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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4959421" data-attributes="member: 4937">Nice long response.  Too bad that it missed the point of the complaint it was responding too entirely.And as far as your justification goes, I'm not convinced at all that what you outline in the original post makes a monster more monsterous, and I'm beginning to get a bit of a 'badwrongfun' vibe from what you write.  But, to keep my complaint simple and to avoid getting into a shouting match, the basic problem with the whole essay you just wrote is that it contains a fundamental contridiction.  You on the one hand complain that a purely mechanical description leads to purely mechanical play in which the fundamental monsterousness of the monster is removed from the game, but at the same time you are advocating as a solution to this problem more mechanics.  Now, I'm as big believer in the idea that complex game mechanics help support depth of play as anyone, but I think in this case I find your prognosis flawed and your prescription ineffective.Simply put, the monsterous quality of a monster lies almost wholly in the proper application of fluff and flavor, and if this is missing, no amount of crunch can make up for it.  That 'thin disguise' you continually denigrate is precisely the answer to the problem.  I think you've gotten caught up in an implicitly system specific thinking (ei, you are writing about D&D) about the problem of engaging the players in the monsterousness of their foes and of emmersing them in an environment of fear, when, if you would step back, you'd realize that good story telling and good game mastering resolves the problem whether we are using FUDGE or CoC or well D&D.  You can make players afraid, panicy, uncertain, and awestruck regardless of system, it's all a matter of pacing, description, and player engagement.  (Read some of the better story hours on EnWorld if you don't have personal experience with this truth).A lack of terror and horror in your game is not a problem for mechanics.  Nothing in the mechanics asserts that the characters or players necessarily know what they are facing.  Nothing in the mechanics of D&D or any other system I can think of makes a monster a predictable foe, and I don't even see how you can begin to advance that argument.  In 3rd edition in particular, in addition to the problem of not being able to recognize a monster from the DM's description, the player has to contend with not knowing what templates the monster might have, not knowing how advanced the monster might be, and not knowing whether and what sort of class levels the monster might have, to say nothing of not knowing whether this is a custom or customized monster that doesn't come right out of a book.  If Lovecraftian 'fear of the unknown' is lacking in a D&D game, the problem isn't that the system as written can't support it, but that the DM doesn't make use of the proper narrative techniques or the tools available to him.At best you can argue that some mechanics hinder or help the game to be emmersive (I would point to the use of minatures, for example), but I don't think you can say that monsters fail to instill fear and a sense of danger because of mechanics unless you are playing a game along the lines of Toon where the worst that can happen to a character is that they lose a scene.And that isn't even getting into the problem of the fact that dangerous doesn't seem to mean what you think it means, since a crewed M1A2 tank is by any objective measure dangerous, threatening, and terrifying.  I think you are trying to describe some other quality than 'dangerous' when you complain that a reskinned modern weapon isn't truly 'dangerous' or 'a threat'.</blockquote>

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