Quote from: Wisithir on April 26, 2022, 10:54:57 PM
When properly executed an RPG setting is as real as the settings and characters of a good book or movie. Yes, it is fantasy, but it still provokes an emotional response as though it were real. The town is more than a save point and item dispensary and the NPCs are more than quest givers. When a game does not resonate emotionally, I cannot be bothered to play it because I do not care and have no interest in seeing what happens in it next.

Emotional resonance and investment is key to immersion!  I liked the phrase used a few posts back... "deep immersion".  That's what I'm going for.  Next level shit!

An understanding and appreciation of human nature is, IMO, a necessary prerequisite to being a good game master.  How you get that to emerge into the game can be done with a variety of techniques, deep immersion being one of the obvious ones. 

To use a literary analog, Terry Pratchett's characters are full of demonstrations of human nature, but not deeply immersed.  There's too many puns, side jokes, flights of fancy, etc. for deep immersion, even if the characters do have at least the consistency of being over the top in a world designed to match.  The underlying consistency won't survive careful scrutiny, as Pratchett has explicitly explained.  He'd have to sacrifice too much of his other goals to reach that kind of consistency, and he didn't consider it important enough in any case.

In the age of quantum mechanics (not to mention Jungian Psychology), it seems reasonable to me to assume that other worlds (or "dimensions") exist. And I suspect my game world includes elements from a variety of different dimensions. Under this theory, elements that resonate strongly do so because they are in fact real, somewhere.

If the curation of those elements is skillful (or equally as intuitive) then sure, the game world itself begins to take on at least a subjective reality of its own. And that's when the gaming starts to get very very good.

Quote from: VengerSatanis on April 27, 2022, 11:23:15 AM
Emotional resonance and investment is key to immersion!  I liked the phrase used a few posts back... "deep immersion".  That's what I'm going for.  Next level shit!

Yep.

Quote from: Zalman on April 27, 2022, 12:07:41 PM
In the age of quantum mechanics (not to mention Jungian Psychology), it seems reasonable to me to assume that other worlds (or "dimensions") exist. And I suspect my game world includes elements from a variety of different dimensions. Under this theory, elements that resonate strongly do so because they are in fact real, somewhere.

If the curation of those elements is skillful (or equally as intuitive) then sure, the game world itself begins to take on at least a subjective reality of its own. And that's when the gaming starts to get very very good.

Quote from: VengerSatanis on April 27, 2022, 11:23:15 AM
Emotional resonance and investment is key to immersion!  I liked the phrase used a few posts back... "deep immersion".  That's what I'm going for.  Next level shit!

Yep.

Damn. Was going to bring up the multiverse theory, but you beat me to it. So yeah, in a sense they do exist on a certain level. IMO, it's kinda comforting to know that Oerth (WoG) exists in the multiverse, with Tenser, Robilar, Morderkainan, and the rest of the gang.

Real as in existing in some other dimension?
No.

Real as in "world in motion" stuff happens even if the PCs arent involved? History and all that?
Yes.

If someone thinks their game world is real as in it actually exists somehow. Then they are drifting dangerously into the same realm of madness as the loons who want to blur the lines between character and player. Hence part of why I have such a deep hate of the obsession with "muh immershun!" The other reason being I've seen way too many storygamers obsessed with it past any point of sane.

Having an internally consistent world is not a must have thing. But for me it makes the setting more real and alive than just a jumble of un-related things happening willy nilly. A totally random style can of course work. But for me it loses some impact. This has been a problem I've had with for example Neverwinter Online. The "plots" to use the term in the loosest of sense, tend to boil down to "random stuff happens for no reason" with little to no connection between each segment. It is rather sad that their much older random nemesis plot generator for Champions Online tells a more coherent story than NWO can seem to muster.

I felt a bit the same with the Zebulon series of modules for Star Frontiers. The first two in particular have a certain feel of being too random as it were.

No. The whole point is that it's NOT real. It's no more real than a fantasy novel or computer game. If you start philosophizing about the morals of shooting computer pixel persons you've lost track of the plot. I remember a couple of times when I played Civiliation on my computer back in the day, and went all batshit, nuking everything in sight. In RPGs we sometimes play more sophisticated settings, or we play barbarians axing up anyone in our way.  Why not? It's just a game. And that's the point.

Thinking of our games as being "real" in the sense that we are creating actual new dimensions of reality somewhere out in the multiverse is... a bit disconcerting.

For starters, who or what fills in the blanks?
Not every little thing is fleshed out in a game world, so what driver is making that alternate reality "real?" In other words, if the world is created through the descriptions and actions of the GM/players, does anything not explicitly described even exist? Or does nothing exist unless /until it's described or interacted with?
Additionally, players often ignore, infer, or invent entirely different narrative events within their own heads when a piece of environment isn't explicitly described. This would necessarily require that there be separate dimensions for each player.

The disconcerting part is what that says about our own reality. If we, as players, can create entire dimensions of existence while drinking beers and eating chips with friends on a weekend, who's to say that WE aren't the manifested delusions of some basement-dweller somewhere? If WE are the characters in someone else's game, then nothing outside of our experiences actually exist. To me, YOU don't exist beyond some words on screen. "Objective reality" would be an illusion. Ultimately, it's just a spiral down into pure solipsism. We're all just some dream of Brahma and nothing is real.

Ehh... so, no... I don't believe my game worlds are "real" places. I'm reasonable certain objective reality exists and no one else's subjective experiences alter that.

Quote from: Effete on May 01, 2022, 05:49:35 AM
Thinking of our games as being "real" in the sense that we are creating actual new dimensions of reality somewhere out in the multiverse is... a bit disconcerting.

For starters, who or what fills in the blanks?
Not every little thing is fleshed out in a game world, so what driver is making that alternate reality "real?" In other words, if the world is created through the descriptions and actions of the GM/players, does anything not explicitly described even exist? Or does nothing exist unless /until it's described or interacted with?
Additionally, players often ignore, infer, or invent entirely different narrative events within their own heads when a piece of environment isn't explicitly described. This would necessarily require that there be separate dimensions for each player.

The disconcerting part is what that says about our own reality. If we, as players, can create entire dimensions of existence while drinking beers and eating chips with friends on a weekend, who's to say that WE aren't the manifested delusions of some basement-dweller somewhere? If WE are the characters in someone else's game, then nothing outside of our experiences actually exist. To me, YOU don't exist beyond some words on screen. "Objective reality" would be an illusion. Ultimately, it's just a spiral down into pure solipsism. We're all just some dream of Brahma and nothing is real.

Ehh... so, no... I don't believe my game worlds are "real" places. I'm reasonable certain objective reality exists and no one else's subjective experiences alter that.

Welcome to why I went from loving Mage the Ascension for being the only splat in the World of Darkness that let you play as a human, to despising Mage the Ascension as I came into a deeper understanding of its metaphysics and how utterly abhorrent they actually are; the world is an evil lie that we must escape by tearing it down; a man can become a woman if they just believe it hard enough and it's only the horrible masses of humanity who keep your special snowflake from being able to bring about your unicorn fart powered reality.

So no, I don't think of my worlds as real. They are constructs designed for the amusement of my players. They are designed for the creation of maximum adventure opportunities, not to be some sustainable independent world.

Quote from: Chris24601 on May 01, 2022, 09:22:03 AM
So no, I don't think of my worlds as real. They are constructs designed for the amusement of my players. They are designed for the creation of maximum adventure opportunities, not to be some sustainable independent world.

This, right here!

Quote from: https://theangrygm.com/defining-your-game/RP means imagining a hypothetical situation, projecting yourself into the mind of your character, and deciding on a course of action.

The fictional world is not real in the same way as the dice, rule book, or character sheet are real. When presented with a situation and deciding how the character reacts to the situation, it is treated as hypothetically real for the purposes of roleplaying else the interaction is reduced to a boardgame move. My character chooses to accept the challenge is not the same as pawn to E4.

Moreover, when watching or reading a work of fiction I do not constantly remind myself that is made up and not real, but instead allow myself to empathize with the fictional characters to fully enjoy the work. A roleplaying game is more than a game in that it is a game with roleplaying, so why would I discard the roleplaying to reduce to just a game by refusing to participate in the hypothetical component.

Pretentious play-actors depicting static characters and whining about "muh immersion" are a different problem, stemming from a failure to roleplay.

Neurologically our brains can't tell the difference between what is physically real and what we use our imagination to imagine and visualize fictionalized realities as similar parts of our brain activate when we think about them. And if we are talking about memory, it doesn't matter if we are remembering something that happened to us at work or if we are remembering us fighting a dragon while playing D&D. To our brain's memory, there is no difference. A memory is a memory.

So it makes perfect sense that the fictional realities we come up with for gaming seem as real to us as our so called physical earth reality, a reality majority of people are clueless about.

I very much treat my settings as "real" to those within the setting.

For NPCs, the setting is their total reality and to portray that reality, it's key to immerse myself in that NPC's perspective.