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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 8811306" data-attributes="member: 6690965">Definitely I agree this can be a problem with turn-based combat resolution, and that's an area I'm used to compromise. Immersion generally suffers in combat scenarios, but that's often a trade-off for ease of resolution and sufficiently interesting gameplay abstraction. Like all aspects of game design, immersion is in tension with other design goals and you'll have to make trade-offs at some point.Outside of turn-based resolution though, this has more impact on things like skill rules, particularly things like stealth rules, where you must specify the circumstances that call for checks ahead of time. For an easy example, consider a check to open a locked door. I need to know as a player what the costs of trying that action are (time, potential lost resources), what the potential failure points are (how many checks could be called for, what are the potential results of a failed check) and what my general chances of success are, so that I can make the best decision about trying the action. A game with an unbounded fail-forward system (or a system with particularly bad "success at cost" outcomes) will fail to be immersive, because the potential downsides of a failed check may make my decision making as a player not align with my character's putative lockpicking ability.Also, no meta-narrative resource management. A 1/encounter ability must be tied to a resource intrinsic to the character that refreshed on say a 5 minute time scale, not to an "opportunity" that they see arise in the opposition, because the decision to use the ability must be something both the character and I as the player can choose to do.This is fair, but I tend to think of character motivation as defining the victory condition of the game you're playing at any point. My motivation and decision making as a player is then based on trying to optimally achieve that objective. Personal survival is generally a reliable character goal, but if it isn't anymore, I can still as a player try to make good decisions to achieve whatever goal has superseded it if the character's motivations change.This feels like a situation you'd have to accept some abstraction, not at the level of mechanical resolution, but at the level of character motivation. You're adding another goal to the character's motivations that mostly goes unstated "remain part of this group" and you might be prioritizing it over other motivations that might otherwise make more "sense" for the character. It's back to the abstraction necessary to play a game at all, the compromise here being that you agree to play as part of a troupe, even if that might not otherwise align with your motivations.Absolutely, but I'd push that challenge in this sense is a necessary outcome of the scenario, not the system itself, if immersion is to be maintained. This goes back to what I was saying about discrete timeframes earlier. If an action I can declare as a player has an impact on the narrative outside of the direct result (say, a mechanic that allows me to succeed by creating a future complication token that the GM can invoke to add another threat later) I cannot immersively take that action, because my calculus as a player cannot align with the character's decision making.</blockquote>

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