This is a site for discussing roleplaying games. Have fun doing so, but there is one major rule: do not discuss political issues that aren't directly and uniquely related to the subject of the thread and about gaming. While this site is dedicated to free speech, the following will not be tolerated: devolving a thread into unrelated political discussion, sockpuppeting (using multiple and/or bogus accounts), disrupting topics without contributing to them, and posting images that could get someone fired in the workplace (an external link is OK, but clearly mark it as Not Safe For Work, or NSFW). If you receive a warning, please take it seriously and either move on to another topic or steer the discussion back to its original RPG-related theme.

Author Topic: Immersion or Attention?  (Read 4401 times)

S. John Ross

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • S
  • Posts: 140
    • http://www.io.com/~sjohn
Immersion or Attention?
« Reply #60 on: September 03, 2006, 02:36:53 AM »
Quote from: Keran
Um ... in my case, I'd say that it's that I'm doing something that bears some resemblance to method acting, rather than experiencing a psychotic delusion.


John Morrow said "[...] that's not possible under conscious control," and that was the focus of my doubt ... the implication that John Morrow surrenders all conscious control of the character.

I appreciate your response (I'm a method actor myself, when perform in the theater ... I've never applied it in RPGs and wouldn't enjoy doing so), but really, only John Morrow can address my doubts on that one.
S. John Ross
"The GM is not God ... God is one of my little NPCs."
http://www.cumberlandgames.com

Keran

  • Guest
Immersion or Attention?
« Reply #61 on: September 03, 2006, 03:58:46 AM »
Quote from: S. John Ross
Of course there are. But in my experience, they are so rare that they deserve comment only as curiosities. Your post seems to imply that you consider them more common than that, and if that's the case then (on that point) our experiences contradict.

If we mean the same thing.  Sometimes it's hard to tell without examples.

I've encountered what I mean for sure once in my own campaigns, where it didn't happen to fit.  The player was playing out of character in order to stir up a kind of cinematic action that my low fantasy just wasn't meant to deliver.

It's pretty much a necessity in MUSH RP, in my experience (which is one of the reasons I like tabletop better: less OOCness).  Most of the time nobody's setting up most of the RP in a way that allows the player simply to react in character; you have to get your character to go looking for it.

I tried some of the Forge games and the narrativist crowd seems actively to think it's a good thing to push characters in particular directions to make dramatic points.

Then, I've heard several other people mention that for them a game is occasionally improved by breaking or pushing the character to do a particular thing the player is interested in.  Like Jason Corley's relating that he once brought on a really anticlimactic ending by having his character take out the enemy in an in-character rational and effective way when he'd have had more fun with the big confrontation they were driving toward, and it was a relief when he realized he didn't have to play strictly in character.

Same thing, or were you meaning something else?

arminius

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 7270
    • http://ewilen.livejournal.com/
Immersion or Attention?
« Reply #62 on: September 03, 2006, 06:15:59 AM »
Hey, Keran, do you have any advice or actual play examples to show how you and your group(s) handle "character-driven sprawl" (good term BTW)? What about the extent of the sprawl in your experience? Can you handle situations where the group completely explodes into individual characters having their own, unconnected adventures?

S. John Ross

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • S
  • Posts: 140
    • http://www.io.com/~sjohn
Immersion or Attention?
« Reply #63 on: September 03, 2006, 02:53:19 PM »
Quote from: Keran
If we mean the same thing.  Sometimes it's hard to tell without examples.

True enough.

Quote
Same thing, or were you meaning something else?

Something entirely different. Different hobby(ies), in fact. My apologies. My comments and experiences are not relevant to this thread at all. Disregard all previous posts of mine in this thread.
S. John Ross
"The GM is not God ... God is one of my little NPCs."
http://www.cumberlandgames.com

John Morrow

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 6254
Immersion or Attention?
« Reply #64 on: September 03, 2006, 03:01:41 PM »
Quote from: S. John Ross
What happens when your character attacks someone? What prevents you from acting it out physically, if not conscious control on your part?


The quick answer is that the character doesn't have a body and can't physically act out anything.

I'm not in conscious control of what the character thinks or how they interpret their environment.  I am in total control of their interface to the game world, though.  They are like a brain in a jar.  They can think and decide what to do but they have no power to actually do anything.

I'm going to talk about the single player as two seperate individuals in order to explain the interaction.  Yes, I know they are the same person, but it's easier to talk about the two threads of thinking going on in my mind this way.

The character runs inside of the player.  The player is the context whithin which the character runs.  The chararacter can't bypass the player because that would cause it to lose the context in which it runs.

The player provides an interface to the game where what is being said at the table get's translated into something the the character can understant.  For example, the player translates the things the the other players and GM say in character into sights and sounds of those characters speaking for the character.  The player translate roll results and action descriptions into the things the character sees, hears, feels, smells, tastes and so on going on around them. The character interprets that input, thinks about it, and acts on it in much the same way that a real person interprets the environment around them and reacts to it.

In the other direction, the player interprets what the character does verbally in a way that makes sense to the other players and GM at the table.  If the character wants to say something, the player says something in character, perhaps with emotional or vocal cues that reflect the character's emotional state and how they'd say it if they could speak directly.  If the character wants to do something, the player translates that into a description of action or, in many cases, the gamespeak required to translate the character's intent into an action in the game.  If the character thinks about attacking an NPC, the player will translate that into something like, "I swing at the NPC.  What do I need to roll?"

Since the character's body is not my body and doesn't exist without the player interpretation layer, there is no chance of the character acting out beyond the player's control using the player's body because the character isn't directly connected to the player that way.  It's a brain in a jar and without the player to provide it input and describe it's output, it's powerless to do anything.
Robin Laws' Game Styles Quiz Results:
Method Actor 100%, Butt-Kicker 75%, Tactician 42%, Storyteller 33%, Power Gamer 33%, Casual Gamer 33%, Specialist 17%

S. John Ross

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • S
  • Posts: 140
    • http://www.io.com/~sjohn
Immersion or Attention?
« Reply #65 on: September 03, 2006, 03:07:25 PM »
John - thanks for the thoughtful reply. My retraction of comments applied to that one as well, but (A) good reply (B) useful for others reading who may have considered my question more relevant than it really was and (C) I figure there's at least a fair chance you were writing it while I was retracting at the same time in another window anyway :)

So either way, thanks.
S. John Ross
"The GM is not God ... God is one of my little NPCs."
http://www.cumberlandgames.com

John Morrow

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 6254
Immersion or Attention?
« Reply #66 on: September 03, 2006, 03:59:55 PM »
One other point.  I've found that I can nudge my character to do certain things at the layer where the player translates what's being said at the table into what the character experiences and by nudging uncertainties in a certain direction.  

For example, in the D&D game I've recently been playing in, I avoided some of the problems with my character not getting along with the other PCs by feeding the character a sense of trust for the other PCs -- that unconscious sense that you can get that you should trust someone just by talking with them for a short while.  That predisposed my character to treat them like friends and give them the benefit of the doubt.  There were also instances where it was possible that my character would realize that another PC was part of an organization that my character despised, thus breaking up the party.  I purpose nudged the character to miss clues that would have helped him figure it out, and when it was not longer plausible that he wouldn't notice, he did figure it out, which did break up the party.

Nudging can work, so long as it feels like something that comes from inside the character.  What doesn't work is making the character do something that doesn't make any sense in character.  If I can't answer, "Why would my character do that?" with sufficiently plausible answer, I can't make the character do it and maintain immersion.

In the same D&D game, one of the other players was running a character with strong persuasive skills.  The player wanted to persuade my character to not hand in some loot that we found to our superiors so we could use it ourselves.  My character was a stickler for hierarchy and procedure so I explained to the other player that he couldn't directly ask my character to lie to his superior and go along with stealing (how the character would see it) the loot directly.  But he could persuade my character to make him responsible for the loot and keep it if he left my character with deniable plausibility, even if my character really knew what he was up to.  So I'm also willing to tell other players what makes my character tick so that, in character, they can persuade my character to do things.
Robin Laws' Game Styles Quiz Results:
Method Actor 100%, Butt-Kicker 75%, Tactician 42%, Storyteller 33%, Power Gamer 33%, Casual Gamer 33%, Specialist 17%

Kyle Aaron

  • high-minded hack
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 9487
  • high-minded hack
    • The Viking Hat GM
Immersion or Attention?
« Reply #67 on: September 03, 2006, 08:54:09 PM »
I'd like to thank John Morrow for his thoughtful and informative replies. Keran's replies could have been summed up as "JimBobOz you are a poopyhead, and I am a legend." This is a forum where you're allowed to say these things openly, you don't have to pad it out with verbiage. So just go ahead and call me a poopyhead :p

The only thing I'd correct with John Morrow's responses, I'd said that in my games I run, I like to make sure everyone can participate directly or indirectly as much as they'd like to; that includes giving them a new character within half an hour of the death of their old. John Morrow said that wouldn't appeal to him much. Note that I said, "as much as they'd like to."

When players have choices, they like that better than when they have no choices. That includes the choice to participate. Sometimes they won't exercise that choice, but they always want the option. For example, I remember one time the characters were about to go and meet a new race. One player said to the other that she wanted him to promise not to have his character speak or act in the ensuing scene. Basically, she thought he'd fuck it up (but didn't say so openly). What it came down to was one player saying, "I want this scene all to myself." He replied that he couldn't promise that, he'd have his character interfere if it seemed appropriate for the character ("immersionist") and the situation ("tactical"). The real conflict between the players was not "immersion" vs "tactics" but rather each player wanting the choice of whether or not to participate.

I don't know whether you'd like my games in general, John Morrow. But everyone likes having the choice of whether or not to participate. You don't have to join in on any scene, and you don't have to have a new character straight away (or ever) if your old one dies. But you have the choice.

Everyone gets to join in, if they want to.
The Viking Hat GM
Conflict, the adventure game of modern warfare
Wastrel Wednesdays, livestream with Dungeondelver

John Morrow

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 6254
Immersion or Attention?
« Reply #68 on: September 04, 2006, 02:29:20 AM »
Quote from: JimBobOz
The only thing I'd correct with John Morrow's responses, I'd said that in my games I run, I like to make sure everyone can participate directly or indirectly as much as they'd like to; that includes giving them a new character within half an hour of the death of their old. John Morrow said that wouldn't appeal to him much. Note that I said, "as much as they'd like to."


And that's why I said "I wouldn't enjoy it".  I'm sure other players prefer it that way.

Oddly enough, that's how I do prefer board games.  One of the reasons why I prefer board games like Axis and Allies, Cosmic Encounters, Settlers of Catan, Kill Dr. Lucky and even a lot of card games over board games like Risk and Samurai Swords is that, normally, all of the players are in the game until the end in the former while players can be eliminated from play and have to sit the rest of the game out in the latter.  So I can and do understand the appeal of wanting to be involved and wanting to play.  I just have other stronger priorities when I role-play.

In many ways, I think most players would be happy with a game that provides it all -- verisimiltude, theme, story, challenge, adventure, teamwork, and so on.  Style conflict happens when you hit a point where you'd have to make a choice between one or the other because one is going to ruin the other.  I love to play constantly and have my characters succeed at all of their goals.  But I'm willing to sacrifice those ideals for verisimilitude and to allow other players the time they need to support verisimitude for their characters.  

I'd also prefer to play large parts of games out in real time rather than skipping over them (e.g., your prison scene) because the experience of time and nuances, in character, can be important for the immersive experience for me.  But there I do have to compromise immersion for the reality that we don't have an infinite amount of time to play.  Some things have to be skipped over and fast forwarded simply to allow the game to move along at a reasonable pace.

Quote from: JimBobOz
For example, I remember one time the characters were about to go and meet a new race. One player said to the other that she wanted him to promise not to have his character speak or act in the ensuing scene. Basically, she thought he'd fuck it up (but didn't say so openly). What it came down to was one player saying, "I want this scene all to myself." He replied that he couldn't promise that, he'd have his character interfere if it seemed appropriate for the character ("immersionist") and the situation ("tactical"). The real conflict between the players was not "immersion" vs "tactics" but rather each player wanting the choice of whether or not to participate.


I do think this was an "in character" vs. "tactical" conflict.  From a tactical standpoint, it makes sense to have that conversation at the player level, with one player extracting a promise from the other player.  From an immersive standpoint, it would have made sense to have that conversation at the character level, with one character extracting a promise from the other player.  Where control and choice come into play is that, either way, the other player should have the final call over what their character will do, unless they are breaking the social contract of the group.

Quote from: JimBobOz
I don't know whether you'd like my games in general, John Morrow. But everyone likes having the choice of whether or not to participate. You don't have to join in on any scene, and you don't have to have a new character straight away (or ever) if your old one dies. But you have the choice.


I can enjoy non-immersive games and I've also learned to create immersive characters that work well in immersion-hostile games.  The key there is to create a character that's not sensitive to the verisimiltude of the setting and doesn't depend too much on it.  Basically, I create characters that don't ask "Why?" and don't really need to know why.  Characters with simple motivations and simple needs.  They tend to roll with the punches when things don't necessarily make sense in character.

Also note that it's sometimes my preference to walk away from the table if the scene covers information that is important to my character but my character wouldn't now, so they won't prejudice the way my character behaves later when they have to make decisions based on what they do or don't know about that information.  I've offended at least one GM at a casua l game club game because I walked away from the table and he interpreted that as disinterest in the game.  Actually, I walked away because I was interested.

Quote from: JimBobOz
Everyone gets to join in, if they want to.


And that's fine.  If your players are happy with that, then keep doing it that way.  Because the thing that get's lost in a lot of these theory and style discussions is that it's really all about having fun.
Robin Laws' Game Styles Quiz Results:
Method Actor 100%, Butt-Kicker 75%, Tactician 42%, Storyteller 33%, Power Gamer 33%, Casual Gamer 33%, Specialist 17%

Keran

  • Guest
Immersion or Attention?
« Reply #69 on: September 04, 2006, 06:54:36 AM »
Quote from: Elliot Wilen
Hey, Keran, do you have any advice or actual play examples to show how you and your group(s) handle "character-driven sprawl" (good term BTW)? What about the extent of the sprawl in your experience? Can you handle situations where the group completely explodes into individual characters having their own, unconnected adventures?

The big thing is setup.  If you set up in the sort of typical plotted-adventure fashion, with characters who are only loosely connected and really don't have any good reason to be together, then if the players play in a character-driven fashion, why shouldn't they scatter?  The five random strangers who meet in a tavern and get hired by someone they don't know to do something they have no personal reason to care about don't have any strong motives for sticking together that make much in-character sense at the start, unless they all really want the money.  They might form bonds as the adventure progresses, but you can't count on that.  So you need a different kind of a setup.

At the start of a new campaign, I describe the setting and genre, and pitch a very sketchy idea for a scenario: it'll be some kind of conflict or problem in the setting.  Then we do group character creation.  Not necessarily at a session, because it takes me longer to think through a character than that; what I do is forward all the emails about the characters back and forth between the players.  We figure out how the characters are going to be connected to each other, how they might come to be involved in problems in the setting, and what conflicts they might bring into play themselves, in a process of feedback and adjustment.   I do my best to get people to make motivated, connected characters who can work together, in a setting in which there are interesting things to do.

Characters need to have niches that aren't overshadowed.  Sometimes it's the profession that's the character's main claim to uniqueness, but it can also be background and connections.  I need to balance differently for a focus on roleplayed intrigue and investigation than I would for a game focused on mechanical combat.

I don't want to see characters who can't or won't work with the others, and I don't want to see scoundrels -- hard, dangerous characters with an edge are acceptable; the amoral, the betrayers, the abusers of the innocent are not.  I'm not running narrativist games where watching the characters or the group morally self-destruct is the point, so I don't want characters who are likely to bring the group to destruction.

I don't want characters who don't have any drives or goals, passive characters who'll stand there like posts if I don't push a plot at them.

Tension among the PCs is acceptable, and can add a lot of dramatic interest to play, but it's risky and should be constructed with caution.  Particularly, it's risky if there's a significant power differential between the PCs and there isn't a pre-existing relationship of OOC trust between the players involved.  I've seen tension between the PCs work magnificently when the players were getting along.  However, if you don't know the players, particularly if one PC is likely to end up in a position of advantage with respect to the other, walk warily.  Real-life control freaks who enjoy pushing people around will gravitate to positions where they can do so under cover -- sometimes the excuse is "I'm just playing my character," but it can also be "I'm just playing by the rules" or "I'm just adding dramatic tension."   (Actually, I don't want people like this around at all, because when they're not in a position of power they spend all their time jockeying for one, which is a royal pain in a cooperative game.  You can afford to take risks with cooperative players that you can't take with players who think like social-climbing baboons.)

I tell players to make the characters they want to play that make sense in the setting -- they don't have to make a weak starting character unless they specifically want one.  The reward for play isn't getting points to try to reach the character you wanted to play all along; it's to explore whatever it is that interested you about the character and the world in the first place, and perhaps to achieve your character's objectives.

(To some extent many systems fight against the construction of some kinds of characters that are perfectly good fictional concepts.  And to some extent many systems mildly constrain overarching plot, at least if you use them in the most expected way: the assumption that characters should start weak and then advance has a tendency to channel play into a certain plot pattern -- Claw Your Way to the Top.

If you happen to be interested in characters that the system fights against, or you're interested in the sort of exploration that the Claw Your Way to the Top pattern gets in the way of, then you end up sometimes having to do odd things that don't really fit the character, and which might not really have any good in-world justification, in order to secure the right advantages to try for the play you want.  This can create a conflict for the player who really wants to do X with the character, and whose internal model of the character might be built to do X, while he's expected by the system and convention to do Y.  The expectation to conform to the system can obscure the desire and intent to do X, without removing it; and if there isn't a lot of fictional-world reason to do Y -- if it's only game-mechanical -- then it becomes more likely that the immersive player will consciously intend Y OOCly while the subconscious character model is pulling toward making a break for X.  I don't want my system doing things like this, and my rules-light homebrew is very unconstricting this way.)

After character creation, we play intro scenes for each of the characters, so the players have a chance to get into character and see a bit of the setting before they meet each other, and maybe make some adjustments.  And after that we bring the characters together and start play in earnest.

I don't worry about the characters deviating from the plot, because what the characters decide to do is the plot.   Telling the PCs what they ought to be doing isn't my job: they're supposed to figure out what they want to do and then try to do it.  They're agents.  The NPCs are agents.  Natural processes cause events.  But  preplanned plot has no presence in the fictional world.  Neither does theme or game.  They can't do anything, can't cause anything: only the characters can.  I usually have some idea of what the characters will be undertaking in the next session or so, but it's really up to them.

If the players aren't happy with what their own characters are doing, they can adjust their characters to anything reasonable and not too disconnected from the past, and which their own modelling will permit; we can figure out how to change their character's circumstances; they can make new characters; they can drop out.

Or they could go do something else in the setting.  If they interest me enough, I might be willing to run a side campaign for them; but so far I've never had the circumstance come up.  Because how many players, given the choice of still connecting to the rest of the PCs in some manner or going it completely alone, are going to pick the latter?  What's the payoff for that choice?

Mostly there isn't one.

There are circumstances in which there is a payoff.  I think you mentioned one of them earlier -- not having any significant ability to affect the group's actions, being overshadowed or overlooked.  The other one is that somebody in the group is playing a jerk character that's making associating with the group a miserable experience.

I may or may not be able to fix the overshadowed or overlooked problem while the player keeps the same character, since I'm not in control of PC social dynamics.  But I am the gatekeeper, and I have only myself to blame for a split if I tolerate a jerk character for one minute past the point where I realize that talking to the jerk's player isn't going to change the character's behavior (which is usually the case: most jerk characters are played by jerk players).

I've always played online, and it's fairly easy to set up side sessions online and log them so that other players who didn't watch or play can read them.  So we have an approach that part of the pleasure is playing, and part of the pleasure is getting to watch the whole story unfold, wherever it's going.  Good players with interesting characters can make this pretty entertaining, and it encourages people to take an interest in other people's subplots.

I'm happy to hand out some authority usually reserved for the GM to players who want it and whose creations mesh well with mine.  Often, players will take an interest in developing parts of the setting or cultures that their characters are from, and that's fine with me if they're good at it; and they may also be the ones answering questions about in during play, as well as developing it outside of play.  The setting becomes a collaborative effort, not just mine, with more people's knowledge and creativity gone into making it believable and interesting, and more people actively invested in it.  I coordinate the whole thing and make sure it hangs together, but I don't necessarily have to be tightly managing everybody else's play -- in fact, at times we might switch off informally in the middle of a session, when one of the players might take over the narrating and resolving if the PCs move into an area he developed.

In my first campaign I hadn't figured out that I needed to do some of this stuff, or how to do it -- I didn't realize at the start that I was going to be running a character-driven open-ended political intrigue instead of a specific adventure with a lot of GM-planned obstacles, and I didn't realize that while the underlying ideas behind typical game-text GMing advice were often still valid, the specific techniques would sometimes be different from standard expectations.  So that campaign had a higher dropout rate than my later ones did.  In later ones I'd figured out most of the above to some extent, and while I still wasn't great at communicating to players exactly what the structure of the campaign was, I managed to prepare more of them for the idea that it probably wasn't what they were used to.

I guess if someone isn't interested enough to stick with the main campaign, they're not interested enough to stick around at all.  So I've had people leave, but I haven't had a campaign threatening to fracture into four separate pieces or something.

Edited to add: Oh, yeah, one thing: Persistent Style Clash != Jerk Player

I've had people who were so strongly grooved into reacting to a GM-prepared plot that they never managed to make characters with the motivations to steer themselves.  These people don't actively annoy anybody else; they just wind up passive and bored in my campaigns.  Nothing wrong with wanting a plot to react to, it's just that I don't run this way and couldn't manage it longterm.  (I find it draining and I'm bad at it besides.)

I've had people whose tastes were so strongly cinematic that they always ended up playing Pirates of the Caribbean in my Master and Commander game.  They'd do things that made no IC sense because OOC they wanted Action! Now this is actively annoying, but it isn't intended to be so: it's just the player's preference and ingrained habit.  And there's nothing wrong with this preference either, but I can't make it work with my campaign worlds.

So both of the above sorts of players really need some other game than mine, but this doesn't imply anything bad about the player.

The jerk player is someone who's pleased only if he's stepping on other people, or who doesn't care even slightly if he does.  And I don't mean he wants to beat a challenge or compete in a fictional area where the group agrees that competition is a good thing.  He's generally competing in the social area where the players are supposed to be cooperating, and the roleplaying becomes a cover for some of the OOC powergaming, with the characters seen as proxies for the players.  It doesn't stay confined to the roleplaying, either.  I've seen players try to run out any other player the GM was listening to because they wanted to controlling the game by controlling the GM, and couples where the guy's character is a powerful IC bully and OOCly he behaves in such a domineering manner to his SO that she's afraid to talk to the other players openly and wants to set up secret channels of communication. Behavior that isn't desirable anywhere.

Keran

  • Guest
Immersion or Attention?
« Reply #70 on: September 04, 2006, 08:19:07 AM »
Quote from: John Morrow
I can enjoy non-immersive games and I've also learned to create immersive characters that work well in immersion-hostile games.  The key there is to create a character that's not sensitive to the verisimiltude of the setting and doesn't depend too much on it.  Basically, I create characters that don't ask "Why?" and don't really need to know why.  Characters with simple motivations and simple needs.  They tend to roll with the punches when things don't necessarily make sense in character.

I've never managed this.  So far I've never built an immersible character who doesn't keep asking why, and I'm not sure if I could.

I've played some immersion-hostile games intentionally to see how they work, and I didn't actively hate them or anything, but they didn't give me what I roleplay for, or anything else that would inspire me to make steady hobby of them.

Quote
Also note that it's sometimes my preference to walk away from the table if the scene covers information that is important to my character but my character wouldn't now, so they won't prejudice the way my character behaves later when they have to make decisions based on what they do or don't know about that information.  I've offended at least one GM at a casua l game club game because I walked away from the table and he interpreted that as disinterest in the game.  Actually, I walked away because I was interested.

Except in a very few cases, I'd rather firewall and watch.  But if the point of play is to figure out a mystery I don't want to have to firewall the solution.  I tried that once perforce (not with an immersible character), where I happened to have read the book the plot was based on, and it didn't work very well.

In the other direction, one of the experiences I had was not being able to break a firewall when I wanted to.  I had gotten exceedingly strong immersion, the deepest ever, with a character who was imprisoned.  The villain was threatening his family in an effort to coerce him into doing something morally intolerable, and he decided that the only thing he could do was to kill himself, thereby removing the villain's primary motive for specifically targeting his family.  What this felt like to experience immersively I leave to your imagination.

OOCly, the GM told me that a rescue was coming.  I thought, and he thought, that at least some consciousness of this would bleed into play.  But it didn't change the character's emotions at all.  And outside of play, when I wasn't thinking about anything else specific -- when I was trying to fall asleep -- I'd find my mind wandering back there to the cell and to the character's black anguish, fury, fear, and terrible resolve.

I often spend time thinking as an immersible character outside of play, but in this case it was proving to be a trial.  Experience suggested that I could have forced the model away from the game's scenario, moved it into another context, but if I did that I'd probably have broken it for play in the game.  Which led to me asking the GM to run the session where the character got sprung as soon as possible.

I've run a lot more than I've played, and I guess the distractions of GMing have meant that I haven't been getting as deep with immersible NPCs as I may end up getting when I'm only playing.  It's made me hang back and think hard about getting into other people's games, because your typical adventure game involves the characters doing a fair number of things that aren't enjoyable at all when done for real.  They work in books and movies because the sympathy the readers or audience have with the characters isn't complete -- there's enough sympathy for interest and enough distance to make the suspense fun.

There's less distance with immersion.  It seems that it would be easy to go beyond suspense into the harrowing.

Keran

  • Guest
Immersion or Attention?
« Reply #71 on: September 04, 2006, 08:36:01 AM »
Quote from: JimBobOz
I'd like to thank John Morrow for his thoughtful and informative replies. Keran's replies could have been summed up as "JimBobOz you are a poopyhead, and I am a legend." This is a forum where you're allowed to say these things openly, you don't have to pad it out with verbiage. So just go ahead and call me a poopyhead :p

Man, if I have to listen to another one of those bloody awful ideas like "dramatism is emotional porn," "simulationists are cowards," and "traditional roleplaying causes brain damage," then if I answer at all it's not simply going to be to call you a poopyhead. :p

Feel free to have the last word.

John Morrow

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 6254
Immersion or Attention?
« Reply #72 on: September 04, 2006, 02:35:18 PM »
Quote from: Keran
Except in a very few cases, I'd rather firewall and watch.  But if the point of play is to figure out a mystery I don't want to have to firewall the solution.


I enjoy vicariously experiencing the emotions that my character experiences discovering either mundane things so I'm most likely to listen to things my character ins't involved in when it won't have much impact on my character to learn it.  The other time I listen is when I know the other characters will tell me characer what happened and it's easier and saves time to watch what happened then have the other players summarize it in character.

Quote from: Keran
OOCly, the GM told me that a rescue was coming.  I thought, and he thought, that at least some consciousness of this would bleed into play.  But it didn't change the character's emotions at all.  And outside of play, when I wasn't thinking about anything else specific -- when I was trying to fall asleep -- I'd find my mind wandering back there to the cell and to the character's black anguish, fury, fear, and terrible resolve.


And that's a wonderful illustration of the classic case where the character acts out of genre and can ruin a game.  This is the sort of situation I had in mind when I mentioned that an immersive player should, "Learn to recognize when situations develop that will lead [their] character toward decisions the other players won't find fun and deal with them early."  The main type of situation that I've seen that causes problems is forcing an immersive character into a desperate situation.  That's what happened here and your description helped me clarify what the problem is.

Many genres make assumptions that don't make sense in character that get carried over into role-playing games.  Among those are a faith that things will all work out  for the character (e.g., if the character is captured, they will have the opprotunity to escape).  This is why a variety of situations which require genre knowledge to ensure patience on the part of the characters tend to go very badly with immersive characters.  Among the problem situations are being captures, hostage situations, and giving the character no safe haven that they can retreat into.  These tend to make characters feel helpless and desperate and helpless and desperate people make desperate choices that often don't reflect what happens in genre fiction and movies.

And, no, this isn't easily fixed or avoided because there is a disconnect between how the situation is portrayed in the setting (as desperate) and how it is portrayed outside of the setting (nothing to worry too much about) and no way to close the gap.  Some game try to make genre conventions an integral part of the setting but this doesn't often work and can create more problems than it solves for an immersive player (by changing the meaning of danger for the whole setting).  If everyone in the setting knows that being captured and locked up in a cell would lead to the prisoner's eventual escape, why would villains even bother to do it?

Anything that treats the the PCs as inherently different than any other character in the setting can cause immersion problems, even when the difference is codified in the rules, if it is not reflected in the setting.  Making sure that PCs have a better opportunity to escape than the average prisoner is that sort of bias.

One way I handled this problem as a GM was with divinations.  I was running an adventure loosely based on the old A4 D&D module, which started out assuming the PCs had been captured and then gives them an opportunity to escape.  That's essentially the classic situation that you described.  The way I avoided desperate actions on the part of the PCs is that I knew they'd do a divination first and the answer to the divination told them that they' d be captured but, "don't despair," and that things would turn out OK.  That gave them the confidence to accept their capture and not try desperate measures to escape.  And it was pretty funny when, "Don't despair!" got shouted out by the ex-Paladin whenever things looked like they were going really down-hill. :)
Robin Laws' Game Styles Quiz Results:
Method Actor 100%, Butt-Kicker 75%, Tactician 42%, Storyteller 33%, Power Gamer 33%, Casual Gamer 33%, Specialist 17%

arminius

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 7270
    • http://ewilen.livejournal.com/
Immersion or Attention?
« Reply #73 on: September 04, 2006, 08:05:39 PM »
Thanks, Keran, that was very interesting and useful, too.

Keran

  • Guest
Immersion or Attention?
« Reply #74 on: September 04, 2006, 11:49:40 PM »
Quote from: John Morrow

And that's a wonderful illustration of the classic case where the character acts out of genre and can ruin a game.  This is the sort of situation I had in mind when I mentioned that an immersive player should, "Learn to recognize when situations develop that will lead [their] character toward decisions the other players won't find fun and deal with them early."  The main type of situation that I've seen that causes problems is forcing an immersive character into a desperate situation.  That's what happened here and your description helped me clarify what the problem is.

You're right.  I hadn't clearly realized before this that there's a definite and repeating pattern to the difficult situations, but there is.

In this particular case, it wasn't so much that the reaction was likely to spoil anything for anyone else as that the character climbing the wall was driving me up the wall, so I wanted to resolve it quickly.  And it was inadvertent, rather than being the way the GM had intended to set things up.  So it didn't prove to be a serious problem overall.

Quote
Many genres make assumptions that don't make sense in character that get carried over into role-playing games.  Among those are a faith that things will all work out  for the character (e.g., if the character is captured, they will have the opprotunity to escape).  This is why a variety of situations which require genre knowledge to ensure patience on the part of the characters tend to go very badly with immersive characters.  Among the problem situations are being captures, hostage situations, and giving the character no safe haven that they can retreat into.  These tend to make characters feel helpless and desperate and helpless and desperate people make desperate choices that often don't reflect what happens in genre fiction and movies.

Yup.

All the other cases I ever experienced involve the character being trapped -- not necessarily in as physically definite a way as imprisonment, but being in a position where they were in positions of disadvantage, and were subjected to serious threats delivered by other PCs.  There is no good way to escape the threat without violence to the threatening PC; worse, the threatening PC is sufficiently more powerful that the only technique that has any hope at all of succeeding is the crippling pre-emptive strike -- total surprise, and decisive and lasting disablement.  And the threatening PC not only has the power to make good on the threat, but is behaving in such a way that they seem disposed to do so.

I didn't used to worry all that much about raw powerful differential between PCs as long as mine had adequate niche protection, because I've played in games where it wasn't a problem.  Basically, as long as the more powerful PC is played in a manner so as to indicate that even if they can deliver on a threat, they don't actually want to, then it can work.  But there's no way to tell merely from looking at a sheet how the more powerful character will be played.  If you don't know the player ...

In two of the cases, the threatening characters were played by men whose out-of-game behavior with their SOs was domineering to the point where the women were afraid to speak freely to other players in front of them, in order to avoid fights, but sought out secret channels of communication.  I probably don't have to describe how they handled their more-powerful characters.  Another one wasn't so extreme as that, but he seemed to be a rampaging powergamer who spent a lot of time making verbal jabs at the GM and generally being a pain, to the point where the GM decided not to have him back in any future campaigns.

In none of these cases did my character end up executing any violence, but in the two cases with the men whose SOs were afraid to speak freely, both games broke up messily due to OOC stresses that these situations brought into the open.  In the third case, I realized before I even got into play that the particular situation was a trap, given what my character knew, didn't know, what he was likely to find out, and the way the other PC was behaving, so I didn't bring the character into play to avoid the probable campaign-wrecking reaction.

Quote
And, no, this isn't easily fixed or avoided because there is a disconnect between how the situation is portrayed in the setting (as desperate) and how it is portrayed outside of the setting (nothing to worry too much about) and no way to close the gap.  Some game try to make genre conventions an integral part of the setting but this doesn't often work and can create more problems than it solves for an immersive player (by changing the meaning of danger for the whole setting).  If everyone in the setting knows that being captured and locked up in a cell would lead to the prisoner's eventual escape, why would villains even bother to do it?

Again, yes.

Quote
One way I handled this problem as a GM was with divinations.  I was running an adventure loosely based on the old A4 D&D module, which started out assuming the PCs had been captured and then gives them an opportunity to escape.  That's essentially the classic situation that you described.  The way I avoided desperate actions on the part of the PCs is that I knew they'd do a divination first and the answer to the divination told them that they' d be captured but, "don't despair," and that things would turn out OK.  That gave them the confidence to accept their capture and not try desperate measures to escape.  And it was pretty funny when, "Don't despair!" got shouted out by the ex-Paladin whenever things looked like they were going really down-hill. :)

Interesting technique.  I've never had future-predicting magic in my campaigns in part because my inability to predict what's going to happen in the upcoming session is bad enough to be a standing joke. :)