The reason I don't like to do this during play is that I find it causes people to drop out of character too much and continually think in the meta-game. I really like players to be thinking "Alright, I'm on a street, I'm a badass rogue who owes money to everyone in the city. I see people in the shadows...what would I do?"
For me this is where issues with immersion kick in. If I was
really a badass rogue I would know the town, know its people, know where to go and who to meet.
But if I'm relying on the GM to dribble all this out to me, it breaks my sense of immersion pretty badly.
But what you are arguing is that players can't assume things about the setting that their characters would know and be able to exploi
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if you are in character, player establishment of things only enhances this. You declare to be true what you believe would be true in character.
This.
You do break character, though when you decide that this guy is there. That's not something that your character has the power to decide.
Is "breaking character" a logical state, or a psychological one?
When we're talking about immersion - which is a psyhcological state - then I'm not that interested in abstract logical analysis. I'm interested in empirical realities.
And in my experience it does not, as an empirical matter, break immersion when I narrate something that fits in with my expectations that I have as my character. Just as, in the real world, it doesn't break my immersion when I reach my hand out to greet someone, expecting him/her to shake it, and s/he does.
Of course, the GM can always break those expectations if s/he wants, by vetoing a narration. Which is actually closer to reality - the surprise of expecting to see someone and him/her not being there - than if
everything is being doled out by the GM, which reduces the experiential contrast between expectations being thwarted or confirmed (in part because it tends to reduce all expectations and increase uncertainty and a quite unimmersive sense of loss of control over one's immediate environment).
I look upon dice, record keeping, and even game rules as necessary evils. They interfere with my play goals, but we need a method of conflict resolution and I haven't found one that's less intrusive. Giving players game authorship may be a smaller problem, but at least it's one I can avoid entirely.
The way I understood [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION], he was saying that you can
trade a degree of player authorship for d20 rolls - instead of making Streetwise checks and getting the GM to tell me what I (as a badass rogue) know, I just relate to the table what I know, where I'm going, and who I'm planning to see there.
I've likely already figured out who the people in the shadows are and why they are there and it is way too late to start giving the PCs authorial control over the adventure. If something happens DURING the adventure, I likely already have a good reason for it and don't want my plan second guessed by players.
Whereas I tend not to know who is for what, and where s/he came from, and how exactly s/he relates to the PCs, until this comes out through play. I'm expecting to be flexible and responsive to the players' action declarations, and also to their hopes/expectations for where the story is going.