I've posted about this to a writing forum to which I frequently post, but in a different way since the people there are not gamers.

Everybody who plays D&D or any other fantasy RPG knows that magic works, basically just because it does and it doesn't need any explanation for it to work. People who play horror RPGs know that supernatural beasts are just there and need to be fought against (or roleplayed, if you play White Wolf games). And in sci fi, the fancy gear just works, again, without explanation. Everybody just wants to get on with the adventure and not have to be burdened by minutia.

What do you do, as a GM or as a player, to keep the sense of wonder alive? What do you do to strike awe in the hearts and minds of your players when you confront them with things that are "ordinary" aspects of fantastic game worlds but which are clearly not of the world that we know?

Describe fantastic scenery. I don't mean castles to invade, or such. I mean waterfalls that are miles high. Trees that glitter in the sun like gold, or shine at night like a reflection of the moon.

Describe the storms violet lightning which dances across a black sky, or the moons flying free across the sky. Describe different stars that wander in new shapes and patterns, or the fish which swim that are familiar but different. The Ruby scales of the red trout. The scintillating eggs of the glow frog.

Make the world magical, not weird. Just a step beyond our own. Deer the size of horses of our age. Glorious white harts.

Make the world magical. The wonder will come. I love magic that isn't reliable as well. D&D is problematic that way--to work as it does and be effective it has to be reliable. Yet at the same time its reliability strikes the sense of wonder out of it. Not silly "Wild Magic" just strange. No two spell castings alike. Maybe the components change and the hours of recovery are searching for the components that now work for it. Speaking with the spirits/djinn what have you to uncover the new spell words even for the simplest spells. Sure you can light a candle on your own, or maybe summon a shield. But to learn the fireball and use it you must research the symmetry of stars and planetary alignments for the day you plan to use it. Know the name for fire this week in the tongue of the elementals of Fire...

Quote from: ABPMS;406851Everybody who plays D&D or any other fantasy RPG knows that magic works, basically just because it does and it doesn't need any explanation for it to work. People who play horror RPGs know that supernatural beasts are just there and need to be fought against (or roleplayed, if you play White Wolf games). And in sci fi, the fancy gear just works, again, without explanation. Everybody just wants to get on with the adventure and not have to be burdened by minutia.

Amen brother!

Quote from: ABPMS;406851What do you do, as a GM or as a player, to keep the sense of wonder alive? What do you do to strike awe in the hearts and minds of your players when you confront them with things that are "ordinary" aspects of fantastic game worlds but which are clearly not of the world that we know?

Speaking strictly for myself, my "sense of wonder" button is the same as my "not in Kansas anymore" button. Before writingh this post, I never thought of myself as an "immersionist" (is that a word?), but maybe that's what I am.

As a GM, I try to keep descriptions as brief and evocative as possible, and I try do offer a little "immersion". It's tricky as all hell, of course; if you describe things which are entirely outside players' experiences, they're not likely to relate. I find that evoking images from day-to-day life, and framing them in fantastic situations, works fairly consistently to me.

This can be as prosaic as describing the foul stench of rotten meat or open sewage which accompanies a shuffling zombie, or as unusual as comparing the sheen of a red dragon's scales to the rich, metallic red of a brand-new Ferrari Testarossa (I usually avoid this sort of weird juxtaposition in, say, a D&D game, but this serves to illustrate the concept).

As a player, I have to feel that I'm in a very different predicament from my day-to-day life. I want to know what the dungeon looks like, and smells like, and whether it's hot or cold or musty or humid or whatever. Mind you, if the GM isn't providing those bits, I'm filling in the blanks myself (I do have an overactive imagination), but if he does, I'm glad.

I'm also thrilled by the unknown, the new, the different. If you're the sort of guy who has a 3-ring binder with 20 pages on why your Elves are different, complete with notes on everything from funeral customs to culinary practices -- and if you can spin a decent adventure out of this information (this of course is crucial) -- then I'd love to play in your game. I can be a bit of a stickler for consistency, but game expediency (and, for a lesser degree, Rule of Cool) will make me waive my suspension of disbelief. and overlook anything short of a gaping hole.

I don't have the time to create huge settings with tons of information, so as a GM I'm usually a bottom-up, make-up-as-you-go setting builder. Still, I try to insert odd cultural tidbits which I feel make the world more consistent and lifelike.

Of course, those are all cheap tricks pertatining to form. If the adventure's crappy, not all the trickery in the world would help.

I'm not sure this is the sort of answer you're looking for, but I hope that helps (and spurs some debate).

Quote from: Silverlion;406865Make the world magical, not weird. Just a step beyond our own. Deer the size of horses of our age. Glorious white harts.

Damn, Silverlion conveyed in a paragraph what took me one huge post to lay out.

Quote from: Silverlion;406865I love magic that isn't reliable as well. D&D is problematic that way--to work as it does and be effective it has to be reliable. Yet at the same time its reliability strikes the sense of wonder out of it. Not silly "Wild Magic" just strange. No two spell castings alike. Maybe the components change and the hours of recovery are searching for the components that now work for it. Speaking with the spirits/djinn what have you to uncover the new spell words even for the simplest spells. Sure you can light a candle on your own, or maybe summon a shield. But to learn the fireball and use it you must research the symmetry of stars and planetary alignments for the day you plan to use it. Know the name for fire this week in the tongue of the elementals of Fire...

Great ideas! In precise opposition to the game's evolution, I've been searching for ways to make D&D magic more Vancian (as in, closer to Vance's magnificent, baroque imaginings) and this might be it. Solid gold! :hatsoff:

Just about any system of 'magic' I can think of... real world or fantasy... implies fairly detailed explanations for how it works... regardless if all those details are spelled out for the reader.  Magicians are implied to have studied for years to gain some sort of knowledge... to be able to control those sorts of powers.
That's what gives various forms of magic their flavor... and those flavors are what draw me to them. The 'minutae' is a big part of what makes the 'wonder'... for me.
Not that all that knowledge should make the magic reliable...'
(My sense of it is much better voiced by Vreeg a few posts down...)

It's one of the reasons Earthdawn magic feels a lot more 'alive' to me than the magic in a lot of fantasy games... spells and items have detailed histories and individualized relationships to the people who use them. They don't 'just work'.

I've been re-reading my way through the Cadwallon book and that setting, Aarklash, feels very high magic to me, full of wonder, much more so than the average D&D setting. Part of that is the impossible architecture of the city. There are enormous towers and bridges and platforms.
There is also this cosmopolitan feeling to all the fantastical elements... the streets are alive with magical effects and creatures.
A lot of standard fantasy settings just feel like medieval history with magic and monsters tacked on... with no thought as to how high powered magic would alter everything... even down to the bricks in the buildings... no thought to how the presence of fantastic beings would require all sorts of changes to infrastructure. Most of the time magic just comes up in combat.

I don't think the sense of wonder dies that easily. I still love Superman. Millions of people love Superman, no matter how old and played out it should be... it just isn't.

I keep it going, not by trying to come up with something odd and crazy that no one has thought of before, but by coming up with stories of people being great and terrible that you can relate to and get behind.

I'm in the field so this might be more brief and less complete than I would like.

But I need to connect a few things here, and amplify another.

First off, both words have been used but I need to place it in a proper context.  The sense of wonder is contingent on immersion, and the amount you get of the first directly infers the amount of the latter you can attain.  I might make this Vreeg's Fifth Law of setting design.  One must step into the looking glass, to some degree, to see things in more than one or 2 dimensions.  Without the feeling of some level of contiguity and dramatic velocity, this sense of wonder is impossible to achieve.

But this also means that I agree with Akrasia...creating a sense of wonder requires more complete undertsnding of magic (At least from the GM's standpoint).  The laws of magic may be wierd and strange, but they must function as laws to achieve immersion.  One of the definitions of achieved immersion is when a PC starts to expect results from campaign-specific events..
In magic, I think part of the sense of wonder is created by the opposite of magic happening just because it does. The sense of wonder comes from the player feeling like they can, at some level, feel and see as their character does, and this comes from consistency.

Quote from: LordVreeg;406880I'm in the field so this might be more brief and less complete than I would like.

But I need to connect a few things here, and amplify another.

First off, both words have been used but I need to place it in a proper context.  The sense of wonder is contingent on immersion, and the amount you get of the first directly infers the amount of the latter you can attain.  I might make this Vreeg's Fifth Law of setting design.  One must step into the looking glass, to some degree, to see things in more than one or 2 dimensions.  Without the feeling of some level of contiguity and dramatic velocity, this sense of wonder is impossible to achieve.

But this also means that I agree with Akrasia...creating a sense of wonder requires more complete undertsnding of magic (At least from the GM's standpoint).  The laws of magic may be wierd and strange, but they must function as laws to achieve immersion.  One of the definitions of achieved immersion is when a PC starts to expect results from campaign-specific events..
In magic, I think part of the sense of wonder is created by the opposite of magic happening just because it does. The sense of wonder comes from the player feeling like they can, at some level, feel and see as their character does, and this comes from consistency.

I really, honestly feel like Vancian casting in D&D is a block to immersion.

Quote from: Cranewings;406890I really, honestly feel like Vancian casting in D&D is a block to immersion.

As do I.
which may, at the outset, seem in contradiction to my earlier statement.

But I got away from Vancian magic because it made no sense to me or my players. Despite the rules on how it worked, there was little understanding on why it worked.   I think back, and that was one of the 3 original reasons why I had to leave the system.  
Vancian magic was always dissociated for me; a ruleset built for the sake of game logic with no nod to setting logic.

Appeal to all of the senses and be as vivid as possible when you need to be to get an image across, but don't be too specific.

Learn when to be subtle and when to be obvious.  If an NPC is normal by game-world standards, but weird by ours, drop hints about oddities in your descriptions but do not plainly state what makes them different or weird -- that just keeps the players from coming up with their own image of the thing you're describing -- less is more, basically.  You want a feeling of weirdness to pick at the players.

Going along with that, even when being obvious about how epic/awesome/different something is, avoid being overzealous/laundry-list in your detailing.  Tolkien didn't describe the Balrog in explicit detail, but he described what it was like.  Same thing with a lot of creatures in the Cthulhu mythos.  Bring out the wondrous aspects of the creature or thing you're describing, but leave enough room for the players to fill in some of the details themselves -- their imaginations are certainly more capable of filling in the blanks with awesome stuff than your descriptive rant is.

Quote from: Cranewings;406890I really, honestly feel like Vancian casting in D&D is a block to immersion.

See, recognizing this is a good thing. By contrast, I don't find it a block to immersion, but if either you do or your players do, a lecture on its roots in Vance is not getting anywhere. There's usually not much point in explaining why a joke is funny to an audience that didn't laugh.

One general point is to watch and listen to the players closely and make a mental note of what seems to grab them and focus on that. If they hush up and seem on the edge of their seats when you talk about the moaning of the approaching undead, remember that. If their reaction is to make "braaaains" jokes, that tactic might not work.

I think overdoing description can kill the sense of wonder, as the separately wondrous elements can starts to blend into a mystic haze. Focusing on one or maybe two details, expecially a striking incongruity, can really grab people. If you have a burial chamber of gray stone, filled with dust and cobwebs, and there is a crack in the central sarcophagus of which is growing a curling green vine ending in a huge, lush orchid, I would find the orchid very striking, compared to seeing it in a jungle grove.

Avoid overexplaining elements of the campaign world. If too much of a monster's ecological details are known, they start becoming exotic animals more than monsters. I am also a fan of having magical effects in the world not necessarily in keeping with with PC spellcasters can do; overall I prefer the behind the curtain workings of magic to be inexplicable to the adventurers.

As GM, I think it's good to periodically "refresh" your own warehouse of ideas with reading, visual art, etc; movies are good too, but in my opinion less so because they give you the whole picture, rather than leaving half the experience incomplete for your imagination to work through. You could try an 'acting class' type of exercise where you take an illustration, look at is closely for a minute or so, then put it away and try describing the scene as if to your players in a sentence or two. Take a mental note of what was the memorable part of the illustration to you.

I think that "modern" (let's say after the 70's or so - maybe "post-D&D!") fantasy novels can be great for situation and "story" ideas, but are often poorer "sense of wonder" training because they are frequently very verbose and large scale, and
furthermore tend even when serious to have a revisionist quality, or to comment on the conventions of fantasy in a way that assumes familiarity, rather than introducing them as new. If you haven't read, say, Howard's Conan (or other) stories in a while (or at all!) take a look at them and see what, if anything, you respond to in them - in his original stories, Howard is skilled at efficient, compelling description with a touch of the exotic - there are lessons in there even outside the realm of Sword & Sorcery. Clark Ashton Smith and Dunsany are other good choices, I think, for "refresher courses."

I also think it's a good idea to reacquaint oneself with folklore sources; if something is a folk tale, clearly it found resonance with a reasonably large number of people for a long time, and may still at your table. Even though everyone "knows," say, Grimm's fairy tales, just taking 20 minutes and reading a tale anew lets you rediscover the *specifics* of the tale, not just the general idea, or worse, the postmodern joke that's easy to make about any old story. If there's an element in the text that you didn't remember, or otherwise surprises you, you can build on that in the adventure.

Collections of fairytales and folktales also have the advantage that they're very distilled. In a classic dungeon style game, one tale can equal one "dungeon room" or one "house in the wilderness. Some examples that might be good are "The Complete
Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm" by Jack Zipes "Italian Folktales" by Italo Calvino, "Russian Fairy Tales" by Aleksandr Afanasev, "American Indian Myths and Legends" by Richard Erdoes, "Japanese Tales" by Royall Tyler, etc. (or most stuff from the Pantheon Folklore library, etc.) I think a good trick for gaming is not to tie the tale you're reading to its 'home culture' for the adventure - no reason not to adapt and idea from the Arabian nights to a game set in Feudal Japan or Eberron's Sharn for that matter. The juxtaposition can help it feel new.

On the other hand, if the spareness and modern organization start getting a little clinical, various original epics, things like that, are great inspiration that usually have a more "personal touch." They are also generally episodic enough that you can open to an arbitrary section and read at your leisure. As a basic example, if you haven't taken a look at the Odyssey in a while, just take a look at the Cyclops or Underworld or Lotus Eaters episodes - particularly, try an english version you haven't read before just to meet the text anew - it's just an RPG, not a term paper, so you don't have to worry about the academic minefield that is translation theory - just see how the familiar story is different if it's your first time with Chapman's wry jacobean couplets or Lombardo's terse modern lines. Other winners are Apollonios' Argonautica, Statius' Thebaid, The Mabinogion, The Tain (especially ludicrous and violent), The Journey to the West, The Song of Rolund, The Nibelungenlied, Grettir's Saga, Seven Viking Romances, etc, etc.

RPGs are a verbal form; much of my advice boils down to "read more, learn from that," I guess.

Make monsters Monstrous.   Don't play a fantasy monster as just something with HP, it should be something out of a nightmare.   Make a dividing line between "natural" and "unnatural" creatures and the "unnatural" ones don't have to follow the same laws of ecology, biology and modern science because those are The Monsters.

James Raggi has a good discussion about this in his Esoteric Creature Generator book.  He suggests that all Monsters should be unique encounters.  There is only ONE of XYZ monster and they don't have names...unless the beastie has developed a reputation "The Haunter of the Northern Marsh" or "Crawler Beneath the Waves"

As for D&D Magic, I am very cool with letting players know that all magic is Wild and you never know how it will behave under the wrong circumstances.   I also put some of the burden on players.   If you cast a spell, I often want to know what the effect looks like, what sounds or F/X come along with the manifestation.  

It also helps to have player's personalize their magic.   Have them rename the generic spells and define their special F/X.   One of my favorites was a player whose "magic missile" was "Ethereal Sharkbite" where as a ranged attack, a small shark's jaw would appear and bite the foe.    None of the mechanics were effected.  Just the F/X.

Quote from: Spinachcat;406926James Raggi has a good discussion about this in his Esoteric Creature Generator book.  He suggests that all Monsters should be unique encounters.  There is only ONE of XYZ monster and they don't have names...unless the beastie has developed a reputation "The Haunter of the Northern Marsh" or "Crawler Beneath the Waves"

I believe that "Gaming" is the problem with this. A "Monster" is believed to need to be stated up and balanced. Few rule systems make this easy for the average GM. Because of this, "standard" monsters are used and their uniqueness is lost. Even when a lot of unique monsters are provided in a manual, it seems to be a common trend that they are cut from the book and pasted into a game with little concern for "fit". It seems not uncommon that multiples are also rubber stamped into an area to "fill" it.

QuoteIt also helps to have player's personalize their magic.   Have them rename the generic spells and define their special F/X.   One of my favorites was a player whose "magic missile" was "Ethereal Sharkbite" where as a ranged attack, a small shark's jaw would appear and bite the foe.    None of the mechanics were effected.  Just the F/X.

This is the method used by Savage Worlds, and a great hue and cry is raised about the "lack of spells" in the rule book.
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Quote from: Spinachcat;406926It also helps to have player's personalize their magic.   Have them rename the generic spells and define their special F/X.   One of my favorites was a player whose "magic missile" was "Ethereal Sharkbite" where as a ranged attack, a small shark's jaw would appear and bite the foe.    None of the mechanics were effected.  Just the F/X.

I've been doing this kind of thing for at least 20 years now.

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