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

Charlaquin

Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
So you're saying it's not impossible to overcome this issue... ;)

Also it doesn't take much time at all, and it's why I don't have a problem with hit points, Vancian casting, resting and healing, warlords shouting severed hands back on, and on and on and on.

I wasn't always this way, but I decided to change.
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You can make a difference
You can make it right
You can make it better
We don't have to fight
You can make an effort
Starting with tonight
'Cause you
You can make a change
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iserith

Magic Wordsmith
Like, I am now adding the "all problems with suspension of disbelief in fiction are the fault of the audience" as 1b on my list of "Most Stupid Arguments I have ever Seen Here."

Nobody's making that argument.

What is being suggested is a solution for issues related to someone else (or a rule) potentially breaking your immersion. Specifically, how to become more resilient against those things.
 


Charlaquin

Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
Well, you may not have a problem with it, but I am guessing that this is from a general rules-perspective as opposed to an immersion perspective.

For example, your compatriot-in-argument, Charlaquin, thinks immersion is just a buzzword. But that's because (as in this post) the two of you are used to arguing about rules.

If you are playing, say, Cthulhu, and you're an hour-and-half into the game, and everything has been building this gradual sense of horror, and you're feeling it, and you open a door behind which is the eldritch horror you're sure will drive you (your character) beyond the bend, and the GM says, "Hey it's Mike Meyers, and he's going to do his Dieter Impression" and then proceeds to do a 30 minute, terrible, Sprockets routine and then says that he Dieter wants you to love his abshmienke ... does that break immersion for you?

Maybe?
What’s been broken in this example is the tone. There’s certainly no reason that an elder god couldn’t take the form of Michael Myers and do a Dieter impression. It isn’t unrealistic, any more than the elder god itself already is. But it is very silly, and not in line with the tone of Call of Cthulhu.

No, of course not! The fault is not with the DM, Iserith, or with the stars, the fault is with YOU for not being fully immersed.

Shame on you. Immerse yourself better.
Who said anything about fault? Not me. I’m not trying to assign blame. I’m trying to offer solutions.
 



Sacrosanct

Legend
It's not dismissive at all. I recognize it as a real problem, one that I've had personally, but overcame. I also stated that there are a number of solutions and that I preferred one in particular because it is useful in more areas than just watching movies or playing D&D. I can't control the casting of Narcos. I can't control how a TV show writes its stories. But I can control myself. And so that's the best place to start in my view.


It's about as dismissive as telling people they don't need to be on anti depression medication if they just got outside in the woods more.

People are bothered by different things that others aren't. Because you don't get as bothered by immersion breaking things or if you managed to get over it, doesn't mean that Jane over there isn't justified for being bothered by it or that she should just "get over it". Your posts are in fact, very dismissive.
 

Indeed, if you just stop at “well, none of it is real, so it doesn’t matter if it’s consistent or not,” then we are dodging the question. It is also dodging the question to say “this inconsistency breaks my immersion” and leave it at that. If we want to answer the question, we must accept that what has happened in the fiction has happened in the fiction and does not match our expectations of what would happen in reality and then come up with an in-fiction reason how it happened.
Alternatively, we can say that having this happen within the fiction is unacceptable, and actually do something about it. In a comic book, that means not continuing with the series. In an RPG, that means house rules, or changing to a new system.

In no case are we under any obligation to simply accept something as it is. By trying to post-hoc justify the irrational, it prevents us from finding a solution to the actual problem.
 


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