Do you still feel the wonder you had in your childhood games?

[Silver Moon]

Yes, I still feel that wonder.

I feel it every time I game at Piratecat's House. I know that if I walk into there with no expectations other than that I am going to get to play a great game that is what I will receive. I strongly encourage any of you in the New England area to attend future Boston ENWorld game events, you'll see what I mean.


I will also be starting a group this fall for my twelve-year-old daughter and some of her friends. I am very much looking forward to seeing the game again through the eyes of beginners.

 

[DragonLancer]

I'm sorry to say that I kinda lost my sense of wonder a long long time ago.

The problem is (for me at least) that everything is now about the system. Using D20 as the example system, when I bought 3.0 I was amazed at the new system. It was great, a change to what I had played previously, and full of cool ideas. But then after about a year or so of playing, the SOW vanished as the game became more and more about the rules and how best to use them. I think thats why I am so against the idea of what we tend to refer to as powergaming and rules-lawyering.

At the moment I am taking time off DMing to just play, and hopefully reinvigorate myself.

 

[arwink]

Yes, I still feel that wonder.

I feel it every time I game at Piratecat's House. I know that if I walk into there with no expectations of than that I am going to get to play a great game that is what I will recieve. I strongly encourage any of you in the New England area to attend future Boston ENWorld game events, you'll see what I mean.

While I've never played in a Boston game day, this does remind me of a couple of recent convention experiences. Both as a player and a GM, I've had the priveledge of being involved in some damn fine games that both shook the foundations of what I thought a game could be as well as sweeping me up in the moment and letting me forget that it was just a game.

 

[BryonD]

You know, these days I run the kind of games I dreamed of running when I was a kid.

Heh, well, that is certainly true for me as well.
But I don't see that and the "sense of wonder" as being on the same axis.

 

[arwink]

Heh, well, that is certainly true for me as well.
But I don't see that and the "sense of wonder" as being on the same axis.

Then we're talking about different things.

When I was a kid, I threw in wierd and wonderful things without knowing how to handle them. Players would arrive, go "wow, that's wierd" then proceed to treat the encounter just like any other encounter after the mechanical effect of the wierdness (10d6 damage for falling onto the roof, for example, or taking the potions that let them stand on the cloud) was bypassed. There was wonder there, sure, but it was momentary and fleeting, never really having the impact that I wanted on the game.

These days I routinely look back at my old dungeons or the influences on my old game, and I recreate the same motiffs with a better sense of setting the scene and thinking through how it will have an affect on the encounter.

When I was twelve, fighting the necromancer Ghulan Shauth in his toadstool tower was just another dungeon. Two years ago, fighting the necromancer Ghulan Shauth in his living toadstool tower was the kind of adventure that my players still remember because of the location, the unusual denizens and the creepy vibe.

At age twelve, I flubbed the impact of all sorts of encounters. Fighting dread linorms while dangling from a chain high above the lair, fighting vampire legions as they climbed the outside of the tower the PC's were standing on, encountering a room with a magic wall covered in bloody hearts that were pulled still beating from the chest of those who entered. They were cool, yes, but just another encounter in a series of similar encounters.

The sense of wonder isn't just in conception, it's in execution. While I was probably better at the former fifteen or so years ago, the execution fell appart. These days I can take the same ideas and make them something special.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I have it more than I did as a child though I often get in different contexts or in response to different variables of the game.

I'm far more interested in the people I play with than I was as a child, among other things.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I do miss it, but the sense of wonder still shows up now and then.

Killing a goblin in one blow at 1st level in C&C

Picking up that first magic weapon (The Obsidian Pick) that was completely tricked out with 3e's magic item rules

Reading through the Lejendary Adventure Essentials boxed set (now if only I can convince the gaming group to give it a try)

Reading through a new campaign setting, or creating one myself, and feeling whole new vistas and ideas unfold

But I agree with the others that the sense of wonder has been replaced by a higher quality of gaming...more creative adventures, descriptive details, and deeper characters & NPCs.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I tried to figure out where my sense of wonder comes from and as best I can tell it's the realization that the there's more to experience in the world than I knew about and new avenues have opened up for me to explore. I base this on the situations in which I've experienced it, which not only include gaming, books, and movies, but also real life experiences such as

a) hiking, where I topped a mountain and found an area to explore totally inaccesible by car
b) on my first scuba dive
c) spelunking,
d) stepping off the plane in Manilla, knowing I would be there for years and knowing that I would have experiences with the people, culture, and places that I couldn't even guess what they would be
e) discovering that calculus could be used to solve real-world problems,
f) my introduction to marketing theory, and
g) getting married

Keeping this in mind, there are a couple of ways to promote sense of wonder in a game

1) Be a player, not a DM. The DM has to know everything, while a player explores the world a bit at a time, experiencing the SOW over an extended period.

2) Be genuinely creative. (that sounds pompous, but I can't think of a better way to put it) My few moments of SOW as a DM have been when things have just be flowing for me creatively and when I look down to see what I've written I can't figure out where it came from.

3) Draw from sources your players are not familiar with such as real-world culture and obscure fiction.

4) Promote versimillitude. If it doesn't feel like there's someting real to be explored, you don't get the SOW. To this end
a) Provide lots of details - exploration requires data
b) Have some rules as to how the world works and stay consistent with them. The players will figure them out eventually.

5) Promote immersion. If the world does no feel real, like you're actually there, there is no SOW. To this end
a) Provide a lot of sensory informatiion. All 5 senses and details on each

6) Limit player access and exposure to the rules. a DC 20 lock trap is a mechanic, not an experience.

7) Don't use baseline monsters. Your players already know all the details --> no SOW.

8) Use sympathetic characters. This applies more to fiction than RPGs, but if people don't care what happens to the characters, they won't be sufficiently involved to experience SOW.

From the point of view of GNS theory (yes I know it's flawed, but it's still sometimes useful) sense of wonder is IME a simulation phenomenon in that it's about experience and exploration. It's inhibited by gamist play since focusing on the game aspect of RPGs (as opposed to simulation and narration) requires understanding the rules and circumstances.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

To me the problem is overthinking. As others have mentioned, as kis most of us played in those dungeons where one room held 50 orcs, the room next door had a Remorhaz, and the room next to that contained a demon. Probably very few of us sat there thinking, "well, that makes no sense whatsoever!"

We used to play in a hobby store once a week. Kids from all over town would bike to the store to play. Everything was a one-shot. I had a folder full of character sheets that I would bring. "Oh, Dan is DMing a dungeon for 7th-9th level characters. I have that 8th level thief I ran in Paula's game last week..." No worries about continuity, we just played for the fun of playing. Characters may have had some personality and backstory built into them, but nothing to the level I try to do with my characters today.

As we matured, we started to desire more consistency. We started long-running campaigns. Suddenly characters had plans and ambitions, and at the same time, losing a high level character became a little more painful. Gaining levels wasn't just enjoyed for the glory of being more powerful, but became a step to gaining that next thing you want to do with the character.

Combine this with the fact that it is rare that a creature we encounter isn't immediately broken down into the context of abilities and probable stat blocks in the back of my mind. Even when meeting some new creature for the first time, it is still often analyzed in the context of the game mechanics, and so the wonder and mystery is diminshed.

I have learned to accept that the game will never be quite as much "fun" as it was when I was a kid, but that does not mean that I don't get as much enjoyment. It is just that the enjoyment is different; not quite as innocent and pure as it used to be.

Of course I see that same joy now reflected in the eyes of my children when they play; the challenge of a game of Chutes and Ladders, the excitement of running around the yard pretending to be a superhero. Part of me wishes I could just let go of everything and join them in that bliss. I cannot so I instead just bask in a new joy of watching them.

 

[Orius]

It's the difference between "He cast a Horrid Wilting spell so he must be a 15th level Wizard" and "Ow - how the hell did he do that and how can I learn it?"

One way I deal with this is to never tell the players what spell is being cast unless they successfully make a Spellcraft check. I instead describe the effect the spell has on the PCs. Many experiences players can out figure out the spell and counter it, if it's a spell that last several rounds, but that's not a big deal to me. It does occasionally lead to confusion when a player thinks a spell was cast instead of another, like the time they ran into a yuan-ti that dropped a deeper darkness on them and they thought it was just darkness:

Player: How many minutes are left on that darkness spell?
Me: (doing some quick number crunching on my calculator) 11,515.
Player: WHAT!?! How the hell many levels did that guy have?
Me: (evil grin): That wasn't a darkness spell....