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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9618770" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I checked out a little bit when we starting throwing around immersion as I've long since settled on a perfectly workable technical understanding of the term and don't really care what anyone else is doing with it*, but this bothers me, precisely because it's a poor use of "game." My critique of what's being called "challenge-based play" amounts to "it doesn't use very interesting game mechanisms" and in so much as I end up in the 'sim' camp, it's because I find it leads to better gameplay; you need a board state with more levers and more information in order to have interesting moves, and RPGs are interesting precisely because they have the potential to allow for more moves on a broader board for a longer time than other kinds of games. I think there's some value in critique that drives at whether some parts of that state are too arbitrary to undermine player agency, but the fixes all seem to involve stripping out the potential for gameplay in the first place.Framing and stacking the interesting gameplay moments is insufficient; you need to then make interacting with them mechanically interesting unto itself. Did I get to put together a strategy? Was it evaluated verse an alternative? Is there feedback I can use to refine my decision making in future? And equally importantly, was the decision space interesting while I was in it? Did I have to work to find a line, were my choices interesting to deploy? Fundamentally, there's a gameplay argument here, not just the case for "immersion."*I plot immersion as a spectrum that measures the distance between a character's and player's decision making on an action by action basis. Immersive mechanics are forward looking in causality and have quick feedback loops.</blockquote>

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