Roleplaying games are deceptively multifaceted, offering such a broad array of disparate experiences that it can make getting on the same page about the game-preferences feel like a minefield. One groups’ RPG goals/experiences may bear scant resemblance to another’s even if they are using the same edition of the same published game.
As discussed in Beyond Bread & Water, we have innumerable options in our RPG appetites. Many gamers realize that they long for something that, regardless of how much they enjoy their RPG groups, they are not actually getting.
This requires perusing their options by engaging with different gamers. Through my many years of gnawing at this oak, I know what precise experience I want in my RPG: To generate a powerful sense of “Otherworld Immersion”.
An old mistake I repeated through the years was (as many other gamers did) to simply speak of ‘immersion’. While many of us were on the same page about this term, it also generated confusion. People can be ‘immersed’ into any activity, be it poker or football or painting. So, in RPG discourse, this likely causes as much harm as good.
“Otherworld Immersion” is a far more accurate term, for it points to the experience
of the players’ imaginations being deeply saturated in the Secondary Worlds; they feel transported into it.
This is the experience we have when we get “lost” in a novel we’re reading. Six hours magically passed by as we read, and we were elsewhere. That is the beauty of being pulled away from this world, and into a captivating Otherworld.
This goal in RPGs is in opposition to “pawn stance” where the players are consciously outside of their characters & world, looking down as we do in boardgames & miniature wargaming.
Those who long for Otherworld Immersion
eschew anything in the RPG experience that pulls them out of the illusion in the direction of “consciously playing a game”. Facilitating this goal cannot happen by simply ‘brute-forcing’ our psyches into such a state. It requires changing a multitude of methods & presuppositions about your game. Roleplaying games are art, and the experience we collectively generate as we play depends on the tools and practices employed for that art.
But for now, I encourage you to just consider your own RPG desires. As discussed in earlier essays (see RPG Chimeras) each RPG group generates its own type of Chimera, the melding of older games and experiences into whatever iteration you’re using in your games. Is that bringing you specifically what you want? If so, great!
But upon reflection, perhaps not. Perhaps you hunger for this Otherworld Immersion I’m describing. I can only attest to the fact that it is both attainable and deeply enriching.
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