“Immersion”

I like a lot of the roleplaying blogs that are out there. They’re straight-talking affairs and whether you agree or disagree with th definition of “swine” or whether you agree that “Wrongist” behaviour is simply not-on, they’re usually varied enough to give you something to read.

New to the blogroll is Malcolm Sheppard’s Shooting Dice blog which hits on immersion and alienation due to rules which I kinda agree on. Rules are necessary to reach the whole market but the kind of people who don’t pay attention to rules won’t care whether you have rules or not. However, people who like to have a rule for everything will be turned off by a game that just says “Roll 2d6 and get over 7, woohoo!”. Hey, it’d work….

Malcolm’s blog entry on immersion is very verbose and reads a little dry so you have to read it and then go away and digest it. It’s otherwise a cracker post. Go Malcolm!

It seems it’s a hot topic. There’s a thread on TheRPGSite about it as well (mine is post #87). I think that there’s a trend to label “in character” playing as “Immersionist” and now we have some backlash on that. I sense a lot of hostility in the Intarweb!

And isn’t there a lot of labelling? Gamist? Simulationist? Narritivist? Immersionist?