Synchronicity strikes the blogosphere.

Just when I finished discussing with Mo how I have to adjust, as a player, to the "Say yes or roll dice" philosophy in Dogs in the Vineyard--I see it as pretty anti-immersive--Jere Genest puts up a piece on saying no to your players.

So isn't that funny?

Going back to my functional analysis of immersion, note that this falls under the perception category.

Also note that, for (some) people who value immersion, the concept of GM Force is a non-issue. It just doesn't compute. If the immersionist's character wants to find the lost gold mine on the other side of the mountain, the immersionist himself will be equally happy if the GM tells him it's there or it isn't there. On the other hand, it's going to reduce his enjoyment of the game if the GM says (or implies), "You want to find it? Okay, you found it."

I made a rather long comment in Merten's blog so rather than reproduce it here, I'm just going to give a link to his entry. Here it is. (May take a little while to show up as Merten moderates his comments.)

I get a little polemical. But actually I think we may be approaching a new level of understanding across the RPG theory world, with at least some acknowledgment of immersion as a genuine, worthwhile aesthetic goal--not just a form of design conservatism--albeit not one that everyone shares.

Things seem to happen in waves in the RPG blabosphere.

Anyway, Chris Chinn has been putting up some practical advice on how to develop scenarios which I find interesting and potentially useful. Find it here.

Meanwhile both RPG.net and Harnforum (free registration required) have been getting into the same practical issues of how to create scenarios that involve the characters. (Another RPG.net thread, started by Levi Kornelsen is here.) The most interesting element of these discussions, for me, is the paradigm clash between the idea of "adventure hooks" and the idea of "flags" or "player-driven" scenarios. The most depressing element is the way that "player-driven" scenario-building is repeatedly caught up in the ideology of "story", such that if you don't have a "player-driven story", then either the GM must be leading the players around by the nose, or nothing particularly interesting happens.

I find this ironic and to illustrate why, I'll offer a completely unfair analysis of Dogs in the Vineyard as a game where the players are forced into taking cowboy defenders of the faith as their PCs, because, you know, if your friend purchases the book and gets you to play the game, that's your only choice. Player empowerment is not absolute; once you buy into playing the game with other people, you're always giving up some of your power to control the scope and expression of game elements, including your own character. At the same time, everyone else including the GM is giving up some of their power to you. It's your job to make the most of this arrangement, and exactly how you do it has a highly complex, non-isomorphic relationship to whether you're "authoring a story" or doing something entirely different.

I think for a certain class of roleplayers ("immersionists", "simulationists", or anyone whose primary goal is to "experience the fictional world" without regard to "theme" or "Premise" but certainly with regard to "interest"), it's probably useful to take up an alternative to Forge-inspired "protagonism", in a combination of "PC proactivity" and "PC magnetism". By the latter I mean construction of PCs such that, even if they don't go looking for interesting things to do, the nature of their role in life means that interesting things will happen to them. And by interesting, I mean no more or less than things which the player of the PC will enjoy dealing with, and which the other people around the table will enjoy interacting with either actively or as audience. A prime example of a proactive character is the entrepreneurial rogue or the seeker of arcane mysteries. "Magnetic" characters are often what I think of as "static responsibles"--a sheriff, for example, or a land owner. However, troubleshooters like superhero teams and superspies are also largely "magnetic" in that their presumed responsibilities tend to result in missions and crises being thrust on them.

For my purposes it's important to note where player-character interests converge and where they diverge. The player always wants interesting things, while the character perhaps not so much, unless he's proactively creating them. By definition, a problem is something that the character would just as soon avoid, or certainly something that he didn't deliberately bring on himself. It's still something the player craves, but for the sake of player-character identification, it's not something the player wants to generate himself.

(I really need a better term than "PC magnetism" since it's a bit on the whimsical and idiosyncratic side, and I prefer to use jargon that's easily grasped on the first pass. I am tempted to say "PC fitness"--but that's too close to Vincent's terminology.)

Some might see this paradigm as no more than an expression of Narrativist campaign/scenario construction. That may be, but where I think it differs from the outlook that inspires common Narrativist techniques, and indeed rejects the common GNS concept of Incoherence, is that it takes player interest, flexibly defined, as the central value instead of the literary/dramaturgical concept of Premise. For game systems, this paradigm also offers as a benchmark the ability to engage the interest of the players by providing mechanics that are actually enjoyable ways of negotiating/resolving the events of the imagined world. That is, if the combat mechanics of a given game are enjoyable in themselves, then the players' interests might well focus on situations that allow them to exercise those mechanics. Yet those players may have no special interest in combat per se--give them an enjoyable system of social conflict resolution, and they may gravitate toward political or social scenarios.

Hm, while searching for another thread I came across this one on the Forge, where it looks like some of the same issues are hashed out. Just including it here for future reference; I haven't read it closely yet.

Lee Short also covers some related ground in his work-in-progress Star Moon Cross, particularly in the campaign prep discussion of "what kinds of activities do you envision your character engaging in"?

I just came across this on RPG.net. Battlefield Press has opened a forum devoted to the discussion of immersive play. You can find it here.

eyebeams has also been talking more about immersion lately and I think he and his commenters have some very interesting things to say (in fact, I found the above link indirectly from there, via RPG.net). There are two entries: Reinventing the Method and Immersion-Fu!

Some discussions going on about Immersion these days. See previous entry for links.

I'd just like to raise one point which I think people need to be careful about. "Immersion" is often connected in theory and practice with lack of "out of character" communication. Both here and in Mo's LJ there's been some discussion about the need to maintain interpersonal communication channels to ensure game focus. (I agree.)

What needs to be differentiated are at least three practices, all of which might be called "immersionist":

1) Discouraging or refusing to engage in out of character communication at all times, including between sessions.

2) Similar to (1), but being receptive to out of character communication between game sessions.

3) Thinking and responding to the game "in character" during a game session, but being receptive to out of character communication at any time.

This last is basically saying, "I know my character so well that in any situation, the way I have my character act is the only way that s/he can act, as far as I'm concerned. But if necessary I can also explain what my character's thinking, at least as well as I could explain my own thoughts. And I can also talk about what I'm thinking, and what I want out of the game, as distinct from what my character wants."

Now that I think about it, we can add three similar distinctions having to do with perception:

A) Preferring to perceive the game experience at all times through the eyes of the character. (Thus, you never want to hear about, or even suspect, that the GM is manipulating things behind the curtain, and you don't want to have to deal with "metagame" concerns such as party unity or telling a good story.)

B) Accepting metagame awareness of the game, when not actually playing the game. (You know the GM is presenting a scenario that was written up last night. You're willing to position your character before play in such a way as to achieve certain metagame goals.)

C) Accepting metagame awareness of the game during the game. (As a player, you accept that the GM is fudging dice to keep you alive, but you can separate that from the character's awareness. Yet you can still "slip into" the character's mindset and "know" what s/he's thinking and what s/he'll do in a given circumstance.)

I think it's possible to be "immersionist" to different degrees at the communication level vs. perception level, by the way. For example, unless I explicitly agree otherwise, I'm not very keen on Illusionism and in-game Dramatism, but I wouldn't object to explaining my character during a game. So my lower Immersion tolerance might be categorized as 3B.

Note that "absolutely no Immersionism" wouldn't be 3C. As long as you have the baseline level of "being able to see things entirely from your character's P.O.V., so that your decisions are exactly what you 'know' your character would decide", you're immersing. Maybe this baseline characteristic is what should be dubbed "channeling".

Sin Aesthetics introduces a series of posts on Immersion with some issues that are closely related to the discussion we just had in Notes on Correlation.

This thread concerning '"Channeling" and GNS' on the Forge ended badly. Perhaps its successor here will be more productive. (Note: "channeling" refers to the practice of "channeling character"--seeing and doing things entirely from the perspective of a character. "Drama", I suppose, refers to the desire for thematic developments in the course of play.)

One thing that came up in the doomed thread was a comment from Ron Edwards that "channeling/drama" conflicts are likely to arise when Narrativist and Simulationist CA's clash, but that a "channeling/drama" conflict doesn't mean that a CA clash is occurring.

It turns out that this is an unbelievably complex assertion. It can be approached from many angles, but before you can even start, you have to grapple with the fundamental limitations of normal speech and how people tend to think about words like "correlation" and "typical" when they aren't being careful.

Suppose you have 100 cases where games went wrong due to either "channel/drama" conflicts or N/S clash. They might break down as:

40 "channel/drama" clash and N/S clash
20 N/S clash only
40 "channel/drama" clash only

With these numbers you could reasonably say that an N/S clash typically entails a "channel/drama" clash, since 67% of all N/S clashes are also "channel/drama" clashes. Conversely you might say that a "channel/drama" clash is just as likely not to involve an N/S clash as it is to have one, so there's nothing "typically N/S" about "channel/drama" clashes.

But let's look at things a little differently. Suppose that in addition to the 100 cases we just talked about, we've also seen some number of clashes which involved neither "channel/drama" nor N/S clash. And now I say that one type of clash is typical of the other, or that the two types of problems are correlated. What does that mean? This opens up an alternate view of "typical", which happens to be the strict definition of "correlation" in mathematical terms. ("Positive correlation", if you want to be picky.) Instead of saying that "X is typical of Y" when X shows up more than 50% of the time that Y is present, we might say that "X is typical of (correlated with) Y" when the presence of Y makes us more likely to believe that X will show up than we would think otherwise.

Suppose that, other than the 100 cases, there are 10 more clashes that fall into the category "other". Now, if I make a slip of paper for each case, throw them all in a hat, and draw one at random, what's the chance that it will be an N/S clash? Answer: 60/110 = 55%. But what if you draw one at random and tell me that it's a "channel/drama" clash--what is the chance that it's also N/S? Answer: 40/80 = 50%.

Let's look at it from the other direction. Draw a random case: what's the chance it will be a "channeling/drama" clash? Answer: 80/110 = 73%. Now draw a random case and see that it's an N/S clash. The chance that it's also a channeling clash goes down to 40/60 = 67%

In other words, if these 110 cases are representative of all your gaming experience, then seeing one type of clash should make you less likely to suspect that the other type is present. The two types of clash really aren't "typical" of each other at all, from that perspective. At best, they're just "typical" of the sorts of clashes that turn up in gaming.

But wait a second. Suppose that, instead of 10 "other" cases, there are 100. If you draw a random case now, the chance it'll be "channeling/drama" is 80/200 = 40%. But if you know it's N/S, the chance it's also "channeling/drama" goes up, to 67%. Conversely, the chance that a random case will be N/S is 60/200 = 30% if you don't know anything else about it. But if you know it entails "channeling/drama", there's a 50% chance that it's also N/S.

Now, even though seeing a "channeling/drama" clash shouldn't make you think that there's a better-than-even chance that the other type is also present, we might still say that they're "typical" of each other--certainly, they're related enough that seeing one of them should make you more likely to suspect that the other is present.

Well, I have to run. This entry was originally going to be "Notes on Correlation and Causation", but I'll have to take that up in the comments.