I've been thinking a lot about immersion lately, and tried to prioritize it in my entry to this year's 200 Word RPG Challenge. The game itself is about vampire guidos, but that's just a thin (yet awesome) veneer over the designed pattern of interaction. Every action a player takes garners an immediate and hopefully strong response from the other players, and players are prescribed a fairly stringent arena within which to act. Ideally, players immerse themselves in this Big Brother-esque environment and get immediate positive feedback from that immersion.

The game also exploits the power of self-organized criticality (the Abelian sandpile model,
specifically), previously attempted in Elementary and Abelian. I'm convinced it can make for great game mechanics, and one of these days I'll get it right.

You can find the actual 200-word version here, or read the original (pre-brutal-editing version below).

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You’re on one of them reality shows. You and some guidos and Jersey girls all stuck in one house. Some of you’s are vampires. Maybe you just like drinking blood, I don’t know, no judgement.

Before You Play

So you’re sitting at a table with 3 or 5 other people. You’ve got someone sitting opposite of you, and a couple people sitting next to you. Either you or your opposite is a vampire; decide between the two of you.

You’ve got some people sitting between you and your opposite. Pick one you’re really into, and one you’ve got beef with. If there’s 6 players, make sure your opposite also picked one of them.

You start with one six sided die, and you need a bunch in the middle of the table. Or wherever, you do you.

How to Play

Say what you do, whatever you want, and how it goes for you. You can’t just do whatever you want to other people, cause they say how what you do goes for them.

When your opposite is like, “Nah, you can’t just do that”, roll all your dice and check the highest:

• 6: So nice. Screw them, you can just do that.
• 4-5: I mean, maybe someone gets all freaked about it, but you do it. Say how it goes for you (great probably) but you gotta pick up a new die and give it to someone.
• 3 or less: Sorry bro. Your opposite says what happens, and you gotta pick up a die yourself.

Once you’ve got 6 dice, oh man. Keep one, but give 2 to one player sitting next to you, 3 to the other. Plus your opposite gets to say what wrecked your day so bad.

Whenever someone gives you some dice, you caught some of the fallout. You gotta say how what they did affected you and what the hell you’re gonna do about it.

You’re gonna get a lot of dice, and you definitely don’t want to get 6. So here’s what you do:

• If you and your boo (or not your boo, no judgement) smush, or you can get someone DTF (Down To Fang), take one of their dice and give it to someone else.
• We all need time to ourselves, right? So when you take a sec with the crew and do one of them little interviews with the camera to vent, lose one of your dice.

You win if your shit got wrecked fewer times than your opposite.

--Karaktakus, DTGTL