If the other players are running their characters in unbelievable ways it can be even worse than genre cliches or the Truman Show effect.  Things like:

* Suddenly suicidal (jump off a cliff)
* "contemporary" language or behaviour in a historical game
* Silly / Joke actions or in-character comments
* Fearless (it's only 2d6 damage, I jump)
* Random / Violent actions (attacking an NPC for no reason)
* etc

Even when a player is trying to have their character act in a believable way, I've found that other people at the table engaged in certain kinds of "serious roleplaying" (aka really bad improv acting) can completely break my suspension of disbelief.  Talking in falsetto / nasally voices, or dragging out awkward exchanges with NPCs run by the GM with both people speaking in character with long uncomfortable pauses... that's brutal. :haw:

Done well it can make the game awesome.  Done poorly... I'd hit the fast-forward button if I could.

Quote from: StuartWhat sort of things break your suspension of disbelief when playing an RPG?

I posted this in the Immersion thread on the theory forum but I'll repeat it here, because I think it captures things pretty well.  From J. R. R. Tolkiens "On Fairy-Stories":

QuoteChildren are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called "willing suspension of disbelief." But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful "sub-creator." He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is "true": it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed.

To me, verisimilitude in the game setting and the behavior of the characters in it is of paramount importance to maintaining a willing suspension of disbelief.

Quote from: John MorrowTo me, verisimilitude in the game setting and the behavior of the characters in it is of paramount importance to maintaining a willing suspension of disbelief.

Indeed. Internally consistent characteristics and behaviours are far more important to me than anachronisms or a reliance on real-world terminologies. If a setting makes sense in and of itself, and does not require me to handwave details in order to maintain "authenticity," then it tends to be a far easier sell to my players.

Tolkien does a good job of describing what I think Stuart is after--better than the definition at the top of the thread (to be a bit presumptuous), which may relate to some of the push-back his question has gotten at Story Games.

But note, Tolkien doesn't say what brings about the "magic".

I can't say that I've explored RPGs enough to say, but for me the "magic" he's talking about can be found in some pretty "unrealistic" fiction. For example One Hundred Years of Solitude, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, or movies like The Naked Lunch, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Being John Malkovich, Alphaville. I think these fictions profit from a lot of things but one of them is being just plain interesting conceptually and stylistically.

This is why I think the discussion could benefit from looking at positive elements that support the "magic" as well as negative elements that "break the spell".

Quote from: Elliot WilenI agree with Stuart's first example, where encounters sit "in stasis" until the PCs contact them.

This is ... well, not a problem for me, but I have made a mental note about it:
Aren't sandbox settings like Wilderness also prone to that phenomenon? I mean, there are all those hexes with situations (or seeds of situations) in stasis.
For instance:

Quote from: Wilderlands of High Fantasy, Chapter 9 "Ebony Coast", pg. 2802628 The Burial Ground (EL 4): A cairn covered by a thicket conceals the eternal resting place of three ancient heroes. Within each sepulcher is a silver dagger, scimitar, a box filled with moldy tobacco. Three medium vipers (CR 1; hp 9 each) will drop upon any intruder(s) from cracks in the arched roof.

The way this stuff is written there is no chance that those vipers are outside looking for food, or lying in a corner, digesting a mouse or rat, or are dead and eaten themselves by some other animal.
And it doesn't matter whether the heroes enter that hex in the beginning of a campaign, or one year into it. Three immortal vipers will be waiting for them.

It may be a different scope of event but conceptionally, I don't see a difference to the princess that is always being saved in the last possible, or most dramatic, pre-scripted moment.

Cell phones.

We have a strict rule, they gotta be on vibrate (if on at all).  It's understood we have families and need to be reached sometimes, but having some custom ringtone playing in the middle of intense diplomatic negotiations with those SOB High Elves is a killer.

Cheating.

Games mostly played on boards and maps with counters and dice are harder for cheaters.

Games which are played to actually simulate meaningful tactics are harder for cheaters.  (However, they are also often less fun for me because they offer fewer opportunities for tactical innovation.)

Games in which the GM can make up anything he likes, alter the laws of in-game physics, cause miraculous reinforcements to materialize out of nowhere -- are no longer games.  They are exercises in which the GM bribes players with imaginary goodies so that they will be actors in the theater of the GM's imagination.  I believe someone posted a story on this very site wherein a castle was initially 50 feet high, but the roof warped down to five feet of height so that guards could jump off without hurting themselves -- that kind of things wrecks it for me.

(Players sometimes cheat as well, and they often don't *need* to cheat, because the GM would allow them whatever they were going to do if they just asked.)

The problem for me is that TRPGs are only superior to other games because the imagination constitutes an unlimited budget for new tactics.  So TRPGs offer a big payoff -- genuine tactical originality -- but they are higher maintenance than almost any other game.

My preferred way out of the mess would be to learn a lot of tactics and military history and just play really competitive wargames, but it's easier to keep limping along with GURPS.

GMPCs

Quote from: riprockCheating.

Games mostly played on boards and maps with counters and dice are harder for cheaters.

Games which are played to actually simulate meaningful tactics are harder for cheaters.  (However, they are also often less fun for me because they offer fewer opportunities for tactical innovation.)

I'll tell you what drove me crazy as a GM:  I'd have two PCs discussing something, say, in the wee hours of the morning in the empty common room of the inn the party is staying at.  Perhaps it has something to do with their plans to relieve PC #3, who announced hours ago he was going straight to bed and locking his door, of that large mystic gem he's been sporting about and cackling evilly over.

PC #3's player, hearing the discussion, immediately says, "Um, I'm actually downstairs in the common room now.  In full plate armor.  With my sword drawn.  Listening to see if anything is going on".

Uh.  No.  Not really.  And certainly for no better reason than "my character just felt like it".

That sort of metgamey crap was the kind of thing I learned to nip in the bud as a GM.

The host's wife walking in because she wants to video CSI.

Quote from: AosGMPCs

I agree.  What about them does it in your opinion?

Are you distinguishing GMPCs from "GM pet NPCs"?

Quote from: StuartI agree.  What about them does it in your opinion?

IME, they tend to dominate the action, and GMs tend to get really attached not only to the characters themselves but to the characters dominance. If you have GMPCs in a game your measly character will never be Gandalf or Conan or Superman- the job is already taken.

Here's a true story
I have a friend that went though a year long campaign wherein he and the party went on a series of epic quests to find some bad guy, eventually they found him. They then performed a spell they were taught by the guy that hired them (GMPC). The spell opened a gate or something and the GMPC walked though and stepped on the bad guy. A whole fucking year so some NPC could kill the bad guy. WTF?  I'm sorry, I thought we came to play D&D, not to watch you jerk off- oops.

I use the above example because its pretty simple, but I have seen the essentially the same thing over and over in games. Furthermore, the GM that does this sort of thing usually has severe railroad problems too- because if you don't follow the plot the GMPC can't shine. Refusing to follow the plot usually (IME) results in said GMPC showing up to kick the shit of the characters and humiliate them until they return to the fold.


All of these things can make for a shitty game that is nearly impossible for me to get into.

Personally if I show up at a game and i see any sign that it might go this way, I make up an excuse and split- never to be heard from again.

Quote from: Elliot WilenTolkien does a good job of describing what I think Stuart is after--better than the definition at the top of the thread (to be a bit presumptuous), which may relate to some of the push-back his question has gotten at Story Games.

I'll read the Tolkien article tonight.  

I think there are a variety of reasons for the mixed reaction at Story Games (although I think a good number of people there seem to 'get it' just fine).  The push-back is likely due to people who suspect this is an area Story Games don't do as well as "Traditional" RPGs, so they don't want the discussion to take place.  The other element is the unrelenting drive some people have to create new jargon...

Quote from: Zachary The FirstCell phones.

PCs with cell phones. Or radio sets. Or magical communication devices. Who insist on splitting up whenever possible, forcing the GM to run a bunch of solo scenes, while keeping track of the respective amount of time passing, because one player might say "I'm calling PC #3" at any time...

I never had a problem with settings that don't make sense, as long as they follow the "rule of cool" and don't constrain the PCs unnecessarily. In one pulpy game a PC disarmed a bomb. The player (a novice roleplayer) made the roll and described the bomb counting down to "00:00:01" and then stopping. I was like: "Wow, that was cool, but why did you do it this way?" to which he replied "Well, it would have been boring if he just disarmed it without tension, right? Besides its a genre staple." To which we all agreed.