then you have a process where some rules generated an outcome, but no roleplaying necessarily took place. No one will have a clear idea what happened in the game reality, only that you transitioned from one game state to another after a move was made. And at that point, you are playing a board game, because part of what makes a board game a board game is the reality it is modelling does not need to be and usually is not concretely imagined.
Incidentally, this is one of the reasons I find most consciously created Nar games terrible at actually creating Narrative and the experience of being in a story.
Well, by my definition you could do some sort of double blind study, and if the participants could at a higher percentage rate agree to what the essentials of an action had been based on the proposition, then we could prove within a certain confidence interval than one sort of play had been more immersive than the other.
For example, for the proposition, "I attempt to persuade the Duke.", if two separated participants independently reported afterwards the same words said to the Duke, then that was immersive. But I think it is clear they'd do a much better at agreeing what had been said with a proposition like, "Your Grace, you have always been known as a man of honor. If you do not lend your strong aid now, and tragedy ensues, what will your loyal subjects say of you?"
All of which is irrelevant. That's just the underlying mechanical engine which the GM then cranks the handle of to decide whether or not the Duke is persuaded. The point is the proposition. The underlying mechanical engine only matters to the extent that it pushes the game toward abstract declarations by prioritizing the meta-declaration over the proposition itself.
Point is, you have to define the NPCs goals and traits. Some systems encourage you to do that and provide a framework for it. Others provide no such encouragement or framework, but as I'm hopefully showing - even in systems that traditionally don't define NPC social traits in a mechanical way - you still can define those traits in a mechanical way.
Well, I direct you back to the start of this line of argument for why combat and social challenges are inherently different in a TRPG context, and why therefore attempts to treat them as exactly the same tend to fail, and are quite possibly poor design because they are more unalike than they are alike. (
https://www.enworld.org/forum/showt...-RPGs/page10&p=7621872&viewfull=1#post7621872)
