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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5777887" data-attributes="member: 54877">Point of order: There is an assumption here (I think) that the only way to get immersion is to stick to 1st person and have procedures in the game that mirror the actions of the character. This is certainly true for a large number of people who value immersion. (And near as I can tell, almost universal for those who immerse "deeply," but that's problematic.)  However, technically immersion is imagining the game world as the character, not as a game piece or as an explicit protagonist in a story (e.g. such as from the point of view of a narrator of the story). And however "shallow" the immersion may be in practice, the verisimilitude of the story certainly contributes to that effort.  And just note hear that people that I've run games for have often immersed more readily (albeit shallowly) in third person than first person.  It's more comfortable sometimes, and easier to create a shared, imagined space.  Yet, when you model processes, you often get results that are incongruent with the results. All systems, even those highly focused on immersion, do this to some extent. Deep immersionist talk about having to get over the hump so that the offending mechanics can be ignored. Turn by turn movement in a tabletop RPG is often cited as an example. Two characters charge each other, but because Bob moves first, he moves across the room to hit Joe who stands there. The participants just imagine that Bob's initiative was more determinant that it was, or that Joe moved a bit too, or any number of such rationales.  If a particular such item is one you can't get over, then you'll often switch to mechanics that model results instead. For example, you might have a declaration phase, then everyone moves simultaneously. If Bob and Joe both declare a charge, they both move and meet somewhere in the middle. (Note, no assumptions made about how abstract or detailed this is. It could--and has--gone many ways.)  This is all separate from choosing to bypass immersion altogether and go straight for narrative conceits that are applied to the mechanics, presumably to keep the story flowing. Here, immersion has been dropped in order to produce a different aspect of verisimilitude: Namely, that when a big action hero smacks a bunch of nearby orc fodder, the story doesn't get bogged down in procedures or even result resolution (any more than necessary).  You can see this as a startingly fashion in Burning Wheel's Range and Cover and Fight mechanics (for skirmish and close melee important contests, respectively). They use scripting, and you must script several moves ahead. This leaves your character often making off-beat moves in the resulting action. Howeer, this very effectively models what BW wants to model--not the simulation of the process of a capable warrior confronting his enemies, but the simulation of the uncertainty and risk of combat--where people are only semi-predictable. If your goal is to simulate something, the traditional process task resolution is not automatically the correct answer.</blockquote>

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