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Reinventing fantasy cliches
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<blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 4150934" data-attributes="member: 2205"><p>I'm a big fan of the idea that execution is way more important than innovation. Well-done cliches are vastly more entertaining than something that's not cliched but which is poorly executed and leaves the players wandering around wondering what to do, or is just flat out not compelling.</p><p></p><p>In fact, to some extent, the cliches are what fans of the genre expect; if you go too far afield, they don't identify your stuff with the genre and they're either 1) not interested in the first place, or 2) unable to follow what you're trying to get at.</p><p></p><p>Are we talking about settings here? I'm not sure in what respect this question was asked. Novels? Adventures? Settings? Movies? Something else?</p><p></p><p>In any case, I think the same basic ground rules apply; rather than make everything alien and different, employ cliches well, and only make a few elements buck the expectations. A few things that are cliche-breakers, amongst a setting that otherwise feels familiar is much more likely to be successful than something that's completely new and unfamiliar. Make sure that your audience has some baseline assumptions from which they can depart, or they won't feel connected to your work and probably won't get it or like it.</p><p></p><p>My "least cliched" fantasy setting, for example, is different in that it borrows well-known conventions and "cliches" from a number of other genres and mashes them together. It's not truly new, but the specific combination of elements is. That way, the players of my game knew what to expect from the different elements. When they were in the city, they knew to expect a gritty, dark, amoral, Charles Dickens-esque landscape with Mafia-like organizations running the show, and thoroughly corrupt officials. Nothing new there, although maybe not exactly as they expected from fantasy. When they went out of town, they found a lot of small, insular groups threatened by larger armed groups; kinda a Sergio Leone vision of the frontier. The world itself was harsh and full of alien life-forms, but it still had a very Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom-like feel to it in that regard. Overall, there was a strong H. P. Lovecraft-like horror vibe, and my plots read like rejected Robert Ludlum drafts that included occult elements.</p><p></p><p>I'd like to think that the feel was not cliched, but I'm also honest enough to realize that really all I did was pull cliches from a number of genres that typically don't play in the same sandbox and threw them all together into a kind of RPG gumbo. Because it used this type of managed cliches, the players weren't ever completely lost and unfamiliar with what to expect, but because they hadn't ever seen these genre conventions combined like this, they thought the experience was fresh and exciting at the same time.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Desdichado, post: 4150934, member: 2205"] I'm a big fan of the idea that execution is way more important than innovation. Well-done cliches are vastly more entertaining than something that's not cliched but which is poorly executed and leaves the players wandering around wondering what to do, or is just flat out not compelling. In fact, to some extent, the cliches are what fans of the genre expect; if you go too far afield, they don't identify your stuff with the genre and they're either 1) not interested in the first place, or 2) unable to follow what you're trying to get at. Are we talking about settings here? I'm not sure in what respect this question was asked. Novels? Adventures? Settings? Movies? Something else? In any case, I think the same basic ground rules apply; rather than make everything alien and different, employ cliches well, and only make a few elements buck the expectations. A few things that are cliche-breakers, amongst a setting that otherwise feels familiar is much more likely to be successful than something that's completely new and unfamiliar. Make sure that your audience has some baseline assumptions from which they can depart, or they won't feel connected to your work and probably won't get it or like it. My "least cliched" fantasy setting, for example, is different in that it borrows well-known conventions and "cliches" from a number of other genres and mashes them together. It's not truly new, but the specific combination of elements is. That way, the players of my game knew what to expect from the different elements. When they were in the city, they knew to expect a gritty, dark, amoral, Charles Dickens-esque landscape with Mafia-like organizations running the show, and thoroughly corrupt officials. Nothing new there, although maybe not exactly as they expected from fantasy. When they went out of town, they found a lot of small, insular groups threatened by larger armed groups; kinda a Sergio Leone vision of the frontier. The world itself was harsh and full of alien life-forms, but it still had a very Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom-like feel to it in that regard. Overall, there was a strong H. P. Lovecraft-like horror vibe, and my plots read like rejected Robert Ludlum drafts that included occult elements. I'd like to think that the feel was not cliched, but I'm also honest enough to realize that really all I did was pull cliches from a number of genres that typically don't play in the same sandbox and threw them all together into a kind of RPG gumbo. Because it used this type of managed cliches, the players weren't ever completely lost and unfamiliar with what to expect, but because they hadn't ever seen these genre conventions combined like this, they thought the experience was fresh and exciting at the same time. [/QUOTE]
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