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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6439251" data-attributes="member: 4937">Wow is this thread old.   I just realized.   Ok, actual clichés that I really hate:a) The PC's invent magic.  That is to say, in so many games I'm in the DM has never considered how magic might alter society and so the NPCs have never prepared for magic, and as such when the PC's use a spell for even the most obvious advantage, the NPCs are completely unprepared for coping with it.   Examples: merchants have never heard of illusions or other means of magical trickery and have no means of protecting themselves, society that hasn't made charming someone illegal, societies with insecure jail/prison practices unable to accommodate spell-casters, fortresses unable to protect themselves from invisible intruders, anyone seemingly oblivious to or surprised by magical effects that would be common given the prevalence of wizards in the world ("Look, the door just opened on its own.  Must have been a freak occurrence and there is nothing strange going on."), wooden warships unable to deal with magical fire, or pretty much any economic investment that amount to the Maginot Line blind to inexpensive magic.  b) Barbarians: If there is one class trope I hate above all others, it's the barbarian.  Everything about this class is wrong.  First of all, most barbarians you actually run into in published adventures aren't actually remote wilderness tribesman, but just big tough guys living amidst mainstream civilization.  So why do they still retain the flavor of being a 'barbarian'?   Secondly, why must everyone from the wilderness be chaotic?   We don't make the reverse assumption, that if you are a city dweller you are lawful.   In fact, its highly likely that a remote tribesman has a more developed sense of place in the world, duty, respect for tradition, loyalty to kith and kin, and so forth than your average city dweller in a cosmopolitan ever changing social structure loosely based off the modern.   So why do we retain this assumption that wilderness = chaotic?  Ditto the same assumption with shamans.c) Lightly armored fighters deserve the same AC as heavily armored fighters, because 'balance'.  Ugh, no.  That's just stupid.  Not having to wear heavy armor is itself a huge advantage in every version of D&D that ever was.d) High level mundane classed individuals are limited to what real world normal people can do.   Beyond about 6th level, even if you are a fighter, rogue, or what not, your abilities are so beyond what normal people can do, that you are still superhuman even if not explicitly supernatural.   By 15th level, you are The Batman.  Or, you are Green Arrow.   Actually, by high level, you probably are more potent and capable than either one, since the comics require plot protection to prevent heroes of that sort from actually falling off high places or taking devastating wounds - and high level D&D fighters don't.   They are literally superheroic 'bricks' with magic swords that reasonably can chop through stone.   You can do not just what Olympic level athletes can do, but pretty much anything you see an action movie hero do.  DMs that refuse to acknowledge this, perhaps out of a misplaced desire to be 'gritty', are effectively adding a house rule that amounts to, "Play a spell caster if you want to be cool."e) Caves are flat with level floors.  Been in a real cave?  Enough said.f) Every single threat the PCs discover rises to the level of saving the world, but only the PCs are involved and every NPC is trying to thwart them no matter how obvious the threat or how trivial the aid would be to provide.  NPCs with vastly more resources than the PCs are all over the place, but are uninvolved beyond having gold exclamation points over their head for no obvious reason.All of these clichés can be fairly easily escaped and unlike escaping uniform currency or universal trades languages they have immediate benefits for your game IMO, but conscious attempts to escape them seem fairly rare.</blockquote>

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