D&D 5E What are your biggest immersion breakers, rules wise?

[doctorbadwolf]

If you miss a creature with your attack on one turn, you can try again the next. If you fail to pick a lock... why can’t you try again after whatever interval lock picking takes? It’s inconsistent.


...huh? It should be resolved with one or more rolls. What gave you the impression that I would have thought otherwise?


How so?


Because the “best effort” method makes my character’s utmost capacity a variable determined by a dice roll, instead of a fixed value. Under “best effort,” a Very Hard task might be within my character’s capabilities one moment, and beyond it the next, just based on the roll of a die. Under “one roll per attempt,” I always know the exact difficulty task my character can succeed at under ideal circumstances, and whether or not I succeed at doing it in less-than-ideal circumstances depends on whether or not I’m willing to pay the cost to try and/or risk the consequences of failure until I do.



Who said anything about quickly and easily? If trying again eats up time, by all means, have it eat up that time. What I find immersion breaking is being told “nope, you can’t try again. That 2 you rolled? That’s the best your character can do, and it wasn’t enough.” Meanwhile, I’ve successfully opened a dozen locks with higher DCs to pick than, but ok, I guess for some reason the best my character can do just got magically lower for this lock. Funny, that.

Edit: Deleted some text in which I was a jerk. What I should say is, I didn’t want to have the same argument again, I just wanted to understand your POV. I still don’t really grok what the specific issue is, but your last reply was more argumentative than I expected. Which is probably at least partial due to me being more argumentative than I thought I was being.

So, some questions.

Does it bother you when you roll a 2 on a single-opportunity check to pick a fairly simple lock, even though you’ve picked dozens of much harder locks in the past? If not, why is this different?

Other than the swinginess of the d20, I just can’t figure out what is different about rolling for a day of activity vs rolling for a single attempt where you’ve only a “single attempt” worth of time to do the thing.

I mean...an attack roll is literally an example of “best effort” resolution, right? Your “attack” is game jargon for a series of strikes. It doesn’t take 6 seconds, or even 1 second, to make a single attack. I’ve fought with swords, and I can make 3 reasonably precise attacks, or an aggressive flurry of 4-6 designed to simply force the opponent to back up and come at me from a different angle (or if I’m lucky throw them off or set up an attack from a totally different angle). So,I can see a roll per day, but per “attempt” I just don’t see the difference in terms of immersion?/


But if it is clearly within your skill, and there isn’t any reason to believe you might fail over the course of an hour, and you’ve got that and more to try, it just shouldn’t be a roll, so the game/DM has to figure out how to handle a week of attempts without spending 30 minutes adjudicating roll after roll, virtually guaranteeing your success.

So, I can see something abstract like the downtime rules mechanics, making 3 checks with 1-3 proficiencies, with degrees of success and failure, chances for complications, etc. but, if the situation doesn’t warrant that, it’s just as consistent with how the game works to view the whole time spent trying as a check, and determining how long it takes, andif there are consequences for that, using that roll.

Also, if your DM is saying, “sorry, you rolled a 2, you didn’t open the lock”, then they are running 5e DnD incorrectly. Full stop. They should be failing forward, and adjudicating what price you have to pay for a frustratingly difficult success, and letting you work out why you had such a hard time with something that isn’t normally that hard for you.

 

[Coroc]

Well I got one, but it is from 2nd edition:

Lightning Bolt !


A spark of electricity flying to the target up to 60ft but if the distance to the next wall is shorter than 30 ft the bolt reflects and returns making the target save twice eventually hitting the caster also

That is so many fundamental errors and misconceptions about how electricity works as there can be.

First: there is some half truth: The voltage applied does determine the maximum distance a spark discharge can cover.

But electricity is instant. It does travel at the speed of light.
The only cases of electricity travelling is a ball lighting, which is a particular rare occurrence and not totally explored by science yet. Although some Japanese scientists were able to create an artificial ball lightning with the help of high RF seemingly.

Then:
If the caster of the spell is one node and the wall is another, then the floor has to be a perfect isolator (made of PET or similar material), otherwise the bolt would discharge into the floor.

If we assume that above condition is given, then the amount of voltage applied on the target is dependent on the electrical field strength which would be Volts/meter. The lesser the absolute distance, the more Volts per meter you would get. So there again is some half truth, the part of the voltage which is applied to the target would be higher if the distance between the nodes is shorter. So maybe it is justified if the target saves twice, just not for the reasons given in the spell description.

But again, the nodes getting even closer just increase the field strength, not alter the physical node itself, so no way the caster could get damaged himself if he is the point with the highest potential.

But here comes the next silliness: A electrical potential applied to a caster would discharge in all directions to the next points with a different potential, so what about the casters party eventually standing closer to the caster? The electric potential would seek the closest conducting point for its discharge (That is why your lightning arrester is mounted on the roof, which is closer to the cloud in the sky than your garden).

Well this topic was something which I found absolutely funny, but I shrugged it of with: "well magic obviously breaks physical laws in all kinds of manners "

 

[coolAlias]

I like to handle ability checks for things like smashing doors down a little differently - it's not "can you do it?" because by allowing a roll, I've essentially already established that the character can succeed, but rather "how quickly/well can you do it?"

So for smashing a door down, we'll roll once. If they succeed, they smash it in one or two blows and perhaps get the drop on whoever's on the other side.

If they fail, perhaps they can take a few minutes (or longer, depending on the door and tools) to succeed with no further check, or perhaps if they are using their body instead of a tool or weapon they can continue to retry but each failed attempt costs them some HP.

The only time I would ask a character to keep rolling for this type of check is when time is a major constraint, for example during combat.

 

[Coroc]

Ye since just a thread came up: TWF other than two daggers, shortswords, maybe scimitars or rapier dagger or nnchakus is very hard for me to imagine, and it really breaks immersion for me, since it is only useful and has been used like that historically in a bigger scale, using these weapons.
IRL it is neither faster nor allowing you to deal more damage easily. The opposite applies.

 

[Lanefan]

This is a thread about what rules break immersion.

Yet you're literally ignoring the rules as written, and then complaining that when you do, your immersion is broken!

Can you not see the disconnect there?

You: 'This rule breaks my immersion'.
Me: 'Thats not what the rule says'
You: 'I agree thats not what the rule says.'

Doesnt that perhaps indicate to you that it's not the rule thats breaking your immersion; the problem lies elsewhere?

Not quite.

Me: 'This rule breaks my immersion, so I've chosen to ignore it and replace it with something better'
You: 'That [i.e. my version] is not what the rule says'
Me: 'I agree that's not what the rule says; I've already changed it because the original rule is garbage'

Put another way, I'm complaining that my immersion is broken when I don't ignore the rules as written.

Got it now?

 

[Lanefan]

If you miss a creature with your attack on one turn, you can try again the next. If you fail to pick a lock... why can’t you try again after whatever interval lock picking takes? It’s inconsistent.

You can, and you have, and the one roll builds that all in.

Because the “best effort” method makes my character’s utmost capacity a variable determined by a dice roll, instead of a fixed value. Under “best effort,” a Very Hard task might be within my character’s capabilities one moment, and beyond it the next, just based on the roll of a die.

Exactly, and that's just what I'm aiming for here.

Your utmost capacity is variable. It's not a constant - if it was, a fully-fit 100m sprinter would post the exact same time on every run, varied only by external factors such as wind. But it don't work that way...

Also, from a more game-based perspective, D&D is in part a game of luck. If it wasn't, there wouldn't be dice involved.

Under “one roll per attempt,” I always know the exact difficulty task my character can succeed at under ideal circumstances, and whether or not I succeed at doing it in less-than-ideal circumstances depends on whether or not I’m willing to pay the cost to try and/or risk the consequences of failure for every attempt until I do. And the dice rolls determine how many attempts it takes, if I don’t give up before I get it.

The problem with this doesn't arise when you only get one attempt, it arises when you've got all day to keep re-trying; at which point the whole thing in effect becomes Take-20 and very binary.

Who said anything about quickly and easily? If trying again eats up time, by all means, have it eat up that time. What I find immersion breaking is being told “nope, you can’t try again. That 2 you rolled? That’s the best your character can do, and it wasn’t enough.” Meanwhile, I’ve successfully opened a dozen locks with higher DCs to pick than, but ok, I guess for some reason the best my character can do just got magically lower for this lock. Funny, that.

Not at all. Something about this particular lock just happened to stump you*; meanwhile your understudy - who hasn't otherwise succeeded all day - nails it first try. Stuff like this happens all the time in reality.

* - and that 'something' could even be that you were expecting it to be a tougher challenge than it actually was, and just overthought the whole process.

 

[Lanefan]

Does it bother you when you roll a 2 on a single-opportunity check to pick a fairly simple lock, even though you’ve picked dozens of much harder locks in the past? If not, why is this different?

Doesn't bother me at all. Some days I just ain't got it.

But if it is clearly within your skill, and there isn’t any reason to believe you might fail over the course of an hour, and you’ve got that and more to try, it just shouldn’t be a roll, so the game/DM has to figure out how to handle a week of attempts without spending 30 minutes adjudicating roll after roll, virtually guaranteeing your success.

Ah, but this is just it: sometimes something can be clearly within one's skill in theory but still doesn't come off in practice when you need it to.

Take a world-class dart player. Throwing 180 is clearly within his skill - hell, he's done it hundreds if not thousands of times in his life- yet entire matches can go by without his throwing a single 180 because for whatever reason he just ain't got it that day.

Also, if your DM is saying, “sorry, you rolled a 2, you didn’t open the lock”, then they are running 5e DnD incorrectly. Full stop. They should be failing forward, and adjudicating what price you have to pay for a frustratingly difficult success, and letting you work out why you had such a hard time with something that isn’t normally that hard for you.

Sorry, but "success on a fail" to me raises the same horrible red flags as does "damage on a miss", as it's exactly the same concept: allowing success or partial success where there should be none.

I guess it's a question of what one takes as the default result.

For me the default is hard fail (usually meaning the status quo remains unchanged) unless the roll indicates success: I'll sometimes mitigate a success on a barely-made roll, but almost never mitigate a failure. 'Fail forward', as far as I can tell, seeks to have the default be hard success and looks to migitate failure when it can and somehow turn it into success.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

Doesn't bother me at all. Some days I just ain't got it.

How incredibly IMMERSIVE @doctorbadwolf . like i said in an earlier post, OFF DAYS exist and are a part of making things feel real. Ever playes basketball and had a shot you normally always make just miss multiple times in a row? Thats what this is like. Nothing to break your immersion. As a matter of fact it should make the immersion feel deeper to occasionally fail.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Nebulous]

Yeah, I've heard it before. It's the option (a) I mentioned earlier, which requires me to believe that those arrows didn't really hit me after all. (Also, sleeping replenishes luck?)

Seriously, I've read just about every possible explanation about damage, hit points, and the nature of their relationship, and none of them make sense in an immersive way. So I've learned to just live with it.

I've also just learned to accept it too as a necessary part of playing D&D. If I wanted true to life immersion there are other games that do that.