ahh, dialogue, you bastard.

I'm close to throwing together the preliminary mechanics and setting info for Heroes & Hubris (working title, actually just made that up as I was typing it.)

In the meantime, a little blurb about dialogue. As I tend to rant about, I think gaming is all about the social context of the folks there, right now, at the table, and so "doing it the right way" is just a moronic concept in general. I know some people really want to do scenes all the way through with full dialogue, in character, but I typically don't.

I prefer first or third person narration, myself. I'm not all that comfortable with dialogue, and in fact my players tend to wipe the floor with an NPC if they get in a proper argument with them. (Especially my wife.) They told me I have to step it up and make my NPCs with more gumption. As a PC, I remember my first D&D 3 character was a skilled diplomat and ambassador who routinely got thrown in jail for being suspicious, because I didn't pull off convincing dialogue. I rejiggered the guy (a Cleric) into a combat monster and party goofball, which wasn't very satisfying, but was at least plausible based on my acting skill. I think he hit his head or something. It was lame.

I personally only experienced Immersion (cue trumpets) one time roleplaying. I was fourteen. It was neat, kind of like being in a play, really being into the performance and kind of tuning out other stuff.

I've had lots and lots of great moments where I was "going with the flow", though. So I guess that's what I get rather than immersion. Where I'm like, "Okay, my guy is gonna have to do so-and-so, I can't wait to see what happens." Like, my PC? I care about the little dude, like he's a protagonist in a story I'm really enjoying. I just don't get much out of actually pretending to be him.

We also go with players driving the story (in terms of choosing what they want to do and what goals to pursue), with inter-PC conflict totally acceptable, and no private conferences or notepassing. If stuff happens in another scene and there's no way your PC would know about it, but you as the player wanna angle them into colliding with that stuff going on over there, go for it. So in general, I don't think our group's style is all that conducive to deep-immersion play, but we're all creatively and emotionally invested in the characters and what's happening to them.

Again, this has been sitting in my head for a bit. I had remarked a while back that our games had a lot of dialogue and descriptive action from the players, and Aces was like, "Well, yeah, we fill time if you don't cut away". So I'd been trying to stretch in their direction when that'd probably just bog things down further. Plus, witty dialogue just isn't in my comfort zone yet. Weird, but that's just something I'm labeling for future improvement. In the meantime, I'm working on having my NPC do shit the PCs can't ignore, even if they don't talk about it so purty.