Immersion and Handling Time

[Sean]

One complaint that theorists here sometimes receive from immersionist tabletop gamers and members of the Scandinavian LARP scene basically boils down to the following argument:

1) I like immersion.
2) If I, as player, have to interact with mechanics/real-world social stuff at all, it breaks my immersion.
3) Therefore something about what you guys are saying is BadWrongFun for me.

Playing games like Dogs in the Vineyard and Heroquest, especially with a GM who adheres FIRMLY to the say-yes-or-roll principle (rule in Dogs), makes me, as I think it has made some of you, question this argument. Because here's the thing: everyone can go on immersed, freeforming, indefinitely, as long as all of your visions of what's going on are concordant. It's only when you want things to go differently than they're going that a problem breaks out, and then, surely, your immersion is broken no matter what. Isn't it?

I guess my opinion about this now is 'yes and no'. I grant, having long experience with immersive play, that a player who is good enough at treating all his own declarations of imaginary character intent as 'I try this', subject to final GM approval, can alter the way his or her own ego is involved in the game enough not to experience the GMs "no" or "it works like this instead" as particularly jarring; and if you're used to playing this way I think you hardly miss the other alternative after a while.

But still, isn't it a little jarring?

Well, maybe it might be, if you had to think about it. Since most traditional immersive RPGs effectively run by GM fiat (yes, I know they have all these rules that the GM has to obey too, but there's no constraint on GM Force, so I can whack you with an ancient red dragon by the rules, but of course I won't do that, because that would be obvious force, so instead I'll learn to use just enough that you can't quite see behind the curtain unless you stare really hard, to help you stay immersed, and you will all go and tell your friends what an amazing GM I am and how you felt so free in my game to explore, and for you I was just that), and ditto for the immersive LARPs,there's a simpler explanation here than all the theoretical posturing for understanding this.

GM fiat has the fastest handling time of any adjudication in an RPG. If you have rules as a prop to give it the appearance of fairness, or just (as with the LARPers) a social contract that the GMs word goes, and if the players don't especially have to interact with that, they're good to go.

And if you're all about the immersion, why not? What better way to stay immersed in your character's actions and, mostly, reactions than handing over as much of the game/world adjudication to someone else?

So that seems OK to me as an explanation. Fire at will.

What I'm really interested now is keeping some of the immersive techniques, which I quite enjoy, in more narrativist play. Going back to Dogs and Heroquest again, with say yes or roll firmly intact, you can get really immersed together, in a more conscious and active way, until your visions jar with one another. Until two PLAYERS (not characters!) are in a CONFLCT you need to RESOLVE. Then, engage mechanics, slip out to gaming a little, figure out whose vision is going to dominate play for the next little while. Then keep going.

Well, that kind of play is actually more general; it only becomes narrativist if your conflicts are over value-laden issues you want to explore. You could actually use exactly the same method for other CA as well.

So anyway, that's what I got right now.

[Mark Woodhouse]

What I'm really interested now is keeping some of the immersive techniques, which I quite enjoy, in more narrativist play. Going back to Dogs and Heroquest again, with say yes or roll firmly intact, you can get really immersed together, in a more conscious and active way, until your visions jar with one another. Until two PLAYERS (not characters!) are in a CONFLCT you need to RESOLVE. Then, engage mechanics, slip out to gaming a little, figure out whose vision is going to dominate play for the next little while. Then keep going.

Not sure that's really going to do the trick. The currency of conflict in Dogs is tied very strongly to the characters - but players can be in conflict over stuff that's only peripherally related to their characters. Dogs as written deals with this in part by Vincent's advice that players should kibitz and contribute in scenes regardless of their character's presence. What do I roll when you and I disagree over whether the Mountain People are really favored of the King? Not our characters (they both know the doctrine and believe it) - US, the players.

[Sean]

Good point, Mark. Dogs as written does not support the interpretation of my post; and for that matter, Heroquest as written supports multiple conflicting interpretations (IMO). What I was really positing was a play-style using this kind of mechanics - that you could maybe do with those mechanics or something similar to them - that would support player-level immersion (shared private imagining, say) as long as the group had consensus, but would rely on a more democratic process (the conflict rez mechanics) than GM fiat to resolve interplayer conflicts when two peoples' imaginings were veering off in incompatible directions.

I hope that helps. If not, I guess I should write a game that I think facilitates it and try it out to see how it works.

[Ron Edwards]

Hey Sean,

interplayer conflicts when two peoples' imaginings were veering off in incompatible directions.

I think I need a concrete example. All I keep imagining are perfectly standard conflicts of interest in purely Explorative terms - what we want our characters to do, what happens when they do it, and how it turns out. Which it seems to me that Dogs, The Mountain Witch, The Shadow of Yesterday, Sorcerer, The Riddle of Steel, Universalis, and (uh well) Elfs are admirably suited to resolving, all in distinctive ways.

And not resolving in terms of "everyone gets his way," either. I mean resolution, not mind-melds.

Best,
Ron

[Mark Woodhouse]

What I'm imagining as the non-character-local conflicts are things that are traditionally GM tasks. Is Count Maxwell a vampire, or just creepy and misunderstood? Do warp cores explode when they're breached, or do they fail gracefully? This is principally a problem for No Myth play, obviously.

[Sean]

OK, several different topics in my thread.

Topic 1 - is having the GM basically in charge of adjudicating everything actually functional for hardcore immersionist players, because it minimizes handling time and thereby minimizes player points of contact with system and/or external social reality?

I think the answer is probably yes, and it seems like a straightforward point to make. However, I blew it in my original post: GM-adjudication doesn't mean GM-Fiat with or without rules-as-prop. A GM who's heavily internalized the rules, knows them all by heart, can make fast accurate decisions etc. accomplishes the same thing. So maybe (if anyone cares) we can head that off at the pass. Does this part at least sound plausible to people?


Topic 2 - my musings on 'quasi-immersionist Narrativism' or whatever. Mark, I'm definitely thinking of this in terms of 'players play their characters, GM plays everything else' traditional play - though I'd want GM Force to be controlled by the system in my proposed applicaiton of it, because otherwise it can very easily become the same-ol-same-ol with nicer rez mechanics - so the stuff you're bringing up, while important in the big picture, isn't really relevant to what I'm thinking about.

Which brings me to Ron's request for concrete examples.

Situation 1: My player wants to go to Lakaloka and face down the ancient bird-thing Zyz. The GM wants me to go to the Eye'n Gut Spitoon House so I can get hired by the ancient wizard to clear out the Tombs of Shale-Chuun. No boats to take me to Lakaloka on the docks, all the other bars are closed. So I either get on board with the GMs thing or go home.

Situation 2: Same deal, I go to Lakaloka because I said so. The GM improvises cool stuff in response to me, or rolls on his random encounter charts until he can think of some cool stuff to improvise, or goes home because his player won't go on his adventure, whatever.

SItuations 1 and 2 both seem pretty straightforward to me, They're also kind of bad because they're at the level of adventure setup rather than decisions in the adventure. So let's take it again from the top:

Situation 1: I want the queen to fall in love with my character after I sing at her window. The GM doesn't, so the queen turns away uninterested.

Situation 2: Ditto first sentence, but my intention goes, so I get the queen.

Situation 3: The system has hardwired task numbers. I want to seduce the queen; the GM might feel either way about this, but he makes me roll my Smoove B skill because that's what the game system says 'would really happen' in this situation.

Situation 4: Exactly like situation 1, Our intentions are different; if they were the same we would say yes instead of rolling. So what we do now is, we have a player-level contest to see whose vision of the story is going to win out.

OK, just really talking about resolution there.

1 and 2 are both fine for immersive play but we usually get 1 because 2 is exhausting/beyond the skills of most GMs to keep up with (though a game where really all the GM was doing was providing wish fulfillment might be interesting; drum machine GM instead of bass playing GM).

3 is not so hot for immersive play, but because almost none of these games have constraints on GM force they can be drifted there by 'an experienced GM who knows what he's doing' who uses just the right force assignments so that your character's choices are mostly being made for them but you don't notice this because the GM doesn't use absurdly differential force to ram his desires down your throat. An oversized wyvern keeps you away instead of the ancient red dragon.

Now some people who encounter the Forge think that 4 and immersive play just don't mix. I'm not so sure. You obviously can't have the very long unbroken immersion experience that some of these people are getting at LARPs and the like by handing over everything to the GM, unless you're just all really miraculously on the same page with each other all the time. But it seems to me that it might wind up producing something satisfying along rather traditional lines: you invest/immerse in your character, try to experience things through his or her eyes, etc., as a default mode of play, but you expect that your active intentions are going to influence what happens in a real way, and that when you and other players or the GM differ on what's going to happen you can use the dice to negotiate it. So OK, that breaks your immersion, and nobody's going to be moving here from Scandinavia to try it out any time soon maybe, but it seems like it's an interesting way to allow for hard-core character identification and a real stake in your character's ongoing story that doesn't just reduce to options 1-3 above.

One example was in my Dogs thread, though it wasn't perfect. I wanted George's character to sin with this woman,and he didn't, so we rolled it out. The interaction with it wasn't immersive, but since you work the Dogs mechanics through your character's traits we didn't exactly forget about the character either. Before and after though George was pretty much trying to 'be' his guy in the traditional style (which he's a master of). So OK, the problematic issues with sex stuff aside, model 1 makes the character deal with the fact that he's now not a virgin and slept with this lustful woman, model 2 lets the player put off anything he or she doesn't want to deal with, and model 3 forces you to roll even when you agree about what the best outcome would be.

But it seems to me that there's a model 4 that could facilitate at least some of the best stuff about character-immersive gaming while providing a more functional and 'honest' (= recognizing the real world as part of what you're doing in the game) way of resolving conflicts between the different players at the table. It worked for me and George pretty well; he's back into his character dealing with the stuff now, but he had a stake in the way it came out. Something similar happened in an adventure that Del ran for Calithena last year (that's where that Lakaloka stuff was coming in). So that's where I'm going with this.

Does that help any?