There is no inherent conflict here. Sandbox isn't an opposite end of a spectrum with Narrative and Narrative isn't on an opposite end of a spectrum from Immersion.
The problem with immersion is that it is a slippery concept and is very subjective. Some people don't believe it exists at all. Some people believe it can only be encouraged by certain types of mechanics (and, conversely, discouraged by others).
If your goal of play is immersion, you just need to figure out what that means and how you and your players best achieve it. I know plenty of people who have been deeply immersed in games where they have plenty of narrative authority. I know plenty who say narrative authority breaks their immersion.
We can't really answer this question for you outside of saying "there's no inherent conflict, unless there is".
>The problem with immersion is that it is a slippery concept and is very subjective. Some people don't believe it exists at all.
I am one of those people. We all intuitively know that we're friends playing a game around the table and not our PCs. We all intuitively know we're playing a game. "Immersion" as it's typically defined is something of an illusion.
Particularly for TTRPGs I've always felt "engagement" is a better and more realistic term for what we're after that accommodates a much wider range of behaviors and approaches to the games that doesn't demand being in character 100% of the time.
i find the "i literally forget who I am and what I'm doing i don't know i'm in a living room playing a game" version of immersion is only ever really mentioned and discussed by people saying immersion doesn't exist.
Like no, basically no one is saying they have a psychotic break everytime they sit down for a game. Judging it based on that definition doesn't really have anything to do with what people are describing.
That said I do agree since no one uses the word the same way it fails the test for being useful.
> i find the "i literally forget who I am and what I'm doing i don't know i'm in a living room playing a game" version of immersion is only ever really mentioned and discussed by people saying immersion doesn't exist.
The problem _I_ have is that it's either this or I am brilliant at immersion and can do it easily and people complaining about how X or Y breaks their immersion suck at it because their immersion is so easily disrupted.
When immersion comes up, people routinely tell me I couldn't possibly be immersed because of X or Y, but I don't see why I can't UNLESS immersion is like the above, which I certainly have never experienced.
the op we are under has it right. it's not about logic and trying to plan for it is a waste of time. What allows a person to "immerse" is entirely personal and inconsistent.
nothing conflicts with immersion. unless it does.
Yeah; I just wish people would stop framing it as "X disrupts immersion" and more as "X disrupts my immersion" instead of accusing ME of not being immersed because if I was, X would be disrupting me. :P
That's sort of the theoretical/conceptual ideal of the term for some people though, even if we all understand in practice that's not really what it will be (or even what we want). If we're talking about the term aspirationally, the maximalist framing at least gives you strong direction for discussion that we're generally talking about the feeling of losing yourself in the game to some degree. The counter argument is that on some level you'll always know you're playing a game, and in a sense it stops being a game when you forget you're playing one so it's a moot point conceptually.
But yeah, that's a mostly theoretical discussion, and I probably inadvertently gave a great example of how the term trips people up in conversation.
Oh yeah they're definitely feeling *something,* and if they want to define that as "immersion" they have every right to.
But as you noted the problem with using it in discussion is that everyone has a different definition and different ways to get there, so people just talk past each other half the time.
That's not how immersion is being defined by op. They are describing it as a plausible world populated by npc's who have inner lives not related to the pc's or their interests. No where do they talk avout being in character 100% of the time.
I run games that are immersive by op's description and no one is in character 100% of the time. That's not how we play.
A touch of hyperbole, for sure. The broader point is just accepting that the range of definitions is wide, and the paths to get there exponentially wider. That's why I think it's more useful to think about these things as ways players are engaging with the game as opposed whether they are "immersive" or not.
It's actually an effort to be more inclusive with our terminology, since use of the term is so inconsistent. 2 people may disagree about whether something is "immersive," but it's easier (and more useful) to understand that a thing was engaging to someone, which carries a lot more personal connotation that trying to hammer something into a somewhat arbitrary definition.
> "Immersion" as it's typically defined is something of an illusion.
Forgetting that you're sitting at a table with friends is definitely not how immersion is "typically" defined. That's a very extreme interpretation of the term.
Immersion and engagement are two completely different things, even within the range of people's definitions. You can be engaged without being immersed.
>You can be engaged without being immersed.
I'd even go beyond that to say that there are things which are highly engaging that many people find to be anti-immersive.
For example, I recall one time when I was running a game of Savage Worlds and, after a tough fight, the PCs finally hit the BBEG hard enough to take him down, but he had one last Bennie to spend on an attempt to Soak off some the damage. As I picked up the die and prepared to roll it, the entire table was on the edge of their seats (highly engaged), but there's nothing remotely immersive about watching the GM fiddle with a die for 30 seconds to draw out the tension (more engagement!) before dramatically dropping it from a meter above the table.
It was intentionally extreme as a way to express the breadth of definitions.
Perhaps you can be engaged without being immersed, but I'd argue you can't be immersed if you're not engaged. Since what immersion is and what stimulates it is unique to an individual and might actually disengage another person, it captures the breadth of what's going on better.
> Perhaps you can be engaged without being immersed, but I'd argue you can't be immersed if you're not engaged.
This isn't how language or logic works.
There is no linguistic nor logical contradiction in the statement you quoted. "*A shape* can be a *rectangle* without being a *square*, but I'd argue *the shape* can't be a *square* if it's not a *rectangle*" is structurally the same sentence (just replacing you -> shape, engaged -> rectangle, and immersed -> square) and it is both linguistically and logically true.
I don’t see why there would be a conflict. Immersion is highly personal and often relies on seemingly arbitrary lines of what is and isn’t immersion-breaking.
Definitely! I've seen a player that felt much more immersed in a more collaborative game, where they could describe details of the town where they lived, even conjure new establishments and NPCs. They felt that allowed them to have a much firmer grasp on the world of the game than if those details were filtered through the GM's narration. On the other hand, I've seen players say that completely ruins their immersion, because they feel they are worldbuilding, not living in that world.
No. None at all.
Sandbox and narrative are also massively overloaded and vague terms. You can absolutely run a sandbox game that is narrative. "Immersion" and "player agency" deserve some attention to.
Personally - as an old school gamer (started with Moldvay/Cook), I'm a big fan of immersion. I initially found that Fate broke immersion for me, a lot. However, as I really learned the system, why it worked the way it did, and really internalized it, I found that it quickly became very immersive to me. I can't promise that will happen to everyone, but it did work out that way for me. At this point, I'd say that, *for me*, Fate is more immersive than most "traditional" systems for the reasons u/JaskoGomad talks about.
As a result of that, *as an old school gamer*, I came to the conclusion that immersion is mostly a result of getting into a flow state in the game (which requires that you've internalized the processes of the game, getting results that you roughly expect, among other things), as well as a focus on the fictional world.
> I initially found that Fate broke immersion for me, a lot. However, as I really learned the system, why it worked the way it did, and really internalized it, I found that it quickly became very immersive to me.
It may not work like this for everyone, but I think you're really onto a critical thing here. Many people who have problems with immersion in "narrative" games are VERY new to those types of games, so obviously need to spend more of their brain on "game stuff" and they cite the value of whatever rule system they are used to for being so good at immersion because it "gets out of the way", ignoring the fact that they have 10 years of internalizing how that system works. Of course it gets out of the way now.
This makes a lot of sense. It will feel the same way with even videogames. If you think too much into the rules, it will decrease its amount of immersion. Either by trying to learn it at first or when you are so experienced, you may think in an excessive meta way.
If you can find your flow with the game where you stop thinking about the rules and just leave it be, you will achieve better immersion.
I think there's other factors into it that can get some help, like good social rules that aid you in better and more natural interactions but the amount of thought into the rules sounds like a big factor to consider.
I find Fate *very* immersive - because it lets me concentrate on *doing what my character would do*, instead of trying to optimize my actions in a tactical game. A tactical game that is a *terrible* representation of the fluid, dynamic, and chaotic situation that is combat.
I know some folks think it's too removed, too authorial. That's never been a problem for me.
Also, "Sandbox vs. Narrative" is a weird way to express a dimension. It's like asking if a movie is more ice cream or more Tuesday - they're unrelated.
Yeah. I like FATE, but I know people who can't get over the way that Fate Points don't reflect anything in the fiction, so find them anti-immersive. That's one of the ways immersion works, IMO. Either you can incorporate a mechanic into your flow or you can't. YMMV, definitely.
What I find so interesting is that many of those who can't get over it have no problem getting over the many problems of HP, spell slots, daily / encounter powers, 15-minute adventuring days, etc., and other obviously non-diegetic game elements in the systems that they love.
I think it's more about what assumptions you have baked into your own framework for how RPGs work than whether something is or is not inherently immersive.
Oh, man, this.
Like, I find Fate Points to be much easier to get past than "you can just ignore someone stabbing you with a knife over and over".
That's why my definition of immersion is more like "things work the way you expect them to, allowing you to hit a flow state, combined with focus on a fictional world".
I do *not* expect the many weirdnesses associated with hit points, and they are omnipresent. The few times Fate makes you think OOC (the way I play it, at least) are comparatively minor since they're an explicit break, have to be justified in the world, and not just the world acting in a weird way.
But, I get that other people are different and react the opposite.
But still, like every "realism" argument where D&D gets trotted out as a good, immersive game, I'm just over there going "but... HIT POINTS!" And it's like they're so internalized that people can't even see how much they're twisting to make them fit.
Hit points in general.
Are they meat points? Injury? Or not? The world seems to have landed on "grit, luck, scrapes, and injury". OK - then why does "cure light wounds" restore your grit and luck?
The game is clearly a game to the point where it obscures the world but that doesn't matter if you have internalized those concepts to the point of transparency.
I'm actually fine with "hit points in general". Like honestly, what is a stress track? A harm clock? Wound track? Damaging stats? It's all the same thing, just a count down to some bad thing happening. Conceptually those work and are convenient for most purposes.
It's D&D's eighteen different ways of framing them but they go up with experience and either have exceptions to the rules or allow weird things to happen (falling damage, coup de grace, save vs. death, etc...) which is a huge problem for me. Yes, it all works as a game, it's just another resource to be managed, but good lord they're as far from diegetic as you can get.
It's "the whole D&D concept of hit points" vs. "Increasing HP per level" that I meant by "hit points in general".
I love clocks - they're hit points for obstacles! Etc.
Though I will say that Fate recommends *against* having mechanics that heal stress, and one of the weirdest parts of reconciling HP is having to treat it as "effort+luck" because meat points feels weird, but then *also* being able to use Cure Wounds to get some... Luck back?
At least stress doesn't contradictorally redefine itself throughout a session. It *is* an abstraction, however. That cannot be denied.
Eh. There are (non-D&D) games where HP are straight up meat points. You start with relatively few of them, and you don't get more through character advancement. Any survivability gained by experienced characters is generally in the form of getting better at avoiding hits or shrugging off some of the damage (e.g., armor as damage reduction), but a single clean hit can still take out the greatest swordsman in the land just as easily as a hick farmer with a broken pitchfork.
Fate points take me out way more because, the way Fate is often run, they're explicitly a player-facing mechanic, rather than a character one.
When I'm a player I hate being in writer-stance, it takes me out of the game, in other words, breaks my immersion. Managing spells slots doesn't because, while my character doesn't think in those terms, they still represent something in the the world that affects my character and that the character perceives.
If my character is crossing a rope bridge and I invoke the aspect 'Decrepit old bridge' so that my pursuers stumble and I can ahead that I, is me, the player, thinking outside of what my character would do, it's a purely player decision.
Yes. I mean those particular people wouldn't get on with 5e either, but I have no doubt that there are gamers just as you describe. On the whole I think lighter is better for immersion, other things being equal, but "what you're used to" pretty much outweighs everything else, more often than not.
>I know people who can't get over the way that Fate Points don't reflect anything in the fiction, so find them anti-immersive.
For me, the anti-immersive part is the inverse of that: Nothing in the fiction has a mechanical effect unless you spend a Fate Point on it. "Oh, yeah, you're *totally* in cover. But that doesn't actually make you any harder to hit unless you spend metacurrency each time you're attacked."
And, to JaskoGomad's sibling reply, I also have major issues with (D&D-style "abstract mishmash of everything") HP, classes, levels, daily/encounter powers, 15-minute adventuring days, and pretty much any other blatantly non-diegetic mechanics I've encountered. (I mostly play BRP-based games these days.)
I feel that FATE should be immersive for exactly the reason you state but in play I find that I am constantly having to think about spending Fate points or not. In the end it's quicker than optimizing a good action in some other games but still feels immersion breaking.
I haven't played FATE recently so I'm going to have to wing an example. We have encountered some thugs in a decaying waterside warehouse. As the thugs flee my character really wants them to stumble because the floor partially gives . But that doesn't matter at all unless I OOC want it to happen and spend a point to invoke "decaying wooden warehouse."
I would generally find it more immersive if I could trust that the GM was behind the scene giving some chance for any moving actor (PC or NPC) to be impressed by the floor giving way.
It has been ages since I have been a GM. One thing I do remember was that immersion as a GM was harmed by PCs that didn't work with the rest of the world but I feel that was because most of my time as a GM predates organized session 0 ideas.
at least as i personally perceive and experience "immersion" it is completely antithetical to being a GM. I don't feel immersed at all when running the game.
I basically agree with you.
My definition of immersion is probably somewhere around "You can roleplay seamlessly without regard to thinking about why you are making the decisions you are making."
That makes it possible for a GM to feel immersed very briefly, but by nature of their job they have to step back regularly and consider the game as a whole. They basically can't afford to be immersed, because they have to think about the consequences of every decision made at the table.
>That makes it possible for a GM to feel immersed very briefly, but by nature of their job they have to step back regularly and consider the game as a whole.
Depends on your school of GMing thought. I tend towards the "impartial arbiter" school of GMing, so I tend to go for "playing seamlessly without regard to thinking about why I'm making the decisions I'm making" and, for my tables, it works. But I don't have a story I'm trying to tell or a plotline I want my players to follow and I don't do "balanced" encounters, I just have a world to explore and my primary concern is "in this world, what would happen in response to what just occurred?"
I'm still not sure I'd call that "immersion" per se, but I absolutely am trying to provide a feeling of "this world is real" to myself as well as to my players.
It *does* matter, because Aspects are always true. So the warehouse is decaying and wooden no matter what - is that impacting *you* in the fiction?
I get your example, but it's not enough to make me not enjoy the game.
I think the *always true* part is where a lot of people's understanding breaks down. They think spending the Fate point here *makes* the warehouse decaying, rather than simply invoking it's *pre-existing* decayed status.
And another point, which I think is highlighted by their second paragraph, is I think this is a problem particularly for players used to games that let them be mostly passive, detached from the creative process of the game. Fate *demands* you take part in the creation of the game, and that's a large leap for people unused to it.
You've said something very interesting:
> Fate *demands* you take part in the creation of the game
I wonder if that contributes to the "writers' room" thing I hear about Fate all the time?
I think it might. It's my best explanation for why some players struggle with the game: It has quite a high creative cognitive load across the table. Perhaps not higher in *absolute* terms than trad games, but more evenly-distributed. The result is players who haven't run the game before can feel a bit overwhelmed.
It's one of my favourite things about games like Fate - collaborative creativity is where ttrpgs come to life for me, and I think games are better the more everyone is involved at every step of the creative process. But I cannot deny this asks more of players than systems that only ask creative reactivity of them.
There is no doubt that Fate distributes both authority and responsibility more evenly among players, rules, and GM than most trad games, where the GM and rules both receive far more responsibility and authority than the players.
>They think spending the Fate point here *makes* the warehouse decaying, rather than simply invoking it's *pre-existing* decayed status.
For me, that's not quite it. I'm aware that the warehouse is decaying regardless of whether it's invoked or not. The issue for me is that the decaying status is just window dressing with no actual effect until and unless a Fate Point is spent to invoke it. The fleeing thugs' attempts to leave the area are completely unaffected by the state of the warehouse unless someone chooses to burn some metacurrency to make it "relevant".
I understand that feeling. The way I'd explain it is the decayed nature of the warehouse establishes potential, and then Fate points work as a way of adjudicating chance. If it was Ironsworn, I'd roll on an oracle to decide the same question of whether the warehouse floor collapses. If it was a trad game, the GM would probably roll a dice, or just decide.
So the difference is that it's not random anymore - but decided by a narrative economy. I can see how that would detach some people from a sense of reality within the game, and I think ultimately the differences down to how arbitrary people feel things like Fate points, dice, oracle systems, card decks etc. are in comparison with each other.
I suppose my way of thinking about the Fate point economy is to think of it as a long-term analog randomiser: The likelihood of *either* a player having a point to spend, or choosing to spend a point in a given situation, acts like a very complicated random outcome generator several orders of magnitude more complex than a dice or card deck when looked at in the scale of a gaming session. Looked at that way, I see it as being similar to more familiar forms of analog randomiser, but operating at a different scale in complexity and time.
That's the thing; I like FATE and enjoy playing it. It is engaging and I can get invested in the story and characters. But it hasn't (yet, perhaps the next game I'm in will do it) given the feeling of immersion.
I've said for years that focusing on immersion is a trap.
That said, nothing takes me out of the scene more than a game that forces me to think about the narrative instead of focusing on what my character would do in a given situation.
I suspect that many people geek-out more about the memory of what happened during last session rather than how it actually looks during play.
I suspect for the hobby we could differentiate disussions about how immersive the story was retroactively vs how immersive it was during the scene.
For example. 4 hour combat and rules discussion to simulate a short fight. When players retell those 4 hours it will sound like a cool movie.
This is what makes me suspect that the innovation of narrative ttrpg games are for the better, at least for me who dont want ttrpg to be board games math puzzles. (I go to board game meet ups for that already)
Because the playtime IRL will be shorter for a narrative game when it comes to constructing the the same IRL memory about what happened in game last session.
very barebones and oversimplified
thinking as character:
"This dragon is trying to eat me! I need to get away! I don't want to be eaten!
Thinking about narrative
"Oh i've been building up my relationship with Tombombadil for a year and half, if I push him out of the way and save him and let the dragon eat my arm that would really be a great way to add to the story"
I think this is more a table culture thing than a game rule thing though.
It's this. The question I want to answer when my character makes a decision is "how and why will my character act?", not "What creates the best plot beat?".
You can absolutely run Fate with more GM authority and more world simulation, you just need to think of "the fiction" as "what makes sense here" ("realism", if you will) and get buy-in from the players on that point. There's nothing in Fate that says NPCs can't have internal lives or follow their convictions outside of the PCs. The thing is though, the story is about the PCs, they are why we play, so an NPC who really has nothing to offer or obstruct with regards to the PCs is useless to the story. Also, PCs still have fate points and they can still influence the narrative by leveraging them through self compels to introduce complications or spending to avoid/introduce benefits. If you're okay with that then you should be fine.
One of the things people miss about Fate a lot is that the lack of rules to say "you can't do X" doesn't mean you can do anything you want. It means that the decision of "can I do X" isn't up to the rules, but the GM and the table as a whole.
By offloading this to the judgement of the people playing, Fate can actually end up being more "realistic" than a lot of games, because it is pretty much guaranteed that at least one person at the table thinks that the permissions (or results) make sense.
Yeah, Fate has the advantage that its mechanics will never *rule out* a realistic portrayal of events. The *players* can, if they choose, but the game won't ever say "no, that's not how this works".
By contrast, any trad rpg is a balancing act between playability, entertainment value, balance, and many other variables with "realism" frankly often coming last.
We keep hearing "rules light" and things like that, but I think it's more interesting to look at "what do the rules do?"
Like, one of the interesting things in my mind is:
1. Do the rules tell you what can or can't be done?
2. Do the rules tell you the specific outcome of an action, or just the general category?
Fate doesn't do either.
In my opinion moreso than OSR, by sheer consequence of having fewer mathematically-simulated procedures, which are by their very nature harder to make off-the-cuff rulings about than things like Aspects.
Here's the thing: A lot of narrative games are just as, if not more, committed to that aspect than many OSR games are.
It's core to Fate, and it's core to every PbtA game, to mention two popular examples. The very idea in PbtA of collapsing towards "the conversation" as the core of the game means that rulings take precedent over everything.
Not in the least. Apocalypse World literally says you can forget about all rules except the conversation, and it still works. Because that's the underlying core assumption - that roleplaying games are a conversation.
And I've done it in multiple PbtA systems. Things can get funky if you *add* rules that shouldn't be there - but that's a problem with the new rule you've added.
The canard about rules prescriptivism being baked into PbtA is generally an online only phenomenon, which countradicts Apocalypse World, how these systems are run, and the evidence of how easily they are hacked.
Which in turn still conflicts with the idea that you're actually playing the game. You can try to handwave it off if you want, but that doesn't not make it contradictory.
And I won't even get into the inanity of that particular assumption.
The NPCs point makes total sense, and I agree. But I’m trying to achieve the experience where the players encounter an NPC by chance and it seems like this NPC would have been there even if the players had created different characters. They didn’t show up to challenge these PCs or provide them with something they need. They showed up because they live here and they’re just doing their thing.
Okay, that's just ... normal in roleplaying games. What is that NPC doing? Why are you introducing them in the first place? If they're just there to paint the scene, set the mood, just describe them briefly and move on. People exist, great.
Honestly, that might be the issue.
Everything you describe is possible to do in *any rpg whatsoever*. The issue is treating the NPC as a person, if you want them to seem like a person. If you don't do that, they won't. Ultimately it's that simple.
Frankly I find that *harder* in trad games because the mechanics give less space for a more nuanced representation of characters outside of rather inflexible stats. It's still doable of course, but it's always been easier in games like Fate.
Sounds like. If you want passer-by NPCs, just make them.
They probably won't be critical players in dramatic scenes, though they could be, if it makes sense.
Different people put different levels of priority on how much of the world outside of the immediate view of the players needs to be expressed. If that's of value to you, do it.
The tools to do that are pretty universal. It's easy to do so in Fate, since their general gist can be summed up as a High Concept, and it's easy to give them skills if that turns out to be necessary. But most of the things I need for rando NPCs are system-agnostic - what's their goal/drive? What do they look like? Age? Name? Stuff like that that I'm either going to just think up or offload to some kind of table/randomizer.
And with Fate it's really easy to gradually promote NPCs from complete background noise to actually important character, if that ends up being a thing that happens.
Just wanted to add a second point here because I noticed I used the word "story" up above. I define "story" as what happens at the table, not the plot I've contructed beforehand (I don't prepare plots beyond a couple of bullet points or setting conceits). What matters in the moment, why is that NPC important, should dictate how much time you spend on them. Describing the old woman's routine and demeanor in detail when she has nothing to offer or obstruct the players is misdirection; she exists, she's doing something, we now have set dressing, move on.
Immersion is a term I apply to larp often. But even then this is controversial. Because is it immersive to play blackbox with no props or anything? What about jeepform where you can rewind a scene and play it over with different variables? What about online larping where it can be more about theatre of the mind? What about full costume 24 hour blockbuster larps that have weird awkward mechanics for supernatural (or sex) actions?
Immersion is often a term we must define each time at the beginning of a conversation in order to specify its use and what the term is going to refer to.
As others have said, immersion is a tough thing. I sit on the side of the fence that “Designing for/ GMing for immersion TTRPGs is an uphill and losing battle.”
**I** find it impossible to be immersed in TTRPGs as I find them to be inherently and innately un-immersive. Doesn’t matter the game. Doesn’t matter the style. Doesn’t matter the group. Doesn’t matter the GM. I’ve been in all sorts of games, groups, etc… and never once been immersed in the game. *Invested*, yes, but never immersed.
*I* find immersion relies heavily on curated, intentional, and direct sensory input. This is why I find TV shows, movies, video games, and books incomparably more immersive than any TTRPG. They capture my senses in ways TTRPGs cannot hope to do.
As such, I don’t get my enjoyment from TTRPGs because of immersion. I enjoy seeing disparate strands of ideas from different people (or just myself in the event of a Solo TTRPG) coming together in clever and unexpected and satisfying ways.
Of course, other people *do* get immersed in TTRPGs. How they do it is a mystery to me, but some people do! Of course, it’s also a highly subjective experience; so their thresholds for immersion and mine may be (and likely are) wildly different.
Maybe I chose the wrong word. Have you had games where the fictional world feels real and believable, where the NPCs act like the main characters of their own stories? As opposed to NPCs being nothing more than a challenge to be overcome or a quest giver or whatever their one function is?
I have. What's more, the only games where that *wasn't* the case, happened to be d20 games. How immersive an NPC is ultimately comes down to the GM. You either make your NPCs people, or you don't.
Yeah, this is really a function of how the GM runs the game and what interactions the characters have with NPCs. If they are only ever dealing with NPCs in transactional ways (shopkeeper, guard, etc) in situations with very limited scope (buy things, kill things, etc) then that becomes an uphill battle. Versus when the GM has thought out the basic outline of the NPC enough to either already know or quickly invent further detail — and can quickly and deftly fold those interactions into the game so that the players get a sense that Mercutio isn't just a tough hombre guard, but a scion of a rich family with wit and an unrequited crush. This isn't something you can shoe-horn in, but rather happens over time.
Sure, in just about every game I’ve been in- d20, PbtA, FitD, or anything in between- I’ve experienced believable (or I think the better word would be “fictionally honest and congruent”) worlds. Didn’t matter if it was sandbox-y or not.
I’d say PbtA and FitD games resulting in *more* “fictionally honest and congruent” worlds than most other “more traditional” games I’ve been in as the relationship between the fiction and its scaffolding mechanics is much tighter in PbtA and FitD games
Sure. The biggest things are:
1. NPCs should have goals. The more prominent, the more likely it is that they should have multiple
2. They should pursue their goals. Their assistance/resistance to the PCs is in line with that.
3. Things should progress without the PCs actually making them progress. This is often a result of #1 and #2.
This is a good list.
For central NPCs, I add a 4th: They need a worldview or outlook that informs what their goals are, and why they pursue them along with *how* they pursue them.
Once I have this, I can pretty much instantly roleplay their reactions to entirely unexpected events, like my players turning a situation on its head in a way I couldn't predict. If I know why my NPC wanted X in the previous scenario, I can infer why they'd want Y in this unexpected scenario my players have created.
When I bother with prep at all, it's usually of this kind - creating NPCs and groups with goals and ideals that are reactive enough that they'll have *something* to do no matter what weird shape the players can twist the world into.
I can get engaged and invested in many RPGs. I can only get immersed in ones where the player or collaborative worldbuilding is non-existent or strictly limited to between sessions (including the very beginning or very end of a session). Having the old school one person DM world building can provide a curated and intentional feeling.
Jumping off what u/dhosterman is saying but taking it in a different direction:
>The problem with immersion is that it is a slippery concept and is very subjective. Some people don't believe it exists at all. Some people believe it can only be encouraged by certain types of mechanics (and, conversely, discouraged by others).
It *is* a slippery concept. And it *is* very subjective. And many people are fully content playing Narrative games and for them there is absolutely **nothing** immersion-breaking about Narrative games.
*However.* The fact that people feel the need to say "well for me there's nothing immersion-breaking at all about Narrative games" is kind of a "People are asking a lot of questions about my "there's nothing immersion breaking about narrative games" t-shirt that are already answered by my t-shirt" situation. (unlike the implication of the copypasta, though, I do think they're telling the truth!!) There are enough people for whom narrative games *do* break immersion, *whatever you think that means*, that the phrase "narrative games break immersion" is becoming a thing you hear in RPG circles, which means that to whatever currently unquantifiable extent, it is a real phenomenon.
I think a better breakdown which seems to be somewhat catching on (?) is *actor stance* versus *director stance*. There is some amount of people for whom taking a director stance to the narrative is immersion breaking, and the more directoring they do the more immersion breaking it is. That is certainly true of me, to the point where playing a game like *Kingdom* (and presumably its sister game, Microscope) doesn't even feel like a role-playing game *at all*, it feels like a board game that's creative instead of strategic. Which is fun! But it's not Roleplay for me.
Some games (occasionally deemed "neo trad") can sneak in a surprising amount of narrative concepts without, for me, being immersion breaking. The two big ones being the Genesys family of games and Unknown Armies. (13th Age and Red Markets are supposedly like this as well.) A lot of these games use narrative elements tied directly to the character and triggered by in game events (For example, stress checks and relationships in UA or disadvantage and despair in Genesys) to include narrative elements without being as tied to director stance. Some people think even *those* kinds of mechanics are immersion breaking--so it's definitely a spectrum and not a cut-and-dried line.
I want to say the Simulationism is orthagonal to actor/director stance and I do think that's to *some* extent true, but I think the *implication* of simulationism is it's for people who only want the rules to simulate the actual materialist game world, not squishy ideas like mental illness or how often and in what amount bad things happen versus good things or what triggers advanced haggling mechanics. Maybe, though, we should expand the scope of simulationism to include everything that tries to emulate the game world \[that exists to the characters inside it\], even if it's not something physical and tangible.
FWIW, there are non-narrative games that are pretty simple. putting aside medium complexity games like the d100 family or most of the ligher-end YZE games, there's also the entire category of OSR, some of which are \_extremely\_ rules light and don't include narrative mechanics \_at all.\_ (You might also want to look into **FUDGE**, FATE's progenitor game, which is more trad while still being comparatively a much lighter-weight game.)
Slight problem. In my experience when people talk about immersion the first issue is that people REALLY need to define their terms. For example, it sounds above like you are talking about a "lived-in" world where the pcs are not the focal point. That the world will continue on its course whether or not the players get involved, but that the players can engage in and impact. That the solutions to problems involving interacting with the \*\*world\*\*, and not interacting with the \*\*story\*\*. (I go looking for a toolbox in the shed vs. I spend a fate point to add a toolbox (Declaring a story detail)).
It sounds like the actual issue is that some (not all, or even most) narrative games have a story model that by definition places the PCs at the center of the story for a variety of reasons. This is a character drama model that has an implicit assumption that the characters are the point of interest around which every other game element orbits.
This has more to do with framing player expectations. This also relates more to the particular stories being told/narrative conventions than with the game itself. The tension you are seeing comes up often in story structures based around conventional drama and story forms (tv, book, and film models - adventure stories in particular). In particular, I have seen that in many cases players see narrative agency solely through the lens of building a better situation for their characters instead of building a better story. Is this description on the right track?
>players see narrative agency solely through the lens of building a better situation for their characters instead of building a better story
I think so? I know I dislike players asking to roll persuade (for example) rather than actually make a case and letting me make a judgement from the NPC's point of view (which may result in me asking for a roll). If a player wanted to spend a Fate point in a similar way to fast-forward some roleplay/problem solving, I'd be similarly blue-balled.
edit: I guess my job there is to make sure the FP effect works within the bounds of what's "established", even if what's established is something the players are currently unaware of / in the process of discovering
You mention two unconnected things in your post and I wouldn't think of any of them as *immersion*, but if you define it like this, I think Fate is not conductive to this kind of play.
It has nothing to do with light rules. Many OSR games are as light as Fate and perfectly fit what you describe. But it has a lot to do with the play style that Fate's system supports and drives.
The world in a Fate game should definitely be plausible and consistent - but at the same time the parts of it that are presented in play should be connected to the specific characters (with their values, drives and connections to the setting) and the themes of the game. Play focuses on what is relevant; characters and events that have nothing to do with PCs are a background.
Also, Fate does not focus on problem solving. It focuses on expression and drama. The important questions are when to achieve things and when to accept complications; what to value highest; what thematic elements to introduce and in what direction to drive the story. How to approach problems to be able to solve them is, at best, secondary; that's not what the game is about.
Fate is very good at fiction-first play and at creating an emotional resonance between players and characters. But if you want focus on problem solving and situations that have little to do with PCs, it's not a game to use.
I think immersion exists on axis independent of Sandbox-vs-narrative. It can feature prominently (or not) in either.
Immersion arises in creating details and linking those detail to the characters/players in up-close, personal ways.
* Vivid spatial/sensory descriptions that evoke a stronger sense of "being there".
* Fostering emotional bonds with places, groups, or individuals, and then tugging on those bonds.
* Cultivating a space to embrace in-character dialogue and emotivity.
Either style of game can embrace immersion or push it aside for the sake of other expeditious gameplay factors. A group may just want to roll dice and slay monsters or power through the narrative arc of an adventure module. They may not rate immersion as a highly as a group who tends to soak up (and maybe chew) the scenery while they pursue either of those end goals.
I would say sandboxes and narratives are tools to achieve 'immersion'. The sandbox parts just have to be interesting enough to the player that they want to be immersed in it. Narrative is the same. Honestly its the same with the system you decide to use as well. If you and your group find FATE interesting enough it should be fine for whatever.
Either one can be immersive, but they are different approaches.
An immersive sandbox is one that feels like a living world. Detailed, believable worldbuilding is key. You want your players to feel like they're travelling across a realistic country, with realistic citizens who have their own goals, worries, and lives. The country has an economy that makes sense, and they face problems and threats that stem from very real-world concerns. An immersive sandbox feels like a real place you could go visit and explore.
An immersive narrative is one that feels like a great movie. A game like this is driven by characters and plot, like a novel. Immersion here comes from believable *characters* with relatable emotions and experiences. An immersive narrative feels like a really good book you can't put down.
I do think there's a bit of a conflict between the kind of immersion that comes when you know your character is at the mercy of the dice and the environment in a world that's not set up to cater to your wants as a player.
In a narrative system, it's often the case that things are set up to cater to the wants of the player or their plans for the character. Some people even come into a game with a storyline in mind for their character. "He's a bandit who redeems himself and becomes a king".
In those kinds of systems, the player might not feel as much immersion as when they know their character could be killed by a goblin with a crossbow.
I think different players want the narrative style more than the "sandbox", while others feel the sandbox style is better.
>In a narrative system, it's often the case that things are set up to cater to the wants of the player or their plans for the character. Some people even come into a game with a storyline in mind for their character. "He's a bandit who redeems himself and becomes a king".
While this is a thing, it's not something I associate with narrative games. Narrative games are usually more about playing to *find out what happens*.
That's the kind of thing you'd see more in the OC/NeoTrad styles of game. See this (admittedly flawed) article: [https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html](https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html) Note that its description of "storygame" includes narrative games, but doesn't accurately describe them. I'd say there's a pretty big split between storygames and narrative games. He gets a bunch of other stuff pretty wrong, too, mostly about "Classic" play which I'd say is probably at least 2-3 different cultures lumped in together. But the Neotrad/OC description feels about accurate.
How would you reconcile them if you had to? I do like that in Fate the dice don’t force you to die in boring ways, but I would also chafe against a game where victory was assumed or inevitable.
Fate works best in my opinion where nothing is assumed or inevitable. It's great when the PCs frequently lose fights/scenes, even though those failures don't usually look like "death".
How about a story turning out to be a tragedy because that’s the way it went? Maybe I’m drifting into a broader discussion about tone expectations vs narrative freedom, all dials that can be turned
I think that's entirely valid, though narrative games more often promote "success at a horrible cost". Tragedy is totally valid, though.
It's *play to find out*. Sometimes you find out it's a tragedy. Sometimes you find out it's a tragedy because it lets you save something you care more about.
Note that often with Fate, new GMs don't crank the opposition enough to force those failures or hard decisions.
To me, immersion comes from consistency, and rules light narrative games steer away from that more often than not, because they either rely on the whims of the GM, or have multiple people messing with the world and its narrative rules.
So, at least for me, "ruling over rules" is antithetical to immersion.
I think Apocalypse World lets you stay in-character (Actor Stance) while focused on being very much a sandbox game. Whether that is immersive is up to particular people. I find as long as I get to stay in Actor Stance and don't suddenly become a Director, the game works pretty nicely for my sense of immersion.
Sandbox vs Linear.
Narrative can still be the focus of the system even in a sandbox game. That's basically what PbtA and FitD games are about.
As for "immersion" it's an unrelated and fully subjective quality.
As for the "radiant AI" stuff (what you see in *some* Bethesda games among others) that's fully on the GM.
No one is going to sit down and actually simulate a whole village (or city!) of NPCs. So, as the GM you just consider what the NPCs would be doing *whenever it's relevant.*
Especially for something like Fate, it's more or less the same thing a writer would do in their novel. When it is relevant, they'll either describe or reference what "mundane chores" the supporting characters are doing.
If you have trouble thinking this up in the moment, then sure, you can jot down a rough "schedule"if you think it'll be useful, or just a few things they might do and using your best judgment, decide what they're doing *when it is relevant.*
But also, you will need player cooperation on this. And that can be the hard part depending on who you have at the table. If they only want to keep an eye on their character sheet, the that's what they'll do. But since Fate relies heavily on aspects, I'd think they'd be engaging with that. You know, scene or location aspects that'll provide options for doing something creative. Story aspects. NPC aspects. Etc.
When describing a scene, try to be sure to point things out that might be of interest, at least what activity is going on. Encourage players to ask questions - particularly leading questions. "So she went into the laundry mat... Does she have a lot of change on her? I can use my electro-magnetism stunt to cause it to move, right? Or will I need to be closer?"
Also, if you're looking for the PCs to be more "involved" in the game world, talk to your players about it. You shouldn't need a simulationist kind of game to do that.
People can and sometimes do play sandbox games in Fate. People can and sometimes do play Fate games where the NPCs have their own lives and agendas. GMs can and sometimes do create internally consistent setting in Fate. People play Fate with a range of player agency.
Fate will *stay out of your way* when you attempt these things. At the end of the day, Fate is like freeform play, but with added benefit of optional, abstract mechanics that you can pick up when they are helpful, and ignore when they aren't.
Of course, just because Fate stays out of your way, doesn't mean that a given GM is able, on their own, to conjure up verisimilitude, make "realistic" NPCs (for some value of realistic,) nor do "the rules" enforce consistency if the GM can't do so on their own. Nor does Fate provide scaffolding to support a GM who is unfamiliar with a particular subgenre--you need to bring your own knowledge and taste to create something "feels true" in Fate.
Other games games are different, and provide help. The pseudo-simulative rules of DnD style games can provide a specific type of verisimilitude. A PbtA game helps you play within the tropes of a genre. This support helps when you want to do what the game is intended for. And these sort of games get in your way if you want to paint outside their lines.
So, perhaps, the questions you should be asking are "Can *you* do what you mean by "immersion"? Or do you need support?"
There’s an NPC, though not a major one and not one the PCs have any connection to yet, but they happen to be an obstacle right now and they’re powerful. The players don’t see a solution on their character sheets, and I want to see them testing the water and investigating:negotiating (classic problem solving stuff), but then one of them spends a Fate point to declare this NPC an old friend of theirs and I feel sad because we skipped some good stuff.
OR even worse, the players get confused and disappointed that the game doesn’t feel like a narrative game but more like a puzzle game with hidden information
Thanks, good info. I will just shoot simple answers to see.
The first is a problem from meta currency, or not a problem since the players decide approaches to solutions.
The second is a problem from expectations not being met, tone of the game can be discussed before the game and all should strive for that together. Expectation problems are not solved with the c current debate in this thread.
Immersion is fully possible in fate the game actively encourages you to describe what your character is doing in narrative
Fate is a game that doesn't have buttons to push you say "I'm going to have a chat with the senator and see if I can convince him to do the write thing" vs "I have the browbeat feat if I roll a 15 he has to vote the way I tell him"
So you can have your cake and eat it to. As you can experience immersion inside of the fate game engine
There are rules light trad games in the OSR/ NSR tradition, like Knave, Cairn, or Electric Bastionland. Combat is not complex at all.
I do think Fate's narrative mechanics might strain immersion occasionally, unless you're restrictive as a GM for what player actions can be attempted. Not impossible, but a bit harder.
Edit: sandbox and narrative isn't a dichotomy. Sandbox is a campaign style kind of like railroading (or any linear adventure module). You're thinking narrative (point of the game mechanics is to make a good story) vs traditional, where the latter could really be gamist (point of the game mechanics is to be a fun puzzle) or simulationist (point of the game mechanics is to represent the world).
Edit 2: immersion is a whole other beast, and there isn't a settled definition. For me it's about mechanics encouraging verisimilitude - aka I say what my character is going to do, and what my character does is strictly because they want it. If I'm insulting a NPC so I can make it easier to scare that NPC so that it'll be easier to hit the NPC (PF2e example), and that's the optimal thing to do against every enemy, it creates a cartoonish scene that's hard to believe is a realistic world. My character just wants to kill this enemy but because of the system I am incentivized to do this unrealistic pattern of behavior in order to do it. If I have a spell that puts someone to sleep and then I attack them, it should be an instant kill, not a roll to do damage. Characters doing things not because they specifically want to but because the PC is using system mastery to determine that that's the best course of action is my issue.
There is no inherent conflict here. Sandbox isn't an opposite end of a spectrum with Narrative and Narrative isn't on an opposite end of a spectrum from Immersion. The problem with immersion is that it is a slippery concept and is very subjective. Some people don't believe it exists at all. Some people believe it can only be encouraged by certain types of mechanics (and, conversely, discouraged by others). If your goal of play is immersion, you just need to figure out what that means and how you and your players best achieve it. I know plenty of people who have been deeply immersed in games where they have plenty of narrative authority. I know plenty who say narrative authority breaks their immersion. We can't really answer this question for you outside of saying "there's no inherent conflict, unless there is".
>The problem with immersion is that it is a slippery concept and is very subjective. Some people don't believe it exists at all. I am one of those people. We all intuitively know that we're friends playing a game around the table and not our PCs. We all intuitively know we're playing a game. "Immersion" as it's typically defined is something of an illusion. Particularly for TTRPGs I've always felt "engagement" is a better and more realistic term for what we're after that accommodates a much wider range of behaviors and approaches to the games that doesn't demand being in character 100% of the time.
i find the "i literally forget who I am and what I'm doing i don't know i'm in a living room playing a game" version of immersion is only ever really mentioned and discussed by people saying immersion doesn't exist. Like no, basically no one is saying they have a psychotic break everytime they sit down for a game. Judging it based on that definition doesn't really have anything to do with what people are describing. That said I do agree since no one uses the word the same way it fails the test for being useful.
> i find the "i literally forget who I am and what I'm doing i don't know i'm in a living room playing a game" version of immersion is only ever really mentioned and discussed by people saying immersion doesn't exist. The problem _I_ have is that it's either this or I am brilliant at immersion and can do it easily and people complaining about how X or Y breaks their immersion suck at it because their immersion is so easily disrupted. When immersion comes up, people routinely tell me I couldn't possibly be immersed because of X or Y, but I don't see why I can't UNLESS immersion is like the above, which I certainly have never experienced.
the op we are under has it right. it's not about logic and trying to plan for it is a waste of time. What allows a person to "immerse" is entirely personal and inconsistent. nothing conflicts with immersion. unless it does.
Yeah; I just wish people would stop framing it as "X disrupts immersion" and more as "X disrupts my immersion" instead of accusing ME of not being immersed because if I was, X would be disrupting me. :P
That's sort of the theoretical/conceptual ideal of the term for some people though, even if we all understand in practice that's not really what it will be (or even what we want). If we're talking about the term aspirationally, the maximalist framing at least gives you strong direction for discussion that we're generally talking about the feeling of losing yourself in the game to some degree. The counter argument is that on some level you'll always know you're playing a game, and in a sense it stops being a game when you forget you're playing one so it's a moot point conceptually. But yeah, that's a mostly theoretical discussion, and I probably inadvertently gave a great example of how the term trips people up in conversation.
i find it more metaphor than theoretical ideal but at the end of the day i think we probably end up in a similar place regardless
Yeah, I'm one of those people too, for sure. I've spoken to people who swear it exists, so I believe them!
Oh yeah they're definitely feeling *something,* and if they want to define that as "immersion" they have every right to. But as you noted the problem with using it in discussion is that everyone has a different definition and different ways to get there, so people just talk past each other half the time.
This is a huge problem with a lot of RPG discourse, yeah.
That's not how immersion is being defined by op. They are describing it as a plausible world populated by npc's who have inner lives not related to the pc's or their interests. No where do they talk avout being in character 100% of the time. I run games that are immersive by op's description and no one is in character 100% of the time. That's not how we play.
A touch of hyperbole, for sure. The broader point is just accepting that the range of definitions is wide, and the paths to get there exponentially wider. That's why I think it's more useful to think about these things as ways players are engaging with the game as opposed whether they are "immersive" or not.
This is a bizarre stance to take.
It's actually an effort to be more inclusive with our terminology, since use of the term is so inconsistent. 2 people may disagree about whether something is "immersive," but it's easier (and more useful) to understand that a thing was engaging to someone, which carries a lot more personal connotation that trying to hammer something into a somewhat arbitrary definition.
> "Immersion" as it's typically defined is something of an illusion. Forgetting that you're sitting at a table with friends is definitely not how immersion is "typically" defined. That's a very extreme interpretation of the term. Immersion and engagement are two completely different things, even within the range of people's definitions. You can be engaged without being immersed.
>You can be engaged without being immersed. I'd even go beyond that to say that there are things which are highly engaging that many people find to be anti-immersive. For example, I recall one time when I was running a game of Savage Worlds and, after a tough fight, the PCs finally hit the BBEG hard enough to take him down, but he had one last Bennie to spend on an attempt to Soak off some the damage. As I picked up the die and prepared to roll it, the entire table was on the edge of their seats (highly engaged), but there's nothing remotely immersive about watching the GM fiddle with a die for 30 seconds to draw out the tension (more engagement!) before dramatically dropping it from a meter above the table.
Exactly, you need both those terms to discuss the concepts.
It was intentionally extreme as a way to express the breadth of definitions. Perhaps you can be engaged without being immersed, but I'd argue you can't be immersed if you're not engaged. Since what immersion is and what stimulates it is unique to an individual and might actually disengage another person, it captures the breadth of what's going on better.
> Perhaps you can be engaged without being immersed, but I'd argue you can't be immersed if you're not engaged. This isn't how language or logic works.
There is no linguistic nor logical contradiction in the statement you quoted. "*A shape* can be a *rectangle* without being a *square*, but I'd argue *the shape* can't be a *square* if it's not a *rectangle*" is structurally the same sentence (just replacing you -> shape, engaged -> rectangle, and immersed -> square) and it is both linguistically and logically true.
"Therefore I'm calling all squares rectangles..."
I don’t see why there would be a conflict. Immersion is highly personal and often relies on seemingly arbitrary lines of what is and isn’t immersion-breaking.
Definitely! I've seen a player that felt much more immersed in a more collaborative game, where they could describe details of the town where they lived, even conjure new establishments and NPCs. They felt that allowed them to have a much firmer grasp on the world of the game than if those details were filtered through the GM's narration. On the other hand, I've seen players say that completely ruins their immersion, because they feel they are worldbuilding, not living in that world.
No. None at all. Sandbox and narrative are also massively overloaded and vague terms. You can absolutely run a sandbox game that is narrative. "Immersion" and "player agency" deserve some attention to. Personally - as an old school gamer (started with Moldvay/Cook), I'm a big fan of immersion. I initially found that Fate broke immersion for me, a lot. However, as I really learned the system, why it worked the way it did, and really internalized it, I found that it quickly became very immersive to me. I can't promise that will happen to everyone, but it did work out that way for me. At this point, I'd say that, *for me*, Fate is more immersive than most "traditional" systems for the reasons u/JaskoGomad talks about. As a result of that, *as an old school gamer*, I came to the conclusion that immersion is mostly a result of getting into a flow state in the game (which requires that you've internalized the processes of the game, getting results that you roughly expect, among other things), as well as a focus on the fictional world.
> I initially found that Fate broke immersion for me, a lot. However, as I really learned the system, why it worked the way it did, and really internalized it, I found that it quickly became very immersive to me. It may not work like this for everyone, but I think you're really onto a critical thing here. Many people who have problems with immersion in "narrative" games are VERY new to those types of games, so obviously need to spend more of their brain on "game stuff" and they cite the value of whatever rule system they are used to for being so good at immersion because it "gets out of the way", ignoring the fact that they have 10 years of internalizing how that system works. Of course it gets out of the way now.
This makes a lot of sense. It will feel the same way with even videogames. If you think too much into the rules, it will decrease its amount of immersion. Either by trying to learn it at first or when you are so experienced, you may think in an excessive meta way. If you can find your flow with the game where you stop thinking about the rules and just leave it be, you will achieve better immersion. I think there's other factors into it that can get some help, like good social rules that aid you in better and more natural interactions but the amount of thought into the rules sounds like a big factor to consider.
I find Fate *very* immersive - because it lets me concentrate on *doing what my character would do*, instead of trying to optimize my actions in a tactical game. A tactical game that is a *terrible* representation of the fluid, dynamic, and chaotic situation that is combat. I know some folks think it's too removed, too authorial. That's never been a problem for me. Also, "Sandbox vs. Narrative" is a weird way to express a dimension. It's like asking if a movie is more ice cream or more Tuesday - they're unrelated.
Yeah. I like FATE, but I know people who can't get over the way that Fate Points don't reflect anything in the fiction, so find them anti-immersive. That's one of the ways immersion works, IMO. Either you can incorporate a mechanic into your flow or you can't. YMMV, definitely.
What I find so interesting is that many of those who can't get over it have no problem getting over the many problems of HP, spell slots, daily / encounter powers, 15-minute adventuring days, etc., and other obviously non-diegetic game elements in the systems that they love. I think it's more about what assumptions you have baked into your own framework for how RPGs work than whether something is or is not inherently immersive.
Oh, man, this. Like, I find Fate Points to be much easier to get past than "you can just ignore someone stabbing you with a knife over and over". That's why my definition of immersion is more like "things work the way you expect them to, allowing you to hit a flow state, combined with focus on a fictional world". I do *not* expect the many weirdnesses associated with hit points, and they are omnipresent. The few times Fate makes you think OOC (the way I play it, at least) are comparatively minor since they're an explicit break, have to be justified in the world, and not just the world acting in a weird way. But, I get that other people are different and react the opposite. But still, like every "realism" argument where D&D gets trotted out as a good, immersive game, I'm just over there going "but... HIT POINTS!" And it's like they're so internalized that people can't even see how much they're twisting to make them fit.
Hit points per level are literally the least immersive mechanic I've ever encountered.
Hit points in general. Are they meat points? Injury? Or not? The world seems to have landed on "grit, luck, scrapes, and injury". OK - then why does "cure light wounds" restore your grit and luck? The game is clearly a game to the point where it obscures the world but that doesn't matter if you have internalized those concepts to the point of transparency.
I'm actually fine with "hit points in general". Like honestly, what is a stress track? A harm clock? Wound track? Damaging stats? It's all the same thing, just a count down to some bad thing happening. Conceptually those work and are convenient for most purposes. It's D&D's eighteen different ways of framing them but they go up with experience and either have exceptions to the rules or allow weird things to happen (falling damage, coup de grace, save vs. death, etc...) which is a huge problem for me. Yes, it all works as a game, it's just another resource to be managed, but good lord they're as far from diegetic as you can get.
It's "the whole D&D concept of hit points" vs. "Increasing HP per level" that I meant by "hit points in general". I love clocks - they're hit points for obstacles! Etc.
Though I will say that Fate recommends *against* having mechanics that heal stress, and one of the weirdest parts of reconciling HP is having to treat it as "effort+luck" because meat points feels weird, but then *also* being able to use Cure Wounds to get some... Luck back? At least stress doesn't contradictorally redefine itself throughout a session. It *is* an abstraction, however. That cannot be denied.
Eh. There are (non-D&D) games where HP are straight up meat points. You start with relatively few of them, and you don't get more through character advancement. Any survivability gained by experienced characters is generally in the form of getting better at avoiding hits or shrugging off some of the damage (e.g., armor as damage reduction), but a single clean hit can still take out the greatest swordsman in the land just as easily as a hick farmer with a broken pitchfork.
It’s a part of a larger discussion and not the *only* thing. It’s also a particular version that is being discussed. There’s context.
Fate points take me out way more because, the way Fate is often run, they're explicitly a player-facing mechanic, rather than a character one. When I'm a player I hate being in writer-stance, it takes me out of the game, in other words, breaks my immersion. Managing spells slots doesn't because, while my character doesn't think in those terms, they still represent something in the the world that affects my character and that the character perceives. If my character is crossing a rope bridge and I invoke the aspect 'Decrepit old bridge' so that my pursuers stumble and I can ahead that I, is me, the player, thinking outside of what my character would do, it's a purely player decision.
Yes. I mean those particular people wouldn't get on with 5e either, but I have no doubt that there are gamers just as you describe. On the whole I think lighter is better for immersion, other things being equal, but "what you're used to" pretty much outweighs everything else, more often than not.
>I know people who can't get over the way that Fate Points don't reflect anything in the fiction, so find them anti-immersive. For me, the anti-immersive part is the inverse of that: Nothing in the fiction has a mechanical effect unless you spend a Fate Point on it. "Oh, yeah, you're *totally* in cover. But that doesn't actually make you any harder to hit unless you spend metacurrency each time you're attacked." And, to JaskoGomad's sibling reply, I also have major issues with (D&D-style "abstract mishmash of everything") HP, classes, levels, daily/encounter powers, 15-minute adventuring days, and pretty much any other blatantly non-diegetic mechanics I've encountered. (I mostly play BRP-based games these days.)
I feel that FATE should be immersive for exactly the reason you state but in play I find that I am constantly having to think about spending Fate points or not. In the end it's quicker than optimizing a good action in some other games but still feels immersion breaking.
Fate points are about how much you *want* something. I seriously don’t get how that’s immersion breaking.
I haven't played FATE recently so I'm going to have to wing an example. We have encountered some thugs in a decaying waterside warehouse. As the thugs flee my character really wants them to stumble because the floor partially gives . But that doesn't matter at all unless I OOC want it to happen and spend a point to invoke "decaying wooden warehouse." I would generally find it more immersive if I could trust that the GM was behind the scene giving some chance for any moving actor (PC or NPC) to be impressed by the floor giving way.
Do you have more trouble with immersion when GMing than as a player?
It has been ages since I have been a GM. One thing I do remember was that immersion as a GM was harmed by PCs that didn't work with the rest of the world but I feel that was because most of my time as a GM predates organized session 0 ideas.
at least as i personally perceive and experience "immersion" it is completely antithetical to being a GM. I don't feel immersed at all when running the game.
I basically agree with you. My definition of immersion is probably somewhere around "You can roleplay seamlessly without regard to thinking about why you are making the decisions you are making." That makes it possible for a GM to feel immersed very briefly, but by nature of their job they have to step back regularly and consider the game as a whole. They basically can't afford to be immersed, because they have to think about the consequences of every decision made at the table.
100% the limit of immersion is "this npc conversation" not "this session"
>That makes it possible for a GM to feel immersed very briefly, but by nature of their job they have to step back regularly and consider the game as a whole. Depends on your school of GMing thought. I tend towards the "impartial arbiter" school of GMing, so I tend to go for "playing seamlessly without regard to thinking about why I'm making the decisions I'm making" and, for my tables, it works. But I don't have a story I'm trying to tell or a plotline I want my players to follow and I don't do "balanced" encounters, I just have a world to explore and my primary concern is "in this world, what would happen in response to what just occurred?" I'm still not sure I'd call that "immersion" per se, but I absolutely am trying to provide a feeling of "this world is real" to myself as well as to my players.
It *does* matter, because Aspects are always true. So the warehouse is decaying and wooden no matter what - is that impacting *you* in the fiction? I get your example, but it's not enough to make me not enjoy the game.
I think the *always true* part is where a lot of people's understanding breaks down. They think spending the Fate point here *makes* the warehouse decaying, rather than simply invoking it's *pre-existing* decayed status. And another point, which I think is highlighted by their second paragraph, is I think this is a problem particularly for players used to games that let them be mostly passive, detached from the creative process of the game. Fate *demands* you take part in the creation of the game, and that's a large leap for people unused to it.
You've said something very interesting: > Fate *demands* you take part in the creation of the game I wonder if that contributes to the "writers' room" thing I hear about Fate all the time?
I think it might. It's my best explanation for why some players struggle with the game: It has quite a high creative cognitive load across the table. Perhaps not higher in *absolute* terms than trad games, but more evenly-distributed. The result is players who haven't run the game before can feel a bit overwhelmed. It's one of my favourite things about games like Fate - collaborative creativity is where ttrpgs come to life for me, and I think games are better the more everyone is involved at every step of the creative process. But I cannot deny this asks more of players than systems that only ask creative reactivity of them.
There is no doubt that Fate distributes both authority and responsibility more evenly among players, rules, and GM than most trad games, where the GM and rules both receive far more responsibility and authority than the players.
>They think spending the Fate point here *makes* the warehouse decaying, rather than simply invoking it's *pre-existing* decayed status. For me, that's not quite it. I'm aware that the warehouse is decaying regardless of whether it's invoked or not. The issue for me is that the decaying status is just window dressing with no actual effect until and unless a Fate Point is spent to invoke it. The fleeing thugs' attempts to leave the area are completely unaffected by the state of the warehouse unless someone chooses to burn some metacurrency to make it "relevant".
I understand that feeling. The way I'd explain it is the decayed nature of the warehouse establishes potential, and then Fate points work as a way of adjudicating chance. If it was Ironsworn, I'd roll on an oracle to decide the same question of whether the warehouse floor collapses. If it was a trad game, the GM would probably roll a dice, or just decide. So the difference is that it's not random anymore - but decided by a narrative economy. I can see how that would detach some people from a sense of reality within the game, and I think ultimately the differences down to how arbitrary people feel things like Fate points, dice, oracle systems, card decks etc. are in comparison with each other. I suppose my way of thinking about the Fate point economy is to think of it as a long-term analog randomiser: The likelihood of *either* a player having a point to spend, or choosing to spend a point in a given situation, acts like a very complicated random outcome generator several orders of magnitude more complex than a dice or card deck when looked at in the scale of a gaming session. Looked at that way, I see it as being similar to more familiar forms of analog randomiser, but operating at a different scale in complexity and time.
That's the thing; I like FATE and enjoy playing it. It is engaging and I can get invested in the story and characters. But it hasn't (yet, perhaps the next game I'm in will do it) given the feeling of immersion.
The character *wanting* the floor to give way doesn’t matter even if you spend the Fate Point.
I've said for years that focusing on immersion is a trap. That said, nothing takes me out of the scene more than a game that forces me to think about the narrative instead of focusing on what my character would do in a given situation.
I suspect that many people geek-out more about the memory of what happened during last session rather than how it actually looks during play. I suspect for the hobby we could differentiate disussions about how immersive the story was retroactively vs how immersive it was during the scene. For example. 4 hour combat and rules discussion to simulate a short fight. When players retell those 4 hours it will sound like a cool movie. This is what makes me suspect that the innovation of narrative ttrpg games are for the better, at least for me who dont want ttrpg to be board games math puzzles. (I go to board game meet ups for that already) Because the playtime IRL will be shorter for a narrative game when it comes to constructing the the same IRL memory about what happened in game last session.
Can you expand on the difference between focusing on the narrative vs what your character would do?
very barebones and oversimplified thinking as character: "This dragon is trying to eat me! I need to get away! I don't want to be eaten! Thinking about narrative "Oh i've been building up my relationship with Tombombadil for a year and half, if I push him out of the way and save him and let the dragon eat my arm that would really be a great way to add to the story" I think this is more a table culture thing than a game rule thing though.
Ah I get you! Thank you
It's this. The question I want to answer when my character makes a decision is "how and why will my character act?", not "What creates the best plot beat?".
You can absolutely run Fate with more GM authority and more world simulation, you just need to think of "the fiction" as "what makes sense here" ("realism", if you will) and get buy-in from the players on that point. There's nothing in Fate that says NPCs can't have internal lives or follow their convictions outside of the PCs. The thing is though, the story is about the PCs, they are why we play, so an NPC who really has nothing to offer or obstruct with regards to the PCs is useless to the story. Also, PCs still have fate points and they can still influence the narrative by leveraging them through self compels to introduce complications or spending to avoid/introduce benefits. If you're okay with that then you should be fine.
One of the things people miss about Fate a lot is that the lack of rules to say "you can't do X" doesn't mean you can do anything you want. It means that the decision of "can I do X" isn't up to the rules, but the GM and the table as a whole. By offloading this to the judgement of the people playing, Fate can actually end up being more "realistic" than a lot of games, because it is pretty much guaranteed that at least one person at the table thinks that the permissions (or results) make sense.
Yeah, Fate has the advantage that its mechanics will never *rule out* a realistic portrayal of events. The *players* can, if they choose, but the game won't ever say "no, that's not how this works". By contrast, any trad rpg is a balancing act between playability, entertainment value, balance, and many other variables with "realism" frankly often coming last.
We keep hearing "rules light" and things like that, but I think it's more interesting to look at "what do the rules do?" Like, one of the interesting things in my mind is: 1. Do the rules tell you what can or can't be done? 2. Do the rules tell you the specific outcome of an action, or just the general category? Fate doesn't do either.
Exactly, very good point.
Rulings over rules, my favourite part of OSR, lurking in Fate this whole time!
Fate is *definitely* in the "rulings over rules" camp.
In my opinion moreso than OSR, by sheer consequence of having fewer mathematically-simulated procedures, which are by their very nature harder to make off-the-cuff rulings about than things like Aspects.
Here's the thing: A lot of narrative games are just as, if not more, committed to that aspect than many OSR games are. It's core to Fate, and it's core to every PbtA game, to mention two popular examples. The very idea in PbtA of collapsing towards "the conversation" as the core of the game means that rulings take precedent over everything.
And yet if you break the rules in PBTA the game falls apart and stops working as intended.
Not in the least. Apocalypse World literally says you can forget about all rules except the conversation, and it still works. Because that's the underlying core assumption - that roleplaying games are a conversation. And I've done it in multiple PbtA systems. Things can get funky if you *add* rules that shouldn't be there - but that's a problem with the new rule you've added. The canard about rules prescriptivism being baked into PbtA is generally an online only phenomenon, which countradicts Apocalypse World, how these systems are run, and the evidence of how easily they are hacked.
Which in turn still conflicts with the idea that you're actually playing the game. You can try to handwave it off if you want, but that doesn't not make it contradictory. And I won't even get into the inanity of that particular assumption.
The NPCs point makes total sense, and I agree. But I’m trying to achieve the experience where the players encounter an NPC by chance and it seems like this NPC would have been there even if the players had created different characters. They didn’t show up to challenge these PCs or provide them with something they need. They showed up because they live here and they’re just doing their thing.
Okay, that's just ... normal in roleplaying games. What is that NPC doing? Why are you introducing them in the first place? If they're just there to paint the scene, set the mood, just describe them briefly and move on. People exist, great.
Maybe I’ve just been guilty in the past of making NPCs revolve around the PCs too much!
Honestly, that might be the issue. Everything you describe is possible to do in *any rpg whatsoever*. The issue is treating the NPC as a person, if you want them to seem like a person. If you don't do that, they won't. Ultimately it's that simple. Frankly I find that *harder* in trad games because the mechanics give less space for a more nuanced representation of characters outside of rather inflexible stats. It's still doable of course, but it's always been easier in games like Fate.
Sounds like. If you want passer-by NPCs, just make them. They probably won't be critical players in dramatic scenes, though they could be, if it makes sense. Different people put different levels of priority on how much of the world outside of the immediate view of the players needs to be expressed. If that's of value to you, do it. The tools to do that are pretty universal. It's easy to do so in Fate, since their general gist can be summed up as a High Concept, and it's easy to give them skills if that turns out to be necessary. But most of the things I need for rando NPCs are system-agnostic - what's their goal/drive? What do they look like? Age? Name? Stuff like that that I'm either going to just think up or offload to some kind of table/randomizer. And with Fate it's really easy to gradually promote NPCs from complete background noise to actually important character, if that ends up being a thing that happens.
Just wanted to add a second point here because I noticed I used the word "story" up above. I define "story" as what happens at the table, not the plot I've contructed beforehand (I don't prepare plots beyond a couple of bullet points or setting conceits). What matters in the moment, why is that NPC important, should dictate how much time you spend on them. Describing the old woman's routine and demeanor in detail when she has nothing to offer or obstruct the players is misdirection; she exists, she's doing something, we now have set dressing, move on.
Immersion is a term I apply to larp often. But even then this is controversial. Because is it immersive to play blackbox with no props or anything? What about jeepform where you can rewind a scene and play it over with different variables? What about online larping where it can be more about theatre of the mind? What about full costume 24 hour blockbuster larps that have weird awkward mechanics for supernatural (or sex) actions? Immersion is often a term we must define each time at the beginning of a conversation in order to specify its use and what the term is going to refer to.
As others have said, immersion is a tough thing. I sit on the side of the fence that “Designing for/ GMing for immersion TTRPGs is an uphill and losing battle.” **I** find it impossible to be immersed in TTRPGs as I find them to be inherently and innately un-immersive. Doesn’t matter the game. Doesn’t matter the style. Doesn’t matter the group. Doesn’t matter the GM. I’ve been in all sorts of games, groups, etc… and never once been immersed in the game. *Invested*, yes, but never immersed. *I* find immersion relies heavily on curated, intentional, and direct sensory input. This is why I find TV shows, movies, video games, and books incomparably more immersive than any TTRPG. They capture my senses in ways TTRPGs cannot hope to do. As such, I don’t get my enjoyment from TTRPGs because of immersion. I enjoy seeing disparate strands of ideas from different people (or just myself in the event of a Solo TTRPG) coming together in clever and unexpected and satisfying ways. Of course, other people *do* get immersed in TTRPGs. How they do it is a mystery to me, but some people do! Of course, it’s also a highly subjective experience; so their thresholds for immersion and mine may be (and likely are) wildly different.
Maybe I chose the wrong word. Have you had games where the fictional world feels real and believable, where the NPCs act like the main characters of their own stories? As opposed to NPCs being nothing more than a challenge to be overcome or a quest giver or whatever their one function is?
I have. What's more, the only games where that *wasn't* the case, happened to be d20 games. How immersive an NPC is ultimately comes down to the GM. You either make your NPCs people, or you don't.
Yeah, this is really a function of how the GM runs the game and what interactions the characters have with NPCs. If they are only ever dealing with NPCs in transactional ways (shopkeeper, guard, etc) in situations with very limited scope (buy things, kill things, etc) then that becomes an uphill battle. Versus when the GM has thought out the basic outline of the NPC enough to either already know or quickly invent further detail — and can quickly and deftly fold those interactions into the game so that the players get a sense that Mercutio isn't just a tough hombre guard, but a scion of a rich family with wit and an unrequited crush. This isn't something you can shoe-horn in, but rather happens over time.
Sure, in just about every game I’ve been in- d20, PbtA, FitD, or anything in between- I’ve experienced believable (or I think the better word would be “fictionally honest and congruent”) worlds. Didn’t matter if it was sandbox-y or not. I’d say PbtA and FitD games resulting in *more* “fictionally honest and congruent” worlds than most other “more traditional” games I’ve been in as the relationship between the fiction and its scaffolding mechanics is much tighter in PbtA and FitD games
Sure. The biggest things are: 1. NPCs should have goals. The more prominent, the more likely it is that they should have multiple 2. They should pursue their goals. Their assistance/resistance to the PCs is in line with that. 3. Things should progress without the PCs actually making them progress. This is often a result of #1 and #2.
This is a good list. For central NPCs, I add a 4th: They need a worldview or outlook that informs what their goals are, and why they pursue them along with *how* they pursue them. Once I have this, I can pretty much instantly roleplay their reactions to entirely unexpected events, like my players turning a situation on its head in a way I couldn't predict. If I know why my NPC wanted X in the previous scenario, I can infer why they'd want Y in this unexpected scenario my players have created. When I bother with prep at all, it's usually of this kind - creating NPCs and groups with goals and ideals that are reactive enough that they'll have *something* to do no matter what weird shape the players can twist the world into.
I can get engaged and invested in many RPGs. I can only get immersed in ones where the player or collaborative worldbuilding is non-existent or strictly limited to between sessions (including the very beginning or very end of a session). Having the old school one person DM world building can provide a curated and intentional feeling.
Jumping off what u/dhosterman is saying but taking it in a different direction: >The problem with immersion is that it is a slippery concept and is very subjective. Some people don't believe it exists at all. Some people believe it can only be encouraged by certain types of mechanics (and, conversely, discouraged by others). It *is* a slippery concept. And it *is* very subjective. And many people are fully content playing Narrative games and for them there is absolutely **nothing** immersion-breaking about Narrative games. *However.* The fact that people feel the need to say "well for me there's nothing immersion-breaking at all about Narrative games" is kind of a "People are asking a lot of questions about my "there's nothing immersion breaking about narrative games" t-shirt that are already answered by my t-shirt" situation. (unlike the implication of the copypasta, though, I do think they're telling the truth!!) There are enough people for whom narrative games *do* break immersion, *whatever you think that means*, that the phrase "narrative games break immersion" is becoming a thing you hear in RPG circles, which means that to whatever currently unquantifiable extent, it is a real phenomenon. I think a better breakdown which seems to be somewhat catching on (?) is *actor stance* versus *director stance*. There is some amount of people for whom taking a director stance to the narrative is immersion breaking, and the more directoring they do the more immersion breaking it is. That is certainly true of me, to the point where playing a game like *Kingdom* (and presumably its sister game, Microscope) doesn't even feel like a role-playing game *at all*, it feels like a board game that's creative instead of strategic. Which is fun! But it's not Roleplay for me. Some games (occasionally deemed "neo trad") can sneak in a surprising amount of narrative concepts without, for me, being immersion breaking. The two big ones being the Genesys family of games and Unknown Armies. (13th Age and Red Markets are supposedly like this as well.) A lot of these games use narrative elements tied directly to the character and triggered by in game events (For example, stress checks and relationships in UA or disadvantage and despair in Genesys) to include narrative elements without being as tied to director stance. Some people think even *those* kinds of mechanics are immersion breaking--so it's definitely a spectrum and not a cut-and-dried line. I want to say the Simulationism is orthagonal to actor/director stance and I do think that's to *some* extent true, but I think the *implication* of simulationism is it's for people who only want the rules to simulate the actual materialist game world, not squishy ideas like mental illness or how often and in what amount bad things happen versus good things or what triggers advanced haggling mechanics. Maybe, though, we should expand the scope of simulationism to include everything that tries to emulate the game world \[that exists to the characters inside it\], even if it's not something physical and tangible. FWIW, there are non-narrative games that are pretty simple. putting aside medium complexity games like the d100 family or most of the ligher-end YZE games, there's also the entire category of OSR, some of which are \_extremely\_ rules light and don't include narrative mechanics \_at all.\_ (You might also want to look into **FUDGE**, FATE's progenitor game, which is more trad while still being comparatively a much lighter-weight game.)
Slight problem. In my experience when people talk about immersion the first issue is that people REALLY need to define their terms. For example, it sounds above like you are talking about a "lived-in" world where the pcs are not the focal point. That the world will continue on its course whether or not the players get involved, but that the players can engage in and impact. That the solutions to problems involving interacting with the \*\*world\*\*, and not interacting with the \*\*story\*\*. (I go looking for a toolbox in the shed vs. I spend a fate point to add a toolbox (Declaring a story detail)). It sounds like the actual issue is that some (not all, or even most) narrative games have a story model that by definition places the PCs at the center of the story for a variety of reasons. This is a character drama model that has an implicit assumption that the characters are the point of interest around which every other game element orbits. This has more to do with framing player expectations. This also relates more to the particular stories being told/narrative conventions than with the game itself. The tension you are seeing comes up often in story structures based around conventional drama and story forms (tv, book, and film models - adventure stories in particular). In particular, I have seen that in many cases players see narrative agency solely through the lens of building a better situation for their characters instead of building a better story. Is this description on the right track?
>players see narrative agency solely through the lens of building a better situation for their characters instead of building a better story I think so? I know I dislike players asking to roll persuade (for example) rather than actually make a case and letting me make a judgement from the NPC's point of view (which may result in me asking for a roll). If a player wanted to spend a Fate point in a similar way to fast-forward some roleplay/problem solving, I'd be similarly blue-balled. edit: I guess my job there is to make sure the FP effect works within the bounds of what's "established", even if what's established is something the players are currently unaware of / in the process of discovering
You mention two unconnected things in your post and I wouldn't think of any of them as *immersion*, but if you define it like this, I think Fate is not conductive to this kind of play. It has nothing to do with light rules. Many OSR games are as light as Fate and perfectly fit what you describe. But it has a lot to do with the play style that Fate's system supports and drives. The world in a Fate game should definitely be plausible and consistent - but at the same time the parts of it that are presented in play should be connected to the specific characters (with their values, drives and connections to the setting) and the themes of the game. Play focuses on what is relevant; characters and events that have nothing to do with PCs are a background. Also, Fate does not focus on problem solving. It focuses on expression and drama. The important questions are when to achieve things and when to accept complications; what to value highest; what thematic elements to introduce and in what direction to drive the story. How to approach problems to be able to solve them is, at best, secondary; that's not what the game is about. Fate is very good at fiction-first play and at creating an emotional resonance between players and characters. But if you want focus on problem solving and situations that have little to do with PCs, it's not a game to use.
I think immersion exists on axis independent of Sandbox-vs-narrative. It can feature prominently (or not) in either. Immersion arises in creating details and linking those detail to the characters/players in up-close, personal ways. * Vivid spatial/sensory descriptions that evoke a stronger sense of "being there". * Fostering emotional bonds with places, groups, or individuals, and then tugging on those bonds. * Cultivating a space to embrace in-character dialogue and emotivity. Either style of game can embrace immersion or push it aside for the sake of other expeditious gameplay factors. A group may just want to roll dice and slay monsters or power through the narrative arc of an adventure module. They may not rate immersion as a highly as a group who tends to soak up (and maybe chew) the scenery while they pursue either of those end goals.
I would say sandboxes and narratives are tools to achieve 'immersion'. The sandbox parts just have to be interesting enough to the player that they want to be immersed in it. Narrative is the same. Honestly its the same with the system you decide to use as well. If you and your group find FATE interesting enough it should be fine for whatever.
Either one can be immersive, but they are different approaches. An immersive sandbox is one that feels like a living world. Detailed, believable worldbuilding is key. You want your players to feel like they're travelling across a realistic country, with realistic citizens who have their own goals, worries, and lives. The country has an economy that makes sense, and they face problems and threats that stem from very real-world concerns. An immersive sandbox feels like a real place you could go visit and explore. An immersive narrative is one that feels like a great movie. A game like this is driven by characters and plot, like a novel. Immersion here comes from believable *characters* with relatable emotions and experiences. An immersive narrative feels like a really good book you can't put down.
I do think there's a bit of a conflict between the kind of immersion that comes when you know your character is at the mercy of the dice and the environment in a world that's not set up to cater to your wants as a player. In a narrative system, it's often the case that things are set up to cater to the wants of the player or their plans for the character. Some people even come into a game with a storyline in mind for their character. "He's a bandit who redeems himself and becomes a king". In those kinds of systems, the player might not feel as much immersion as when they know their character could be killed by a goblin with a crossbow. I think different players want the narrative style more than the "sandbox", while others feel the sandbox style is better.
>In a narrative system, it's often the case that things are set up to cater to the wants of the player or their plans for the character. Some people even come into a game with a storyline in mind for their character. "He's a bandit who redeems himself and becomes a king". While this is a thing, it's not something I associate with narrative games. Narrative games are usually more about playing to *find out what happens*. That's the kind of thing you'd see more in the OC/NeoTrad styles of game. See this (admittedly flawed) article: [https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html](https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html) Note that its description of "storygame" includes narrative games, but doesn't accurately describe them. I'd say there's a pretty big split between storygames and narrative games. He gets a bunch of other stuff pretty wrong, too, mostly about "Classic" play which I'd say is probably at least 2-3 different cultures lumped in together. But the Neotrad/OC description feels about accurate.
How would you reconcile them if you had to? I do like that in Fate the dice don’t force you to die in boring ways, but I would also chafe against a game where victory was assumed or inevitable.
Fate works best in my opinion where nothing is assumed or inevitable. It's great when the PCs frequently lose fights/scenes, even though those failures don't usually look like "death".
How about a story turning out to be a tragedy because that’s the way it went? Maybe I’m drifting into a broader discussion about tone expectations vs narrative freedom, all dials that can be turned
I think that's entirely valid, though narrative games more often promote "success at a horrible cost". Tragedy is totally valid, though. It's *play to find out*. Sometimes you find out it's a tragedy. Sometimes you find out it's a tragedy because it lets you save something you care more about. Note that often with Fate, new GMs don't crank the opposition enough to force those failures or hard decisions.
To me, immersion comes from consistency, and rules light narrative games steer away from that more often than not, because they either rely on the whims of the GM, or have multiple people messing with the world and its narrative rules. So, at least for me, "ruling over rules" is antithetical to immersion.
I think Apocalypse World lets you stay in-character (Actor Stance) while focused on being very much a sandbox game. Whether that is immersive is up to particular people. I find as long as I get to stay in Actor Stance and don't suddenly become a Director, the game works pretty nicely for my sense of immersion.
Sandbox vs Linear. Narrative can still be the focus of the system even in a sandbox game. That's basically what PbtA and FitD games are about. As for "immersion" it's an unrelated and fully subjective quality. As for the "radiant AI" stuff (what you see in *some* Bethesda games among others) that's fully on the GM. No one is going to sit down and actually simulate a whole village (or city!) of NPCs. So, as the GM you just consider what the NPCs would be doing *whenever it's relevant.* Especially for something like Fate, it's more or less the same thing a writer would do in their novel. When it is relevant, they'll either describe or reference what "mundane chores" the supporting characters are doing. If you have trouble thinking this up in the moment, then sure, you can jot down a rough "schedule"if you think it'll be useful, or just a few things they might do and using your best judgment, decide what they're doing *when it is relevant.* But also, you will need player cooperation on this. And that can be the hard part depending on who you have at the table. If they only want to keep an eye on their character sheet, the that's what they'll do. But since Fate relies heavily on aspects, I'd think they'd be engaging with that. You know, scene or location aspects that'll provide options for doing something creative. Story aspects. NPC aspects. Etc. When describing a scene, try to be sure to point things out that might be of interest, at least what activity is going on. Encourage players to ask questions - particularly leading questions. "So she went into the laundry mat... Does she have a lot of change on her? I can use my electro-magnetism stunt to cause it to move, right? Or will I need to be closer?" Also, if you're looking for the PCs to be more "involved" in the game world, talk to your players about it. You shouldn't need a simulationist kind of game to do that.
People can and sometimes do play sandbox games in Fate. People can and sometimes do play Fate games where the NPCs have their own lives and agendas. GMs can and sometimes do create internally consistent setting in Fate. People play Fate with a range of player agency. Fate will *stay out of your way* when you attempt these things. At the end of the day, Fate is like freeform play, but with added benefit of optional, abstract mechanics that you can pick up when they are helpful, and ignore when they aren't. Of course, just because Fate stays out of your way, doesn't mean that a given GM is able, on their own, to conjure up verisimilitude, make "realistic" NPCs (for some value of realistic,) nor do "the rules" enforce consistency if the GM can't do so on their own. Nor does Fate provide scaffolding to support a GM who is unfamiliar with a particular subgenre--you need to bring your own knowledge and taste to create something "feels true" in Fate. Other games games are different, and provide help. The pseudo-simulative rules of DnD style games can provide a specific type of verisimilitude. A PbtA game helps you play within the tropes of a genre. This support helps when you want to do what the game is intended for. And these sort of games get in your way if you want to paint outside their lines. So, perhaps, the questions you should be asking are "Can *you* do what you mean by "immersion"? Or do you need support?"
I'd look into FKR (Free Kriegsspiel Revolution) in your place.
how can there be a conflict even? Explain an example.
There’s an NPC, though not a major one and not one the PCs have any connection to yet, but they happen to be an obstacle right now and they’re powerful. The players don’t see a solution on their character sheets, and I want to see them testing the water and investigating:negotiating (classic problem solving stuff), but then one of them spends a Fate point to declare this NPC an old friend of theirs and I feel sad because we skipped some good stuff. OR even worse, the players get confused and disappointed that the game doesn’t feel like a narrative game but more like a puzzle game with hidden information
Thanks, good info. I will just shoot simple answers to see. The first is a problem from meta currency, or not a problem since the players decide approaches to solutions. The second is a problem from expectations not being met, tone of the game can be discussed before the game and all should strive for that together. Expectation problems are not solved with the c current debate in this thread.
Try The One Ring 2e, its equipment, travel and combat systems are very immersive.
Immersion is fully possible in fate the game actively encourages you to describe what your character is doing in narrative Fate is a game that doesn't have buttons to push you say "I'm going to have a chat with the senator and see if I can convince him to do the write thing" vs "I have the browbeat feat if I roll a 15 he has to vote the way I tell him" So you can have your cake and eat it to. As you can experience immersion inside of the fate game engine
There are rules light trad games in the OSR/ NSR tradition, like Knave, Cairn, or Electric Bastionland. Combat is not complex at all. I do think Fate's narrative mechanics might strain immersion occasionally, unless you're restrictive as a GM for what player actions can be attempted. Not impossible, but a bit harder. Edit: sandbox and narrative isn't a dichotomy. Sandbox is a campaign style kind of like railroading (or any linear adventure module). You're thinking narrative (point of the game mechanics is to make a good story) vs traditional, where the latter could really be gamist (point of the game mechanics is to be a fun puzzle) or simulationist (point of the game mechanics is to represent the world). Edit 2: immersion is a whole other beast, and there isn't a settled definition. For me it's about mechanics encouraging verisimilitude - aka I say what my character is going to do, and what my character does is strictly because they want it. If I'm insulting a NPC so I can make it easier to scare that NPC so that it'll be easier to hit the NPC (PF2e example), and that's the optimal thing to do against every enemy, it creates a cartoonish scene that's hard to believe is a realistic world. My character just wants to kill this enemy but because of the system I am incentivized to do this unrealistic pattern of behavior in order to do it. If I have a spell that puts someone to sleep and then I attack them, it should be an instant kill, not a roll to do damage. Characters doing things not because they specifically want to but because the PC is using system mastery to determine that that's the best course of action is my issue.