That Thread in Which We Ruminate on the Confluence of Actor Stance, Immersion, and "Playing as if I Was My Character"

[aramis erak]

I know what can increase immersion; dressing up as your character! Why hasn't anyone suggested it before?

Because for some, it's just a distraction. For others, a disruption. It also pushed into LARP territory, which for a significant subset is a no-go zone. There is very little that is truly a universal aid to immersion.

 

[Emerikol]

I don't think it's controversial to say that early editions of D&D had a number of mechanisms that were internally at odds with creating "immersive" play experiences. Not to say that you couldn't immerse, just that there were lots of artifacts getting in the way.

• Gaming the "XP is gold" system, as noted by many.
• General lethality / assumption of "troupe" play meant it was dangerous to get attached to any one character, let alone try and "immerse" as one.
• The massive amounts of procedural rules (time, mapping, wandering monsters, massive numbers of tables on which to roll).
• Gamist resource management of all sorts (rations, hit points, consumables, treasure hauling).

All of these are aimed at pushing players towards "skilled play" kinds of behaviors, of the kind predominant from '78-'83. And there's nothing wrong with it, it's just that taken at face value, they're largely at odds with "immersion" as a concept. The general "win conditions" of skilled play have no direct avenue into "immersion."

I disagree. Well I disagree on some of your bullets.

1. XP is Gold. Sure if your players game the system this way then that is bad and yes it could happen. My Job as DM is to disincentivize that behavior. It was not a big deal for me. This is probably the one I can concede was probably a problem for many groups though not mine.
2. Beyond the very early levels, I didn't see this that much and even then with my groups it wasn't common place. But my groups were highly skilled in my opinion. Maybe this was a problem for many groups but honestly even outside of mine I didn't see it that much.
3. These procedural rules as you call them were almost all handled by the GM. Mapping was a player duty but we viewed it as our characters mapping in game. If the character wasn't mapping then the player wasn't mapping. So this one is at best neutral but in fact is likely pro-immersion.
4. Resource management and skilled play is just doing what you would really do if you really were that character. That would be immersing me further. So I have to say this is the one I'm most opposed to in concept. Lack of resource management would be non-immersive for me.

And I'm talking about being immersed in character and not just being focused on the game. One implies the other but the other does not imply the first.