Rules for Immersion

[GMMichael]

It's an inverse ratio, generally speaking. The more rules, the less immersion.

Agreed, in general. To be immersed in the story is to no longer realize you're playing a game.

No, (asking for personalized initiative) would utterly break immersion because it's still game-mechanics time rather than narrative-immersion time. To be immersed in the story you have to stay in the story as much as possible. Every time you call attention to the mechanics that breaks immersion.

This is wandering toward the never-say-always problem, I think. Because what I said above, "no longer realize you're playing a game," just isn't going to happen unless your GM is a hypnotherapist (which sounds kind of cool...). So that leaves us with: there are going to be some rules involved. How do we make them more immersive?

Rules that help with immersion would be things like torches lasting 30-60 minutes (because they do), torches not sitting burning in every sconce in a castle (because that's a monumentally stupid waste or resources), weight being tracked and excessive weight slowing characters and causing exhaustion (because it does), needing to sleep uninterrupted for 6-8 hours (because people do), etc. Anything that reinforces the world helps with immersion. But, the closer your in-game world is to the real world, the less rules you need to bother with because all your players are (hopefully) quite familiar with the real world and don't need a book to tell them things like "people don't like when you threaten their lives and tend to react poorly if you do."

Agreed and disagreed. A lot of things happen (like torchlight duration) because the real world demands it, but that doesn't mean that I know everything that the real world demands. What I don't know, I have to look up in the book. Or the DuckDuckGo. And once I start doing that, I'm thinking about page numbers, that cool piece of art on the earlier page, and whether the other players (not characters) are thinking that I'm taking too long to look this up. So, it seems that too many immersive rules can have a non-immersive effect.

Harmful to your immersion. Such a rule does nothing to mine and may even enhance someone else's since it allows them to realize the world fully. This is why I specified that immersion is highly individual. What breaks immersion for you mechanically does not have the same effect on me. That indicates to me that the rules aren't the factor in breaking immersion, but how the individual player approaches the rules. It's why I won't ever write a game to "preserve" immersion.

I have to wonder if you're conflating an immersive game and a fun game here. I'm not disputing that it's a subjective thing, because what isn't subjective about a role-playing game? But maybe we can safely say that the player who feels "immersed" in battle when using 4 pages of character sheet because they contain all of the realistic combat options is... a bit of an outlier? Or experiencing more fun than immersion?

 

[MichaelSomething]

Have you considered having the players dress up like their characters??

 

[CreamCloud0]

i think immersion for me would be the point where i stop thinking about how i play the game from the perspective of being the result of a bunch of rules and mechanics and just enter the flowstate of 'this is what my character would want/feel/do in this situation' this doesn't mean i object to/forget the rules that are being used but i don't make decisions based on them,however particularly jarring 'gamey' rules or ones that break vermisilitude often tend to break immersion too.

 

[payn]

Have you considered having the players dress up like their characters??

 

[clearstream]

For example, I would say any decision I make as a player that my character can't make is necessarily less immersive. This means that a mechanic that say, lets me declare that there exists a helpful object in the nearby environment is harmful to my immersion. Having or not having a rule that enables that will absolutely affect me.

I was going to ask you about that, so thank you for clarifying. Is it right to say that OOC mechanics such as tokens players choose to spend will often fall into the same category?

 

[Pedantic]

I was going to ask you about that, so thank you for clarifying. Is it right to say that OOC mechanics such as tokens players choose to spend will often fall into the same category?

Yes, though I think it's all a sliding scale, reliant on both the effect of such tokens and their narrative. 3.5's Hero Points in Ebberon are mechanically pretty similar to Willpower in nWoD, but the former are explicitly invoking luck and protagonism, while the latter are diegetically expressing a limited pool of extra effort from a character, making the former less immersive. Both are more immersive than something like Fate Points, which encourage entirely separate player/character motives.

 

[Umbran]

This is why I specified that immersion is highly individual. What breaks immersion for you mechanically does not have the same effect on me. That indicates to me that the rules aren't the factor in breaking immersion, but how the individual player approaches the rules.

I don't believe that indication follows. It indicates that (unsurprisingly) people are different from each other.

That two people get different results from rules does not clearly indicate that somehow if one player did something different, their results would suddenly be the same. The work to establish that as a general truth has not been shown.

 

[RivetGeekWil]

I don't believe that indication follows. It indicates that (unsurprisingly) people are different from each other.

That two people get different results from rules does not clearly indicate that somehow if one player did something different, their results would suddenly be the same. The work to establish that as a general truth has not been shown.

It indicates that if two players approached a set of rules in identical ways, they would still not both necessarily experience "immersion" (or only one of them or maybe both of them), or derive the same quality thereof. Because the rules don't make the immersion, the players do.

 

[aramis erak]

To expand a bit on my view - mechanics don't break immersion for me when they don't take too long to resolve.

LEG's Aliens Adventure Game took too long for combat; FL's ALIEN Roleplaying Game much better fits. I find myself submerged into the story by the rules in the latter, and so, despite GMing, am on edge awaiting the outcomes.

And yet, some mechanics zipyank me out of enjoying the story... amongst those, D&D 3.x, D&D 5, Classic Traveller (if only because they're so minimalist and inconsistent, at least when one actually uses the rules in the books)...

It's the same for boardgames ... I get deeply engrossed in AH's Advanced Civilization, DoW's entire catalog except TTR:USA, and a few others... I'm waiting to see how things unfold, not for being deeply in character.

Players in costume often actually hinders my ability to get into the story - the distraction factor plus the piles of costuming books I've read...

 

[MichaelSomething]

Sounds like a person who never played 4E.

It indicates that if two players approached a set of rules in identical ways, they would still not both necessarily experience "immersion" (or only one of them or maybe both of them), or derive the same quality thereof. Because the rules don't make the immersion, the players do.