How to bring back wonder to pathfinder


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Hi folks,

i was just thinking about the things that make RPG interesting and wonderous.
Or more to the point, what takes all the wonder out of it.

Personally i think there are several things.

1. Magic items are far to frequent and far to easy to obtain. You can even build the stuff yourselfes for halve the costs.

2. Magic items follow certain rules. They are all mechanically set. There is nothing wonderous or special about them.

3. In general i think most APs, items etc. follow the rules to vigerously. Wonderous stuff is stuff that is rare, special, unique, not easy to understand and non-mundane.

In Pathfinder, magic is mostly mundane, magic items are mundane and most stuff you find is not really useful and will be thrown on top of the large pile of loot destined to be sold. Most things that happen can be explained by rules or plot. But things that defy explaination (at least for the moment) create this feeling of "WTF just happened?" or "Wow, that awesome!".

And i'm kinda missing that in most APs.

I would really love to hear your thoughts about this topic.
Do you think i'm wrong? Do you think there is a problem but for other reasons that those i mentioned?

Or better yet:
If you agree, do you have ideas and measures that can be used to "reintroduce" wonder into Pathfinder, without throwing balance totally out of whack?

Thanks in advance!


Brakiri wrote:

Hi folks,

i was just thinking about the things that make RPG interesting and wonderous.
Or more to the point, what takes all the wonder out of it.

Personally i think there are several things. Etc Etc

Hi tall folk!!

First of all, dont run, my tribe wont eat your face just because you decided to write your thoughts, but since you did, they dont belong to you anymore.

Jokes aside.

I feel the same way. I think this is a problem caused by a missunderstanding of the setting we are playing in. Pathfinder is a "high fantasy" setting, so, if we want to make something feel wonderfull, we have two options.

1. Go back to the things that items and magic cant do; emotions, feelings, love relations, and decisions. Our players will be finding more than 50 woundrous items along their paths, but how many kind acts? how many redeemed enemys? how many kids looking at them with full open eyes while they say "there he is mom, there he is!" Its hard to me to find anything that makes me feel better than a gratefull NPC when i'm playing.

When the PC'S come back to a town after traveling and they find a statue with their faces, thats something a ring will never give to them.

2. Make something beyond understanding, just as you said. That doesnt mean to give the players an unbalanced item, nor a spell that any other person have. Maybe, just maybe, you can take their personal histories and use them to make your players feel amazing.
Maybe a fairy appears from nowhere and give the druid the last one flower of the moonlight, maybe the warrior finds clues that he has a unknown sister, or your rogue find the catacomb of an ancient guild of thieves, or your wizard enters into a sphere where he can literaly learn how to "see" magic and the consecuences of its use.

Wonder, that brilliant and magical emotion of us humans dont really need to come from items, but from the sensation that we are living an unforgettable moment in our history.

^^ hope i helped

Sovereign Court

It's a high fantasy setting...so embrace it. The problem most of times, people don't run it like high fantasy. There is fantasy and wonders literally everywhere. The problem you often run into, is trying to make it run like a low fantasy game or people get bugged down too much in "realism".

You have feys and the strange first world, dragons that control time and space, alien spaceships and laser guns, merchants from other dimensions, mythic realms to explore including mythic foes and npcs, gods sending their heralds, seas with mermaids that are 50 feet tall and higher, runelords with contingency that are still going thousand of years after their "death", a nation using undead as a work force, a nation runs by a Golden Wyrm Dragon, elixir of immortality, etc...

At least, that's just a sample of what's going in Golarion, not even taking into account the planes or the fact that people can travel to Earth quite literally or wizards making their own demiplanes etc...

So let players ride Hippogryphs, have them fight Erynes in the sky while quite possibly plummeting down to their death or emerging victorious, just go all the way out, don't hold back.


There are several arguments in favor of the current state:

1) AP designers don't know exactly what the PCs will need, so they try to cover everything. Which means more items - unless you pull tricks like transformative items.

2) The magical item the GM considers great can be a total disappointment for the player. And if the PC only gets gear every five sessions or so, the disappointment might be intense enough to leave the campaign outright.

3) A flow of (relatively) mundane items makes it easier to give each player roughly the same. The option to sell 'crap' also helps here - if you can't find anything interesting in the loot piles the GM throws at you, you can at least buy something.

4) Some people like their games in a predictable, controlled way - concepts like WBL and a steady flow of items contribute to that. Difficult to argue about taste...

5) The presence of many magic items supports the classes which don't have (much) magic on their own, reducing the gap to the casters. Which usually means more fun.

6) Actually, APs do have a few items which are exceptional. Minor artifacts are something you can introduce at low level already.

It's also about the presentation whether an item is perceived as a wonder. If you simply put a flaming longsword +1 into a treasure chest, it's just loot. But if you find such a sword at the remains of a dedicated troll hunter and soon after you encounter trolls which are totally afraid of the wielder, it will invoke way more emotions.


#1
Remember that this is a game, and that it was never the intent for the rules to get in the way of the narrative or having fun. The rules are there to create a flexible midpoint between a tactical, non-RPG and running around with your friends playing make believe.

#2
Have a talk with your gaming group. Any measures you take might be wasted unless everyone commits. Maybe everyone doen’t want the same changes, but I’m certain that some things can be agreed upon.

#3
Don’t be afraid to make up stuff, outside of the session or on the fly. In my personal experience, the players are usually on board as long as the changes add to the fun and aren’t there to screw them over somehow. Hopefully spontaneity will lead to some wonder. It sounds like you already have a passion to make the changes you want happen, so go for it.


Play with new/new-ish players who are full of wonder. I'm not the best GM, but my players are awesome. When the tiefling dies and finds herself facing a colossal holy symbol of Abadar, dead god of humanity, there's wonder there because the player is invested in the character and considers things from her perspective.

Not very helpful fo an existing game, I know.


I remember a panel from Phil Foglio's What's New with Phil and Dixie comic related to this. Mr. Foglio was pointing out the similarities between fantasy RPG stories and science fiction RPG stories. Both went to exotic places, fought monsters, etc. But he did find one difference.
Wizard: This wand was forged 353 years ago by Wizix the Wise in the volcano Eruptris in the Wisty Mountains of Quoldoom.
Spaceman: This ray gun? Sears & Roebuck, $13.99.

As for Brakiri's individual points:

1. When I played AD&D, magic items could be found but not made. This did not make them mystically fantastic, but it did make them precious. We kept every magic item, tried to use it, and sold it only if it proved useless to us.

2. Magic spells follow certain rules, too. It is the nature of the game: we need rules to figure out what happens. Even the random-effect Wand of Wonder uses strict rules about its random effects.

3. The Adventure Paths do have some back pages with unique magic items to spice up the adventure. Due to point #2 above, the magic items have to be described in detail. That means either using up space in the module that could have been used for more adventure, or saying, "See page X in Ultimate Equipment." And, of course, when PCs make their own magic items, they must follow the item creation rules, which are pretty restrictive to prevent creating overpowered equipment.

I added a houserule to my games that made PC-made magic items seem more exotic. Oddly, I made the new rule to help the party overcome their poverty; the exotic flavor was a fortuitous side effect.

In The Hungry Storm, the 3rd module of the Jade Regent AP, the party crosses the northern ice cap in a caravan. Three characters decided to use that travel time for crafting magic items, with Rings of Sustenance giving them 4 hours a day to craft in an improvised crafting environment. Rather than letting them turn gold coins into magic items as the rulebook implies, I declared that those gold coins ordinarily went buying magical reagents for making magic items. Out on the ice cap, they could not buy reagents, they had to harvest them. They could extract these reagents from the magical creatures they killed. For example, they killed a bullette and could use its tough magical skin to enchant armor.

I did not have an exact formula for the amount of magical reagents; instead, I guessed a number that seemed right, based on the XP of the creature and how magical it was. Extracting all the reagents took a Survival skill check, DC 15, with half the reagents extracted if failed by 5 or less. Later on, to simplify recordkeeping, I stopped differentiating between the types of reagents, so bullette skin could be used for weapons or wands or wondrous items, too.


Hi,

thank you all for you input!

I made notes. ;)

Will think about ways to improve the experience.

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