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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nytmare" data-source="post: 7649836" data-attributes="member: 55178">Most of these feel like they're more cliche than stereotype, and I'd caution against changing too many at once, or not thinking through all the consequences and reasonings behind a change.Stereotypes and cliches in stories tend to serve a purpose, as does the breaking of said stereotypes or cliches.  Dwarves love gold, step mothers are wicked, and butlers did it, because it's an easy short hand that tells more of the story for you, and it makes the characters that break free from those boundaries stand out more.  If you change too many of them, you run the risk of making the story feel too alien and the players/readers unable to identify with the world.  Some examples of recognizable broken or modified stereotypes and cliches that exist in some form of D&D (and that may have become their OWN stereotypes and cliches at some point in the process) could be the world is a desert and all wizards are evil, world corrupting bad guys who should be put to death on sight (Darksun), the players are all playing dragons and humans are ill mannered dragon slaying bad guys (Council of Wyrms), it's just like D&D, but instead we're in space (Spelljammer)...As for unintended consequences, a trap that leads you to something good is no longer a trap, it's a secret passage.  Why would a person who is hiding something of value, and trying to protect it, decide to let someone stumble onto it by dumb luck?  A prison exists because someone (or more likely someoneS) decided that they needed a place to put people so that they could do no more harm, be punished, or be held on to where they were stripped of anything that gave them power or made them important.  How would a society make the jump from building a dungeon and torture chamber to making a resort and spa instead?  What would the reasoning be behind investing in and building an amusement park, and then filling it only with people you're trying to dissuade from committing crimes?A high tech world without indoor plumbing is really only strange from the point of view of an outsider looking in, and I would assume that any kind of anachronism would need to have some kind of an explanation for most players.  Realistically, technology and inventions follow a rough, leapfrogging path of some kind.  In the real world, indoor plumbing exists because a population center can only get so big before the amount of stuff you'd normally flush down a drain ends up creating an explosion of disease that kills off your population center.  So, our imaginary world would need to do one of two things, and if it isn't "invent a magical or mundane substitute for indoor plumbing" it would have to be "never have a population center get big enough that everyone dies of cholera."  If your answer to the disease is magical healing, you still have to deal with the fact that everyone is standing around knee deep is human waste.  If your answer to being knee deep in human waste is for every house to have a pygmy otyugh sitting at the bottom of their latrine, you've effectively created a magical version of indoor plumbing.</blockquote>

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