Killing the sense of wonder

[pawsplay]

Your mother.

I mean, seriously, since I already read all her stats, the sense of wonder is just all gone.

 

[roguerouge]

Games last only 2 hours now due to aging effects on the players.

Waiting for players to role the dice.

The size of battle mats making outdoor encounters the same as indoor ones. Battle boards in general, actually.

Players no longer map; DMs do.

Standard action/move action/free action/swift action combined with AoOs grinds every unusual decision to a halt. It would be so much simpler to swashbuckle if it was just two actions/round, one of which can be an attack.

Bardic "songs" that last three seconds.

The way that modules make scouting a suicidal option, rather than allowing for the sense of wonder and fear of exploring alone in the dark. Seriously, mess up once in scouting and it's you vs. an encounter designed for four people.

 

[Heathen72]

The last thing I care about is what square is character X standing in. After all, the space the action takes place in isn't actually gridded so why have the players obsessed over the area as if it were?

Exactly. I enjoyed using minis much more back when we played 2nd Ed, when they were merely colourful visual representations of the approximate positions of the characters, not surrogate chips on a wargaming board. Sadly, I recently played in a 4th Ed game where the DM refused to let us use miniatures, insisting instead on using counters, because it was easy to put buttons on them to indicate who was marked, etc. Sigh.

It's a sad malaise when the rules get in the way of the sense of wonder. I remember my dismay when I was dutifully 'informed' by a player in a short 3rd Ed game I was running that every magic effect had to be codified and, indeed, balanced. We had, for instance, to be able to tell how a magical effect impacted on, say, undead. It seemed like any magic item I created had to have a series of suffixs attached to it, like a list of degrees at the end of the name of some oxford scholar. But it wasn't about making the items more impressive. It was about pigeon holing them.

I don't want it to look like I am bashing the later editions btw; frankly, D&D has suffered from these sorts of issues all along. Consider the extensive monster manuals and long spell lists; in some ways they are virtues, but defining the world so extensively can have its problems. For instance, in the first post in this thread I mentioned that how the response of my players to the freaky roof climbing baby was to assume it was 'Spiderclimb'. I was hoping to elicit a sense of supernatural horror, but all the players seemed to witness was a spell effect. It brought home to me how 'unmagical' magic had become - in a world filled with magic, magic was no longer special. Ultimately the myriad list of spells had made the world a smaller place, where magic was all mapped out. It felt like there was no wildernesses left, no place on the chart where the only label was "here be dragons". The lack of frontiers was killing the sense of wonder.

 

[ExploderWizard]

For instance, in the first post in this thread I mentioned that how the response of my players to the freaky roof climbing baby was to assume it was 'Spiderclimb'. I was hoping to elicit a sense of supernatural horror, but all the players seemed to witness was a spell effect. It brought home to me how 'unmagical' magic had become - in a world filled with magic, magic was no longer special. Ultimately the myriad list of spells had made the world a smaller place, where magic was all mapped out. It felt like there was no wildernesses left, no place on the chart where the only label was "here be dragons". The lack of frontiers was killing the sense of wonder.

To fair though, the typical D&D universe is quite magical and a great many things that would be truly terrifying to witness in our own world have a perfectly logical, if magical explanation in the D&D world.

Context within a genre is important. If your players had witnessed that baby while roleplaying people in our own world the creepy factor would be more likely. We have to start with the baseline rules for the universe that the average guy knows before we can begin to determine what sorts of phenomena will produce fear or unease.

Standard D&D magic is fairly predictable. A given spell will produce the expected results. If wizards are even remotely familiar to the typical person then a logical reaction to something otherwise unexplainable is going to be " a wizard did it somehow". Even if that person is not familliar with the laws of magic or has any knowledge of what a wizard can or cannot do, the presence of actual magic that exists in the world will make even the meekest peasant harder to mystify than anyone from our world.

To even begin to justify magic feeling "really" magical it would have to be much more rare and less understood by the people of the game world. Rare enough that most people could live their entire lives and never experience or see the effects of magic. With adventurers and bad guy casters running all over the place slinging magic missiles, fireballs and the like this would be hard to do and still keep the game resembling what happens during typical D&D play.

Keeping standard D&D magic in play and still producing that sense of wonder requires there be a magic behind the magic. A wild type of magic with effects unexplainable by the "normal" laws of magic. The laws that govern this magic don't need to be balanced in game terms since it is important that the players never discover how this magic operates. Magical theory or "arcana" should be irrelevant to this type of magic. Let the players try and apply such logic but it should be as productive as trying to apply the laws of physics to a Warner Bros. cartoon. Encountering the occasional item or rare effect that has no logical (or magical) explanation is sometimes enough to keep players guessing.

 

[Rel]

Lots of things can happen to bring the game down. Once in a while (thankfully not too often) we have a night where we're all together but the game never really gets on track because something is distracting us too much. Could be that we're all excited about something else or maybe somebody is having trouble with work/family/whatever that they want to talk about (the guys I game with are all people I've been friends with for close to 20 years). When that happens we try to recognize that it just ain't happenin' that night and relax, have a few drinks and go with the conversation.

When the game is on I find that one thing that can drag the mood down is if a combat feels like we're just grinding through monster hit points. When the minis are just sliding around a relatively featureless surface then it feels more like a boardgame. It helps to have something else going on. Interesting terrain or environmental effects or some great, monstrous contraption. It creates something out of the ordinary that the players must contend with and helps (IMHO) generate sensory inputs that make the scene feel more alive.

Combine that with a decent story that actively tries to engage with the PC personalities and immersion gets a whole lot easier.

 

[Umbran]

Keeping standard D&D magic in play and still producing that sense of wonder requires there be a magic behind the magic. A wild type of magic with effects unexplainable by the "normal" laws of magic. The laws that govern this magic don't need to be balanced in game terms since it is important that the players never discover how this magic operates.

Alternatively, how that magic works can be one of the things that drives events in the world, such that the characters have to learn it - by the end of the campaign they've figured out enough to deal with the situation. The magic is slowly peeled away over time, but by the time it is fully exposed, the game's done.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Alternatively, how that magic works can be one of the things that drives events in the world, such that the characters have to learn it - by the end of the campaign they've figured out enough to deal with the situation. The magic is slowly peeled away over time, but by the time it is fully exposed, the game's done.

That works great too. Keep em guessing till the end.

 

[Quickleaf]

Asking for battle music for the final battle versus the dracolich and... my friends' 3 year old puts on the alphabet song. Epic. And us DMs think we're in control

 

[Derren]

1. Characters (including the PCs of other players) who are very obvious clones from movie or (other media) characters.

2. Using the real world modern society in a non modern or even historic game.

 

[Richards]

My solution was to buy a few big sheets of poster sized graph paper and draw battlemats ahead of time.

I do almost the same, but I use the back side of desk calendar sheets and have to draw my own grids on it (using a pencil and a yardstick) before getting to the details of the given battlemat.

Optionally, sometimes I make geomorphs of each room out of posterboard, cardboard, or construction paper. It pretty much depends on the situation.

Johnathan