"irony" or distance
In case you haven't yet stumbled across Zak's Playing D&D With Porn Stars, it's probably the most interesting RPG blog at the moment. Not only the immediate subject, but the writing and the thought that goes into it.
Right now I'd like to focus on one post, Like Playing Monopoly With Squatters, which brought to mind a much earlier thread on RPG. ( Read more... )
Right now I'd like to focus on one post, Like Playing Monopoly With Squatters, which brought to mind a much earlier thread on RPG. ( Read more... )
There is some complex psychological stuff around the relationship to narrative and control--as well as emotional distance from the character and so on. I think that we don't have good words for these things which makes the discussion difficult and I like your listed breakdown.
I agree that I can "enjoy" some turns of the narrative that go against my character (death is an interesting one since it is usually and 'end-state' which means if my character is early to die in a one-night one-shot I might find the kill interesting or cool but I'm still balancing that against sitting out for several more hours). However, yes--these are all real things.
The last time I was deeply immersed was playing a Skype game face to face (the GM was in town and we all met at my house to play). I was laid up in bed with a hurt knee (had surgery) so we played in a bed-room with everyone sitting around the bed while my leg was in a constant-motion-machine.
The enclosed venue, I would say, added in some strange way to the intensity of the experience. The physical presence also added to the immediacy. The lack of distraction: we had several hours of uninterrupted play led me to more deeply "associate" with the imaginary world.
The play was marked by a lot of game-design decisions about combat from vehicles and some number crunching (we were testing a firing-from-vehicle battle system) so it wasn't what I'd normally describe as "rules-get-out-of-the-way and we-feel-our-characters" however there was a sense of being "removed from the room." My image of the imaginary experience was very vivid.
This, I believe, was also helped by the GM facilitation: I think that making decisions about the /narrative/ would've been quite different than making decisions about the rules--even though they are deeply intertwined.
Again, it's a fuzzy thing: it's hard to articulate.
-Marco
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About enjoying narrative that goes against your character: absolutely, if death is what we're talking about, then there are problems. Not insurmountable but very different in kind from almost any other negative effect, because a dead character takes a player out of the game, while an insane, crippled, impoverished, or recently-fallen-into-pig-manure character is an opportunity for even more roleplaying.
Some games/scenarios solve this by letting players of dead characters continue to affect the game by becoming ghosts or memories. This is how TMW does it, I believe...one of the things I like about that game. In a Call of Cthulhu one-shot, dead characters were supposed to try to "haunt" the living characters...unfortunately not quite as effective since they were given entirely new goals that frankly weren't very interesting.
But anyway--I feel that deep immersion is hard to reconcile with irony, but perhaps the best bet is to, basically, give complete freedom to characterization without ever letting anyone impose an outcome on a PC. Basically "I shoot you!" is okay as long as the player gets to decide if they want to respond "Zing, your bullet ricochets off the wall" or "Agh, you got me!" Then you just add a rule: "Don't be boring" and go from there. I'm thinking there'd still be a place for mechanics, though exactly what that would be...I'm not sure.
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