Your Suspension of Disbelief: SHATTERED!

[psychophipps]

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.

"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." - Murphy's Laws of Combat

Yeah, I've had this happen a few times as well back when we were in High School. I have learned as I have GMed myself that it pays to be a fan of the characters and to cheer their successes rather than get mad about them.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

For me, the biggest break is when magic is portrayed is magical - unknowable and unpredictable - rather than just part of the alternate natural laws of the fantasy world.

The idea that someone can do jazz hands and bellow an incantation in order to create a fireball is fine; it just requires alternate energy planes that you can access through scientifically-repeatable methods to produce consistent effects. The idea that nobody knows how magic works, and nobody can know, because it's an inherently mysterious phenomenon, is beyond ridiculous; I cannot force myself to believe in such a non-sensical place.

 

[Riley37]

Anytime I'm reading, as a DM mind you, an adventure and I see something that says "The ritual will be started on the day the PC's enter the dungeon and will be nearing completion when the PC's encounter the Evil Cleric on the lower levels". GRRRRR!!! To me this is basically the DM and/or the writer saying "Don't worry, the girl doesn't get eaten by the eels"

Hey, a Princess Bride reference, in content-relevant context. Is that better than a Monty Python reference?

There are video games in which you can go to the Big Door, and if you open it, the High Priest is about to make the Great Sacrifice; but if instead you walk away and do other stuff for an hour, or leave the game running overnight and the next morning you walk your avatar back to the Big Door and open it, the High Priest is STILL just about to make the Great Sacrifice.

I don't want D&D to be one of those games. Not unless the players and DM have *agreed* to play that way.

I want the PC's decisions to affect outcome. That sometimes includes the decision to walk away from the Big Door without opening it, and come back to the Big Door the next day. For my next campaign, I'm planning to write a timeline of what will happen *if the PCs do nothing to change it*, and then play out the divergence between that timeline, and what actually happens. If the PCs spend 100 days on downtime tasks, they'll get lotsa skills, but also a civil war will have started on day 37, the capital burned on day 54, and on day 82, the war ended with the BBEG on the throne. So the PCs finish their downtime task on day 15 of the new regime. I will give the PCs lots of opportunities to avert that outcome. It's up to them, and up to the players.

On another hand, if I'm running the plot of "Watchmen", if the PCs somehow go directly to the BBEG's lair on day 1, then they will reach the lair *before* the BBEG has completed the master plan. At which point, I might have to say "that's the end of the session, I have some details to work out before I can tell you exactly what you see."

There is a DD (Adventurer's League) adventure which starts with a plot hook. As written, it *assumes* that the PCs are in a tavern, and apparently assumes that they *will never notice events outside the tavern*. So dockworkers enter the tavern and start a brawl, to give the players a hint that there's trouble on the docks.

I run things differently than that adventure assumes. If the PCs ever emerge from the tavern and look towards the bay, they'll see that the main lighthouse is dark; that's a major change to the urban skyline. If they go to the market, they'll see that the fishmongers have nothing to sell, and if the PCs ask, the reason is because the lighthouse is dark so there's less ship activity, including less fishing. Heck, even if they stay in the tavern, the menu will eventually change, as the food shortage has ripple effects. But if the PCs have *no interests other than drinking in a tavern all week long*, then they're not heroes, not as I understand heroism.

 

[Riley37]

FThe idea that nobody knows how magic works, and nobody can know, because it's an inherently mysterious phenomenon, is beyond ridiculous; I cannot force myself to believe in such a non-sensical place.

The degree to which the rules for PC spellcasting are consistent and predictable, should match the degree to which PCs understand magic as consistent and predictable.

On one hand, there is a fictional setting, in which there is a University which teaches students how to do magic, and lesson 1 is that magic *actively resists attempts to confine and systematize it*, so watch out. Learn what has already been learned. if you do too many experiments using scientific method, magic might cause a laboratory fine in which you die horribly. *That* has been established, by trial and error, repeatedly, and if you wanna become the next researcher to die in a laboratory fire, the University says "not in OUR laboratory". Listen to lectures and read books, and play within the boundaries established as safe, before you push any further. This is a paradigm in which PCs can study and learn wizardry, but there's an in-universe reason NOT to ask certain questions.

On another hand, if mages consistently learn first-level spells, and THEN learn second-level spells, and every mage ever has become capable of casting Detect Magic *before* they became capable of casting Detect Thoughts, then of course mages understand that there's a difference between Detect Magic and Detect Thoughts, and when mage A meets mage B, "what's the most powerful spell you can cast?" is in-universe shorthand for level of magery.

That said, there are FRPG rules, in which magic is less consistent and predictable than it is in 5E D&D. In some FRPGs, casting a spell doesn't ALWAYS work. It is as variable as playing a musical instrument, or climbing a cliff; or even more so; that is, there's a skill check, *every time a mage casts a spell*, and a botch is ALWAYS a possible outcome, though it's a minimizable risk (with appropriate preparations for a simple spell). In Shadowrun, for example, there's a skill check AND there's also areas in which magic is stronger or weaker (kinda like the Weave in Forgotten Realms). See also, the Wizard of Earthsea books: "rules change, in the Reaches".

Those rules systems require more effort to run. Or more DM rulings. Maybe magic works consistently in the setting, maybe not so much; what I want, is a close match between the level of consistency in the rules for the PCs, and the level of consistency in the understanding of the characters in the setting.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The degree to which the rules for PC spellcasting are consistent and predictable, should match the degree to which PCs understand magic as consistent and predictable.

Sure, with the caveat that inconsistent and unpredictable spellcasting, in a world where PCs understand that magic is inconsistent and unpredictable, makes for a setting which I find silly. I'm not willing to suspend my disbelief that far.

On one hand, there is a fictional setting, in which there is a University which teaches students how to do magic, and lesson 1 is that magic *actively resists attempts to confine and systematize it*, so watch out.

That sounds a lot like there's an intelligent entity in charge of distributing magic to mortals, and that the actual laws governing magic may well be perfectly consistent, except someone is deliberately messing with you in order to prevent you from figuring them out. It's certainly not unbelievable, as far as magic goes. I can think of good reasons why they might exist.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

There are video games in which you can go to the Big Door, and if you open it, the High Priest is about to make the Great Sacrifice; but if instead you walk away and do other stuff for an hour, or leave the game running overnight and the next morning you walk your avatar back to the Big Door and open it, the High Priest is STILL just about to make the Great Sacrifice.

That happened to me in a Pathfinder module, once. We arrived in a new locale, so I did a quick fly around the area in wind form (because there's no reason to not cast Wind Walk on the party every day), and flying over one particular building triggered an encounter with a monster that was consuming the remains of a plot-relevant NPC. Apparently, the "script" called for us to rescue the NPC's remains by slaying the monster, because it was necessary to interrogate them in order to figure out how a mysterious device worked.

Of course, there's no way that we possibly could have gotten there so quickly if I hadn't been in wind form, and there was no way to engage with the monster while in wind form, so I just resolved to not think about how incredibly stupid it was for them to try and contrive such a coincidence. (Operating the mysterious device required something like a DC 40, and interrogating the NPC would give a +10 bonus to the roll, so it was intended to be obvious and mandatory. We managed to succeed anyway, because the player "legitimately" rolled nothing less than an 18 on all three skill checks, and I resolved to not question it.)

 

[Li Shenron]

Mechanics disassociated from narrative are always the main threat to my own suspension of disbelief.

 

[Ogre Mage]

The DM did not bother giving names to (unimportant) NPCs. Instead he called them Guard 1, Guard 2, Barmaid 1, etc. Terrible!

Though from a metagaming perspective, it made it easy to see which NPCs were significant and which ones were not. If an NPC had a real name it was like okay, this one is important to the story. lol.

 

[Coroc]

Gnomes /dwarves /Halflings running around with 2 handed swords or halberds or similar weapons not suited for their Body size.

Dual wielding of 2 weapons other than Finesse weapons.

 

[Riley37]

Dual wielding of 2 weapons other than Finesse weapons.

On one hand, you were asked what shatters it for you, and that's your answer.

On another hand, I've seen dual-wielding in SCA combat, including a guy who was very effective with a pair of "swords" and in a real fight I suspect he'd be lethal with a baseball bat in each hand.

For me, the distinction between "finesse" and non-finesse melee weapons shatters suspension far more than dual-wielding. Dagger, sword, spear, club, axe - with any of those, it's good to strike strongly AND good to strike accurately AND good to outpace (and anticipate) the opponent's moves and countermoves.