Personally, rules that use natural language for technical terms, goes a long way to facilitate narrative immersion - thus theater of the mind.
Two completely different things, I think.
"Immersion" lost most of it's meaning in the edition war, and I'm not sure 'narrative' has a lot of meaning left, either, thanks to GNS. I guess when you say that, for you personally, narrative immersion is facilitated by natural language, that's true, because that's what 'narrative immersion' means to you.
It doesn't really mean anything useful to me, though, so I'll stick with TotM:
TotM is just a mode of play. You're tracking where characters and terrain features and so forth are relative to eachother, as you put it, below, 'mentally' - eschewing any tools that might aid tracking (or visualization).
That means it's down to the DM's ability to verbally encode his imagined world, and the players to decode it. It's rare that human communication like that will result in everyone having the same visualization. If you visualize 'murky depths of the underdark' vividly, I suppose that might be good for what you mean by your personal 'narrative immersion,' and, if you visualize it differently from the next player, that's not too disruptive to play (though it might be disappointing). But, if you visualize the number and position of the duergar you're fighting in the underdark differently from the next player (or, worse, DM), you can have all sorts of issues deciding upon and resolving actions.
For what it is worth, I prefer mind style, but was unable to play 4e (well) without grid and minis. The need for positioning into specific squares was too ubiquitous in the mechanics of the rules.
I have read about some players who successfully came up with a system to make 4e friendlier for mental. But such systems didnt work well for me. Again, because the rules were too ubiquitous.
To be fair, I couldnt play 3e (well) without minis either.
Running a game TotM is a DM skill (or talent) like anything else. The system you heard of was probably the late Wrecan's 'SARN-FU' which is similar to the kinds of systems that have been specifically designed to facilitate or simplify play in the absence of any visualization aids, like minis or maps - and, not surprisingly, bears some resemblance to what Heinsoo & Tweet came up with for 13A. Though the alternative of simply ignoring the details that caused issues for you in 3.x or 4e (however 'ubiquitous') would have given you the same TotM functionality as 5e presents. Of course, the 'better' experience, /with/ minis would still be there in contrast, while it's not so much better in 5e.
In your experience of 13th Age, what are some other examples of rules that facilitate mental play?
Prettymuch across the board, really. The specifics of character abilities, including the use of backgrounds in place of skills, the way weapons are handled as well as the way spells like the one in the example are, movement, relative position - engaged vs close vs far, a sort of intercept action that takes the place of more position- and threatened-area dependent 'blocking' tactics, the way disengaging is handled, the presentation &
handling of monsters, and, on the broader front, concepts like campaign loss.
The contrast with 5e is that both 13A and 5e take away and streamline options that can be handled well using tools to aid visualization, like minis on a gridded map, but 13A replaces them with mechanics that work well without such tools. That makes both DM & player tasks easier - it facilitates (makes easier) the TotM mode of play.
5e depends on the DM to step in and make up the difference, and that's where it shines: in Empowering the DM to tell his story, evoke his imagined campaign world, and manage the player experience to keep it fun.
It occurs to me. Since 5e doesnt refer to 5-foot squares (except in a brief variant rule in the PH), it is a good opportunity for grid players to switch to 3-foot squares. In other words, go back to the D&D tradition of using yards. Yards also approximate meters.
1e used yards, but, IIRC, only for out door movement and ranges. 1" equaled 10' in the dungeon, but 30' in the wilderness (but only for movement and range, not for AE).
A benefit of the 1-yard square is rooms that normally should be small, will have more tactical space, for maneuvering.
Moreover, weapons can have more nuanced reached. It is plausible to double ones reach at a disadvantage when fighting Large creatures, and so on, thus making Large size more balanced.
Both true. A 1-yard square, if taken to three dimensions, though, makes humans 'tall' creatures in the 3.0 sense, taking up two squares (cubes) vertically, but only 1 horizontally. Realistic, I suppose, but an added level of complexity in play. GURPS used a 1m hex, and the result was that the standard space was a 1m wide, 2m tall hexagonal prism - a 'people tube.' I don't ever remember hearing anyone rave about what a great idea that was.
