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

[Crazy Jerome]

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

OK.

However, if you do a story of nothing but the first one in parallel--where the character dies, that also starts to get pretty strange considered in isolation. Why didn't you break that one out?

The question as written makes no sense.

Edit: And reading your reponse to D'Karr below and your edit clarification in the original, now even less. All I'm seeing now is the difference between grit and less grit.

 

[Underman]

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[Underman]

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[Mallus]

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

That's the beauty of subjectivity!

And yet the difference between the 3 scenes is entirely subjective.

The differences between those scenes are objective. In fact, you listed them. The audiences responses to them will be subjective. Also, I can't say much about a scene without a little context (unless we're talking about, say, a Seijun Suzuki movie).

The feeling that the scene is wrong and suboptimal is "true" enough.

Of course. But in want to discuss your feelings in a public place, you should probably expect both a) a discussion and b) some disagreement.

edit: in an effort to say something (remotely) constructive in this post, let me add...

The relationship between mechanics and immersion is personal. Some gamers feel there are closely and tightly tied. Other, like me, feel they're (almost) completely disconnected. We can talk about our differences, mechanics we like/dislike, techniques for improving play -- but we're not going to demonstrate one approach is more or less subjective than the other.

 

[D'karr]

Doesn't matter.

Is it possible to beg people to focus on the latter half of the post, and not nitpick the first half of the post? Thanks so much!

Well it seems like your post might be causing some confusion, so we are focusing on what we can actually make some sense of. Which is that scenes do not exist in a vacuum. They exist within the context of a larger framework, the movie.

The director might choose the "non-sensical" scene, but it would make no sense only if the context of the movie goes against it. In this case, not a comedy, according to your example.

 

[Underman]

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[jrowland]

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[Argyle King]

While it wasn't the point trying to be made, the movie scenes did pull something out which I think is worthy of some discussion. The three scenes mentioned are going to depend very heavily on context when it comes to whether they screw with a group's head and their idea what should be going on within the fiction of the game. That's a part of 'framing' which I think is often overlooked -context.

Why is this scene important? Why is the outcome of this scene important? How does it relate to the scenes which have come before? How does it relate to those which might come after? These questions can all be asked at multiple levels as well. Why something is important for the party as a whole or the game world could be completely different from why it is important to a particular character.

It's wholly possible to play without any mind toward any of that. Kicking in the door and hacking down orcs for gold and glory and nothing else is a perfectly viable way to play. However, it's not the only way to play, and I'd venture to say I'm not alone in having a desire for a little more context given to the scenes I play through.

 

[D'karr]

It's wholly possible to play without any mind toward any of that. Kicking in the door and hacking down orcs for gold and glory and nothing else is a perfectly viable way to play. However, it's not the only way to play, and I'd venture to say I'm not alone in having a desire for a little more context given to the scenes I play through.

I totally agree. Well said. I'd even venture to say that the biggest aid to immersion at my table has always been "context."

 

[Crazy Jerome]

The thing for me is that, considered in isolation, the director choosing a scene where, "There is an explosion. Character does something. Character dies," when this is supposed to be a protagonist that wants to live--that choice is pretty jarring for me in most normal contexts--regardless of what the character does, genre expectations, tone, etc.

I can imagine and extrapolate any number of exceptions that I would not find jarring, but they are exceptions (or sometimes accommodations to genre).

Heck, you could rewrite the way I've been talking about 4E finally being a version of D&D that could do Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser justice as something like, "Finally, a version of D&D where when you play by the rules, the twain walk into a dungeon and don't get sliced, diced, burnt, mangled, folded, mutilated, or otherwise seriously inconvenienced--as a matter of course."

The closest I ever came to being "disassociated" by anything in D&D was at age 14-16 trying to determine how to keep the heroes of the story mostly alive without blatant fudging.