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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 8811148" data-attributes="member: 6690965">Immersion, as I've experienced and desired it, doesn't have much to do with the emotional state of my character and a lot to do with the rules.What I want is to decrease the distance between my decision making as a player, and the decision making of my character, so that my choices at the level of the gameplay are as close a mirror as possible to the character's decisions in the fictional world. Thus, a system that serves immersion is one that:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Adjudicates results at the level of individual actions</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Provides abilities/declared actions that exist in fixed, specific time intervals</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Does not provide abilities/actions that result from factors outside of a given character's personal powers</li> </ol>I've yet to find a system that actually commits to this model of immersion as a design goal, so I'm always a little behind the ball to begin with. These conditions are often satisfied in some systems, or I'm sufficiently used to the abstractions of time and effort necessary to contort my brain around gaps.In the situations when this is the case, the next point of conflict that's possible is a divergence in player vs. character motivation. Generally this isn't a problem if the goal is success at a given task, because I as a player trying to play a game well, and my character, as a person trying to achieve their goals in the face of obstacles, will make the same decisions and thus immersions is maintained. Picking the most effective gameplay move will satisfy both the character and player, thus maintaining immersion.This becomes a much bigger problem when the system prioritizes specific narrative outcomes, or story/emotional beats, because the actions I may take as a player to optimize success do not benefit my character's motivations. Immersion, as I experience it, is impossible in such situations. I may choose, for example, to undertake an activity that will likely fail, or which my character is ineffective at, because there's a meta-narrative reward that will improve my gameplay outcomes later, or in a strictly narrative sense, because my goal as a player is to hit a particular narrative beat or emotional state for the character. The character obviously does not want to experience failure/defeat, and would like to accomplish their goals, so we are at odds and immersion cannot occur.Fundamentally, I view the goal of an immersive system to be narrowing the cognitive dissonance of players engaged in a game, and characters striving against obstacles in a world. Brennan Lee Mulligan had a good description of this toward the end of this <a href="https://youtu.be/LmZSWKPXhZ4?t=5337" target="_blank">roundtable discussion</a> with Aabria Iyengar and Matt Mercer:Ideally, the non-system aspects of the game, the encounter design and worldbuilding and obstacles created by the GM or intrinsic to the module or scenario, should effectively challenge and stymie the character's attempts to achieve their goals, thus that as I player (and, ideally, as the character) I have to come up with novel applications of the limited actions/abilities I have to succeed, so that the resulting game is interesting.This has, however, routinely led me into conflict with other players who seem to define immersion completely differently, and view the act of playing a game effectively as a separate and sometimes alien experience to the narrative unfolding of a TTRPG. Immersion is generally a pretty easy to acknowledge binary state for me. I can generally point to any individual declared action and tell you whether it was immersive or not, and my preference is strongly that it be the former.</blockquote>

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