Tropes that need to die

[jonesy]

2. The Court Wizard

A king is usually a powerful fighter type. A tank. It's better to have contengied artillery supporting him. And the queen might already have a healer at her side.

 

[JacktheRabbit]

Selection bias - modules don't tend to detail that which isn't tactically interesting or plot-related. Tell me how many outhouses do you see in modules that don't have treasure or an otyugh or other monster in the muck?

Yeah, but its pretty uniform. In the FR you have Waterdeep which is basically the New York City of Faerun. In a citty with over 1000 clerics you still have haunted graveyards and roaming undead.

 

[TerraDave]

I'd say that D&D tropes are more often the following:

1) Undead wizard creates a trap-filled crypt
2) Mad wizard is trying to open a gate to the lower planes
3) An ancient evil has awakened, and you need to put together an artiact from X pieces in order to defeat the ancient evil.
4) The person who hired the party to recover a magic item is really the bad guy that intends to steal the item once the party recovers it.

There are a ton of other tropes, I don't know that they need to die. My sons ages 5 and 7 are just starting to play, and it will be fun to see how they react to these tropes, as it will be their first time encountering them.

They better not die! Those and some small variations/combinations cover just about everything. (well, those plus Invasion or its close cousin Infiltration, but some wizard or extra-planer thing is usually behind it).

And there is this trope:

A semisensical combination of charecters journeys through semisensical places and encounters semisensical (combinations of) monsters. And finds bling.

This trope must stay.

 

[El Mahdi]

A king is usually a powerful fighter type. A tank. It's better to have contengied artillery supporting him. And the queen might already have a healer at her side.

Good point. The Queen might even be a healer also.

 

[Zhaleskra]

Selection bias - modules don't tend to detail that which isn't tactically interesting or plot-related. Tell me how many outhouses do you see in modules that don't have treasure or an otyugh or other monster in the muck?

All those dungeons without bathrooms or kitchens. Where did the monsters "go"? In the corner? Wait, they're monsters, of course they did. ;-)

 

[JacktheRabbit]

Good point. The Queen might even be a healer also.

The funny thing is that even when you consider the full varieties that a fantasy world allows it still does make the most sense that most Kings are fighters.

 

[the Jester]

3. The Party A$ - Not sure how to explain this one. The best is by example. Anyone who has ever read Band of Brothers ask yourself this question. How long would Lt. Sobel have lasted in Easy Company if it had not en egalitarian group of men working together instead of a military unit? Not long at all. The unmasked hatred Winter and others felt for him would have meant Sobel would have been killed or at the least abandoned at the first opportunity. So why are we to assume that the NE Rogue prick that annoys everyone, tries to steal when no one is looking, and is a general pain in the butt to the rest of the party is allowed to stick around? The dynamic of DnD party creation means extremely strange parties are often grouped together when there is no chance they would ever form in any sort of reality.

The answer?

The answer is to make it very clear from the very start that the pcs are fully expected to kick s out of the party. And that if you're the one playing the , you're going to have to make a new pc and wait for a good chance to rejoin the party.

Really, this is easy; just don't put up with it.

 

[Deset Gled]

Character Trope - The Uncompromising Gish

I wanna be an awesome caster! But I also wanna be a strong warrior! Why can't I be both? The system doesn't support by concept!

Because characters are supposed to have limitations, you dolt. Now stop trying to be uber, build a character with some real flaws (Oh, jeez. That's "flaws" not "Flaws". No, you can't get a permanent AC bonus for agreeing to always smell bad), and develop some dimension to your roleplaying.

 

[olshanski]

Hallowed ground also does nothing to stop corpses from being removed from a graveyard then animated.

So if whackos are digging in your cemetary and stealing corpses, the solution is to get rid of the cemetary and burn all corpses?


I hope those whackos don't kidnap any children...

 

[invokethehojo]

The trope I want to die... the adventurer. How many people walk around "looking for adventure", risking their life all the time to find money so they can buy a shinier sword so they can kill more things to get more money to buy shinier other things? It's stupid. Now yes, I have to admit I'm coming from a more serious gamer point of view, but I like my campaigns to be like books, there is room for humor and suspension of disbelief, but the fact that all PC's are built off of a model that almost no sane person would follow is just absurd.

At least pathfinder tried to help this by making the pathfinder society, meaning PC's are affiliated with a group and their job is to do these things (though the fact its still all about buying more shiney's doesn't help).

why can't a game focus on making characters have some kind of purpose, even if it's just being famous or accumulating wealth in an RP sense?