Let me try again: you seem to be saying that you can't get immersed in your character if you have to separate character and player knowledge. Is that right?
I mean, it isn't absolute. Nothing is. But let me try and illustrate the difference I am talking about.
The situation: a PC has run into an old rival and after some tense conversation, the player decides to engage in some violence.
Trad Game: Player says, "That's it! Eat steel!" Roll. Hit. Damage. Mechanics are involved, but they are pretty straight forward. GM: "NPC wipes the blood from his mouth, smiles ruefully, and says, 'Just remember, you started this.'"
Narrative Game: Player says, "That's it! Eat steel!" Roll. Dice come up with a success with a complication. The player says, "Okay, I guess I will hit him but he gets to hit me back?" Player 2 says, "Wait, it would be cool if you got your licks in but your sword got stuck in the table!" The GM says, "No, I think you hit him but he gets a chance to hit you back, Take2 harm."
That negotiation is where I think immersion takes the hit. Up until the time to adjudicate the die roll results, the immersion is equivalent. I'll even concede that based on building fiction previously, narrative games might even have better immersion in the lead up. But I think that once you ahve to put on the brakes to go through the process of determining what those dice results mean beyond simple algorithmic outcomes of smooth GM narration, immersion is broken.
Again, I am NOT saying it is any less fun or any less engaging or any less good. I am just asserting that the quality of immersion -- inhabiting the character inhabiting the world -- is reduced when you have to, as players and GMs, negotiate die rolls. As such, i think trad games with strong GM authority actually promote immersion over narrative games.
I don't think so, but then communication is a funny thing sometimes. In either case I get what you are saying.So you seem to have inverted what I was saying: I was referring to situations where I know something my character doesn’t, and you seem to have assumed the opposite.
That's why I defined it in the OP. It isn't the only definition but the intent was to give us a place to begin discussions from.I think a significant difficulty faced by this topic is that while lots of people use the word immersion to describe a play state they really enjoy, I suspect that we are actually talking about a rather enormous range of actual experiences, rather than some sort of zen-like satori moment that's actually (ostensibly) the same for everyone.
Yeah, I get that, but past the first page the whole idea opens up into a vast cornucopia of opinions as the OP fades from view.That's why I defined it in the OP. It isn't the only definition but the intent was to give us a place to begin discussions from.
How successful that has been is up to interpretation.
That's a different thing entirely, what people usually call "verisimilitude." I know a lot of folks consider this a factor in immersion, but it isn't inherently part of the definition. Immersion just requires that you are "in the fiction" (obviously folks have defined it elsewise in this thread, so take that as my definition).I don't know if "immersive" is the right word, but I do need the world to be believable and consistent with itself.