Your Go To Tropes

[Reynard]

We all do it to some degree, I think. Especially Forever GMs.

What tropes do you lean on consistently? Maybe not every time, but you find yourself going back to them in different adventures and campaigns and characters?

For fantasy, mine are:
Number one for me is Dead Gods Return. This probably has a lot to do with Dragonlance being extremely formative for me.
Also Vity Sized Dragon -- same reason, except Record of Lodoss War.
And there is always, always some form of science fantasy nonsense. It might be that the fantasy world is the far future of a tech world, or it might be that Doom Troopers are going to show up in Avernus because Doom Troopers ARE going to show up in Avernus.

For Sci-Fi, I tend to bring in lot gate networks and Big Dumb Objects regularly.

What tropes show up in your games or characters with frequency? Do you make an effort to avoid treading the same ground? Do you embrace your favorite tropes?

 

[aramis erak]

For Traveller, ...
the busybody dukes... landed dukes are always trying to rope in reward nobles for various deniable actions just outside the borders of the 3I
Scout/Marine "sibling rivalry" - often expressed as barroom brawls. But when the chips are down, for the good of the Imperium, they'll be defending each other from any outsider threat...
NCO promotion almost automatic.
RSM and RQMS are usually 7 terms done... and NPCs... Mess with them at your peril.
Officers need not be college grads...
Aliens don't draw much more attention than oddly dressed humans except on backwater worlds.
Gunnery Sergeant is a posting, not a rank (Yes, I know that contracdicts CT B4, MT expanded Char gen, T:TNE, and T4...

Until MT released, I used the US Civil War and Indian Wars era stripes for my CT games, rather than the Bk4 "not quite US" ones. My group's homebrew still uses Civil War type stripes. Grades Recruit, Private, Lance Corporal, Corporal, Sergeant, Staff Sergeant, Master Sergeant. Co 1 Sgt get a "football" (two arcs ending at their intersections, Bn 1Sgt get a 3 point star, RSM a 4 point star, BSM a 5 point star, DSM a 6 point star... Bote that Staff get a 4th stripe, and Master get the lines between their stripes removed to make one wide stripe. 1Sgt ranks are Staff Sergeant appointments, and Sergeant Major stripes are all Master Sergeants.

For Tunnels and Trolls, well, most NPC wizards are madmen. And Trolls usually don't give a «bleep» about much of anything that doesn't disturb feeding and napping...

 

[jdrakeh]

I really like two:

1. Old heroes taking up the mantle again after retirement to save the world one last time.
2. Adventurers are desperate and hungry people who adventure because they have no other good options in life.

These two usually don't fit together, but when they do - BAM - my favorite campaigns!

 

[Jd Smith1]

For fantasy, some variation on War Hammer, if not the actual setting.

For Old West/modern/post apoc (my favored settings), in the former two are generally a dose of Cthulhu, in the latter, a Fallout-style greater conflict layered over the usual survival.

For zombie settings, nothing that was included in Walking Dead. Generally go with living victims of virus (Last of Us style), and PC backgrounds creating the metaplot.

Sci-fi, either Fading Suns, or a similar 'culture and technology on a sharp decline' mode, with the series Firefly being a strong influence.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I really like two:

1. Old heroes taking up the mantle again after retirement to save the world one last time.
2. Adventurers are desperate and hungry people who adventure because they have no other good options in life.

These two usually don't fit together, but when they do - BAM - my favorite campaigns!

I had a character who was a retired ranger who had become a happy grandma. She went on a little solo wilderness trip, and came back to find her village destroyed, her family killed or missing.

So she returned to her martial calling, hunting down those who had wronged her and he loved ones,

IOW, she was a geriatric murderhobo with a death wish of sorts.

In meta game mechanical terms, she started off at 1st level, and as she leveled up, she was shaking off the rust and remembering her past skills.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

The following are very common for my fantasy games (not always tropes, despite how I've phrased my answers.)

Never trust a priest, they're either pious hypocrites practicing all the vices they rail against, or outright corrupted by demons, or knight templars keen to invite "wrong doers" to an auto de fe. At least priests of evil gods are honest.

Gods are transcendent, and may not exist at all.

All cities have ridiculously large sewer systems. These are home to both thieves' guilds and all manner of critters.

Vampires are always nobility.

 

[humble minion]

According to my long-term co-GM, my reflexive tropes are:

• sea monsters
• eldritch horrors
• gratuitous involvement of real-world history
• dramatic reveals

 

[Deset Gled]

Unbreakable Doors. Let's just agree that no matter how strong the barbarian gets, the party is still occasionally going to need to find some keys.

Don't Trust The Skeletons. They're going to be laying around lots of places. Almost all of them are dead. Eventually, one is going to attack.

Plot Protected Shopkeepers. Yeah, youse murderhobos could probably just kill the proprietor instead of paying for stuff. I haven't prepped a story for each one about how they're actually a ridiculously high level retired adventurer or are 2nd cousins with the sheriff. If we can just agree to not kill them and steal the whole shop, the game will move a lot quicker.

Violent Cultists. Maybe it's just the games I see, but since always-evil races have lost favor it feels like evil cults have really stepped up their game to fill in gaps in the market for mooks.

 

[Clint_L]

For horror games, I really like going with high school/college kids getting in over their heads - the wilderness trip gone wrong, the ill advised stay in the creepy house, etc.. These are classics for a reason - the cockiness of youth leads to guaranteed trouble, and teenaged/young adult relationships are so fun to RP. Drama!

For fantasy games, I actively try to avoid the most common tropes for character creation. My characters never have links to nobility or were marked from birth or anything like that, they always come from fairly normal families (no orphans!), they don't have a super mysterious patron, none of that nonsense. I generally try to subvert tropes in my adventures, too. In the current campaign arc, the characters went to help a swamp village out by killing a local hag, except they failed and it turned out the villagers were more in the wrong than the hag was, so now they owe her and are questing to help her reconnect with her long lost coven...so the hags can go on a retreat to a beachside resort and catch up.

But subverting tropes is super basic, especially if you came of age in the 80s/90s, so it's not like I'm being cutting edge or anything.

Cosmic horror/Lovecraftian entities are a staple in most anything I run.

Oh, and pirates. I like pirates in any genre. All the pirate tropes. Unironically.

 

[Mad_Jack]

The Boss isn't The Boss: In most of my games, the guy that everyone thinks is in charge is either just a flunky (and/or outright pawn) of someone bigger, or, in the opposite direction, is actually being manipulated by their second-in-command or other henchman...

In one campaign, a random minion from the very first fight of the game ended up turning into the BBEG of the entire campaign...

Spoiler

The first group of human bad guys the party fought had one particular mook that got insanely lucky on the dice rolls and gave them a lot more trouble than he was worth, and through PC error he managed to escape the fight. So I promoted him in the organization. Again. And again. He always seemed to give the party hell and it just randomly happened every time that he found himself in a position to get away. Without any real intention on my part he'd just organically become that one uber-competent henchman that all bad guys have in the movies. In the last battle against the BBEG he was the second-in-command, and conveniently skipped out just ahead of the party's victory - while vaguely implying that he may have been playing his boss for his own ends.
Cut to the next group the party goes up against. A slightly larger organization. Guess who turns up again working for them? lol. And then the next group. No matter who the party was going up against, this guy would turn up somewhere working as a henchman and give them grief. He became their nemesis. The party thought they'd killed him twice, only for him to show up again somewhere else.
I'd never meant for this guy to be a recurring villain, and I definitely didn't have any sort of master plan for him - the way things played out on their own it just kept being a logical story choice to have this guy keep showing up. And of course, the party always wanted another shot at him.
Eventually, even though I hadn't planned it that way, it just became obvious that this guy was playing out a supervillain origin story - due to a single tactical error on their part and some ridiculously lucky dice rolls, the party had created their own bad guy... So more than halfway through the campaign I retconned it that he'd been seeking revenge ever since that first fight, and working his way up in all these organization in order to manipulate the guys in charge and use them against the party.