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What are your biggest immersion breakers, rules wise?
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<blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7836370" data-attributes="member: 6779196"><p>Yeah, I should clarify, my point was not merely that I follow the pattern of play described in the PHB - I think most DMs follow it in a general sense. Rather, I was pointing out that I try to adhere to it as closely as possible as often as possible.</p><p></p><p></p><p>When I say an in my ideal game the players wouldn't ever have to ask questions, that's an ideal that I recognize is not possible to live up to, but the closer I can get to it, the better. I find that being reasonably specific and concise in my descriptions helps in this endeavor. I try not to make assumptions about what the players will or won't find important, and stick to describing what is present in reasonable detail. I also try to focus my description on opportunities for players to interact with the environment.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Hmm... I get the sense that social interactions probably look quite different in your games than they do in mind, because I'm having trouble following what you mean here. Why would the players be asking questions of me in a social interaction? I would think they would be interacting instead with the NPC(s) involved in the encounter.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Oh, I would definitely not want the players asking questions of me to inform their mid/long-term planning. They are free to talk to each other as needed, and if they require more information to formulate their plan, then it would be better for them to describe actions their characters take to try to gain that information. If they want to know what varieties of local game are available, they should search for tracks that might give an indication of that, or make educated guesses based on the terrain and climate. I suppose this would probably be a situation where "From my training in Nature, would I be familiar enough with this kind of terrain to make a good guess about what kind of game we might find here?" would be pretty appropriate.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Well, keep in mind, the dice being added to the pool represent the passing of time. It's not that choosing to try to pick the lock made the rats show up, it's that the rats happened to blunder into you during the 10-ish minutes you took to try and pick the lock. When you declare that action, I'll also go around the table and ask what the other players' characters are doing during those 10 minutes. Might be a good opportunity to cast a ritual spell, or to simply stand on guard in case any monsters wander by during that time (smart play, in my opinion, if you're at 5 dice in the pool or 50-ish minutes past the hour.) Sure, if you had succeeded on picking the lock on the first try you wouldn't have encountered the rats... But you also wouldn't have been there 10 minutes later when the rats theoretically showed up. Instead, you'd have gotten through the door, and there's a good chance that some time in the next 10 minutes you'd run into something else.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Yeah, that definitely helped illustrate where you're coming from, and I can see why you find it un-immersive. Does it help re-framing it in terms that, it's not the actions you took that lead to that encounter, but the time that it took to execute those actions? Assuming that you are not taking any reckless actions, it doesn't actually matter what those actions are. It's the passage of an hour, as measured by the accumulation of 6 tension dice, that triggered the encounter, not the actions. Heck, you might not even have taken any time-consuming actions over the course of the hour, the roll still happens once per hour. The only actions that actually trigger a roll of the tension pool in and of themselves are noisy or otherwise attention-grabbing ones, which trigger a roll of however many dice are currently in the pool without resetting it. And I'd think it's clear what that represents in the narrative. You were loud, the monsters heard you, they came to investigate the noise. In that instance the action didn't create the encounter, it just brought it down on you. Am I making sense?</p><p></p><p></p><p>I mean, that's effectively what I'm doing, apart from the "that we already know about" part. I guess I'm not sure why that makes a difference?</p><p></p><p></p><p>Oh, for sure! That was definitely the impression that I got. I also definitely recognize that the tension pool has the potential for breaking some people's sense of immersion, because there are definitely things I'll include on my complication tables that some simulation purists would protest don't make sense to be triggered by a noisy or reckless action (such as hazardous environmental effects). I was just surprised that the passage of time triggering a random encounter would be immersion-breaking for you, as I feel like that's pretty standard practice.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Charlaquin, post: 7836370, member: 6779196"] Yeah, I should clarify, my point was not merely that I follow the pattern of play described in the PHB - I think most DMs follow it in a general sense. Rather, I was pointing out that I try to adhere to it as closely as possible as often as possible. When I say an in my ideal game the players wouldn't ever have to ask questions, that's an ideal that I recognize is not possible to live up to, but the closer I can get to it, the better. I find that being reasonably specific and concise in my descriptions helps in this endeavor. I try not to make assumptions about what the players will or won't find important, and stick to describing what is present in reasonable detail. I also try to focus my description on opportunities for players to interact with the environment. Hmm... I get the sense that social interactions probably look quite different in your games than they do in mind, because I'm having trouble following what you mean here. Why would the players be asking questions of me in a social interaction? I would think they would be interacting instead with the NPC(s) involved in the encounter. Oh, I would definitely not want the players asking questions of me to inform their mid/long-term planning. They are free to talk to each other as needed, and if they require more information to formulate their plan, then it would be better for them to describe actions their characters take to try to gain that information. If they want to know what varieties of local game are available, they should search for tracks that might give an indication of that, or make educated guesses based on the terrain and climate. I suppose this would probably be a situation where "From my training in Nature, would I be familiar enough with this kind of terrain to make a good guess about what kind of game we might find here?" would be pretty appropriate. Well, keep in mind, the dice being added to the pool represent the passing of time. It's not that choosing to try to pick the lock made the rats show up, it's that the rats happened to blunder into you during the 10-ish minutes you took to try and pick the lock. When you declare that action, I'll also go around the table and ask what the other players' characters are doing during those 10 minutes. Might be a good opportunity to cast a ritual spell, or to simply stand on guard in case any monsters wander by during that time (smart play, in my opinion, if you're at 5 dice in the pool or 50-ish minutes past the hour.) Sure, if you had succeeded on picking the lock on the first try you wouldn't have encountered the rats... But you also wouldn't have been there 10 minutes later when the rats theoretically showed up. Instead, you'd have gotten through the door, and there's a good chance that some time in the next 10 minutes you'd run into something else. Yeah, that definitely helped illustrate where you're coming from, and I can see why you find it un-immersive. Does it help re-framing it in terms that, it's not the actions you took that lead to that encounter, but the time that it took to execute those actions? Assuming that you are not taking any reckless actions, it doesn't actually matter what those actions are. It's the passage of an hour, as measured by the accumulation of 6 tension dice, that triggered the encounter, not the actions. Heck, you might not even have taken any time-consuming actions over the course of the hour, the roll still happens once per hour. The only actions that actually trigger a roll of the tension pool in and of themselves are noisy or otherwise attention-grabbing ones, which trigger a roll of however many dice are currently in the pool without resetting it. And I'd think it's clear what that represents in the narrative. You were loud, the monsters heard you, they came to investigate the noise. In that instance the action didn't create the encounter, it just brought it down on you. Am I making sense? I mean, that's effectively what I'm doing, apart from the "that we already know about" part. I guess I'm not sure why that makes a difference? Oh, for sure! That was definitely the impression that I got. I also definitely recognize that the tension pool has the potential for breaking some people's sense of immersion, because there are definitely things I'll include on my complication tables that some simulation purists would protest don't make sense to be triggered by a noisy or reckless action (such as hazardous environmental effects). I was just surprised that the passage of time triggering a random encounter would be immersion-breaking for you, as I feel like that's pretty standard practice. [/QUOTE]
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