How do people balance immersing in their characters and the fictional situation with the real-life necessity of (say) rolling dice?

Are there some die rolls that are less immersion-breaking than others?  If, for instance, you throw a die and it tells you what type of actions you can choose to undertake, does that shake you out of immersion more than saying "Okay, I'm swinging my sword at him, let's see if I hit!" and throwing a die?  I'm pretty sure (from my own experiences in immersion) that it would ...

I think my current theory is that mechanics that you can call upon to say "I'm trying this, but its success or failure is partly outside my character's control, so I'm happy to throw dice to see how those parts work out" are pretty solid for supporting immersion.  Does that sound right to the folks who take this matter deadly seriously?

Yeah, I agree.  Rolling to hit doesn't break immersion for me, it's a substitute for swinging the sword or firing the gun.  Some mechanics can aid immersion - eg in Twilight 2000 when you switched to autofire you rolled a bucket of d6s, one for every bullet, which really gave a feel of spraying the bullets around as they rolled all over the table.  I found the Heroquest 'bidding' task mechanic really crushed my sense of immersion though as it bore no relation I could see to what my character was trying to do.

Yes. When the player's control relative to the mechanics mirrors the character's control relative to the world, the game supports immersion better than otherwise. (Assuming we don't get into a diversion over defining "immersion".)

So do metagame resources like 4e's Daily Powers kill people's immersion?  Or is it workable to say "I know that my character can do this now, so I can attempt to do it now and roll the dice ... later I will know that he can't do this until tomrrow, so I'll attempt something else"?

I'm wondering, generally, how people would react a card system where you could play cards that represented character abilities ... but sometimes the cards in your hand wouldn't be the cards you most wanted (particularly if you spent the good ones earlier).  Immersion-killing, I worry ....

Being an elite Role Playere Gamere, I pretty much only play Dread Poison (a homebrew game of my own creation).  There is no GM.  We are all pirates, playing a game of Pirate Jenga, which involves taking a drink of rum after each pull.  If you knock the tower over, everybody yells "Jenga, Arrr!" and we kill you (in character).  We use a Jenga tower and some rum as the mechanics.  It's pretty immersive.

Quote from: TonyLB;242743So do metagame resources like 4e's Daily Powers kill people's immersion?  Or is it workable to say "I know that my character can do this now, so I can attempt to do it now and roll the dice ... later I will know that he can't do this until tomrrow, so I'll attempt something else"?

I'm wondering, generally, how people would react a card system where you could play cards that represented character abilities ... but sometimes the cards in your hand wouldn't be the cards you most wanted (particularly if you spent the good ones earlier).  Immersion-killing, I worry ....

I can justify daily powers in a wahoo game like 4e as 'focussing my chi' or similar, though really I think it's more a dramatic device to create dramatic scenes.  I think the card system you suggest would in practice tend to detract from my immersion.

Quote from: TonyLB;242743So do metagame resources like 4e's Daily Powers kill people's immersion?  Or is it workable to say "I know that my character can do this now, so I can attempt to do it now and roll the dice ... later I will know that he can't do this until tomrrow, so I'll attempt something else"?

Probably one of the things people disliked about pre-4e (sometimes called Vancian) magic was that the flavor for why I could only sling so much magic a day seemed....weak. Ironically, it seems 4e didn't really seek to solve that while simultaneously getting rid of Vancian magic. Weird, actually. Interestingly, neither involves dice rolls, however.

It's one of the few places where D&D verisimilitude broke for me. Because the rest is, essentially, "I'm going to try this and the dice will tell me if I succeed." If mechanics go beyond that, tell me in any way what my character should or has to do, it gets dicey - no pun intended.

Mechanics that take over the personality of the character is the most immersive breaking in my experience. The classical example is Pendragon although there are others.

These are different than the common 'physic' engines because they override the one major assumption of rpgs- the player controls the decisions and personality of the character.

Tony you might be over-thinking this a little.

 Sometimes "IMMERSION" has less to do with game mechanics and more to do with a good GM and players that trust him or her.


 One player that often plays in my games has tries other RPGs over the years. She is somewhat more comfortable with GURPS, because I take most of the charactyer creation on myself. (She tells me what she wants for her character - and I do the creation) Once in the game she likes that there are that many dice rolls...also that there is only one kind of die used.


 All the times she played D&D she kept forgetting which type of dice she was supposed to use and why - it  mostly slowed things down for her.


- Ed C.

Ed:  Maybe so, but I can't package up a good game-master in a rule book (well, I can, but they get grumpy) so when I'm thinking about systems I usually look at the other stuff that has an impact.

Whatever else I could say, I seem to find consistency of mechanics more conductive to immersion than the use or non-use any particular mechanic.

Example: combat. Normally anytime fighting-like stuff happens the GM would call roll init, which I've always found pretty jarring (especially if a character was supposed to just whip out a weapon in the middle of a conversation and attack, Han Solo-versus-Greedo-before-the-shitty-retcon-style). But this one time the GM skipped the init rolls when the fight was an extended battle with waves and waves of guys constantly coming in and instead he just called for us to react to stuff at his discretion. This meant our attacks and defences were little more than normal opposed task rolls (plus damage if applicable), which really helped the "oh shit this is really happening" feel of the battle instead of the usual gamey "combat mode" that characterized a lot of other fights.

Conversely,* though, this one time the PCs had a guy tied down who then started casting a particularly nasty spell. We had seconds to stop him, and my guy of course had his gun. We didn't roll init (it was obvious I could fire long before the spell finished), but we did use the normal attack, hit/miss/botch (I botched the first shot, amusingly enough), and damage rules as if this were combat. No dodge roll, of course. It was the only way I could really feel like we were safe even after the guy had a huge hole through his head and wasn't saying or doing anything.


*EDIT: Now that I re-read this it seems like I'm talking about the same sort of thing in each situation. For me, the first was more like "in combat, but not committing ourselves to full 'combat mode'" while the second was more like "out of combat but using a thing usually associated with combat, therefore importing a mechanic usually associated with 'combat mode'." Not sure if that makes sense to everyone.

Many of the games I create focus on stopping the stop-gap issues of mechanics doing what they're supposed to by breaking immersion. For example Hero Point/Drama point mechanics which are fundamentally designed to allow a limited resource that lets one suddenly do more.

Rather than build mechanics so that you have to step out of character, I focused on letting the character empower himself with his drive (in H&S), or by using what he knows like saying a prayer, or gritting her teeth before leaping into battle, in High Valor. While you still have to step out a bit to invoke any mechanics, by making the way you do so, part of the usual descriptive processes of how you go about things--I hope to remove some of the jumping in and out of the "fictional" persona.

Quote from: TonyLB;242743So do metagame resources like 4e's Daily Powers kill people's immersion?

Probably. I can't really say I'm very interested in the game to begin with. They sound like they're pretty intrusive since (a) they're codified ways of doing things which a player might otherwise just declare they're trying, and (b) the reason for limiting them to 1/day isn't explained well in-game AFAICT.

(Contra JA above, I find it's not too hard to internalize the premise of Vancian magic, provided you don't think of D&D as a tool to represent all fantasy, but a fantasy genre of its own. It also helps to have read THe Dying Earth.)

QuoteI'm wondering, generally, how people would react a card system where you could play cards that represented character abilities ... but sometimes the cards in your hand wouldn't be the cards you most wanted (particularly if you spent the good ones earlier).  Immersion-killing, I worry ....

Probably, but there are approaches which are far worse in this respect.

Quote from: TonyLB;242743So do metagame resources like 4e's Daily Powers kill people's immersion?  Or is it workable to say "I know that my character can do this now, so I can attempt to do it now and roll the dice ... later I will know that he can't do this until tomrrow, so I'll attempt something else"?

I don't find daily limits on powers immersion busting when they are magical effects, presumably because no rules system for magic could challenge my innate understanding of how magic really works.

But when the same mechanic is applied to martial powers, such as maneuvers and tactics, it totally breaks my immersion.  As soon as I realize I can do some non-magical trick one round, but can't use it in the next round, I'm forced to confront the fact that I'm playing a game with entirely arbitrary and artificial rules that contradict my innate understanding of combat.

Quote from: Silverlion;242796Many of the games I create focus on stopping the stop-gap issues of mechanics doing what they're supposed to by breaking immersion. For example Hero Point/Drama point mechanics which are fundamentally designed to allow a limited resource that lets one suddenly do more.

I recently got exposed to Action Points (from Eberron) for the first time, and I actually found they greatly increase my sense of immersion.  It feels more like I'm watching and participating in a story unfolding when certain things occur when I expect them to.

I find action points help prevent the very realism of the game from creating story-holes that take me out of the action.