What traditional fantasy conventions are you tired of?

[nopantsyet]

Yeah, I've got to agree with you, dungeonmastercal. I've been through being sick of elves and the magical divide and Vancian magic, low magic, high magic. I've sliced the archetypes this way and that. I'd really like to try something like, Buy the Numbers, though I doubt my players would much go for it.

It's not that I don't like the classes. It's that the type of plot I want to run has changed. I could probably more easily adapt d20 Modern to what I'm creating, but as pointed out earlier, D&D is what people play. It's gamers' pidgen. It's not the most articulate tool, but it allows enough of us to communicate in a common parlance so as to allow us to game once in a while.

I'd say that's a pretty good benefit. But I also think it's why there's a significant fragmentation of opinion on this matter. I still supply my players with a healthy dose of the archetypes because they're always crowd-pleasers.

 

[Zaruthustran]

Eh, I'm with you, Herpes Cineplex. The cliche is a cliche, and I'm a bit sick of it too. What I wanted to explore were some of the reasons the cliche exists.

For the record, I think *any* history adds weight and import, not just history of better, stronger, faster ancestors. Tieing the plot into the past, putting current events into a historical context--that's good stuff, regardless of who wins in a fight between current and past heroes.

The 70's and 80's were so spooky because NEVER BEFORE had humanity had such a capacity for self-annihilation, and such an increasing likelyhood of using that capacity. It was (and is) a heretofor unknown "Golden Age" of destructive capability.

What a golden age does is add a bit of unknown, and call into question the power of the present. If you achieve uber-9th-level magicness, and no one else has, ever--well that's neat. Great. If you do the same, but know that once, someone else did too--and for an unknown reason, that level of power destroyed civilization--well that's also neat, and (bonus!) scary.

Remember this?

http://www.internal.org/view_poem.phtml?poemID=292

-z

 

[Herpes Cineplex]

...however, I'm a bit worried about the safety of my brain after looking at your avatar...

Oh, it's not so bad. Coolthulhu inflicts 1d6 SAN loss if you don't pass the Sanity check, but only 1 SAN if you do. Just make sure your shotgun's loaded and that someone knows how to draw an Elder Sign, and you'll be fine.

--

 

[mhacdebhandia]

The A-number one fantasy cliche I can do without:

Tolkien's Peoples: Whether they're genuine Tolkien elves or the watered-down traditional D&D version, they bore me. Whether they're hobbits by another name or pseudo-kender, they bore me. Greedy, suspicious, homebody dwarves, they bore me. To say nothing of the fact that I am sick and tired of players equating their character's race with their character's personality.

I prefer games where humans are the only playable race. Or where non-human races are genuinely different. Or where there's a bit of damned variety, however you come at it.

 

[Deadguy]

I can understand the desire for a non-post-Golden-Age setting, HC. It's quite interesting to posit a gameworld where things are advancing and improving, even if there are hiccoughs along the way. For my first 3e campaign, the Shattered World, I borrowed from the novel the Shattered World, though I made the setting my own. And for that I actually combined a past Golden Age and Cataclysm with the ides of a new Renaissance. One thousand years earlier the world had literally been blown apart by the Necromancer. A last ditch effort by the world's many sorcerers and wizards had rescued the planet from total annihilation, but had exhausted their resources, and civilization largely fell. But out of the ashes came the first people to rebuild, and they spread from fragment to fragment. Now a 100o years later people are beginning to become settled and great effort is going into advancing technology and magic (and government) for a new world. People still dig into the ruins of the past and find nuggets of infortmation. But others are working to develop new ideas. In that sense it models the real Renaissance quite closely.

I feel that this has offered me the best of both worlds!

 

[rbingham2000]

For my Deathsworn setting, which pits noble warriors against the unholy princes of a frozen realm ruled by vampires that have recently lost their king, I'm only using humans as a PC race. And I've thrown out perhaps the biggest fantasy convention of all: magic.

Yes, magic.

There's a lot that is fantastical about my world (like giants, spider-climbing goblins, cities carved from the mountains, high-flying wuxia warriors, shadow wolves and the undead themselves), but the two things you will not find in this setting are magic-users (of either the arcane or divine persuasion) and magic items.

 

[ashockney]

Breasts...?

No! Wait; I was kidding! Ow! Stop pummeling me!

This is rude, and socially unacceptable.

It also is so funny, it made me laugh out loud at work.

Stop it!

 

[ashockney]

For our campaigns, evolution has eliminated the following conventions:

Gnomes - not enough difference/interest with halflings and dwarves around
Alignment - just doesn't make sense, really bad with Pro Evil, Smite Evil...
Encumberance - too much detail, keep it high level and free flowing
Components - same as above, too much detail, no bang for the buck
Psionics - we'll think about adding this as soon as we get magic balanced...
Gunpowder - Yuck! Never mixed well with magic. Why bother?
Planar Travel - we didn't get rid of the great wheel per se, just the floating about. We generally keep the campaign home, with at most a couple of "gate" visits to a strange land, that might be extra-planar.
Low-level - my group has no real interest in the game below about 3rd level

 

[shadow]

There are a lot of fantasy clichés that I'm absolutely sick of. Specifically I don't want to see any more D&D campaigns incorporating the following clichés:

Universal Language: Most D&D campaigns seem to take place before the Tower of Babel. While I understand that the common tongue makes gameplay a lot smoother, it makes the speak language skill a waste of skill points, as well as completely defeating the purpose of spells such as comprehend languages and tongues. Besides, different languages add a sense of believability and flavor to a setting.

Clerics: I never understood why the majority of priests and men of the cloth take up arms and go around on adventures. Do all the gods demand that their followers be adventurers and mercenaries? For that matter, where do all the spellcasting priests fit into traditional fantasy fiction? It seems that in most D&D settings every ordained clergy can cast miraculous spells. Most D&D campaigns seem to try to shoehorn the cleric class into the setting.

Polytheism: Why do all D&D campaigns feature the same spiritual assumption? Moreover, most campaigns seem only to feature gods that would appeal to adventurers: the god of war, the god of fortune, the god of adventurers, but no gods of fertility, or gods of the home. Let's have a little variety in religion. Why not monotheism like medieval Europe? Why not animism? Why not pantheism?

Adventurers: I never understood why most settings assume that a large portion of the population goes around looting ruins for a living. There should be a some reason why the characters are living such dangerous lives. Perhaps the PCs are freedom fighters against a tyrant or darklord (such as in Midnight). Perhaps the campaign takes place on a lawless frontier where bounty hunters are employed to capture criminals. The old adventuring mercenary party just seems too hokey and clichéd.

Silly Names: I'm absolutely sick of Thargar the Barbarian and the Lost Ruins of X'an'df'ar'in'sa. I'm not asking for a detailed treatise on the phonetics and naming conventions of a campaign; I'm just looking for names that sound somewhat consistant, and don't sound too silly!

 

[VirgilCaine]

Clerics:

Polytheism:

Adventurers:

Clerics: The old Greyhawk pantheon has several deities that it makes no sense at all to have armor proficiency--Myrhiss, Lendor, one of the sea deities, and a few others. Others have little reason to adventure--Lydia, IIRC their clerics mainly teach basic reading and writing. But in yet other cases, clerics would only enter tombs looking for relics pertinent to their faith or to find out something, not for loot specifically--like Geshtai or Bleredd.

But, the truncated ("PHB") pantheon has strong reasons for each deities clerics to adventure.

As for it not being in fantasy fiction, what does that have to do with anything?

Polytheism: No gods of the home? Perhaps because D&D is a dangerous world, and people aren't worried so much about the harvest, but about the goblins not raiding the harvest. Wenta, IIRC, is an old Greyhawk deity that is essentially, the harvest deity.

Adventurers: Large percentage? What, like 1%?
Just because there are clerics or fighters or whatnot doesn't mean they adventure like everyone else--they are bodyguards or town/private guards or criminals or whatever.