Is Immersion Important to You as a Player?

[zarionofarabel]

In a nutshell, it's the whole point.

If I wanted to do anything other than get immersed in my PCs life, I would play something else.

If I want complex tactical combat, I'll play a minis combat game.

If I want complicated resource management, I'll play a board game that concentrates on such things.

If I just want to tell a good story, I'll write a short story, or read a book.

For me the only real point of playing an RPG is to get immersed in the fictional life of my PC.

DMing an RPG is a different thing, and not really prudent to the OP's question.

So yeah, immersion is the reason I play RPGs. Without it, there is no point. I may as well spend my time with other persuits.

 

[Umbran]

Alongside discussion of definitions, we might want to discuss the experience of immersion.

Have you ever been reading a novel (or watching a TV show or movie) that was so gripping that you forgot you were reading? Because that state, when the outside world drops away, and all there is, is the story, is also called "immersion" in the fiction.

Now, maybe your kid can come in and ask where their left shoe is, and you can wave them off or tell them to look under their bed, and be right back in there, but maybe you can't. Maybe it'll be a while. Or maybe the flow is broken and you might as well get up and help little Jimmy find his darned shoe.

There are levels of awareness of the rest of reality, though. And how easy it is to get into and out of them is dependent on a bunch of stuff.

 

[pemerton]

That's the opposite of immersive, at least how I defined it for the purposes of the discussion. You are engaging the mechanics of the system to produce a result in the fiction. That's the "writer's room" I'm talking about. You're engaged, and you're having fun, but you certainly aren't inhabiting your character.

When a player of 5e D&D declares "I cast Shield", they are are engaging the mechanics to produce a result in the fiction. That's what RPG players do. How is it at odds with immersion?

As @niklinna has said, the decision about trading position for effect is the decision about whether to go "all out" or not. That's an actual decision the character is making. The player, in making it, is inhabiting the character's mental and emotional space.

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."

What RPG are you describing here? Not Apocalypse World or Dungeon World, neither of which has any procedure like this. Not HeroWars/Quest. Not Burning Wheel. Not Torchbearer. Not Prince Valiant. None of them has a procedure like this. Not Agon, the only John Harper game I play. It has no procedure like this.

I'd be very surprised if BitD has a procedure like the one you've described. @niklinna or @hawkeyefan will be able to confirm.

 

[pemerton]

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."

A further thought on this.

A GM may ask someone else at the table - a player - to help interpret the situation and establish a consequence, if it's not obvious. Or a player may have an intuition as to what would happen, and give voice to that. But these are not at odds with immersion - they actually rely on it, as that is what makes it possible to have an intuition about what must "obviously" happen next in a given situation.

 

[pemerton]

I have been in games where the situation devolves into a protracted back-and-forth negotation, and yes, that definitely breaks immersion. But I've actually seen it more often in traditional games than games like Blades in the Dark. For example, I've been in a number of traditional games where there's that one player who's like, "Can I do X and get result Y?" and the GM says no that won't really work like you want. "Well how about if I do A to get result B?" And the GM says, "No, that would make C happen." And so on. Such players tend to do it frequently enough that it gets really tiresome.

This is so tiresome!

And the opposite of immersive.

I want a system that will allow me to inhabit my character, declare my actions, and make sure that play doesn't collapse as a result. "Soft moves" on the way out, not back-and-forth horse-trading on the way in.

 

[Campbell]

Here's what personally hinders my sense of inhabiting a character in the situations they find themselves in:

• Social pressure to pursue some adventure or investigate some lead that really does not have anything to do whatsoever with the aims of the characters I am playing.
• The feeling that by playing a character who has a complex emotional life and might sometimes do things that are not in their best interest I am hindering group success at the scenario. Rules can ameliorate this feeling by relieving the tension between playing to a character's emotional state and playing to achieve one's goals,
• If it feels like a given NPC or PC is being played in a way that is the result of a player or GM trying to achieve some sort of story outcome rather than playing with curiosity.
• Other players playing characters that are basically self inserts with maybe some personality quirks.
• The GM addressing the group rather than individual characters. The whole PC Voltron thing.
• If it feels like the setting is being manipulated to ensure player characters have these big shining hold my beer moments.
  

 

[gorice]

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."

I think there are games that can look like your second example, but I don't think it's a 'narrative' vs. 'trad' affair. Ironsworn and apocalypse world don't play like this, in my experience. On the other hand, Stat Trek Adventures (which I think is fundamentally 'trad') has a bunch of metacurrency stuff that can really bog down resolution.

I think in practice it's at least partly a matter of aesthetic preference. I've never played BitD, but reading the resolution rules, my immediate reaction was 'nope'.

When a player of 5e D&D declares "I cast Shield", they are are engaging the mechanics to produce a result in the fiction. That's what RPG players do. How is it at odds with immersion?

Personally, I prefer it (and find it more immersive) when my 'action statements' (for lack of a better term) are immediately applicable to the fiction.

Spells in D&D are a bit of a weird case, actually, because 'casting shield' is something you can actually do in-universe, so it's impossible to speak the name of the spell without engaging the fiction.

 

[John Dallman]

To me, that sounds more like a description of one aspect of my pleasure when GMing: being absorbed in the action and finding out what's happening and what will happen next.

But as a player, inhabitation of character is quite different, because it has a first personality - decision-making, subjective experience - that is typically absent when I am reading or viewing fiction that I am not in control of.

Aha! You've made me realise how part of my GMing experience works. Playing the NPCs, which is a large part of it, has immersion rather like being a player. That's straightforward.

I've always described the other part, where I'm imagining the setting without perceiving it via an NPC, as requiring "getting the hang of the setting" or "figuring out how the world works." What I'm actually doing is playing the Genius loci (in the Roman religion sense, rather than the D&D monster) of the setting, or of a part of it.

 

[John Dallman]

Interacting with game mechanics is usually not a problem if those mechanics are light-weight enough.

And "light-weight enough" isn't simple to define. It depends on how familiar they are, and how many different mechanics might be in play. I play a lot of GURPS which many would regard as a heavyweight game, but all the rolls for actions are the same: 3d6 wanting low. I don't have to allocate dice pool resources, or try to take advantage of keywords, which are mechanics that I'm less familiar with.

 

[innerdude]

About a year or year and a half ago, I started a thread similar to this one, decrying that I no longer felt that "immersion" as a goal of play was really a fully viable, tenable activity for roleplaying.

None of the experiences I'd had with my own group had ever really remotely brought about the type of "deep" character immersion / depth of character I was hoping to get out of roleplaying.

And so I wondered if I was simply expecting something that couldn't be found.

And I can't remember which poster brought it up (maybe @Campbell ?) but he or she mentioned that immersion as a PC could potentially have an analogue with being an actor on stage.

I've acted in numerous theater productions (and even been paid a couple of times to do it, although a paltry sum), and so I found the concept intriguing, and ultimately, I think it finally made sense why it's so hard to produce in a roleplaying game. As I thought about it, I was able to make peace with how and when I will ever experience "immersion" as roleplaying in the future (rarely, and through a nigh-impossible to define set of circumstances/processes).

As an actor, you're never really fully immersed in character. You are obviously "in character," but you are not "the character." And truth be told, it would feel a bit off, possibly even dangerous to act in a production with someone who did truly, fully immerse in their character.

Is there a quality of "immersiveness" while acting "in character"? Obviously, yes. You are taking on a persona, attempting to represent that individual in a way that's true/authentic to the situation. Even in comedy this is true, and possibly more true; comedic theater relies on the ability to get the audience to believe that a character truly "is that character" for setups / punchlines to pull off well.

So yes, you're "in character", but you're also thinking through your blocking, the next part of the scene ahead of you, watching for the subtle, minor alterations another actor throws at you in the middle of the scene; you're watching for other people coming and going on to the set; you're watching for props; you're looking at the lighting and the backdrops.

It is, without a doubt, a wholly "artificial" sort of immersion. And yes, there are almost always particular scenes, lines, soliloquies, exchanges on the stage where that artificiality does slide almost entirely into the background.

But those moments are few and fleeting, and largely the result of an entire chorus of events, with enormous inputs from everything that happened off stage and before the start of the production in its very beginnings. They're also scripted, and purposefully set out to have a particular emotional impact or demonstrate a particular trait or reality of the world of the characters.

Once I came to this realization, I was able to let go of "immersiveness" as a key goal for my sessions, either as a player or GM. There are simply too many variables involved in getting to a point of genuine "immersion" to ever really worry about it. If it happens, great, but it's simply never going to factor into my overall evaluation of a gaming session's success or failure.

Also, there is another kind of engagement I've discovered in roleplaying games through Ironsworn, which is immersion in the discovery of the game world. There is an amazing quality of immersiveness when you are discovering right along with all of the players the reality of a given situation within the game world. There is a very interesting sense that you are processing / putting the pieces together at the same time they are, and seeing the world as it has suddenly been revealed to the characters, because as a GM you have not completely pre-determined an outcome or backstory, and allowed the inter-relationship between the characters and their place in the world to flow more organically.

It's a different kind of immersion than "in character" immersion, and in my experience is only really possible outside of formalized "trad" play.