I was reading through the GMing section, including Best Practices and Don'ts and it struck me that while there are probably moments of immersion in play, the game seems more structured like being in a writer's room talking through how the "episode" is going to go.
I'm still slightly uncomfortable with the full writers room approach that some indie games have, to the extent that I try to steer things away from that, mostly through pacing and avoiding prompts or questions to the whole table, when the action is really heavy. I don't love the idea of someone's potentially climactic moment being the source of an extended metagame debate. But I'm starting to let go of that trad instinct, for one simple reason:
When the session is over, things become immersive retroactively.
Or they do in my experience, and for my players.
In other words, what might seem gamey or non-immersive in the moment tends to get stitched together after-the-fact, and the memories we have of what happened in the game smooth over and cover the seams. I've seen this happen in Brindlewood Bay, where players not only do a true writers room thing, where they collectively decide what the solution to a murder mystery is, but also how the game has you pose questions to the players that set the scene, such as "What about his bedroom tells you that Pierre is a man who lives in the past?" Players invent those details on the spot, which might seem like the opposite of immersion, and in the moment it sort of is. But then a minute later it's just part of the narrative, and in my experience it deepens the players' investment in the game and in the NPCs they're creating details about.
In FitD there are arguably more opportunities to writers-room it up, and I don't love the idea of debating and negotiating everything. But in practice, with the right group (especially one on the smaller side) I think it works well. And as a player it can be a lot of fun. I was in a session of Scum and Villainy where I needed to fly away from a clearly much better enemy pilot in a much faster ship. And my character wasn't a good pilot at all, stat-wise. We were both taking off, and I said I was going to fly straight toward the other craft, buzzing and possibly even clipping it as I went past, to throw the pilot off her game and ruin her positioning. And to get a bonus on my roll, I proposed to the GM a Devil's Bargain that the ace pilot would consider my character her nemesis.
It was fun to throw in that bit of narrative, and felt super appropriate for the setting and campaign. And now the GM had another story hook and more fodder for future consequences.
Now if that Devil's Bargain had been the result of an entire round-the-table discussion, I wouldn't have liked it as much. But I can imagine situations where even that could be satisfying, particularly in the long run, after our brains had stitched the result into the larger narrative quilt.
