Sense of wonder?

[Mark]

...I don't get it.

...and once you do, you can never go back to not knowing. I think the primary trouble with many games is the reliance on using the knowledge from the written page as a carrot. Once those pages have been turned, much of the mystery is gone. I believe the "sense of wonder" is best instilled in the moment. The rules and the trappings of the game should be downplayed as much as can be. They are finite, but there are conceivably an infinite number of potential moments.

 

[S'mon]

I definitely think that previous editions packaged a 'sense of wonder' in with the rulebooks, and 3e doesn't. It's not just nostalgia for 1e, I never played Basic/Expert D&D but I bought the Rules Cyclopedia recently and I can see the s.o.w. in there. Some 3rd party products have it, WoTC stuff doesn't. I play 3e because it's a good baseline ruleset, but it took me a long time to realise that it doesn't come packaged with much inherent flavour like earlier editions (or most other games) & you have to add your own.

 

[S'mon]

Castles & Crusades does give s.o.w. (despite some clunky writing); OGL Conan does too (brilliantly). I guess Slaine does but the core book is far too skimpy to evoke the setting properly. d20 Traveller rather seems missing it when compared to earlier editions, rather as if d20 has leached out Trav's inherent s.o.w. I hated d20 Star Wars which seemed to lack WEG d6 version's s.o.w. _and_ huge mechanical problems also. Grim Tales has none of the 'pulp adventure' s.o.w. I was expecting, a big disappointment. Green Ronin and Troll Lord Games both seem good at s.o.w., in their different ways. Necromancer Games aren't so good as Ronin or TLG at providing inherent s.o.w. but judging by Lost City of Barakus and their free stuff their products seem mostly good toolkits to work with in providing your own s.o.w.

 

[Quasqueton]

Sorry to say this, but Mark and S'mon, you are making no sense whatsoever to me. Mark has posted gobbledegook, and S'mon needs to define "sense of wonder".

Quasqueton

 

[Mark]

I've read in threads here, many times, this concept that D&D3 lost/discarded the "sense of wonder" in D&D. Can someone explain this idea to me?

It seems to me that any "sense of wonder" with this (or any) game slowly seeps away with personal experience with the game, not with a rule set. Unless the Players are reading books reserved for the DM.

In short, if your "sense of wonder" is informed by the words written on the page, as opposed to coming from the moments around the table (actual gameplay) then as soon as the players have read through the books there is a danger that "sense of wonder" will be gone.

To expand on that, if a player's sense of wonder comes from not knowing that a creature has a certain number of HD, once that number of HD is known, the wonder is gone. If, however, the DM builds the sense of wonder around an idea that the creature has hidden a strip of cloth in a secret pocket within its trousers, and that piece of cloth is made only in one place (two countries west) and imported by the Archduke, whom the creature serves, and the players use a Knowledge (local) check DC 27 to have a "Eureka" moment to discover such a thing and solve the mystery of who is behind a rash of killings, then the HD of the creature doesn't make much difference.

A DM needs to be more than what is written for him in the books he buys.


"Gobbledegook", indeed!

 

[francisca]

I play in a 1e group which has been together 20+ years. The DM keeps coming up with new and exciting things for us to kill. He modifies monsters, and keeps a good plot going along. The wonder probably isn't there, having been replaced by paranoia and a sense of impending doom.

I am DMing a 1e game, and 3 of the players are fairly new to the game, having cut their teeth in B/X with B2. The wonder is there for them, and it's fun to introduce them to these things. Of course, I've fill them with a sene of dread and paranoia as well.

 

[Rel]

Place me in the camp that says 3E does not seem in any way responsible for any loss of the "sense of wonder" some talk about.

I played AD&D for many years and I recall those days fondly. But that's pretty much just nostalgia for the bygone days when I had little to do but hang out with my pals and game for 12-14 hours at a time on weekends and in the summer. Not to mention the wonderment that came with slowly coming to grasp that a lifetime of wonderful stories and games awaited me at the gaming table thanks to these books.

As for the whole "once you know the monster stats from the MM the wonder is gone" thing, I'm not getting that either. Even leaving aside the notion of changing monster descriptions so that the players don't know what they're up against, 3E has an entirely integrated method of adding templates and class levels to critters to make them "more than they appear".

In AD&D you saw a Goblin or an Orc and you viewed this as a threat or not based on what level you were. In 3E you look at a Goblin or Orc then you might be wondering whether he's a Rogue or a Psion or a Wizard or Fighter or Paladin 3/Blackguard 7 or whatever. That might be a regular Ogre Mage or a Half-Fiend Ogre or a Gnomish Illusionist with 13 ranks in Bluff.

Some might say that "a creative GM could have put those things in earlier editions of the game too". I won't disagree. But I've only got so much time and so much creativity to devote to the game. Knowing that I can simply slap on some class levels or a template to a critter to get the desired effect gives me a way to quickly add interesting facets to a creature without me having to make up the rules myself. That lets me devote more time and creativity to the story itself and that's what I'd rather be doing.

To me a better set of rules is a better set of tools is a means to a better game. Whether it is filled with wonderment or not is primarily up to me as the GM, not the system.

 

[MonsterMash]

I maintain sense of wonder with my descriptions. The exact same set of mechanics with a variant description will have experienced players experiencing a sense of wonder just as much as a rank newbie will with the garden-variety orc.

Probably as good a way as I've heard.

Of course I just wonder why I spent money on new rulebooks when I had perfectly good old stuff sitting around.

 

[Gentlegamer]

And the rulebooks aren't fun reading. That's a bigger deal than I would have thought until I started in with the C&C stuff.

Reading the d20 books is like reading stereo instructions . . .

 

[S'mon]

s.o.w. = that "Oh, wow!" feeling that fills you with inspiration.