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

Arnwolf666 · Oct 10, 2019

Oofta said:
Do they automatically become a town guard if they take an arrow the knee?

When I want hit points to be meat I play runequest.

lowkey13 · Oct 10, 2019

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Yaarel · Oct 10, 2019

pming said:
2) Level Advancement Speed. TOO DANG FAST!

It is very easy to finetune the speed of level advancement.

Count the number of encounters, rather than the number of creatures.

On average, it takes roughly 10 ‘routine’ encounters to reach the next level.

There are many benefits to counting encounters instead of xp.
• You decide if an encounter turned out to be unexpectedly easy or hard AFTER THE FACT. Always accurate.
• As a DM, you can put in difficult or easy encounters − per the story − and it works out fine.
• Your encounter can easily be noncombat, and still count fully toward leveling.
• You completely control the speed of advancement by deciding how many encounters you prefer to level.

Use the ‘routine’ medium difficulty as the base line. Count a trivial encounter as a ½-encounter, a hard encounter as a 1½-encounter, and an encounter that almost ended in a TPK as 2 encounters.

iserith · Oct 10, 2019

lowkey13 said:
I'm not sure that this is easily, or ever, possible. Pet peeves, or immersion breaking, is by definition idiosyncratic.

You can always change the channel or (with a TTRPG) change the rules. But it is really, really hard to simply "change oneself" in terms of things that you don't like, or that bug you, or that take you out of the moment. You might know that it's just a pet peeve, but you it's still really hard to stop the way you feel, especially when feelings are inextricably intertwined with immersion and suspension of disbelief.

To use an example I am familiar with- it is almost impossible for me to watch a traditional three-camera, laugh-track sitcom today. It just ... it's like nails on a chalkboard, the falsity of it. I'd like to "rise above it" and liberate myself, but I can't.

I didn't say it was easy, but I think it's worthwhile to try to make oneself more resilient against such distractions both for D&D and in other areas of life.

lowkey13 · Oct 10, 2019

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iserith · Oct 10, 2019

lowkey13 said:
Well, I think there's a difference between things people don't like, and things that break immersion.

For example, maybe I don't like bards. Maybe when I think of bard in D&D, I feel vaguely like Bluto in Animal House, and I just want to take that lute from his hands and smash it. But that's my choice; if someone else really wants to play a bard, so be it. That's a question of taste (I think you would call it distractions) that I can easily deal with.

Immersion (or suspension of disbelief) is a different beast, IMO. Because it's very much not about opinions- I can be immersed in something that is, for example, unpleasant or even something I don't like. By the same token, something I really enjoy can have a part of it that keeps breaking me out, no matter how much I want to love it.

I think that there is a salient distinction between telling people to suck it up when it comes to life in general (be more resilient), as opposed to saying that people can naturally get immersed in things that feel wrong to them.

It's really about creating coping mechanisms and buy-in to make the things that feel wrong feel fine to a level where it can't distract you. It can be done. I've done it and I'm not anyone special (though my mom disagrees). I rarely get XP for suggesting people suck it up and change their own behaviors, but it's a solution to this problem even if folks don't want to try it. I think it's self-defeating to rationalize it being impossible.

lowkey13 · Oct 10, 2019

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iserith · Oct 10, 2019

lowkey13 said:
Well, I'm not trying to mischaracterize your posts. I happen to agree that people complain about things that, more often than not, they would be better of learning to deal with (as I put it, people really should suck it up sometimes). And I think that the nature of a comment thread allows people to easily hyperbolize the nature of their complaint. "Oh noes, hit points totes destroy any immersion every. How can I ever play this game that I am currently playing and talk about?"

I think that it is both useful and helpful to delineate between standard likes/dislikes/opinions, as opposed to issues of immersion. "I like chocolate ice cream, and I don't like vanilla ice cream" is just an opinion, and it would be weird for someone to say, "Vanilla causes me to lose my suspension of disbelief in the yumminess of ice cream!"

But while someone can suck it up with normal likes and dislikes, that usually doesn't work with matters of immersion or suspension of disbelief. If something takes you "out of it," you can't just "suck it up" to get back in. Sure, you can suck it up and keep playing, but that does nothing for the immersion.

It's a different issue entirely.

I think you point out a distinction which exists but I am talking specifically about dealing with issues of immersion not likes or dislikes. One can become more resilient to distraction which is essentially what is pulling someone out of that state. There are ways to do that, just like there's ways to improve one's ability to stay focused.

Lanefan · Oct 10, 2019

Yaarel said:
Something that distracts me from immersion, is the use of minis. Switching from the first-person perspective of mind style to the third-person ‘fly on the wall’ perspective of minis breaks immersion − particularly when one of those minis is supposed to be me.

I find the opposite: having the mini on the board during exploration allows me to know what my character can-cannot see from where it's standing, and in combat makes it much easier to visualize how it has to move in order to see or affect something.