What traditional fantasy conventions are you tired of?

[MDSnowman]

Only one fantasy convetion bugs me enough where I need to bring it up...

The Saintly Female Healer

Wether she's a cleric, a druid, some core class you picked up in a random book, or a character in a video game RPG she's equally flat!

I know the role of the healer will always be needed, but seriously does she need to be the same cookie cutter archetype every time?!? These characters just get on my nerves always just being so good... more so than you'd expect any paladin to be.

I once saw a twist on this that I liked however, a happy bubbly and downright perky healer who healed wounds by sticking her hand in them, closing them up from the inside and working from there... of course she was always drenched in dried blood up to her elbows and had a somewhat morbid sense of humor. Here you've still got your dedicated healer and now she doesn't grate on everyone by being so holier than thou that you can't call her on it.

-This Pointless Rant brought to you by the letter G

 

[Warrior Poet]

This is a great thread. I have really enjoyed reading it and getting some inspiration. There are some great suggestions and ideas in here.

For my current campaign I got rid of half-races. I adopted the idea of races as biologically different species, not just different on a socio-cultural (or even just apperance) level, so elves are truly biologically different than humans, for example, therefore pregnancy cannot result from sexual congress between two members of those species. Also, no subraces: elves come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but there are no drow, wood, or sea elves. There's just elves. And they're not all flighty poets and magicians (unless they want to be); in fact, they have the finest espionage academy around, and a strong monastic sect as well.

Incidentaly, I have nothing personal against flighty poets. Or magicians.

I eliminated gnomes, but that's probably just bias. Don't care much for 'em. Dropped orcs, too, added hobgoblins as a playable race, with much of their philosophy similar to imperial Rome.

I dropped the idea of the (relatively) hyper-civilized world, and instead tried out a more savage land that's actually creeping back and taking over sections that used to be dominated by cities (and not on account of the druids).

Other than those minor things, there's more I would have liked to have done, but it just didn't work out with some of my players' desires, and I wanted to do something that meshed a little bit of what everyone wanted. Still, would have been nice to get rid of alignment, restructure magic (particularly the divine/arcane aspect, and then throw in a Cthulhoid backlash/cost system, and top it off with dropping the Vancian memory structure), and mess with some other things.

Thanks for listening.

No Moss Elves or Limestone Dwarves.

Thank you for this. This made my day.

Warrior Poet

 

[Herpes Cineplex]

(a) Golden Age(s) Long Passed
If things are as good as they've ever been, then what is there to aspire to? Sure, you can have technological progress, but if society is the best it's ever been, it's kind of hard to have epic struggles other than "prevent Osdnaos from ending the golden age!".

Ugh. Whereas with a Golden Age lurking in the background, you can have epic struggles like "prevent Osdnaos from reawakening the ancient evil that ended the golden age!", right?

Seriously, though, if things are as good as they've ever been, then what you aspire to is to make them better. Progress doesn't have to be purely technological. Why can't magic get better, more powerful, easier to use, more varied in its applications? Why can't societies get better, with more social justice, leisure time, education, health care, whatever? Why can't the weather get better? Why can't exploration lead people to places they've never seen before, where foreign cultures are still thriving and there are strange new marvels to witness, instead of always skulking through the wreckage of the golden age? Why can't these new improvements have drawbacks or create other problems which must be dealt with by experts and heroes in order to make the world even better?

It's not like there's anything wrong with a lost golden age in and of itself. (Okay, it's totally unrealistic, but this is a fantasy game, so that's not a big deal.) It's SO overused, though. I think it'd be fun to see more settings where the best, most powerful items and magic and whatever are all new developments, rather than just being pale shadows of the wonders of the past.

--
because in real life, the last 50 years have been better than the previous 5000

 

[VirgilCaine]

1. The Temple of Isis. The clerics of the Temple of Isis grew so rich for selling their bodies that they started the first banking system. They would make loans and charge interest. They were probably on the verge of creating an echequer system when Rome fell and the Dark Ages began.

As the more wealth the PCs have, the more serious it can become. As far as I can tell, D&D economics is very ugly when you consider these ramifications.

1) Interesting...

And again, not everything needs to be in cash form...deeds or rights to mines and the like are worth a lot... But still, it could be a problem.
Also, PCs don't have a lot of cash most of the time, they invest in magic weapons and stuff...and go out and get more money...

Edit:
--Huge Racial Divides

With all the weird aberrations and things to worry about, civilized humanoids IMC don't worry too much about differences between themselves.

Several of the MM monsters kill other races on sight because of isolationism and xenophobia. Doesn't make sense to me for so many humanoid races to just not like each other, just because they are different.

So, instead of hating each other, about half the world IMC chafes under the yoke of a Yuan-Ti empire, which not only covers land, but a large amound of ocean also.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Breasts...?

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


All jokes aside, I think that's just the problem; nobody can agree on what to trade for the various penalties which it would take to make the gender differences 'realistic'. Now, on the other hand, you could just leave female stats alone, and give male characters an optional bonus to strength for a penalty to wisdom. But, then again, I took the wis-penalty, so what would I know?

I'd guess that if you were to model the difference in strength between genders as a plus two bonus for men, then you would have to go with a plus two bonus on constitution for women.

Or whatever else you would use to simulate longer life and better general survivability.

I think it's more then a little misguided to model things that way, but that seems to me to be the way to do it.

Were to be really realistic I would say that human beings in general would be forced to roll wisdom with a penalty and chance for an exploding die, but that's an academic prejuidice. I mean who knows how wise humans are compared to halflings, fer instance?

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

One thing that really bothers me as a traditional fantasy convention is the city as its own world.

I mean unless you lead a very 'recent' sort of a lifestyle the city is just one more place you visit. A different part of the landscape but still a part of the landscape rather than its own place.

But everyone from Lankhmar on up has cities as seperate strange environments. If not all cities then at least one.

And Nomads and riding around on horses are never as cool as they should be.

 

[Sir Elton]

How about every fantasy book is about my English Countryside Vaction?

 

[Desdichado]

One thing that really bothers me as a traditional fantasy convention is the city as its own world.

I mean unless you lead a very 'recent' sort of a lifestyle the city is just one more place you visit. A different part of the landscape but still a part of the landscape rather than its own place.

But everyone from Lankhmar on up has cities as seperate strange environments. If not all cities then at least one.

And Nomads and riding around on horses are never as cool as they should be.

How about every fantasy book is about my English Countryside Vaction?

I have no idea what either of those two mean.

 

[VirgilCaine]

I have no idea what either of those two mean.

Well, the former means that cities are presented as separate from the landscape and villages/towns around them, when they are the direct result of those things. The latter means that too many people think
Pseudo-Medieval England = Original Fantasy Setting, when you have a lot more variety than just England...like the Icelandic Free State for example, when looking at medieval countries to use as themes for fantasy.

 

[Desdichado]

OK, I see. Frankly, I'm a little tired to basing fantasy off of transparently well-known Earth cultures anyway. Even if they're not fantasy English, we have the fantasy Romans, the fantasy Arabs, the fantasy Chinese, the fantasy Japanese, the fantasy Mongols, fantasy Plains Indians, etc. ad infinitum... all with new names, of course.

Sovereign Stone was particularly bad at this; they even advertised on the back of their setting book! Mongol dwarves! Samurai Elves! Ehh, give me something a little more original.