D&D 5E Which played-out D&D trope needs to die?

[Bill Zebub]

Make it their attic and you could have the marauders still thinking that they're the ones with rats down below!

And on their way up the stairs they encounter a group of NPCs on their way down the stairs to clear out the rats.

Or, better yet, it's not stairs it's an elevator, which gets stuck, and through their shared experience they learn to appreciate each other and get along. Just as they resolve their differences and become friends, the elevator starts working again.

 

[Oofta]

This came up on another thread.

The idea that a person in heavy armor is incapable of doing anything and is weighed down so much they need assistance to mount a horse. There's videos of people doing cartwheels in plate, I had a video at one point (lost the link) of a middle-aged guy in heavy chain swimming without an issue because the gambeson you wear underneath basically acted like a flotation device. Add in only people in heavy armor are affected by heat (while never having protection from cold of course) Pretty much any armor of any use historically had a thick layer of padding underneath; any armor that will realistically gives you any significant protection will be hot.. Sleeping in heavy armor (but breastplate is perfectly okay, as is "studded" leather) means you're exhausted but everyone can sleep just fine sleeping on hard rock*.

Meanwhile all those 8 strength PCs can be at 99% encumbrance with absolutely no penalty. D&D is not particularly realistic about much of anything, but the moment someone dares run a PC that isn't dex based for AC they're practically immobilized because it's deemed more "realistic" by people who have never worn properly fitted armor.

*I used to backpack a lot and never brought a sleeping pad, I never had a problem sleeping. I have no idea how bad it would be to sleep in armor, but it is fitted to you. The only times I had problems sleeping was because of wet and cold or extreme heat.

 

[VelvetViolet]

Trying to grimderp everything. I know the hobby is fundamentally a violent crime fantasy (read Powerkill and Violence sometime), but there’s been so many edgelords thru the years and especially in the post-HBO Game of Thrones era. It’s not enough for monsters to engage in unspecified “bad things” to justify adventurers killing them, now they have to skin people alive and sexual violence and yadda yadda. Even if it’s not depicted on-screen, it’s very important for the players to know that the worst possible tortures they can imagine are constantly happening off-screen to infinite nameless villagers. Because how else can we motivate you to fight those nasty humanoids? Not like your actions matter, since there are infinite monsters torturing infinite villagers off-screen. You might as well set in the campaign in Dante’s hell and then say all the damned are actually innocent and the universe just hates you. This has pretty much soured my interest in gaming. Real life is already a living hell for the overwhelming majority of the human population and will stay that way forever. I don’t need my elf-games to constantly remind me of that.

 

[CleverNickName]

@BoxCrayonTales I used to have a problem with that at my game table, too. When it started getting too extreme, I instituted an "X-Card" rule (based on the one from John Stavropolos), and we talked our way through one of the "D&D Player Consent" checklists online. I thought my players would fight it tooth-and-nail, but even the edgiest edge-lord player was relieved. (I suspect everyone had been uncomfortable with all of the violence for a while, and it took me months to notice. )

 

[Monayuris]

I may be repeating others' responses but my own personal list:

1. You're 1st level and you're on a quest to defeat the evil overlord." You're too weak to do anything significant yet, so just faff around until you lose interest/forget the reason you're adventuring/the campaign fizzles out.
2. Raging barbarians. Its possible to be from a barbarian culture without needing to become a frothing-at-the-mouth-murder-machine.
3. Murder-hobos in general. Every PC should have some stakes or ties to the world that gives them some grounding.
4. Anthropomorphic races/too many fantasy races. Humans are diverse and interesting enough to me that you can play human and still have myriad different and unique cultures and concepts. To me, most fantasy races can just be re-visioned as human cultures.

 

[VelvetViolet]

Anthropomorphic races/too many fantasy races. Humans are diverse and interesting enough to me that you can play human and still have myriad different and unique cultures and concepts. To me, most fantasy races can just be re-visioned as human cultures.

I found a cheat to this in my worldbuilding. My “beastmen” are human tribes that invoke animal totems, giving them animal features.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Cultists. Trying to awaken a sleeping God and/or bring a God to the prime material plane. I don’t even remember what modules used for plots before cultists.

I mean it is hard to gain easy to insert bad guys these days so it is why they are common.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Every human town is massively racist because the DM secretly resents you for not playing a Tolkien race.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Every human town is massively racist because the DM secretly resents you for not playing a Tolkien race.

man, that is just a terrible dm.

I got one, the I will include options for other player races but build a setting that is clearly made to be human only but I lack the stomach to make it one as people might dislike me.

 

[VelvetViolet]

I mean it is hard to gain easy to insert bad guys these days so it is why they are common.

I think Dungeons & Delvers-style orcs can work fine. They avoid issues like “what do we do with the baby orcs?” by being a form of self-replicating demonic possession rather than an actual race. After they sacrifice their victims to Orcus, they summon more orcs to inhabit the remains. So there’s also zombie apocalypse parallels.

man, that is just a terrible dm.

I got one, the I will include options for other player races but build a setting that is clearly made to be human only but I lack the stomach to make it one as people might dislike me.

If I design a humanocentric setting, then I use planetouched, dragontouched, and the like to replace fantasy races so players can feel special. They can generally pass for regular human, prejudice will vary by circumstances, and they still get their racial cool powers. This also avoids the monolithic rubber forehead problem of fantasy races, which is one of my personal persistent bugbears