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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7519421" data-attributes="member: 42582">This appears to assume, as I said in my post, that the PCs are strangers.What you describe may be an excellent approach for a novelist wanting to introduce his/her readers to his/her imaginary land (I'm currently 50 pages into a rereading of Dune - Frank Herbert is doing a lot of this). But if one of the players is playing a dwarf; or if any of the PCs is from one of the civilisations in question; then we are back to the GM telling that player how his/her PC experiences the world.(There is a further issue about the quality of the fiction, and the quality of the GM's portrayal of it - but my point is that even if these are top notch, that won't deal with the alienation issue.)I've done a quick review of your posts in this thread and failed to work out what the "important elements" are. You used metaphors like "cardboard thin" and "bare bones" to describe non-immersion generating settings. You also said that immersion-generating canon need not be "super-detailed" and might be "vague".What I think enhances immersion is a strong sense of colour, a strong affective sense (be that familiarity, confusion, horror, etc) and a strong sense of what is possible. Genre and tropes go a long way in this respect; so does not having to wait on the GM to tell you how things are, or what to expect. I think the importance of details is grossly overrated, and tends to elide the difference between imagining a fiction someone else is authoring (reading is the paradigm of this) and participating in the creation of a shared fiction by playing a protagonist which is at the heart of (much, even if not all) RPGing.I would call those (imaginary) facts; as you present them they're not really tropes. Cormyr is the place where knights ride around in shining armour is a trope. But once I know that about Cormyr, then I shouldn't need to read or be told anything else - I've watched Excalibur, I've read LotR, I should be good to go!</blockquote>

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