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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 8808094" data-attributes="member: 85870">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 [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] ?) 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.</blockquote>

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