Magic & monsters too commonplace and boring in most RPGs

Many stories and legends tend to lean toward the idea that in our history, science gradually took the place of magic. Perhaps in New Britannia, with its Tesla Towers, this process is beginning. Perhaps this would allow good reason to say magic is on the down swing, becoming less and less commonplace. I definitely agree that the path to magic should be one shrouded in mystery.

'Boring monsters'.. I feel this can be dealt with by giving them more intelligence. When a monster spawns in the game, it should have a path and purpose that it is following for a distinct reason within the storyline mythos. If it is not stopped, then it will succeed at its task, and move on to the next task. This task could be to aggravate resource input / output channels for villages or towns, or simply hunting at night for a daily meal that can be dragged back to their lair and shared among its clan. Having these tasks, would allow players to sneak around and watch them in action, figure out what they are doing, follow them back to their home base.. then plan a strike where it will interrupt the operations with more permanence. For instance, attacking the den, rather than the monster alone out in the wild would cause an entire new 'den' to spawn after a time, rather than new monsters spawning out of that same den able to continue the killed monster's mission.

As long as there aren't any monsters that are spawning in designated areas, for no apparent reason accept to fill the landscape with stuff to kill, then this should greatly help the game.

Another aspect that would help, is to give monsters a variety of means for mobility. Spiders should be able to crawl on walls and ceilings, jump down out of trees, even fight from these various positions! So you'll have to look up and try to knock them off the ceiling or out of the tree before giving them that killing blow.. In SotA they are creating many new types of creatures we've never seen before, but if they all walk like people, have the same movement speeds, react with the usual agressiveness, get in your face and try to melee with you until they die, that'll still be boring. Some of them need to be scared of humans, or scared of groups of humans.. Some of them might not like loud noises, or are semi-blinded and shrink away from fire. Some should be able to burrow in the earth, or walk through walls. If a creature can fly, please tell me their attack strategy takes advantage of this skill, and they don't just hover in front of me and melee attack, looking more like they just have invisible legs, when they should be able to jump over my head, grab my tunic from the back in mid-air and try to sink their teeth into my neck while I flail my weapon around, trying to slice off a wing to keep them from being air-born.

 

@Miracle Dragon,

Have you ever seen Adventure Time? There's an episode where a character -- Princess Bubblegum -- is complaining about wizards. She says all magic really uses scientifically explainable principles, and wizards really just don't know what they're doing and call it "magic". So she goes to this "wizard city" to buy something and demands that the storeowner explain how it works -- which he can't.

Its funny because that's how magic was described historically -- in literature of previous eras -- as some effect that was understood but not explained.

But perhaps being too rational and scientific-minded causes you to loose some intuitive sensibility and grasp of the subject, always having to look at things through formulas and rules instead of seeing a larger pattern and rhyme to things ...

 

The question of magic *availability* as well as the common-ness of mystical monsters really depends on how much magic the game designers want you to have. A world in which magic is restricted to a few lonely reclusive wizards and magical beasts only happen in rare and special places (for advanced adventurers only) should not logically allow players to start with magic using characters. Because four MILLION players will start a wizard every day, and the game world that claimed to have almost no magic will be crawling with fireball hurling people-in-suspicious-robes.

This will also have consequences on travel, economy, healing, government...

Whereas if the players are allowed to learn and use magic, then the consequences of this should abound, if I can learn a healing spell in the first week of playing the game, ANY healing spell, then so can you. That would logically affect the practice of medicine in that world. Who needs a nasty tasting concoction of plants and herbs that winds up doing the job of an aspirin and some mylanta when I can just wiggle my fingers and you will instantly regenerate lost body parts? Who needs stitches and antibiotics when I can wave my hand and make you regenerate for the next thirty seconds? Likewise travel, likewise economy (who needs oxen driven barges when I can summon and bind water elementals to move your goods upstream?) and even government (mind control spells anyone?).

I agree in consistency of the background story, but I think that we should let LB and Co. Decide how much magic there will be, it's their world. I just plan to live there.