Spot the tropes!

[Jürgen Hubert]

I just found the TV Tropes Wiki - a rather nifty site that has huge lists of tropes from fiction.

As an intellectual exercise, how about taking a look at your favorite settings and spotting the most prominent tropes in them? This could be useful for thinking about the common tropes that drive role-playing games and campaigns...

 

[S'mon]

I recently watched almost a dozen swords & sorcery movies on DVD, most from the '80s. Fire & Ice, Deathstalker, Dragonslayer, Krull, Conan the Barbarian et al have one obvious thing in common. Every single one has a Princess who needs Rescuing.

 

[Asmor]

The Chatty DM has an entire category on his blog dedicated to mining the TVTropes wiki for ideas.

 

[InVinoVeritas]

The Five Man Band seems to work well with the composition of parties.

The Leader, The Lancer, The Big Guy, The Smart Guy, and The Chick are represented by the Standard Four... (Fighter is Leader/Big Guy, Rogue is Lancer, Wizard is Smart Guy, Cleric is Chick).

But do all parties function best as a twist on the Five Man Band?

 

[Doug McCrae]

The PCs can't learn the game rules, rather like being genre blind. The level 8 fighter can never discover he's a level 8 fighter for example.

No matter what the PCs do they will be jumped by mysterious assassins. No exceptions.

A charismatic leader is uniting the savage humanoids. In the campaign I'm currently playing in a charismatic leader is uniting the pirates, a minor twist. It is a pirates game, mind you.

Insane cultists seek to summon Cthulhu or Satan, or someone very much resembling either.

The PCs will learn that their first patron was working for the bad guys. By recovering the macguffin for him they were unwittingly helping their foes.

The Everything Was Better In The Past ex-civilisation that made all the dungeons and stocked them with magic items is always destroyed by a catastrophe. It's never a slow decline.