D&D 5E A Sense of Wonder in 5E

[pemerton]

Good question. I believe if you carefully read the description of the skill it should give you a general sense of the area that is searched with a single skill check. I remember seeing editions do this. But yes, failure to define this area is a part of the problem.

<snip>

this is a good place for the GM to help with the problem by responding "You scan the area around your feet carefully for traps, but see no evidence of anything immediately nearby." Indicating that he hasn't searched the whole hallway yet.

My concern with this - and I'm deliberately saying "concern with" and not "objection to", because like I mentioned earlier my thinking around these issues is tentative, not definitive - is that having the GM fill in the description is a bit like having the GM narrate who was the target of a PC's attack. Now there are some situations in which this is unobjectionable - eg an arena fight of PC vs a single opponent - but most of the time this is meant to be the player's job.

Here is what the Burning Wheel rulebook says about the "Assess" action (at p 151):

Assessing allows for a player [= character] to look for specific details - easy exits, the sources of that burning smell and unarmoured locations on the opponent . . . Such an assess nets the character a Perception test in search of what he described in his intent and task.​

So a player can't just roll a Perception check and ask the GM to tell him/her everything that is interesting and worth noticing. This is one device for setting up the mechanics so that they mandate the player engaging with the fiction - in this case, choosing some specific detail that is worth looking for.

 

[Savage Wombat]

There's a point at which this becomes, to badly quote Weird Pete - "Since you didn't specifically say you were looking for chinks in the stone, you miss the gas trap - lose 8 points of CON."

I think you need to have the DM teach, by example, what level of specificity he's looking for in his game - do I search "the corridor", "the floor", "the first of the twenty stone tiles", etc. Then the player will be more descriptive in the future.

You've got a good point about encourage players to embrace the game fiction descriptively instead of through game mechanics - but I don't think "I roll Trapfinding" is anything more than a player trying to overcome a DM-placed obstacle. It's not an attempt to override the DM's description of the scene, just a reluctance to embrace the narrative of the game instead of the mechanics.

 

[pemerton]

There's a point at which this becomes, to badly quote Weird Pete - "Since you didn't specifically say you were looking for chinks in the stone, you miss the gas trap - lose 8 points of CON."

I very much don't like that sort of play, and I'm guessing that in that respect I'm part of a majority viewpoint.

What I'm not sure about is where I'm located between disliking that sort of nonsense, and disliking the bare "I roll Trapfinding" as a purported mode of action resolution.

My solution in my own game is basically to use no traps or secret doors except on locations that are more-or-less sterotypically obvious (for my group, given our long history together).

 

[Sunseeker]

There's a point at which this becomes, to badly quote Weird Pete - "Since you didn't specifically say you were looking for chinks in the stone, you miss the gas trap - lose 8 points of CON."

I think you need to have the DM teach, by example, what level of specificity he's looking for in his game - do I search "the corridor", "the floor", "the first of the twenty stone tiles", etc. Then the player will be more descriptive in the future.

You've got a good point about encourage players to embrace the game fiction descriptively instead of through game mechanics - but I don't think "I roll Trapfinding" is anything more than a player trying to overcome a DM-placed obstacle. It's not an attempt to override the DM's description of the scene, just a reluctance to embrace the narrative of the game instead of the mechanics.

Exactly, and there's no real even way to address the fact that some DMs are fine with you saying "I make a religion check", and others who want you to say "I think hard and try to remember what I can about the first 100 years of the Church of St Harry and his first female apostle."

 

[Crazy Jerome]

If the DM is the type to put things in because the players are looking for them, then rolling for Traps might cause there to be a trap in the corridor when there wasn't one before.

I don't want to play that way, unless it is explicit. (And in which case, I might play Donjon, which is a game designed to be played that way.) But if you come from the school of thought of, "Don't say that. You might give the DM ideas."--then your options are on a whole other set.

 

[pemerton]

If the DM is the type to put things in because the players are looking for them, then rolling for Traps might cause there to be a trap in the corridor when there wasn't one before.

I've been known to do that sort of thing! Not so much for traps, but in my last session I did it for a secret door.

The PCs were in an old temple of Torog, looking for the way forward in a dead-end room. As per the module I was using, the room had a secret door, but the module is poorly laid out (Delve format, FTW!) and I was having trouble keeping track of where it was and how it worked. In the meantime, I was describing features of the temple that weren't mentioned in the module, but suited the way I had repurposed it for my own campaign purposes.

The wizard decided that (i) in a temple of Torog the way onward is always down, and (ii) that one of the carvings I'd interpolated in was so central to the temple's raison d'etre that it was pretty much guaranteed to be the secret door, and therefore (iii) used a Thunderwave cast through his path-finding Sceptre of Erathis (the Rod of 7 Parts in my campaign) to blast that part of the carving downwards and open.

This was not how the module described it at all, but was a lot cooler than what the module did say, reinforced the story of the temple that the players are forming in their own minds, and meant that things kept moving rather than getting bogged down with tedious searching and Perception rolls.

So, needless to say, the wizard's intuitions were sound and his plan (backed up by a 30-ish attack roll) worked!

 

[Gentlegamer]

Absolutely. This is why we HAVE skills. This is especially important for people who are new to the game, who haven't picked up decades of experience finding out what absurd traps monster lairs might be full of. A player shouldn't feel compelled to actively study fictional scenarios involving poison traps, arcane rune bombs, and the leavings of particular fictional animals in order to get through the adventure.

Or, even better, learn by playing the game.

By your third or fourth character, you'll probably be pretty good at it.

 

[Mattachine]

My concern with this - and I'm deliberately saying "concern with" and not "objection to", because like I mentioned earlier my thinking around these issues is tentative, not definitive - is that having the GM fill in the description is a bit like having the GM narrate who was the target of a PC's attack. Now there are some situations in which this is unobjectionable - eg an arena fight of PC vs a single opponent - but most of the time this is meant to be the player's job.

Here is what the Burning Wheel rulebook says about the "Assess" action (at p 151):

Assessing allows for a player [= character] to look for specific details - easy exits, the sources of that burning smell and unarmoured locations on the opponent . . . Such an assess nets the character a Perception test in search of what he described in his intent and task.​

So a player can't just roll a Perception check and ask the GM to tell him/her everything that is interesting and worth noticing. This is one device for setting up the mechanics so that they mandate the player engaging with the fiction - in this case, choosing some specific detail that is worth looking for.

Of course, Burning Wheel gives players a lot of narrative control, too.
If the player passes that test, then indeed, there is something of the sort he was looking for. In such a game, details are determined largely as needed. In D&D, it's nearly always the opposite--fluff can be determined on the fly, but mechanics are usually set ahead.

Burning Wheel has much to commend itself, but it's much more narrativist than D&D.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Sense of wonder has only one hope:

DM stuff is with the DM. Players are forbidden to look into a book other than the PHB.
It was always something mysterious about the DMG and the MM. We just did not know what to expect.

I want it that way in 5e

I played this way for about 10 years. It worked great.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

For what it's worth I'm in my late twenties and pretty genuinely bored of and disinterested with a lot of fantasy/sci-fi, videogames, and big-budget movies. The things that fascinated me when I was twelve - Lord of the Rings, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, etc., put me to sleep now. As a DM I'm remarkably uninterested in nerd fiction (movies, books, videogames, whatever) in general - I can barely follow the original Star Wars trilogy.

I discovered PS/DS in the last two years. They fill me with a sense of wonder because they rock incredibly hard, irregardless of age or nostalgia. I don't really buy this "you can't feel twelve again" talk since the examples you provided definitely made me feel that way.

Planescape and Dark Sun develop their cult audiences due to:
- wildly inventive ideas
- distinct and original art styles
- creative writing that isn't bogged down by rules or stat blocks

They can totally pull that off again.

This got me thinking. I first read the Hobbit when I was 8. I remember how that felt. I read it again last year. Surprise, surprise, the sense of wonder was still there! Even though I could remember almost exactly what would happen. On the other hand, Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance never gave me that sense of wonder even when they were new. After some consideration, I think these are the things that contribute to sense of wonder for me:

* A sense of reality. Cool stuff in a daydream just isn't as wondrous as cool stuff in real life. The closer something in game seems to cool stuff in real life, the more wondrous it is. So if something in game isn't specifically supposed to be fantastic or wondrous, it needs to conform to my intuitive expectations for real life.

* Cool stuff. Not just things you don't see in real life, stuff that's impossible in real life.

* Depth. Lots of supporting details make the world seem more real. A good example is the Elvish language that Tolkein made up.

* Mystery. The knowledge that there are things off camera or back in history that affect the setting as it is now, that I don't know, but that if I make an effort I might be able to find out.

* Exploration. The ability to go see what's out there. New locations, cultures, personalities, histories, and so on.

* Narrative Interaction. Interacting with the world intuitively rather than through mathematical rules. If I have to interact with the rules, I've taken my eye off the world and I'm back in high school math class.

* Culture. I already mentioned this but it's really a key point. I want to interact with people that really seem to be from other cultures. This is one of the reasons I enjoy early SF so much. Having been born in the 70's, the 50's are almost another worlds to me.


Looking at my list, most of these are setting issue, but there are two things a rule set can really do to help. The first is to disappear. The more I can interact with the world narrative rather than through rules, the happier I am.

The second is that the rules reflect a realistic world. Except where specific design decisions create something wondrous or fantastic, I want the world to be as close to RL as possible.