You Can’t Rely on Players Forgetting Important Information
I Dungeon Master a group of players of mixed experience, with the bulk of them being very experienced, having played through 1st and 2nd edition Dungeons and Dragons, walked away during 3rd/3.5 (myself included) and having returned for 4th, Next, and now 5th edition. The collective player-knowledge of the group is enormous, and the tendency to meta-game, even if they’re trying not to, is high. By now, they’ve fought damn near everything in their lengthy gaming careers, much of it multiple times across different editions. And while some creatures have changed a bit from one edition to the next, and periodically something new is introduced, the more iconic monsters have certainly not changed much. While, for the sake of role-playing, they usually do their best to role-play ‘not knowing’ the particular strengths or weaknesses of any given opponent, the reality is that relying on them to forget is a poor practice.
At the same time, such experienced players also have a great deal of nostalgia about the games of old, wistfully recounting tales of ‘that one time when…’ and ‘that other time when…’ As a group, we work hard at recapturing ‘the good old days’ of those exciting games of our youth.
These two things are not unrelated. A large part of “the good old days” being “good” was the trepidation, the challenge, the surprise, the exhilaration that all stem from the ignorance of being new players and facing the unknown. The first time the players ever meet the shock of Rot Grubs infesting one of the group, a sword bouncing harmlessly off the hide of a Werewolf, or a Vampire appearing out of nowhere to start chomping down on a neck, it creates a memorable character experience because of the associated emotional player experience. Not simply as characters, but as players they are surprised, confused, and so on. Your first roller-coaster ride is far more memorably than your 20th: because it included a sense of wonder. In the distant past, these players experienced an emotional – not merely intellectual – experience, and that is the basis for that nostalgic memory: they remember the surprise, the challenge, the shock, the awe, the confusion, the eureka moment, and finally the triumph. They don’t usually recall the mathematical calculations and die rolls.
I’m not going to spiral into a lengthy discussion of human memories and how they are formed, but a foray into some entry level Psych courses and/or instructional theory will tell you that emotions play a big role in the formation of memory, more so than the specificity of logic and facts. This is why “relying on them to forget” as a strategy for modern adventures is destined to fail: they can role-play the notion that their characters do not know, but no matter how well-intentioned they are or how good a job they do, what they can’t do is experience the genuine surprise, frustration, or confusion for them as novice players, because they’re not.
That’s the reason for the ultimate failure. It’s not a question of how good they are at pretending, provided they’re still pretending. Sincerity: the hardest thing to fake.
So the question then becomes: How can we give them genuine surprise, frustration, confusion, and so on, as players?
For that, they’ll need your help: you need to treat them like novices again.
Stop Naming Names
The first and simplest thing is that we need to break from the habit of the short-cut: naming names. It’s easy to say “twelve zombies shamble toward you” without taking the description any further because we are, in fact, lazily relying on the players to know what we mean when we say “zombie”. In fact, in the case of “zombie” specifically, even novice players have likely (given their tastes led them to D&D) seen “zombies” depicted in various movies, TV shows, and so on. Once we’ve said “zombie”, they instinctively – try as they may to not do so if they’re experienced players role-playing ignorance – recall a list of assumptions about how these creatures will behave, their offensive and defensive capabilities, particular vulnerabilities, and so on. And this will happen for anything you put a name to and with which they’re already at least somewhat familiar. (“Er.. those mummy’s wrappings look very dry, don’t they? Should we… try… fire?”) After all, most D&D monsters are not original creations, but taken from folklore, Greek myths, and popular novels of our youths. And as DMs, the temptation is often to populate our adventures with those things most familiar (to ourselves), because they’re the things we feel most comfortable describing (or because we don’t have to). The more we recycle the things familiar to ourselves, the more we employ things familiar to the players. To get them out of their comfort zone, we have to step out of ours a bit.
So first, stop taking the short-cut.
It’s not a “zombie”, it’s a “fetid, shambling corpse”. It’s not a “ghoul”, it’s another shambling corpse, but this one moves faster and smells really bad. It’s not a “ghast”, it’s another of those fast-moving, bad-smelling ones, and only when it’s too close and too late do they realize this one smells SO bad, in fact, it makes people nauseated.
It’s a skeleton. It has a sword. Is it a “skeleton-skeleton”? A wight? A revenant? A lich carrying his family heirloom though he’s not that keen on swinging the thing?
Not naming is only the first step, of course. This moves them from “Oh, yeah, I know that” to “Hey, what’s that? Oh, yeah, ok, I know that.”
There’s much farther to go.
Lying/Not Lying
They kicked open the door and saw a swarm of animate half-rotted corpses looking back at them. This time, you actually called them “zombies”, going back to that lazy short-cut. Why? Because that’s how they saw them. It’s not your word. It’s the word they use. In a previous encounter in which you described them being attacked by “slow-moving, shambling corpses”, they took to referring to them as “zombies”. They chose that word. Initiative hasn’t been rolled yet. When the count comes around and it’s time for those corpses to act, it turns out that ghouls move much faster than “zombies” usually do. Only when you start describing the “zombies” as rushing forward does the group realize “oh, these aren’t zombies, these are ghouls!”
You lied!
No, actually you didn’t. Not really. As a DM, you describe to the players what their characters see, from the perspective of those characters. They’ve met “zombies” before – their word – but if they haven’t yet fought “ghouls”, then from a character perspective there’s no visual indicator these are anything but more of those same “zombies” they fought in the past. You described what they saw in their own terms.
Essentially, by “lying”, you’re working toward creating a scenario in which the players can no longer trust their “player senses”, but have to instead learn to trust their “character senses”. By viewing things instead through that character lens and considering what that character does or doesn’t know, they then behave accordingly. This is role-playing, and what they’re supposed to be doing anyway, and it’s moving them one step closer to experiencing the game with that same level of exploration and ignorance that their nostalgic memories long for. Without ignorance, there can’t be wonder.
Sometimes, a creature is completely unrecognizable simply because of a different description and your refusal to use its proper name. One of my players – playing an Earth Wu-Jen monk, ironically – once punched a Cockatrice and turned himself to stone because the players thought they knew what a “cockatrice” was, but didn’t recognize it from being told “a bizarre-looking turkey with a scaly, serpent-like tail”. They’d never seen or heard a decent depiction of one. (They thought of it as simply “a chicken that turns things to stone”, I think.) Most of us have not actually read Homer’s Odyssey, but rather only seen works adapted from it. Likewise, how many have actually read Bram Stoker, or does their knowledge of vampires stem more from Anne Rice or the Blade films? Consider the original Gorgon of Greek legend versus the Gorgon of Dungeons and Dragons.
But even with the shortcut removed, the temptation to snap back into “oh wait, I recognize it now” is a powerful habit, and while the refusal to give the common goes a long way, breaking this habit is no small task. Typically, you’re buying yourself the first round or two of combat before they fall into their old ways. “Ah, ‘slow corpses’… Sacred Flame it is!” They’re not quite approaching it with fresh eyes, so it needs to go a step farther.
Original, But Not Original
Suppose your players know the difference between Yellow Mold and Brown Mold. Ok, then it’s Red Mold. Fire: safe? That was easy. The sort of “ultimate answer” to all this would obviously be to completely write your very own custom Monster Manual, with all new, original creatures, based entirely on a lore of your own devising. But that would take a lot of work. Fortunately, that’s not necessary. There are numerable resources at your fingertips.
First, the Dungeon Masters Guide (pages 273-274) speaks to very simple ways to remake or enhance existing monsters.
All you’re trying to do, all you need to do for this last step, is to make things unrecognizable a little longer, long enough to prevent the formation of a battle plan based on prior player knowledge, but based instead on what they’re witnessing in the moment. They need to not recognize what they’re facing, feel the confusion, experience the frustration and surprise, have the exhilaration of the not-knowing, and then immerse themselves in the experience and react to what they’re seeing, not what they remember. If, after that fact, they were to realize that the gang of “chill fiends” was just ghouls re-skinned as halfling-size skeletons with all the same statistics as ghouls, it’s too late: the experience, and its accompanying emotional-impact, has happened.
That might seem illogical, but that’s ok: we’re talking about forming memories, and specifically the role that emotion plays in it. The logic of hindsight does not undo already-formed memories. The experience – and how you felt about at that time – has already been recorded. The realization that comes later is just an addendum or footnote. That they know later ‘what you did’ does not undo their experience; if it did, we wouldn’t have any of these nostalgic stories to begin with.
Obviously, the more work you are willing and able to put in, the more genuinely original the experience, the more memorable it will be.
Getting Truly Original
For the Big Bad Evil Guy and/or their lieutenants, that’s where you’ll probably want to put in that extra bit of effort. I modify or invent monsters all the time. Rearranging even small elements while retaining the same numeric values can reshape it into something unknown while incurring no worries about maintaining encounter balance. While D&D has borrowed much of its inspiration from North American and European folklore and Greek myths, there remain whole worlds of unexplored lore out there waiting to be tapped. I recently put together an encounter with a a creature modeled on the Ijiraq of Inuit lore and placed it just outside The Amber Temple in my Curse of Strahd campaign.
If you’re not comfortable writing monsters from scratch, or making widespread changes to existing stat blocks, there are also plenty of homebrew monsters to be found, such as in 3rd party publications like The Tome of Beasts. I’m a fan of The Witcher video games, and most of my players are unfamiliar with Slavic folklore. Over on Reddit, I found a thread linking to a compilation of homebrew versions of Witcher monsters. They’d look for a Lich’s phylactery or a Vampire’s coffin, sure, but how will they deal with a Nightwraith, and how will they put her to rest permanently? Again, in my Curse of Strahd campaign, I employed a little side-adventure where I adopted The Tempter of the D&D Adventure League and made Lady Fidatov a Nightwraith instead of a Banshee (in turn making the hedge maze a much more difficult experience). Will my players return to the estate to find her haunting it once again?