More Thoughts on Game Design

Chaosium's Goals for RuneQuest
As I continue to anticipate the release of Chaosium's RuneQuest later this year (probably after GenCon as they will have all the 2nd Edition reprint stuff from the kickstarter for sale at GenCon I am guessing), I contemplate design choices and how different an animal RuneQuest is from White Box. Chaosium's stated goals (as found at http://www.chaosium.com/blog/designing-the-new-runequest-part-1/) for the new RuneQuest are:

In approaching the design of the new edition of RuneQuest, we had four over-riding goals:

1. Set RuneQuest firmly in Glorantha.
2. Maintain backwards compatibility with RuneQuest 2 - in particular with the adventure scenarios and campaigns that were rereleased as a result of the highly successful RuneQuest Classic Kickstarter in late 2015.
3. Bring the Runes directly into the game mechanics - the game is Rune-Quest after all! And at the same time, make it more fun to use Rune magic as an initiate: Rune Magic had to be replenishable somehow,
4. Provide deeper incentives for character immersion into the setting, to fulfill the promise of Greg's original Dragon Pass campaign from the early 1980s. The acclaimed computer game King of Dragon Pass provides a rich immersive Gloranthan experience: we want to achieve something as deep as that in the tabletop RuneQuest game. The gold standard for doing this is, of course, Pendragon, a rules system that has strongly influenced my approach to game design and play.

It is this last goal that seems most interesting. Providing "incentives for character immersion" is not a phrase I hear often. The above quote points to the game Pendragon, authored by Greg Stafford at Chaosium, which uses a system of opposed personality traits or passions to connect the character to their society. Certain passions are held as virtues by one in-game culture such as Christians and others by another such as pagans. Therefore a good pagan might well act differently than a good Christian when both are confronted by the same situation. The game incentivizes role-playing the good whatever.
I have struggled as a referee and as a player with immersion, but more in the sense of trying to create an immersive experience through mood, detail and imagination and through identification with one's character rather than through incentive game mechanics. My experience has actually been that only when the mechanics become so second nature, only when they fade into the background can the game experience become immersive. To be honest, I haven't played much with "incentives for character immersion". With the exception of a few Pendragon sessions some 30 years ago, I may not have even encountered a system that makes much attempt at this goal.
Understanding what the developers are going for with a game design is sometimes immensely helpful. White Box was such a radically different game to me at first that my friends and I really struggled to "get it". There are other games that have stretched my abilities to understand, Luke Crane's The Burning Wheel comes immediately to mind. I read and re-read The Burning Wheel until it all finally made sense (-btw- I really love The Burning Wheel), but it was so completely new to me that it was hard to wrap my mind around how it was supposed to work. Reading the designer's intent for the game can be very helpful in the learning process.