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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2672874" data-attributes="member: 7240">I think you speak for everyone on this thread when you say this, regardless of whether they are for or against emotional engagement, for first or third person play, or for or against deep immersion.I don't really see my GM reminding me of my character's cultural context undermining any other values or objectives with respect to immersion, storytelling or emotional engagement. "What would your parents say?" is, I think, a reasonable thing for any GM to ask his players if they appear to breaking with their culture's values without appearing to take that break seriously. It's not as though he told us we had to slaughter the adult males in the town, he just reminded us that choosing not to do so constituted a break with our culture.That's true but it does not follow that the two things are unrelated. When bad things happen to fictional or remote characters, there are two types of (highly related) emotional engagement one can have with that: (a) pity (b) compassion/sympathy (both words meaning, etymologically, suffering with); RPGs add a third possible position for the highly immersive first-person players: (c) suffering as. I think what is going on, however, in this thread is that we are not debating so much which of these three ways people respond to PC or NPC suffering; what the thread has devolved into is a debate over whether suffering is something we want to explore through out play. When I GM or play, my narratives contain suffering insofar as people die, get injured, get sick, lose relatives, etc. but the suffering associated with this is glossed-over; the event still stands because it is necessary to the story but the suffering is left unexplored. If a character loses an arm, the emotional engagement I'm looking for is not, "Poor him, he lost an arm. That's going to deeply affect him." The emotional engagement I'm looking for is, "Whoa! His arm!? Man, that's gotta hurt. Damned red knight, wait 'til I get my hands on him!" Same event. Same story. Totally different levels of emotional engagement, one sympathetic, the other distanced.</blockquote>

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