Your Suspension of Disbelief: SHATTERED!

[Michael Silverbane]

I have never suffered any occasion where I was unable to suspend disbelief.

 

[Umbran]

When a player breaks out their laptop to show a video or picture or play a soundbite they think is pertinent to a scene. Please, just don't.

Unless you are playing in a cyberpunk game, in which case this is totally okay!

 

[Tony Vargas]

Have you ever been in a game that broke your suspension of disbelief?

Meh, not really - my suspension of disbelief must engineered like the Golden Gate Bridge or something.

What did it?

In D&D, the closest anything ever came to doing so was psionics. Though Vancian 'memorization' was pretty awful, at first, too, as were hps & the lengthy one-minute round until I read the relevant treatises in the 1e DMG (I was still impressionable, I guess).

Monty Python quotes. Really, any attempt to score cheap laughs by quoting from real world sources gets under my skin, but it's especially jarring when the character suddenly acquires a British accent. Two different players have done this at the table..

Only two? Back in the day Monty Python & the Holy Grail got quoted by everyone, at every game I ever attended, incessantly. I knew every joke from that movie before I ever saw it. Even obscure out-of-context ones like, "...that's an offensive weapon, that is..."

 

[ad_hoc]

It mostly has to do with changing genres. We were playing D&D and all of a sudden we are on a spaceship that crashed 100s of years ago and it became the 'dungeon'. The DM was trying to describe the captain's deck of Star Trek.

This one sounded good to me until the Star Trek part. Maybe I have just played too much Might & Magic.

Monty Python quotes. Really, any attempt to score cheap laughs by quoting from real world sources gets under my skin, but it's especially jarring when the character suddenly acquires a British accent. Two different players have done this at the table, once where I was a player and once where I was the DM. I put a stop to it immediately in the latter case, but I was new to the group in the former, and didn't want to cause a stir. I didn't last long with that group, but then it had other troubles, besides.

Do you have a problem with players making dumb jokes?

At our table we make dumb jokes and get sidetracked all the time, but when it comes to actual actions in the game we play it straight. Like you, I find having characters do dumb things in the game for a joke doesn't work. Same with joke characters and sabotaging the scene.

 

[Umbran]

So, thinking about this - suspension of disbelief is the willful setting aside of one's critical faculties. A decision to not think about a thing too hard, to overlook inconsistencies and plot holes, and a desire to be generally credulous about a thing. When I watch Star Trek, and I just overlook the fact that FTL travel is not possible, that's suspension of disbelief.

I'd like to separate this from "immersion", which is more like achieving a cognitive or emotional state like a character in the fiction, rather than a person sitting at a table with a character sheet. If you watch a death scene in a movie, and it brings you, the viewer, to actual tears, you are immersed.

One can break immersion without breaking suspension of disbelief. But if you do break suspension of disbelief, you probably break immersion.

 

[Riley37]

The earliest occasion I can recall: back in the 1980s, playing The Fantasy Trip. Our PCs are advancing through a forest or jungle. An enemy patrol shows up. Instead of charging headlong at them, we initially fall back from column into line, so when they charge at us, they end up with relatively ineffective team positioning, compared to the PCs, who then destroy the patrol with minimal injuries. My PC is pleased (yay survival!) and I as a player am pleased (it's fun to play an individual bad-ass, with flashy spells or a huge sword, but it's also fun to play a member of an effective team). The DM, however, isn't happy, because that's not the outcome he expected. So he decides, off the cuff, that we were fighting HALF the patrol, and here's the other half, showing up just now.

It was obvious that he was changing the encounter mid-scene, obvious that he was unhappy with the patrol's results when they charged a spear-line and became shish-kebabs, and obvious that he was, in effect, punishing our PCs for fighting with effective teamwork. I mean, if the DM's goal is "this encounter leaves the party with major wounds", then we might as well have the PCs slash and bash themselves, and get it over with, rather than fight as many waves of "patrol" as it takes to inflict that outcome.

 

[mrpopstar]

So, thinking about this - suspension of disbelief is the willful setting aside of one's critical faculties. A decision to not think about a thing too hard, to overlook inconsistencies and plot holes, and a desire to be generally credulous about a thing. When I watch Star Trek, and I just overlook the fact that FTL travel is not possible, that's suspension of disbelief.

It's willful if you place the onus on the player to suspend their own disbelief and not on the Dungeon Master to promote cognitive estrangement in others. Ultimately, it's a collaborative endeavor.

 

[Nevvur]

Do you have a problem with players making dumb jokes?

At our table we make dumb jokes and get sidetracked all the time, but when it comes to actual actions in the game we play it straight. Like you, I find having characters do dumb things in the game for a joke doesn't work. Same with joke characters and sabotaging the scene.

It's specifically Monty Python references I have a problem with. Dumb jokes and sidetracking are uncommon in the games I run, as I do bi-weekly games and make a concerted effort to keep my players focused on the game to make the most of our time, but I'm not a heavy handed enforcer when it happens. I just find MP quips particularly grating and immersion breaking at the table, much as I love the troupe itself.

 

[Nevvur]

Only two? Back in the day Monty Python & the Holy Grail got quoted by everyone, at every game I ever attended, incessantly. I knew every joke from that movie before I ever saw it. Even obscure out-of-context ones like, "...that's an offensive weapon, that is..."

I'll count myself lucky, then!

So, thinking about this - suspension of disbelief is the willful setting aside of one's critical faculties. A decision to not think about a thing too hard, to overlook inconsistencies and plot holes, and a desire to be generally credulous about a thing. When I watch Star Trek, and I just overlook the fact that FTL travel is not possible, that's suspension of disbelief.

I'd like to separate this from "immersion", which is more like achieving a cognitive or emotional state like a character in the fiction, rather than a person sitting at a table with a character sheet. If you watch a death scene in a movie, and it brings you, the viewer, to actual tears, you are immersed.

One can break immersion without breaking suspension of disbelief. But if you do break suspension of disbelief, you probably break immersion.

Agreed, and for my part, in my first reply to this thread I was talking more about immersion than suspension of disbelief.

 

[iserith]

It's specifically Monty Python references I have a problem with. Dumb jokes and sidetracking are uncommon in the games I run, as I do bi-weekly games and make a concerted effort to keep my players focused on the game to make the most of our time, but I'm not a heavy handed enforcer when it happens. I just find MP quips particularly grating and immersion breaking at the table, much as I love the troupe itself.

I'm less concerned about "immersion breaking" with the MP jokes as much as the references themselves are just quite stale. Like get some new material already, nerds.