shilsen
Adventurer
I was just rereading some of my Terry Pratchett novels and thinking that one of the many things I love about his work is what he does with cliches/tropes from fantasy, literature and other sources. Pratchett points them out, takes them to their "logical" conclusion, and stands them on their heads, usually all at the same time.
So I was wondering, how do you use the standard tropes and cliches from fantasy/folklore in general and D&D in particular in your games? I mean things like dragons sitting on piles of gold, dwarves living underground and loving gold, vampires wearing evening dress & speaking in bad Transylvanian accents, etc. Do you embrace them or eschew them, or (more likely) use some combination thereof? Do people in your game world have an awareness of such cliches and do they respond to them in anyway?
I have used and reacted to cliches in various ways in my own games. For example, as a player, I've played a very non-cliched elf who was very aware of the standard (read, PHB/MM) conception of elves and tended to be quite amused by other PCs and NPCs who acted on such assumptions (and took pleasure in pointing out their error). When he eventually ended up as part of a quest to save the world from a crazy cult, he spent a fair amount of time opining that all this "the world is going to end" garbage couldn't actually be true. After all, we've all heard those kinds of stories and it's hardly as if he was part of an adventure story now, was he? Call it reverse-metagaming, where the PC explicitly tried not to react as if he was part of a game.
Similarly, when DMing, I've had NPCs who took umbrage at "speciesist" (Pratchett term) assumptions about them. I'm tempted to take it a step further and do things like have traditional dragons, who place great emphasis on hoards (leading to some not-so-wealthy dragons saying that it isn't the size of your hoard but what you do with it
), and the new, modern generation of dragons, who put all their money into real estate and make fun of the old wyrms who are 'so five hundred years ago'. Or the traditional vampire who hangs out in his t-shirt and shorts and races to put on his evening gown and drops his Cockney accent whenever people come to call, and the really smart one who's embedded a piece a metal in his chest in front of his heart, and the progressive ones who've been on a diet of garlic-laced food and very carefully diluted holy water for the last hundred years in order to build up immunity.
And yes, I'll stop rambling now...
So I was wondering, how do you use the standard tropes and cliches from fantasy/folklore in general and D&D in particular in your games? I mean things like dragons sitting on piles of gold, dwarves living underground and loving gold, vampires wearing evening dress & speaking in bad Transylvanian accents, etc. Do you embrace them or eschew them, or (more likely) use some combination thereof? Do people in your game world have an awareness of such cliches and do they respond to them in anyway?
I have used and reacted to cliches in various ways in my own games. For example, as a player, I've played a very non-cliched elf who was very aware of the standard (read, PHB/MM) conception of elves and tended to be quite amused by other PCs and NPCs who acted on such assumptions (and took pleasure in pointing out their error). When he eventually ended up as part of a quest to save the world from a crazy cult, he spent a fair amount of time opining that all this "the world is going to end" garbage couldn't actually be true. After all, we've all heard those kinds of stories and it's hardly as if he was part of an adventure story now, was he? Call it reverse-metagaming, where the PC explicitly tried not to react as if he was part of a game.
Similarly, when DMing, I've had NPCs who took umbrage at "speciesist" (Pratchett term) assumptions about them. I'm tempted to take it a step further and do things like have traditional dragons, who place great emphasis on hoards (leading to some not-so-wealthy dragons saying that it isn't the size of your hoard but what you do with it
), and the new, modern generation of dragons, who put all their money into real estate and make fun of the old wyrms who are 'so five hundred years ago'. Or the traditional vampire who hangs out in his t-shirt and shorts and races to put on his evening gown and drops his Cockney accent whenever people come to call, and the really smart one who's embedded a piece a metal in his chest in front of his heart, and the progressive ones who've been on a diet of garlic-laced food and very carefully diluted holy water for the last hundred years in order to build up immunity. And yes, I'll stop rambling now...
