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

[Storminator]

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.

I think this is true when the DM and player have the same general idea of how the game functions, but need to work on the technique.

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 seems to be discussing a different level of detachment than you. If I'm not mistaken about his theory it's more like:

Sometimes players just aren't interested - at all - in the scene. It's not that they don't know where a trap might be hiding, but rather that they just want to roll for initiative already. Giving you NOTHING to work with might just be the dis-empowered player version of rejection. They can't actually say "there are no traps so we cross the hall and open the door already" but they can say "trapfinding 16 - next!"

If this happens, digging into the methods of how to get a player engaged are not just futile, but counterproductive. It increases the importance of the moment the player was just trying to blow past.

Interesting ideas pemerton.

PS

 

[pemerton]

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.

This is one way of playing it, yes, although I think that the game also allows that some of these things will have been determined in advance.

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.

I'm not sure I follow the difference between "determining details largely as needed" and "fluff being determined on the fly". And the mechanics for BW are set ahead of the actual play - it's a pretty mechanically heavy game.

(Sorry if this sounds picky/like quibbling. I'm genuinely trying to work out exactly how you see the differences between the two games. I agree that there are differences, but I'm not sure we're seeing them in the same places.)

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

I agree, although how wide the gap is seems to me highly variable across tables and editions of D&D. The 4e DMG and DMG2, for examle, give GM advice which seems to be aimed at closing the gap between D&D and BW-style play. And skill challenges seem to me to rely upon an approach to play closer to indie games like BW.

 

[Incenjucar]

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:

Keep in mind that your early experiences with the product as a child shape your current response to it. It's entirely possible that, had you not read the Hobbit until you were 28, you would have tossed it aside and wondered to yourself what people saw in it. Personally, despite being a fantasy junkie, and despite growing up on the Hobbit cartoon, I only got my hands on the book when I was 19 or so, and I couldn't get past the first few chapters. Yet I could probably still watch the cartoon movie the same way you can read the book to this day.

Similarly, I don't get why anyone treats the D&D cartoon any better than the Star Wars Christmas Special - I didn't grow up on it.

Nostalgia does horrible things to your perspective.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Burning Wheel is a traditional, mechanics medium-to-heavy game that is entirely about "fighting for what you believe"--"you" being the character in play. It uses some mechanics that are found more often in narrative games--such as stake setting, tight, explicit reward cycles, conflict resolution (instead of task resolution), and each roll advancing the story.

BW is like the game designer equivalent of Adam Smith read about "Story Now" and said, "No, it is not necessary to push story explicitly to get a good story every time. If every player writes good beliefs, within certain conventions of play, and then goes after those beliefs, story will emerge, as from an invisible hand."

It is a BW rule that if the DM agrees to a set of stakes, then he is bound by the roll. But he doesn't have to agree to the stakes. You don't roll against Forest-wise and find a heretofore non-existent stream when you need water. You say that you want to do that, set the stakes, and then the DM tells you what happens if you fail (something interesting but negative for your character). Or he lets you have the water but get no roll, and thus no advancement out of the check.

It's a subtle distinction, but it makes that aspect of "finding things in the fiction" in BW more gamist than narrative. You risk it to advance your character--and story emerges.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Keep in mind that your early experiences with the product as a child shape your current response to it. It's entirely possible that, had you not read the Hobbit until you were 28, you would have tossed it aside and wondered to yourself what people saw in it. Personally, despite being a fantasy junkie, and despite growing up on the Hobbit cartoon, I only got my hands on the book when I was 19 or so, and I couldn't get past the first few chapters. Yet I could probably still watch the cartoon movie the same way you can read the book to this day.

Similarly, I don't get why anyone treats the D&D cartoon any better than the Star Wars Christmas Special - I didn't grow up on it.

Nostalgia does horrible things to your perspective.

While you may or may not be right, it still demolishes the idea that you can't get a sense of wonder from anything you're familiar with.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Keep in mind that your early experiences with the product as a child shape your current response to it ...
Nostalgia does horrible things to your perspective.

You early experience can shape your current response. Nostalgia can do things to your perspective. These are, however, neither automatic nor consistent across people. I liked the Hobbit as a child, and I like it more now. I missed some of the George MacDonald stories as a child, but still like them now as an adult--for roughly the same reasons that I still enjoy the Hobbit.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

I've found putting away the fear of childishness to be central to having a sense of wonder.

 

[Incenjucar]

While you may or may not be right, it still demolishes the idea that you can't get a sense of wonder from anything you're familiar with.

It's kind of an uncanny valley thing.

If you already have an automatic "wonder" response to something, you tend to hold on to that.

If you never experienced something, you're likely to be able to find wonder in it.

If you've experienced something LIKE a thing, but it's just different enough to clash with your memories, your experience may actually be negative. Just look at how a subset of people respond to the latest cataclysm in FR.

Certainly, this varies quite a bit. Some people are happy with getting the same general thing with slight variation, others want a dramatically different thing every time, and most fall in between.

Lacking statistics as to which response predominates, we're stuck with observation, like the classic old people yelling at new things stereotype that has been evident for all of history, especially in the arts.

 

[Incenjucar]

You early experience can shape your current response. Nostalgia can do things to your perspective. These are, however, neither automatic nor consistent across people. I liked the Hobbit as a child, and I like it more now. I missed some of the George MacDonald stories as a child, but still like them now as an adult--for roughly the same reasons that I still enjoy the Hobbit.

Sorry if I seemed to be talking in absolutes, I didn't mean to suggest that human psychology is so exact. It's just a trend.

I've found putting the way the fear of childishness to be central to having a sense of wonder.

This is a forum about make-believe and smashing toys together, so I dearly hope that nobody here is afraid of childish things.

 

[pemerton]

BW is like the game designer equivalent of Adam Smith read about "Story Now" and said, "No, it is not necessary to push story explicitly to get a good story every time. If every player writes good beliefs, within certain conventions of play, and then goes after those beliefs, story will emerge, as from an invisible hand."

I tend to see this as what "Story Now" design per se is about - about ensuring that play will deliver a worthwhile story without anyone having the responsibility to push story explicitly.

It's the absence of that responsibility - and so the freedom to play your character - that makes it an RPG, I think.

The GM is in a different category, though - the GM in BW, for example, in agreeing to and setting stakes, has to have regard to how different choices will push and pull the game in different thematic/dramatic directions.

And on a somewhat related note - I see many people who say that the 4e DMG is one of the best GMing manuals they've read. And while it's not bad, I think that the BW Adventure Burner leaves it for dead - and the Adventure Burner isn't even written for the game that I'm GMing in light of it!

It's a subtle distinction, but it makes that aspect of "finding things in the fiction" in BW more gamist than narrative. You risk it to advance your character--and story emerges.

I'm not going to quibble over gamist vs narrativist here. One way of analysing it might be to say that BW sets up hooks/mechanics that might be seen to play a gamist function in a traditional design, and ensures that they play a narrativist function as well/instead.

One example is its solution to the problem of "the face guy does all the talking" - by requiring advancement to depend upon a range of difficulties of checks, including sometimes near-impossible ones, it gives players an incentive not to always bring all their available dice, or all their best abilities, to bear on a situation. And it offers the assurance that, if you fail, your PC may suffer but the game will keep going (no defaulting to death/TPK as in some approaches to D&D).

These features of the mechanics and of resolution appeal to the players' gamist instincts - what risks do I have an incentive to take? - but produce Story Now as an output.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I'm not going to quibble over gamist vs narrativist here. One way of analysing it might be to say that BW sets up hooks/mechanics that might be seen to play a gamist function in a traditional design, and ensures that they play a narrativist function as well/instead.

One example is its solution to the problem of "the face guy does all the talking" - by requiring advancement to depend upon a range of difficulties of checks, including sometimes near-impossible ones, it gives players an incentive not to always bring all their available dice, or all their best abilities, to bear on a situation. And it offers the assurance that, if you fail, your PC may suffer but the game will keep going (no defaulting to death/TPK as in some approaches to D&D).

These features of the mechanics and of resolution appeal to the players' gamist instincts - what risks do I have an incentive to take? - but produce Story Now as an output.

I agree with that. It is more or less what I was aiming for above. I don't pretend to be inside Luke Crane's head (which could be unpleasant ), but he has said explicitly that BW is traditional, not Forge Narrative. I take his explanation for that statement to correspond to what you said above. I read Forge dogma on Story Now to say that if you don't make Story Now the primary creative agenda, you don't get "story now".

Whereas BW tells the players and GM to (mostly) unleash their inner power-gamers and push the mechanics hard (albeit only with the limits of the fiction). The harder they push, the more and better "narrative" they get. Both elements (well-written beliefs and hard, gamist push) must be present for BW to work at its best. That's actually the hardest part of BW for me--finding a time when the group has the necessary energy to push it that hard for a whole session, with our sessions so long.

BW delivers little "n", normal "narrative" in spades. I'm not sure it really hits Story Now according to the technical definition of the term. (I'd say it hits the practical definition of what Story Now ought to be, but that's another discussion.)