What Creatures "Break" A Fantasy Game World For You?

[Piratecat]

For some reason, I really don't like having guns or gunpowder in my D&D game. I can tolerate it for a one-shot game, but something about it totally breaks my suspension of disbelief.

Yes, I know that's silly... but there it is. When I want gunpowder, I play Spycraft or Sidewinder Recoiled.

 

[Arkhandus]

After reading many things about genra and game-breakers on the internet, I've found that I have a high tolerance to that sort of thing. Who wants to play an intelligent slime? So we are fighting transformers? Ok. Their god is Azatoth? Sure. Humans are the only PC race? I can roll with that. Pokemon are this settings wildlife? Interesting. Freakishly high tolerance.

DUDE.

I SO want to play in a campaign like that. Just for the sheer squirting-Mountain-Dew-out-my-nostrils-and-suppressing-gut-wrenching-laughter-the-whole-time factor. That would be SWEET!

 

[Thurbane]

Psionics.

...and steampunk...

 

[Kmart Kommando]

Anything built specifically to kill a PC each round.

It gets old quick.

 

[cougent]

I am going to follow the trend and say "not much" would get to me, but also agree that everything has a place and not all places are for everything.

Guns / gunpowder maybe as a one time find and after one shot (musket) the thing never works again (PC's don't know how to load powder, shot, wadding, etc.)

Spaceships / high tech, would be the closest to a game breaker for me. It would have to be broken or barely functional, and again how much use is it going to be to middle ages PC's who have never seen or used it before even if it does work? They are as likely to self destruct or overload the engines as they are to do anything useful with it.

Lastly the dinos, no real problem with them in their proper place as others have mentioned. My only issue from the OP [and I plead Druid ignorance here] is how did the Druid know what a dinosaur was to summon it? Is it innate to Druids? Has he seen them before? Are they running around freely in the OP's game world? Maybe nothing wrong with it at all, maybe totally out of place, you decide.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Pretty much nothing bugs me as long as the DM hadn't specifically ruled it out beforehand.

Exceptions: something specifically designed to either punish someone for behavior outside the game or reward the unworthy.

 

[SSquirrel]

I recently had a situation where a player quit my game due to another player creating a Druid with a dinosaur as an animal companion. To him it "broke" the game world for him seeing a PC riding around on a dinosaur.

*SNIP*

I could have fun playing an adventure where the PC's investigate a crashed alien spaceship but I wouldn't want to play a game where one PC has a gun as his main weapon in the campaign. If I wanted that I would play a Sci-fi RPG. I wouldn't play D&D.

Olaf the Stout

It wouldn't bother me having a dino in the game provided the game wasn't billed as standard western fantasy. If you had a Lost World kind of area to your game and the druid was from there or the adventures took place near it, it would make sense to me. Tho look for yr druid to get barred from many cities

As to the gun thing, a normal gunpowder gun I have no issues with. You start bringing in the sharks w/frickin lasers on their frickin heads and the game starts becoming less standard fantasy Iron Kingdoms I don't mind the guns in the game, they're every up front and not really beyond the tech of say the 1600s. Ptolus the guns are an old tech, but their mastery has been lost, so everything old is new again. If the archer of the group is actually a Glitter Boy from RIFTS, I hope to god we're using a better system than Palladium to manage it

Personally, I don't enjoy Dinosaurs, but, in the same way, I don't like undead.

Yeah but Turn Dinosaur is one of the least requested Cleric abilities, and Turn Undead is ratehr powerful

The one time I did quit a campaign for similar reasons was when the DM decided to throw cartoon characters at us. He thought it was hillarious to have us get killed by the likes of bugs bunny and daffy duck both of whom are apparently immortal. But frankly it was really the last straw rather than the only reason I left.

Yeah but what if they had attacked you while running the old 1st Ed Alice in Wonderland based adventures? Reasonable then? I mean, the March Hare was a high level monk after all

 

[ruleslawyer]

The elements that ruin my immersion in a fantasy game world do so by bringing along with them associations with some other world or genre. It's not about how weird or outlandish a creature is; as others have pointed out, beholders and gelatinous cubes are pretty far out there. However, if (medieval) Klingons or Vulcans were introduced into the game world, I wouldn't care if they had reasonable stats and only medieval levels of technology. They belong in a different time and place: Star Trek. Godzilla would not be out of place in D&D in literal terms, but a walking Japanese metaphor for nuclear proliferation doesn't belong in my fantasy role-playing game. I could understand how other people might consign mounted dinosaurs to pulp fiction or comic books.

This.

IMO, creatures or cultures are only problematic in D&D games if they're bringing specific baggage from a specific literary or historic (or game) context with them, AND said literary/historic/game context is at odds with the overall game world, at which point any pretensions to having a consistent game world go out the window. Otherwise, it's all fair game.

To paraphrase an earlier poster responding to the above: Violent warriors and pointy-eared intellectuals with whom humans can interbreed definitely belong to D&D. But start plastering Bird of Prey cloaking ships and references to mind-melding around, and said races start looking a bit more difficult to keep integrated in a campaign without seriously taking the players out of game immersion. Whereas hobgoblins and elves preserve immersion pretty well in most cases.

 

[Jhulae]

It's funny there's so much dislike for Dinosaurs, considering two prominent D&D Settings have them (FR and Eberron). Also, I can kind of understand the gunpowder thing, but it's no more wonky to me than a repeating crossbow (and gunpowder is also featured in FR).

As for me, there's not much that'll break my immersion. We've faced Calzone golems in the past in our campaign and we got through *that*...

 

[InVinoVeritas]

Mmmm.... Calzone golems....

The more I think about it, I have to agree with Thurbane, Kmart Kommando, and Dannyalcatraz. I'm not a big fan of psionics, steampunk (with an asterisk), metagame advantages, or one-shot kills (for either PC or NPC).

Metagame and one-shots I don't like mainly for mechanical reasons--they destroy the sense of fun for me. For me, the game is about overcoming challenges, and any challenge that can be instantly destroyed or instantly destroy others itself gets in the way (I don't typically have a lot of Raise Dead in my games).

Psionics and steampunk aren't so bad for me. For psionics, I just don't like what is essentially magic with a different system. Also, its poor implementation in previous editions tends to leave a bad taste in my mouth. I've just never grown familiar enough with the system for me to have the confidence to design an adventure around it or play a character with it. As for steampunk, it depends on how it's used. Heck, I have a kinda-steampunk campaign right now; the party just beat an artificial vampire involving alchemical processes and a boiler. However, I think I'm more "clockpunk" than "steampunk"; technology bordering on magic is made possible through incredible complexity, not through power storage. The steampunk I don't like is wild-and-wahoo steampunk--a lot of steampunk source material is more comedy than dramatic action. So I like it, kind of, but it's easy to get wrong, in my opinion.

These are just style considerations, though. Be upfront about what the campaign's about, and I'll play... So we're pilots of fantasy mecha controlled by psionics and using a Bribe-The-DM system for resolution? Cool.