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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prabe" data-source="post: 8261419" data-attributes="member: 7016699">Tag!So, upthread I mentioned types of immersion, or different things one could be immersed in while TRPGing. They were story, game, character, and setting. Setting isn't relevant: I've never experienced it, and the possibility of it is dubious.While I think I understand Toru pretty well, and I think I've been playing him honestly, I don't know that I've been immersed in him during our DW play--but remember, character-immersion isn't something that's a big part of my TRPG experience. Like, I may have never experienced it, ever (so if I don't experience it with Toru, it's not a critique of Dungeon World or you as a GM).When I mentioned immersion-in-game, I was talking (mostly) about the processes and rules and literal game-stuff taking up so much bandwidth there wasn't room for much else in my head. When I'm running 5E, this is usually during some large set-piece fight where I have a lot to keep track of; it's really like getting head-down in, say, Gloomhaven and losing track of the evening (or like getting head-down in my MIDI space and losing track of time, hunger, sleep ...). From the player's POV, there aren't enough of those kinds of rules and processes in DW for me to get lost in; that's not snark--I think that's in line with the intent of the game.What there has been (for me, my wife may be having a different experience; I haven't spoken to her about this) is immersion into story. I wouldn't say it's been constant, but for me immersion into story roughly never is constant, in roughly any medium--so that's me, not you or the game.The experience most-closely tracks with college-age-me sitting in a room with friends, all of us writers, and passing around stories for 15 or 30 minutes at a time, or maybe one of the small handful of times a band I was in set out to write lyrics together. There's a lot of bouncing off each other's ideas, and a lot of curiosity about where the story will be when it gets to be time to contribute. Here, I get to say that as with a writing circle, or a band, chemistry around a gaming table matters, a helluva lot; the time passes quickly for me while we're playing, an awful lot like good band times.Probably mostly watching Toru.I have a sneaking suspicion some of the people in this thread would see it as not too much different from "passing the conch." There might be a sense there wasn't much of a way to make much difference to your character's success in the build process. There might be a feeling there wasn't much in the way of tactical choice mattering. There might be the thought that the things that emerge in the story are emerging at the whim of the dice (especially after someone earns 3 XP within 7 minutes of play) and not out of any putatively objective sense of action-consequence--especially not as the result/s of character choice/s.OTOH, I think anyone observing would see that the three of us are enjoying the hell out of the game.Asking the sword for words to speak was ... a result of a concatenation of other things: The decision to describe defeating a spirit as it being pulled into the sword (because that seemed ... cool); the decision to describe throwing off a later possession as involving using the sword to cut myself; the decision (at character advancement) to take the Heirloom move, instead of my more-typical kill-things-more-quickly approach. It wouldn't have worked without the GM's decision that "downloading" the Old Speech from the sword was a plausible use of the move. The decision to go intimidating there was the situation in-game cutting across the player's sense of fairness, in a way that landed more negatively on people mostly like Toru--people who had already lost roughly everything.</blockquote>

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