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

[Krachek]

Resting
It the Dm who set the odd of random encounter in dungeon.
Yes. You can rest, but there is 10% chance that you won’t get disturb!

Hit point meaning is an old debate. But even in realistic movie we see our hero stand up after taking serious blow, fall. So I am ok with actual rules.

Non magical thing.
For me healer kit and healer feat is the most non sense.
Healer kit should be classed as magic item. Healer feat concept is nice, but not to over shine most healing spell.
Otherwise I don’t see much magical thing done by non magical pc.

 

[Bohandas]

Pretty much anything put in to preserve game balance is obviously as such and jarring

Gamist elements that affect the world in general in fact. The worst was the level limits in 2e and earlier which, as I understand them, were a hamfisted attempt to explain away another gamist element (the fact that, although logically we would expect the longer lived races to have way more high level characters, game balance demands that this not be the case) without understanding why the thing they were trying to fix was jarring.

Also problematic is 3e's needless bundling of hit dice, base attack bonus, save bonuses, skill points, and maximum skill ranks. I appreciate that they actually created complete stat blocks for all creatures, but they had no reason for doing it in such a formulaic way, and it certainly doesn't make sense for a giant to get extra skill points simply by virtue of being huge.

Lack of a constitution score for the undead is also problematic. It seems to have been implemented for philosophical reasons that don't actually jive with any perspective whether narrarivist, simulationist, gamist

 

[DWChancellor]

Grappling.
Anything underwater.

I always have to look it up, and I'm always disappointed and annoyed. The pages of flowchart we used in Pathfinder were terrible, and 5E isn't any better (mostly because it makes grappling so weak).

 

[Shiroiken]

Unrealistic timing is a big kicker for me. Medicine and Healers Kit was already mentioned, but I'll add removing traps, as well as opening locks.


The solution to HP, IMO is to view them as your stamina. Taking damage may or may not actually cause a visible wound, either because it's a grazing blow or blunted by armor, or whatever. Only when you go to 0 HP do I actually consider it a serious wound, and if brought back up to 1 HP, you still have the wound, but you're pushing past it. After any combat, as a DM, I assume the party spends at least a few minutes bandaging themselves back up from the small (or not so small) wounds. After non-magical healing, you still have the wounds, but you've managed to at least partially block out the pain.

 

[Wisdom Seeker]

Piping hot opinion coming through:
Vancian magic as handled by D&D makes no sense from a narrative perspective. You're supposed to 'hold spells in your mind', but only people who have spellcaster levels can do this. And yet a wizard can cast any spell he's copied into his spellbook for the mere cost of nine minutes of her time in the morning after studying it for one or two days and paying the laughably 'steep fee' of 450 gold max. This includes spells like Wish, which is essentially 'pull any other spell for my use, as I want, when I need it, once per day'. So by writing an essay about why I should be able to throttle the heavens, I learn how to pull the strings of fate. Once per day. And I have to rest 8 hours before I can do it again because hush. This is usually handwaved because of magic, but mysteriously yelling at someone and making their arm regrow doesn't get the free pass that doing the hokey-pokey in the middle of combat to summon a pressureless fireball does.
Plus scrolls. With a mere Arcana 19 check, you too can bend the fabric of the universe. Oh wait, except you can't, because you can't tear out a spellbook page and use it as a spell scroll despite it containing magical ink that goes 50 gp a page because... Uh. We didn't think of a reason besides mechanical balance, it'll have to do.
Spells tend towards the specific but powerful. Okay, makes sense for wizards, I guess. You pull on the Weave to do specific things and you need to be careful about how you do that. Except there are no Perils of the Warp for the vast majority of spells. Unless you're slapped out of your spell via Concentration check, most of the time the spell just fizzles as if you hadn't touched the Weave at all. And only specific classes are allowed to pull on the Weave anyways. If a script kiddy copies some software onto his computer at no cost of his own and executes it, he can crash massive spans of servers or brick computers, yet this only happens when it's narratively convenient or when you're working with Chaos Magic as per the Sorcerer. Heck, computers can brick for no apparent reason at all due to logic errors, but this logic doesn't seem to apply to magic.
If people find swordsmen fighting dragons unrealistic, I find eldritch knights or bladesingers casting spells in combat the prime rib of unrealistic. It is utterly ridiculous to think of someone doing math while another guy's lunging at him with an axe and then imagining the axeman bursting into flames rather than the would-be pyromancer getting a permanent and fatal headache. Access to the Weave is as arbitrarily dispensed in neat once-per-day packets for the sake of balance, and yet we're supposed to believe this is a world where magic is mystic. How is it that there are enough sorcerers running around capable of casting these spells and the world hasn't exploded yet? Maybe there's a reason why spellcasters are feared in so many settings.

 

[5ekyu]

Hmmm...

Maybe it's me but many of these are - perhaps its baked into the question - cases of choices that could be non-immersion breaking if different choices were made. Manifestation of play, not rules.

Like multi-classing without preamble but the player can provide preamble by establishing in-game fluff in background or actual play leading to it. It's not required by the rules to be surprisingly not foreshadowed, right? My bard had her multi-classing roots established in background and then expanded on over and over in actual play before she did her shift from spellsinger to stone singer (bard-wizard.) Just like she began gathering hits of odd and eclectic bits and doing odd rites with the PCs two levels before she gained her "blessing song of stone's heart" (inspiring leader feat.) After gaining the fest, she did not include anyone who had declined her " odd rites" in her "up to six". It made it feel very "real" and woven into the play - immersive - and it fit the rules just fine driven by my choices.

Or, too many swords not enough spears... but the rules dont show that. As a GM I use in play in gsme far more spears and axes and hammers than really swords. It just fits the NPCs and eorld expectations better. That didn't break any rules. Heck, I also frequently reskin - letting pike be called great spear and have a heavy spear with stats amazingly similar to longsword - adding in new weapons isn't breaking rules either as no rule requires GM to be using that one list of properties and names as "total, there are no others".

These were just dome of the early ones that struck out at me.

Healing certain "damage" overnight in certain circumstances - well in my campaign world the shimmer is a glowing mystical effect responsible for sustaining and maintaining life on the wrecked world manifesting as fireflies like flickers most everywhere that glow brighter with music from the very air for "the hour of songs" each day and vanishing once a month during the "night of screams" when the world goes dark, the shimmer goes out and dark thing hunt in the night and the music is replaced by screams. Within that context, recovering your hp after a long rest unless something special is afoot doesn't really break immersion at all.

Now if my setting was more low-magic mythic Europe... this might not be a good rule to choose.

A rule from the core thst breaks my immersion isxtreating outdoor st night even under moon and stars as blinded - exception for exceptionally bright full moon. So, I changed that rule as a house rule for gsmes, even tho it's not really an issue in my world of shimmer and shadow campaign. That said, in a world without stars or moon, night = blinded could be reasonable.

 

[Salthorae]

The biggest one for me is recovering all hit points after an 8-hour nap. This forces me to believe that either (a) those six arrows didn't really pierce my skin and all that damage was in my head somehow, (b) I woke up so refreshed that I no longer care about all the bleeding arrow-holes in my body, or (c) my body's natural healing rate is faster than Jesus's.

Yes, I've heard all of the "hot takes" on hit points and the nature of damage. They don't help. So I've learned to just live with the broken immersion.

This is why my table does the variant where you recover no hit points but all your HD. It's not much better, but it helps with that a bit for us.

As for what breaks immersion for me...

All the spells/powers/invocations etc that shove PCs/NPCs around the map, but shove them the same distance whether they are a 20 lb. halfling or an 8,000 lb. hill giant. It's just too weird to me.

 

[Wisdom Seeker]

This is why my table does the variant where you recover no hit points but all your HD. It's not much better, but it helps with that a bit for us.

As for what breaks immersion for me...

All the spells/powers/invocations etc that shove PCs/NPCs around the map, but shove them the same distance whether they are a 20 lb. halfling or an 8,000 lb. hill giant. It's just too weird to me.

How about the fact that you have to concentrate on Bigby's Hand but you don't have to concentrate, nor have any understanding of medicine at all, when you're literally knitting someone's organs back together and ending every disease in their body with Heal. Or how stabbing someone in the chest doesn't have the same need for long-term healing as chopping their arm off, despite the heart and intestines presumably being torn to bits. Nope, that never happens. If it isn't a limb, it's a formless meat blob.

 

[Charlaquin]

PCs who have been reduced to 0 HP—i.e. PCs who have taken "a potentially life threatening wound"—also recover all their hit points after 8 hours of rest, so Clever's objection stands even if we accept your reframing of the issue.

Not so. PCs that have been reduced to 0 hp need to gain at least one HP, either via an external source of healing, or by being stabilized and then naturally gaining 1HP after 1d4 hours.

It certainly requires a certain degree of suspension of disbelief, but for me personally, the idea that a blow that knocks you down to 0 is severe enough to leave you unconscious for a few hours and could potentially kill you if you don’t receive first aid or magical healing, and that once you’ve received that aid, 8 hours rest will get you back in the action is an easier pill to swallow than the idea that every time you take damage you’re surviving a serious hit from a deadly weapon. I can understand why someone might feel the opposite though.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

I still recall the painful first encounter with it. No, the zombies didn't even knock anyone out, let alone kill anyone. What happened is they simply wouldn't die, even after we had obviously defeated them. This lead to a situation where we were honestly just considering shoving them down a well, blocking it off, and walking away.

This is almost exactly what I'd expect an encounter against zombies to look and feel like.