NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Teplin" data-source="post: 4155271" data-attributes="member: 64122">I'm wondering if the problem here is less the overuse of familiar elements and more the vagueness with which they are used.  You need to have some familiar elements for the players to rely on, or the game becomes very difficult to run.  It's useful to be able to assume a tech level, a landscape, a rough geography, standard monarchy government, and so on, unless you want to spend hours and hours on scene setting and describing background.*The problem with doing this is if these elements end up being critical, you need to be able to get into more depth.  If it suddenly becomes really really important as to why orcs are attacking, you need to be able to say why.  A real, actual reason, that makes sense.  Elements that start off as a convenience end up as a cliche' when something that should be specific ends up being general.  Orcs attacking because they are generically agressive and evil is a cliche'.  Orcs attacking because they are loyal to an evil ruler who is accepting pay from shadowy conspirators to wage war is a specific.   The problem comes when you don't know really know how or why something works in your gameworld.  If have plots involving the royal sucesssion you need to already know who inherits if various people die in various orders.  If you want players to interact with elven culture, you need a firm idea of why elven culture is the way it is.  Something more than 'they really really like trees' for no obvious reason.I'm not sure using cliches are really a problem.  The problem comes when they are used, not as background, but as shorthand for detailing the parts of the gameworld the players are experiencing up close.  It's ok for distant landmarks to be fuzzy, but if they are still fuzzy close up, then people will just assume the details.  And those details will never surprise them, and they'll start to regard them as over-familiar, and cliched.*There are ways to mitigate this problem.  Use a detailed setting that everyone is familiar with, run a long campaign so that everyone becomes familiar with the specifics of the setting, or get your players to design parts of the setting so that they are already familiar with it before the game starts.</blockquote>

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