D&D General Leaning into the tropes

[Doug McCrae]

A D&D trope that hasn't been mentioned so far is the cleric -- the combination of heavy armour, blunt weapons, turn undead, religious office, and spells that resemble Biblical miracles. These features are a lot less pronounced now than they were in 1974. Frex some clerics in 5e don't wear heavy armour and spells are less Biblical.

 

[Doug McCrae]

The D&D party, which comprises both representatives of a number of fantasy races and differing roles and abilities, is not unique to D&D but is, like Vancian magic, distinctive. The Company of the Ring in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings comes closest, imo. The Company in The Hobbit is also quite similar as it contains a wizard, a burglar, and warriors.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Zero to hero.
Players mainly motivated by desire for their characters to go from zero to hero.

This features in my games.

Zero to hero is achieved by looting and killing. This is repeated many times.
The mega-dungeon as the location where this is achieved.

This does not, and pretty much never has.

 

[Azuresun]

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.

I hang out on a creative writing forum, and every few weeks, you'll see someone who is convinced they're a literary genius because their work doesn't involve tropes (which is impossible), or because they've inverted a trope in a way that's so well-trodden it's become its own cliche (spunky ass-kicking princess, Noble Savage orcs vs evul racist humans, etc).

 

[tommybahama]

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.

I think you are missing the point. Having finesse polearm with reach would be a welcomed option in a fantasy setting.

Beyond that, leaping into the air to bypass an opponents defense to deliver a slashing attack is more of a dexterity move than brute strength. I think a strength based fighter would remain grounded so he could better leverage his strength mechanically (rotating from the hips, etc.) to cleave through her defenses.

 

[Democratus]

I think you are missing the point. Having finesse polearm with reach would be a welcomed option in a fantasy setting.

Beyond that, leaping into the air to bypass an opponents defense to deliver a slashing attack is more of a dexterity move than brute strength. I think a strength based fighter would remain grounded so he could better leverage his strength mechanically (rotating from the hips, etc.) to cleave through her defenses.

Isn't strength exclusively used for leaping?

 

[Oofta]

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.

Whenever I have a druid NPC I keep telling myself "don't play a stoner ... don't play a stoner ..." the first thing out of my mouth is "Dude ..." in classic stoner tones.

 

[Reynard]

I think the benefit of leaning into tropes is that most folks at the table will be on the same page at the outset and you can move to differentiate from there.

 

[Nefermandias]

If you lean really heavily into all of those D&Disms, you end up with Order of the Stick.

 

[Arvok]

The 13th Trope of D&D

No matter what the cultural inspiration or level of technology, there must always be a bewildering array of trivially different Polearms.

I like your post with the caveat that those differences are only trivial in-game. In the real world there were dozens of varieties of polearms because each filled a different niche--not enough of a difference to be worth differentiating in a game that simulates combat and (by design) oversimplifies certain things to make game play more fun, but differences that weren't trivial in real life.

I get your point, though.