Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;388730Players are both actors and audience at the same time in a game.

This statement does not make sense to me. How are players an audience?

Quote from: GnomeWorks;388732This statement does not make sense to me. How are players an audience?

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/audience

I'm using the word in a plain-language kind of way to refer to anyone who is paying attention to a performance.

Audience participation in performances is fairly common these days, so the idea that someone can be both a performer or participant and part of the audience for the performance isn't an uncommon one. I'm not innovating new terminology here.

Pundit should offer a prize for post number 1000.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;388705Being unfamiliar with a system is a big obstacle to immersion, especially if you're trying to get everything "correct" from the start. IME, there's usually a period after you switch systems where people are still drawing from the expectations they had for the way things worked in the last system and still need to look things up all the time, etc. I find in a lot of cases, people simply abandon the system rather than develop the familiarity with the new system that they had with the old system.

Frex, my group just jumped from 4e to nWoD about a month and a half ago, and we're still having moments where we're pulled out of whatever we're doing trying to figure out how something works (degeneration rolls remain a point of confusion). It was like that when we started 4e, when we started Shadowrun 4e, when started Iron Heroes, and when we started 3.5 and 3.0. You've just got to spend some time getting used to it, and relax about making "mistakes".

As well, even familiarity doesn't guarantee you'll like a system. And not liking a system can be an important factor in immersion as well. I don't like Shadowrun 4e (too many dice, cover doesn't matter for shit, magic is nuts, etc.), even though I played it a bunch. I certainly found it difficult to immerse myself in a scene because of my distaste for the mechanics. But I don't think that's some inherent property of Shadowrun 4e's system. It derives from my tastes and preferences.

Again, though, I can control for variables like 'familiarity' and 'like/dislike'.

I've run different systems with which I was (more or less equally) familiar, and found that the system did indeed have an impact on facilitating/impeding immersion during the game.  Similarly, simply because a game has many 'disassociative mechanics' does not mean that I will dislike it (or, conversely, my liking a game does not mean that I will not find that game's mechanics a barrier to immersion).

Obviously the nature of the players in a game, their familiarity/unfamiliarity with the game, the like/dislike that the players have towards the game's mechanics, the skills of the GM, the verisimilitude of the setting and adventures, etc., are all important variables in determining how immersive one's experiences are when playing that game.  But it seems that a game's mechanics are also an important variable.

Quote from: Akrasia;388740Again, though, I can control for variables like 'familiarity' and 'like/dislike'.

How are you "controlling" these variables, exactly? That part remains extremely unclear so far. Combined with the paucity of information about what went on with the group during play, it's difficult to argue with what you've said because there's simply no information to analyse to determine whether you are correct or not.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;388741How are you "controlling" these variables, exactly?

In the sense that I've used different systems with the same group of players in which familiarity/unfamiliarity with the systems in question was not an issue (everyone was adequately familiar with both systems) and in which we liked both systems.  Yet, nonetheless, the mechanics of the systems played a role in the degree of immersion enjoyed by the participants.  That suggests to me that these experiences cannot be entirely 'explained away' by non-mechanics factors, as you seem to be suggesting.

My choice of words was somewhat infelicitous, as "controlling variables" suggests a degree of rigour in contrasting these experiences that obviously was not present.

Nonetheless, it strikes me as simply obvious that mechanics plays a role in facilitating/impeding 'immersion', and that this simply cannot be reduced to factors such as liking/disliking the game systems in question.  LordVreeg's example of 'fate points' does a good job in illustrating this.  For some games I think that a mechanic of this sort is an excellent idea.  But it seems obvious that it is a disassociative mechanic.  Characters in the world do not stop and ask themselves: "Now that I've just had my arm chopped off, perhaps I should go back in time and force that goblin to swing his scimitar again?"

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;388741.. as I've said a couple of times now, that I don't think mechanics play a particularly important role in whether immersion happens or not...

If your position is in fact that mechanics do not "play a particularly important role" as opposed to "no role at all", then I suspect that our disagreement is simply over the importance of the role played by mechanics.  I think that they play an important role, but other factors are important as well.  (I'm not sure on what the precise weightings would be.)

Quote from: Pseudoeephedrine

Quote from: Originally Posted by LordVreegTo some degree. We're not that far off.
At it's most basic and most simple, metagaming is defined as, "In simple terms, using out-of-game information, or resources, to affect one's in-game decisions."

"In role-playing games, a player is metagaming when they use knowledge that is not available to their character in order to change the way they play their character (usually to give them an advantage within the game), such as knowledge of the mathematical nature of character statistics, or the statistics of a creature that the player is familiar with but the character has never encountered. In general, it refers to any gaps between player knowledge and character knowledge which the player acts upon."

Level drain is something a character might now about, and a PC can react honestly enough to it. Conflict resolutions are the physics of combat in a world, so not necessarily.

An example would be Fate/Action Points, as described before. They can be a fun and interesting game mechanic, deciding to have something happen, or not happen, or to have another shot at something. Makes the game more cinematic.
But they force metagaming by their use. "Should I make time go backward and have that spearthrust not hit me?", is not ever an in-character thought (well, for most games). The PLayer has to decide to use expend a resource that the Player has, that the character does not have and that is not part of the in-game world. it's not a character skill or spell or item, So this is an example of a rule that forces out-of character use.

Or so I see it. Am I onto something, or do you think I am merely on something?

I think it's too broad. Basically, any decision made about the mechanics of the game becomes metagaming under the definition laid out above. It also means that important out-of-character knowledge becomes metagaming instead of serving to enrich and inform the characters and the world itself.

My main concern would be in genre emulation games, especially ones that do feature Drama / Fate points. Genre emulation games presuppose an out-of-character knowledge of the tropes of the genre by the players, tropes that the characters themselves don't reflect on (unless it's a comedy game).

What drama points do though, is offer players incentives to follow along with the tropes of pulp games by insulating them from some of the consequences of their actions that would follow from their behaviour in a common sense way, but are inappropriate to the genre being emulated.

For example, it would always be more sensible to plan extensively before approaching a dangerous situation, but in the pulp genre, few heroes do more than mention they have a plan before immediately executing it. Drama points allow players to mimic that, and therefore even though they involve a mechanical resource, they bring player and character expectations about how the world works closer together, rather than pushing them apart. It strikes me that shouldn't be part of a definition of "metagaming" (especially in light of the relatively pejorative use of the term "metagaming").

I'd propose a stricter definition of "metagaming", if we even must use the term, as "the prioritisation of mechanical considerations over the expectations of the players about how the in-character logic of the campaign will operate".

I think prioritisation is an important point because of what I said about drama points above. Prioritisation means that there's some disconnect between our expectations about how the world will work and what the games says to do, and we place the game above the world's logic, which I think strikes closer to both how the term is widely used, and even what your earlier proposed definition is aiming towards.

Too Broad?
Well, I did not make those up.  It's not my proposed definition.  Those were from Wikipedia, and the online dictionary.  I use the term because it has a previously defined meaning, and I don't want to be accused of creating a whole logical fallacy because I am basing a supposition on my own definitions.

And when you say, "It also means that important out-of-character knowledge becomes metagaming instead of serving to enrich and inform the characters and the world itself.", well, yes this is certainly metagaming by definition.

However, I also agree with your use of the term about prioritisation, as there are all sorts of rules, especially in encounter and adventure design, that place the mechanical constrcution as a higher priority than in-game/setting logic.

The piece on genre emulation is well written and certainly raises a valid point.  It is a metagaming mechanic.  No way around that.  But if a mechanic aids genre emulation but is metagaming, do these two facts cancel in terms of the immersive quality?  Maybe they do.  AS 2-Fishes mentions, and rightly, and as I have also said, there are more ingredients than just the rules in creating immersion.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;388692It's actually been fairly productive for me. In particular, it's helped me to develop some of my ideas regarding roleplaying games vs. storytelling games.

Well, I do hope you continue to find some nuggets worth considering here and there.

QuoteI am, however, beginning to wonder why I'm still participating, however. It seems to be trending back towards cesspool.

It always seems to.

Quote from: two_fishes;388714A big part of the problem with this whole discussion is that "immersion" is so big and slippery. You want to say that "associative" mechanics are those which map directly to events or effects in the described imagined world, fine, and "dissociative" mechanics are those that don't, or are mechanics that affect the game-world in ways that are impossible for the inhabitants of the game-world to see or understand, okay, also fine.  If you want to build a chain of reasoning using those definitions, I can go with that.

But then you go on to say that dissociative mechanics inherently break immersion, and there I have a problem. It may be true for a definition for immersion that has been provided, "the player making decisions as if the player were an inhabitant of the game-world," but I think that definition sucks. Pseudoephedrine has pointed out that an audience immerses with the characters in a stage play, and he got slapped down for it, but he's right; audiences of fiction do feel immersion with fiction, it's just not immersion by the provided definition. CRKrueger has likened immersion to what an actor feels with a character, but hey--actors don't make any decisions about what their character says or does, unless they are improvising. By the provided definition, actors can not experience immersion (again, unless they are imrprovising.

So "dissociative" mechanics may break a very narrow aspect of immersion, but there's a lot more to immersion than that.

Well written, 2-F.
And as I said before, there is more to immersion, than merely the rules.  Its just one of the easiest controls to adjust.  And most of what has been proposed (at least by me) is the above mentioned chain of reasoning.  I don't feel like we've started to really work with the amount of immersion created/reduced.

However, above, I think the problem is use of the term immersion.  In an RPG, it is used as shorthand for, 'character immersion' or 'first-person immersion', whereas other perfectly legitimate uses of the term outside the industry would include 'immersing' (being submerged) in the setting of a play or a book.

Quote from: StormBringer;388753Well, I do hope you continue to find some nuggets worth considering here and there.


It always seems to.

Is that why my forhead is bleeding?

Quote from: LordVreeg;388757Is that why my forhead is bleeding?

"Do you have the stones?"

Come on guys, two pages to go.

This thread is starting to lack enough 4e hate.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;388536Skill challenges use, you know, the skill challenge mechanics.

What "skill challenge mechanics" would those be?

Seanchai

Quote from: Werekoala;388586So in one session, we did it both ways. Were we wrong?

Basically, a Skill Challenge is, to my mind, a way of doing two things: creating an interesting "mini-game" and/or awarding XP for things beyond fighting and story/roleplaying/quests.

Seanchai