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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 5619827" data-attributes="member: 21169">I'm not sure that that is as immersive as playing the journey out in more detail. Some LARPers consider LARP to be more immersive than tabletop by far because the player is experiencing a great deal of what his character is experiencing. He travels on the same journeys in real time, sees and hears and feels and smells the world around him, wears the same clothes, even feels a modicum of the pain when struck by a weapon.I played in a SLA game in which we played out, over the course of the first session, the significant moments of our PCs' childhoods and adolescence. The goal, I believe, was for the players to get more of a sense of where the character comes from as an aid to roleplaying as an adult. In other words, to experience more immersion.In a 2e AD&D game, we played out journeys in much detail, in a somewhat Tolkienesque style. I personally found it too boring for my taste. But there's no question that it was more immersive. We really got to experience the boredom that constitutes much of real life!Playing the crpg Morrowind, I remember experiencing strong feelings of immersion - tension, excitement, fear - when my character descended into an unknown cave system, stronger, I think, than anything I've experienced playing tabletop. The fact that this computer game operates in real time, and, as with most crpgs, hides the mechanics, made it more immersive than a tabletop rpg.Imho a major source of non-immersion in a tabletop rpg is rules talk of any kind. I think my mind is in a different mode talking about modifiers, rolls to hit, and such, than it is when I use plain English descriptions of what is happening. Though, for me, it's quite easy to switch back and forth. Combat, being the most rules heavy part of the game, has always been highly non-immersive for me, except when playing games such as Amber, which have almost no rules at all, and feature descriptions that are almost exclusively in plain English, no hit points or armour classes or anything of that nature.</blockquote>

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