The coupled cliche conundrum

[Shadowdancer]

And I believe Failsafe was written before Dr. Strangelove, so that Dr. S was a parady of it. I'm not 100% sure on that.

The novel "Failsafe" was written well before "Dr. Strangelove" came out, but the original movie version of "Failsafe" came out the same year as "Dr. Strangelove." The original starred Henry Fonda as the President, and a young Larry Hagman as his interpreter. Walter Matthau, Dom DeLuise Fritz Weaver also are in it.

 

[Piratecat]

The trick is to take a cliche and change it just enough to mess with your players' expectations. It's like a jazz riff.

 

[Faraer]

When something happens properly, in fiction or otherwise, it's as if for the first time (and a mometary transcendence of time occurs, which is one of the main goals of art). Viewed from outside it might look like a cliché, but that's irrelevant to the experience. In the same way, something may be an archetype if it's fully achieved and felt, and a stereotype if not; they look similar from outside but are not. If that sense of reality and wonder isn't achieved, putting twists on things is just bandaging the problem, and in fact merely participates in the same stereotype (though it can work, as Piratecat says, as a deranging tactic).

Following what Eric said, we moderns have a craving for the real which we falsely perceive as a need for novelty, which won't fulfil that craving.

 

[wocky]

I feel cliches are top quality fuel for RPG experiences. When you want a fast action-filled game, cliches and movie references provide a very rich common code between players.

As good as a particular DMs descriptions might be, an RPG is an RPG, not a book. Plus, whereas in a book you're free to imagine things your way, it helps when all players' imaginations point in the same direction.

 

[I'm A Banana]

"There is nothing new under the sun" is a cliche since it's well known from Ecclesiastes and often quoted in other works. "Every random number generator has a finite cycle" would be a more original way to express the idea, since chances are no one's ever heard that metaphor used to express the idea before. The downside to novel metaphors of course is that they tend to be difficult to understand and are thus very difficult to do well. A cliche is "tried and true"; you know it's going to work. This is true of plots as well. IMO, the old chestnut about there only being N plots (also neglecting the problem with defining what constitutes a distinct plot) is just a lame excuse invented by lazy writers to explain why they can't be bothered to invent something new. There are plenty of possible new plots; it's just that it's extremely difficult to communicate them efficiently because the audience isn't familiar with them already.
Because of the shear volume of fiction produced nowadays, you can figure that anything even remotely easy to come up with as been done repeatedly, so the regions of plot space that haven't been explored yet must take an extraordinary amount of work (and risk) to reach, which is why so few authors ever manage to get there or even dare to try.

I disagree. It's not a matter of effort or laziness or any real negative personality trait at all, in general. It's just all been done before, in one form or another.

Human experience is not infinite. Neither is human imagination. Works of entertainment or art focus on that human experience, using human imagination, and by their own nature cannot be infinite. People struggle with the same problems of life, death, fate, the legal system, war, choise, etc. that even ancient Greeks dealt with. Art and entertainment are not new things. As early as Merry Shelly and before, people were writing every science fiction novel that ever has existed.

Like Wickett said, the devil is in the details. Ug the Tribal Singer may have sung a song about the dangers of fire and Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, and Lucas does the same thing with lightsabers. The trappings are different -- the cultures have changed -- but the story is the same.

"There is nothing new under the sun" is the exact same thing as "Every random number generator has a finite cycle." They're both old tropes that express the same idea that humans have experienced. But they express it in culturally distinct ways. There's no way Holmes could've really experienced much random number generators or know what a finite cycle for one would be.

And that's really where the variation comes in. Culturally. Every story has already been told, but not in every possible way. That's what's infiniate. Human variation.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Almost none of the folks who paid to see "Barb Wire" realize it's a scene-for-scene remake/ripoff of "Casablanca," despite the latter being one of the best-known films of all time. Know your audience, and don't be afraid to throw in some boobies to distract them.

 

[Wasgo]

Has anyone else experienced the sensation of realising that whichever way a plotline resolves, it will be predictable?

It turns out that the magistrate accidently unleashed a horrible curse one hundred years ago. He barginned with the witch for a long life and a prosperous town. In turn, she slew him and made him undead, while for the town, she made it so every person in it would alway bear twins. The magistrate then struck a new bargin with the witch. He would be returned his mind, and given the appearence of human, and the witch would in turn be allowed to take one of child from each pair of twins at birth. The town was inflicted with kind of amnesia so that they would never notice they had been under the same mayor for a century, nor that a mysterious woman always appeared seemingly out of nowhere to be the midwife.

Recent events conspired to change this though. A terrible plague swept through the witch's domain, killing many of her underlings. Unfortunetely for her current plan, she needed a certain number of living test subjects. So she sent her sons under the guise of monsters rampaging through the town, swapping the dead twin for the live one. Feeling that the witch has broken the agreement, the mayor sends for the heroes to hunt her down and kill her, but fails to tell them the whole story because he fears for his own life. And from there our story begins.

 

[Vargo]

I'm going to pull in an experience I had back when I was part of the Anime fan-fiction community. During the period I was involved, I saw each part of the community (I.E., stories about each particular series) go through three distinct phases:

1. Continuing the story
2. Self-insertion
3. Meta-story

The first phase is merely recognizing the original story, and attempting to continue the themes of the original story with the original characters.

The second phase has people inserting new characters into the story - most of the time, these characters were thinly-veiled idealized versions of themselves, like the DM with the uber-NPC.

The third phase had people writing a story in which either the characters recognized they were in a story, or in some way turned the story on its head. While this is not a fanfic, possibly the best example of the meta-story would be Neon Genesis Evangelion, which turned the giant robot story completely on it's head.

Spoilers for NGE:
In the traditional mecha story, a young boy with no self confidence, finds his own courage, gets the girl, earns the approval of his parental figures, and saves the human race. In NGE, a young boy with no self confidence becomes even more insecure, cuts himself off from the rest of the human race, pretty much gets the girl killed, his own father can't stand to look at him by the end of the series, and he's also responsible for most of humanity being destroyed.

Play up the conflict between Chaos and Order, and down the conflict between Good and Evil.
Heaven and Hell unite in a struggle against an Elder Pantheon (lovecraftian) that threatens all that exists. Solar and Pit Fiend fight side by side, old rivalries forgotten.
A second schism occurs in the upper planes, and Heaven wars with itself - with the loser being cast out. And the loser is not Evil, but Good...

 

[jgbrowning]

It may be true that there's nothing new under the sun, but that's ok. Sometimes we watch a movie/read a book/play an RPG to experience something new, to see the pattern broken. But there can be equal pleasure in seeing the pattern fulfilled to perfection.

Plus from a player's point of view, even the most simple plotline can feel convoluted when you only get to see bits and pieces of it at one time.

The trick is to take a cliche and change it just enough to mess with your players' expectations. It's like a jazz riff.

Yep. Herein lies the secret of all wonderful stories.

joe b.

 

[Umbran]

Has anyone else experienced the sensation of realising that whichever way a plotline resolves, it will be predictable?

Don't confuse "has been done before" with "predictable". If every single plot that ever could be devised has been done before, that means that the folks in the middle of it won't be able to predict which one of the myriad endings is coming down the pike

The fact that afterwards the players might say, "Well duh! We should have expected that," if you set up your cards correctly they won't expect it.