D&D General Leaning into the tropes

[Ruin Explorer]

I tend to avoid tropes related to D&D rules but lean heavily into tropes related to action movies.

Is all I can say to that!

 

[tommybahama]

Bludgeoning, i am with you there, need that lucerne hammer, but finesse? What polearm is finesse in your view?

How about this:

 

[Voadam]

The 13th Age RPG has living dungeons like the Stone Thief. I saw an indie game that took the concept one step further: dungeons are demonic entities that spawn monsters which can eventually overrun the area. The only way to kill them is to enter them and remove the "anchor" which us usually in the form of some great treasure.

The Nightmares Underneath (the free indie publisher OSR game your reference) provides a great justification for heroic characters (or moral justification for mercenary characters) to dungeon delve and loot. It also makes dangerous growing spontaneous dungeons a manifestation of Chaos in a cosmological fight against a world of Law, tying into 0e/BX alignment tropes.

The Percy Jackson novels have another example of the living dungeon trope, Daedalus the inventor created a self-sustaining dangerous trap filled Labyrinth for the Minotaur which continues to this day and travels and continuously changes. I forget if it splits like an amoeba to reproduce. Easily grabbed conceptually for a D&D cosmology.

 

[Reynard]

Isn't this common in other fantasy, and its foundational literature? In the Old English poem, Beowulf, Grendel wages a "lonely war" for twelve years "inflicting constant cruelties on the people" (Heaney translation) until he is finally stopped by the eponymous hero.

Superhuman adventurers are not unusual in Appendix N -- Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, and Bilbo (once he acquires his invisibility ring); Zelazny's Corwin and Shadowjack; the god-slaying Elric; John Carter of Mars; Ganelon Silvermane in Lin Carter's World's End series.

Of course Appendix N is going to have examples of the kind of characters that appear in D&D, although I would say that the Tolkien characters don't actually fit the mold since none of them are adventuring for pure profit (except Bilbo, arguably). But most modern fantasy does not focus on characters that go into holes to uncover lost wealth and kill the monsters found therein. Some modern grimdark sword and sorcery kind of leans that way, but more often it's about mercenaries fighting wars or thieves going on heists than what we would call D&D adventuring.

 

[Rabulias]

Other adventuring parties are essential to the game... so when they disappear in the dungeon your adventuring party can enter after them and either save their asses or solve the mystery of their mangled, twisted corpses.

And those same corpses can provide ominous clues to traps, monsters, horrible fates...

And the players believe they can recover the treasure, adventuring gear, and magic items of the adventurers that went in before them...

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

How about this:

View attachment 136272

OK. I'm seeing a Glaive and a . . . Poleaxe?
What about those weapons gives the impression that their effectiveness is not based on the athleticism of the wielder, and the force that they can exert through the haft to maneuver it rapidly and strike hard.

Its hard to tell with the one in blue, but the other person in the picture certainly seems to be quite muscular and athletic.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Everyone knows glaives look like this:

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I once used to subvert tropes and such, everything was flipped, foes became friends, monsters were your allies, yadayada.

Now? I prefer to go hard in the classic D&D-ism: obvious quest-givers, clear evil & good, big-damn adventurers, very loose medieval inspirations, magic swords in a trapped chest and all that stuff.

Comes a time when a trope has been so much subverted that its subversion itself became a trope.

The only tropes I dont tolerate a my table is cliché'ed characters: drunk scotish dwarves, stoned druids and snoby elves can stay home, you need to do better.

 

[Doug McCrae]

But most modern fantasy does not focus on characters that go into holes to uncover lost wealth and kill the monsters found therein.

Yes. I’d say a distinctive feature of D&D, particularly in the 1970s, is the combination of the following elements:

Zero to hero.
Players mainly motivated by desire for their characters to go from zero to hero.
Zero to hero is achieved by looting and killing. This is repeated many times.
The mega-dungeon as the location where this is achieved.

Some of these do appear in some fantasy fiction but not, as far as I know, in combination. Today they are most common in crpgs such as World of Warcraft.

 

[Faolyn]

The 13th Age RPG has living dungeons like the Stone Thief. I saw an indie game that took the concept one step further: dungeons are demonic entities that spawn monsters which can eventually overrun the area. The only way to kill them is to enter them and remove the "anchor" which us usually in the form of some great treasure.

I'm (slowly) working on a setting where the Dungeon is an extradimensional location created by minor liminal gods who are hoping to increase their power. This isn't known to the inhabitants, many of whom are just regular people trying to survive in what seems to them to be a hostile and ever-changing environment.