D&D 5E With Respect to the Door and Expectations....The REAL Reason 5e Can't Unite the Base

this may be random and out of place with what everyone else is talking about, but i think that if they want to "unite" the editions, they need to bring back the old editions campaign settings.

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I don't like how that argument blames the person for everything. The feeling that the scene is wrong and suboptimal is "true" enough.

If we can't criticize the script or scene as 'dissociated' and we're imagining how the story could/should have played out relative to the stupid script, I'd like to know what it is a good word to express this phenomenon. "Implausible" too seems vague. "Variable association" does not imply the loss of suspension of disbelief.

Underman said:

There's still something bothering me about the whole subjectivity argument. I can't put my finger on it.

A director is presented with 3 possible scripts for a war/action movie scene:

There is a massive fiery explosion. The character acts scared. He falls for cover. He lives (or dies).

There is a massive fiery explosion. The character acts nonchalant. He walks away at a cool pace. He lives.

There is a massive fiery explosion. The character acts nonchalant. He walks away at a cool pace. He dies in the shock wave.

The 1st scene is standard gritty action/war genre. The 2nd scene is standard action genre. The 3rd script would be universally disdained by any director (unless it was a parody). It would be implausible and ruin my immersion while watching the movie.

And yet the difference between the 3 scenes is entirely subjective.
1) it's subjective to rule that this fictional movie explosion is followed by a realistic shock wave
2) it's subjective to rule that this fictional movie character behaves in a "realistically" rational way in accordance with the way thing explode in his fictional world

The 3rd scene has nothing to do with D&D. I think it might have something to do with this thread. I could imagine the argument now on Enworld:

"That scene made no sense! It was a dissociated scene. The character would have tried to run or duck from the explosion"

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Depending on the story, I don't see anything wrong with #3 . That's pretty much the exact way that the Beowulf saga ends, right? He fights the dragon and wins, but then dies after due to his injuries.

Also, as someone who has spent time in a war zone, you'd be surprised what sort of things can become 'normal' to your brain with enough exposure. I remember being able to tell who were the new units on a base I was on by how they reacted to the base receiving incoming mortar rounds. For some of the guys who had been there for a while, it wasn't a notable enough event to disrupt eating a meal.

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Gryph said:

There is still a lot more shared between our games in terms of rules and implied game physics than there are differences; because the mechanics, powers and class abilities have some considerable weight of genre expectation built into them.

I'm not really trying to argue with you CJ, just expanding on the experiential context of my previous post.

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Sure. There has be a certain amount of shared stuff, or we couldn't even talk about as "D&D". The trick with D&D is that it's a giant Venn diagram where practially nothing is in the center bit that all the circles touch, even though there is much, more more that a lot of circles touch.

Imaro said:

But even amongst those various worlds there were, barring special abilities or DM intervention, commonalities. As an example, one such commonality is that a greatsword will always, on average, do more damage than a dagger. That may be pure mechanics but it directly correlates to and influences the fiction of a D&D world.

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OD&D had all weapons doing the same damage, 1d6. So this is a great example of exactly what I said above--it's mostly common--so much that a lot of us think of it as common, but then we find out when we look closer that it isn't exactly so. It's also a good example because it shows how the things can grow into the awareness of D&D and then become the perceived D&D way of doing it.

(Responding to both quotes) My larger point, however, is that we are saying across versions and campaigns here is even more true across individual tables. Sure, let's pick and example that should favor this idea of common D&D. Take the genre expectation of "fighter in mail, with longsword and shield, bow on his back, delving into the dungeon to fight goblins." Even with the changes in all the versions, we can all discuss that concept, right?

Yet I guarantee that the play experience of that fighter concept has significant differences at my table compared to other tables. Significant differences compared to your respective tables? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know what goes on at your tables well enough to say. Significant compared to the whole range of tables? Darn straight. I don't need to know what goes on at every table to say that confidently--merely that some people have conveyed what goes on at their table sufficiently well that I know it is different than what happens at mine.

You can draw a big circle around most of that D&D Shared Experience Venn diagram, and the stuff inside the big circle is this thing we call "common". (The better job you do of putting the line in the right place, the more useful it will be.) Stuff inside it are things that people know about, even if they don't use it themselves. I'm not big on psionics, for example, but I'm aware of psionics sitting there where a bunch of other peoples' experiences overlap.

Then you get things that are further afield, sitting on the edge of that big circle, like Birthright dominion bits, Spelljammer-specific concepts, the esoteric Planescape knowledge, actual experience using AD&D grapple rules in play , 3E gestalt options, the duelist and half-ogre, 4E explicit narrative concepts, etc. These are all at least overlapping the circle significantly, but they are in a minority of individual Venn circles.

Then you get things that are outside the circle entirely, such as Runequest skill manipulation or GURPS character generation, for two examples out of thousands.

All of this conspires to make the "mostly common" stuff seem like it is "exactly common". But it's the Princess Bride difference between "mostly dead" and "dead dead"--though reversed in this example.

Underman said:

That's not even the same at all.
So they just yawn when a grenade lands at their feet? They don't yell 'fire in the hole' or whatever is appropriate to handling live grenades?

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Grenades and mortars are very different things.

If you're asking if the reaction to the base being mortared was equal in nature to a yawn for some of the people who had been there a while, my answer would be yes. It was a common enough thing that it had become status quo for them. I myself remember going to breakfast one morning with my platoon sergeant. While eating my eggs, a mortar landed outside the chow hall. It shook the building, but didn't really cause any damage beyond a hole in the ground. I looked at him; he looked at me; we both shrugged and went back to eating.

Underman said:

1. There is a massive fiery explosion. The character acts scared. He falls for cover. He lives (or dies).
2. There is a massive fiery explosion. The character acts nonchalant. He walks away at a cool pace. He lives.
3. There is a massive fiery explosion. The character acts nonchalant. He walks away at a cool pace. He dies in the shock wave.

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If you did a story of nothing but the third one, that would be pretty strange. Maybe if you did the "big action hero" version of "Waiting on Godot" it would fit. However, if you do a story of nothing but the first one in parallel--where the character is also always dying, that also starts to get pretty strange. Why didn't you break that one out?


So let's extrapolate the cases over multiple characters and stories (presumably broken up by something besides explosions):

1. There are a long series of massive fiery explosions. The character(s) involved act scared. They fall for cover. Some live and some die. Every now and then, they all live or all die.
2. There are a long series of massive fiery explosions. The character(s) involved act nonchalant. They walk away at a cool pace. Some live and some die in the shock wave. Every now and then, they all live or all die in the shockwave.

As a kind of dark commentary--Fantasy Vietnam or Reversal of Expectations, you can occasionally get away with all of them dying. First, though, you've got to build up enough credibility by having them live through stuff. The same thing applies to a lesser extent to the individual deaths.

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Underman said:

The director gets to choose one of these scenes for his movie that's it. I don't care about the rest of story. Just this one scene is all that matters. Isolating one little scene so that people don't extrapolate too far. I guess that's too much to ask for
Or we could NOT extrapolate, thus not avoiding the whole point.

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Director's usually don't look at scenes as one-offs. They usually look at them within the context of the entire movie. So they usually don't choose one scene that doesn't make sense within the "frame" of the entire "theme" of the movie.

You even mentioned that scene 3 was probably only appropriate to a comedy. Well, there it is. It would fit within the context of a comedy, and that judgment from the director was subjective. He "feels" like that particular scene would not work, except in a comedy. Another director, and even the movie going public might disagree.