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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6520227" data-attributes="member: 42582">Role labels, and the sentences in which they occur, aren't part of the setting - they are statements of guidelines for how PCs might be built and played. They occupy the same functional space as a bit of advice in an older D&D book saying "If you play a magic-user, you will have to work hard to keep out of combat and avoid being killed, due to your poor AC and hit points."If someone finds the fiction to which PC builds give rise to be arbitrary or genre-breaking, that would be an example of what you quote. That will vary across players. For me, the idea that a gentle word from a charismatic battle captain can revive the spirits of a comrade reinforces (Tokienesque) genre; likewise, the idea that powerful warriors will find themselves at the centre of the action, being swarmed by their enemies (though here the genre is fantasy more generally, with probably REH's Conan as the core example).Others might have different genre expectations and preferences, and therefore find their immersion broken by some of this fiction to which the mechanics give rise."Passive", here, describes a psychological experience - a feeling.In the context of RPG design, what sorts of mechanics create what sorts of feelings? In RPG play, players have to describe what their PCs are doing, sometimes using the technical language of action declaration. Whether or not incorporating into those descriptions references to things that are not the PC, or that - in the fiction - are not under the PC's control will disrupt a certain feeling is not something to be answered by logic. It is an empirical question. And I think it is obvious that these experiences vary across players.Here are two hypothetical action declarations that might be made when a PC, with a roguish background, is trying to find a shady contact in a city:Player: Do I have any contacts from my past here? GM: Yes . . . [fills in some details] . . . Player: Cool. My Streetwise check is 16 - do I make contact? GM: [Consults resolution rules and determines whether or not contact is successfully made.] ************ Player: I'm trying to hook up with one of my contacts here from my past,who can put me in touch with the guildmaster. My Streetwise check is 16. GM: Cool. [Consults resolution rules and determines whether or not contact is successfully made.] You meet . . . [fills in details depending on whether or not check succeeded] . . .The second example - modelled loosely on Burning Wheel's Circles mechanic - illustrates an instance of player authorship - the player is entitled to author elements of his/her PC's background, including having acquaintances in the city; the resolution mechanics determine whether or not the PC, on this occasion, successfully makes contact with one of those acquaintances.There is no a priori reason why the second mode of action declaration should spoil immersion in some way that the first is guaranteed not to.This. Generalising from one's own psychological experience, to what is possible for other RPGers, is fraught with the risk of error.To refer to a different medium: I have no trouble becoming immersed in a foreign-language, subtitled film. I know other people who do. All this shows is that the psychological experience of reading the dialogue is different for different film viewers.</blockquote>

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