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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chupacabra" data-source="post: 1768764" data-attributes="member: 17708">Worn out game tropes?  I have to break this down into some subcategories:Things I am tired of and have abandoned / do not allow in my campaigns:* The overabundance of half-(insert something other than elf or orc) races.  There exist too darn many of them to make sense -- even in a fantasy setting.  Plus, they often smack of a blatant attempt to squeeze the last drop of munchkin-juice out of two races.* Elves being all-good or at least all-noble.  I heartily enjoyed the depiction of the wood elves in The Hobbit:  They were suspicious.  They were xenophobic.  They were militaristic.  They were greedy.  They locked up the heroes in a cage for weeks on end.  They got drunk.  They weren't simply some buncha altruistic nature lovers who lived in the woods yet never seemed to get their hair mussed or clothes dirty.  They seemed more "real" to me than their later LOTR exemplars.  Because I hate the saintly elf stereotype, I try to encourage elves in my campaigns to be as well-rounded and as good or as evil as a human would be -- varying moral shades of grey and all of that.  And no, "evil elf" doesn't necessarily = "Drow"  (a race I disallow as a PC).* The ethic that the party must be well-rounded.  Bah humbug I say!  I don't like players (or GM's) to dictate to others what class to choose.  Let's say a new campaign is starting with five players.  Player one pretty much has unlimited choice in picking his or her PC.  Player two has slightly less choice --they usually won't pick the same race/class that player one chose.  By the time player five hears about the new game, guess what, they get the strong arm treatment from the GM or the other party members to run a cleric or rogue or whatever dump class the group is lacking.  Hell, let the party be made up of all half-orc sorcerers or dwarven bards.  So much the better.  It will be more of a challenge to the DM to contruct meaningful campaigns and encounters and I guarantee more of a challege to the players to survive and thrive in that group than if the party was the same ol' "two warriors, a divine caster, a arcane caster, and a trapfinder."  I try to discourage anyone playing a class just to fill some sort of percieved "hole" in the party.* Favored classes.  Someone tell me how this makes any sense whatsoever.  If a clannish dwarf or an aloof elf or a fat&happy halfling or whatever is such the rebel that he/she/it leaves home and goes off to lead a life of adventuring why must that person be forever tied to some "racially favored class".  Maybe the halfling fighter / wizard left home to become an adventurer precisely because he didn't fit in with the rest of his lithe-footed, quick-fingered, rogue-ish kin.  Favored classes are done away with in my campaigns.    Things I am tired of but keep due to laziness or simplicity of game mechanics:* Universal coinage.  A gold piece from kingdom A should not be worth the same when you cross over the border into kingdom B, especially if A & B happen to be at war or otherwise dont like each other.  It would be like walking into Washington DC circa 1863 with a sheaf of Confederate Dollars and expecting to rent a hotel room.  Not gonna happen.  Also, a "100 gp" pearl should fetch far more in some landlocked desert town than it would at an ocean-side fishing village.  Although the realism of coins (and gems) from different realms being worth varying degrees of wealth appeals to me somewhat, the bookkeeping involved would be too laborious to cope with.  * Everyone ends up fighting with a sword.  Sigh!  Where are the mace-weilding fighters?  When's the last time your paladin broke out a glaive?  Seems that the bad guys always use some type of sword against us players, so when we loot those same said swords from the cold, dead hands of the newly departed bad guys, the party gains yet another sword, which we then use against the next bad guy wielding a slightly better sword.  Oh sure, the evil wizard has a funky dagger in his belt and the big bad cleric swings a wicked flail or something, but most of the weapon loot has been and seemingly always will be swords.  Yawn!  As much as I try to steer the players in my campaigns into using different weapons, they always come back to the sword.  Must be something Freudian.  I've given up trying to change things.  Oh well, I guess it's not called "Flails and Sorcery" for a reason.Things that others I game with are fed up with but I see no problem with:* My last GM had a big, big problem with Common.  He hated it and ran it down at every opportunity.  For him, each race spoke its own language with some overlap between races with similar backgrounds (say, dwarf and gnome).  As players we sometimes found it difficult to exist in parts of the game world where one language predominated -- and we did not understand that language.  I guess that would be more "real world" (if you are adventuring in Spain for example and don't know Spanish, you either learn it or move or quit your whining) but it irked us a players.Tropes I wholeheartedly embrace:* There WAS a golden age whose downfall left all those hidden pockets of magic and treasure squirred away in the dark places of the world.  How the heck else do you explain it?* Halflings are fat and happy, like Tolkein hobbits.  Halflings are NOT overcaffineated and twitchy like (ugh) Kender (oh, how I hate kender..).  And what's up with 3.0 / 3.5 making Halflings into nomadic gypsy like critters?  Whats wrong with burrows and houses built into the sides of hills, etc.  Hell, just own up to the fact that you stole the whole racial concept from Tolkein and move on.  Why change 'em?</blockquote>

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