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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8317365" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Alright, this thread has gotten well and far away from me, but let me address this last bit to me.  Probably won't get back into this thread again until next week.So let start from the bottom and break this out. I don't understand why you're taking offense here (and I definitely don't understand the escalation of the offense taken).  What I was saying in my post is that the inference I was drawing from the relationship of our two posts is that you were relating the salient aspects of what I was just writing about (having a cognitive state being thrust upon you or being mundanely afflicted with something that you would otherwise not wish to have had thrust upon you/been afflicted with) to how perception/insight/awareness is systemitized in a game.Then I just went on to write about how there is a rift between these two things.But if your second part was wholly disconnected from my first part and you were pivoting the conversation to just ask me to contrast those two designs, that is an entirely different thing.  All of my posting should make it clear that I don't believe that "immersion" (or the loss of it) is an objective outgrowth of any design.  Immersion is a personal thing and I don't see any use in discussing it in game design.  So I want reiterate that again.However, as creatures with highly evolved neuroendocrine systems, we absolutely can be "stimulated by proxy" (let's call it) that creates a kindred (not remotely exact, but kindred) cognitive space to the Real McCoy.  A trivial example of this is the Jenga Tower in Dread as action resolution to inculcate the table's participants with the desperation and anxiety and sense of growing loss of volition that is fundamental to that horror genre.  Whether someone doesn't want those feelings or not is not relevant to the point.  But the reality is, that systemization is entirely different from D&D's robust heroes rolling D&D action resolution and cosplaying desperation and anxiety and a sense of growing loss of volition.  Merely adding a Sanity mechanic doesn't bridge that gap.  It does some work, but (a) its not holistically integrated into the system as a whole (there are still far too many ways for D&D heroes to marshal resources to wrest control of the trajectory of play from the spiral), (b) the genre that it is nested within (action/adventure with profoundly capable/robust heroes) is fundamental to play and cannot be stripped from it (in part because of (a) prior), and (c) the visual cue of the failing geometry of a progressively destabilized Jenga Tower just hooks into our OODA Loop profoundly more viscerally than roll dice > mark San (because our evolution from chimps on East African Savannah fighting big cats depended upon these visual cues prompting our endocrine system and developing heuristics for problem solving).  Its a brilliant mechanic.  You can drawback from there and look at all kinds of other instantiations of mechanics and why they're good at doing a particular thing.  Playing high stakes poker absolutely creates a very cultivated cognitive space.  There is vulnerability, there is marshaling courage, there is inventorying and acting upon the past, there is marshaling that inventorying/acting upon the past as a resource, there deciding when to escalate, when to cut your losses, and when this is the hill you're prepared to die upon.And just like when you read a book and you get hooked into a character's plight right off the bat...that is what Dogs (a) character creation + (b) the visceralness of the experience of the brutal (you have a very good chance to lose given the arrayed resources against you) player-authored kicker (player decides the conflict/antagonism and GM plays the antagonism) scene that you resolve (to resolve a seminal moment of your character's backstory and finalize your PC) is meant to do (and pretty much uniformly does except for the most passive Participationist-like players out there...but they shouldn't be playing Dogs because its not a passive experience).You're drawn in to the fullness of this character's multi-faceted thematic plight right off the bat.  And now you're about to be put into an endless succession of Poker games where you are doing all of the things I mentioned above...and the result of that is going to be your character eroding out from under you (even if you remain a stalwart defender of The Faith rather than retire).  No, Dogs and Dread and My Life With Master are not flexible games.  Although, Dogs is way more flexible than its given credit for.  You can trivially drift it to be a general police game or a Star Wars game in an era where the Jedi are deeply reduced in numbers and the forces of the Dark Side are everywhere.But they do things (put you into a particular cognitive + thematic space) that other games fundamentally cannot do.  I mean, other instantiations of this kind of stuff can do some work...but they don't get there.  Full disclosure, I have yet to run the Alien game.  That game may do similar work to Dread from what I hear.So, sum total, I think I disagree with almost everyone in here to one degree or another.  This is my position:1)  Some designs are profoundly focused and they offer a cognitive experience or cognitive + thematic experience that other designs (more muted and/or less holistically integrated and/or nested with different genre trappings and/or more contingent up GM decides as the resolution engine) can't hope to derive.2)  Some designs are extraordinarily flexible in being able to detach genre + cognitive space + thematics and couple different ones (at a holistic level...there aren't niggling bits of design problems lurking downstream that you have to tangle with later).  I mean Crane's base engine of BW and evolution gives you seriously different play in Burning Wheel, Mouse Guard, and Torchbearer.  Apocalypse World's design and the Forged in the Dark design that works off of it (concentric ring integration where you can trivially pull one ring out and have it not have dozens of downstream effects that you have to design around/against when you plan to iterate something new) are both amazingly flexible.  Cortex+ is similar here (Smallville and Leverage and MHRP are not remotely the same and the Hacker's Guide shows you how you can get an abundance of other opportunities for other play).</blockquote>

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