NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5628409" data-attributes="member: 42582">Sorry, I didn't mean to be combative, I just wasn't sure that (1) to (3) were assertions that I might agree to, or more expressions of preference/experience that I might share.Anyway, your reply makes sense to me. I find your contrast between the M&M one-shots and your more "serious" game interesting.The only one-shots I've really been into were years ago now, when I was student and had more time, and tended to be either CoC (very immersive high concept simulationism, when GMed well), other basic RP games (Stormbringer, RQ  - equally immersive when GMed well) and light-hearted AD&D romps (generally not immersive at all - I find aspects of AD&D, both mechanics and some of the dungeon crawl tropes, really get in the way of me taking it very seriously).The most recent one-shot(ish) game I GMed was probably 10 years ago, when our group tried out 3E with 5th level PCs. I used a nice tower-buried-in-desert-sand vignette from an old White Dwarf scenario collection to lead the PCs into Castle Amber. My main memories of the game are the barbarian boxing with the magen, and the wizard catching the sorcerer in his web spell, causing the player of the sorcerer to complain, and the player of the wizard to retort "What? It's only D&D." (That's Rolemaster snobs for you!)If I was going to try and infer anything from this, it would be that, for me, immersion turns more on the seriousness of the play than the details of the mechanics - but that different sorts of mechanics can help produce serious play in different ways. Basic Roleplaying puts a lot of the burden on the GM - if your setting and situations suck, the players don't have a whole lot of capacity to turn that around within the rules of the game. I like the wider distribution of capacity to contribute that 4e style mechanics establish.I also find, for whatever reason, that 4e's default setting, its Monster Manuals, etc, establish a more serious tone for play than more traditional D&D. I'm not sure that I can easily explain why that is, but I'll try. The fictional elements - the gods, monsters etc - are presented in a very coherent fashion, that strongly emphasises various sorts of relationships and conflicts with implied value content (RQ vs Orcus, Erathis vs Bane/Asmodeus, Ioun vs Vecna vs Dagon, etc). I find that these support thematic play out of the box in a way that the traditional D&D gameworlds (Greyhawk, FR) don't, because those traditional gameworlds don't build in those same axes of conflict (Yes, the Scarlet Brotherhood are sinister monks, but what value is at stake in their conflict with Keoland or the Iron League?).The recent spate of Tomb of Horrors threads, including defences of it by serious simulationist posters as a great module, makes me infer that there are some RPGers who would find it easier to immerse playing ToH in AD&D than playing a thematically rich 4e game, because the mechanical issue is so central to them. But that's not me.</blockquote>

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