RPG Cliches

My contribution to RPG cliches:

Being able to walk into Reg the Halfling's house, rummage through his stuff, steal his Short Sword of Rectal Itching and dump a bunch of random crap his Wooden Chest for pickup later, all while he's standing there staring at you, waiting for you to initiate dialogue, where he may or may not give a shit that you've just ransacked his pad.

This is getting better and better in modern PC RPGs these days, but in console 'RPGs' they haven't really made any effort to correct it, which is hardly surprising, I suppose.

 

Yeah, that shit still amazes me, given that Ultima Underworld, 13 years ago, had "You see an <object> belonging to an <NPC>" and the appropriate NPC->Player standing modifiers.

 

Holy shit, that certainly sounds dangerous (for the user!) :shock:

 

I was thinking the same thing. This is one of the things I liked about Fable. When you enter someone else's house, a guard usualy comes after you, if he sees you stealing, you have to pay a fine, etc, not to mention that you get evil points for stealing even if you don't get caught. This actually stopped me from looting the houses in the beginning of the game, but then I realized it was possible to loot every damn house and still have 100% good status...

 

They are both clichés, but the latter is more natural. There really are many dangerous animals and from there it's really a small step - and largely subjective - to evil monsters. In fact, humans are notorious for not making a difference between both. So for practical purposes, the world IS filled with evil monsters already.

Did greatatlantic even say it's overused? I not perfectly certain what he meant to say, but the wording seems to imply that the characters fail to behave appropriately in the situation.

What the hell is the meaning of backwards-nostalgic? Besides, you appear to have missed the point of the cliché.

They could just stop being on your side without becoming your enemies for starters.

I don't. What is cliché about it is the setup, not the fact that there is a guard. Also, at the end of a dungeon filled with monsters you don't really need one more guard so the player can justify the reward.

 

I think I said it earlier in this post, but I'll say it again. There is a difference between using a cliche as a stepping stone, and using it as a crutch. Take Fable, it pretty much uses every cliche except amnesia. Yet, it uses these cliches just to hold the game together so the PC can play dress up.

Some things just make a lot of sense and are part of the artform, like sci-fi games with aliens. But having a gaurd appear after you pick up some item is just a way to throw in some cheap thrills.

Oooooo, I just thought of another. The organization that demands you complete a quest their regular members couldn't do before you are allowed membership. [Triad]

 

It wouldn't need to be a plain villager, it could be a highly trained warrior or soldier. Basically, it would be nice to see somebody succeed based on competence rather than a prophecy stating only they could and would succeed. And not every RPG needs to be about saving mankind. Take Planescape where you played to end your own life. And there is nothing wrong with a new enemy, Fallout's mutants where right out of the vat. Or Bloodlines, where you play because somebody a lot more powerful than you told you to do something for him.

Obviously, your plotline would make for bad game, but I never claimed purposely avoiding cliches is the way to a great one. Basically, developers should try to be creative when it comes storyline, which isn't easy. But hey, they should have 2 years to get all the details hammered out.

 

There are allways barrels - from post-apocalypse til fantasy and StarWars counting. Yeah, that and, of course, crates. And, yeah, you can smash/loot crates/barrels and they..contain valuable things!

And talking about valuable things - goblins or other weak creatures are guarding some sword with bonuses, but theu never use it. The goblins are allways weak and annoying.

You meet the main evil guy couple of times before fighting. You may also encounter his/her side-kicks which are battled for short arc of time and then they flee threatening to return and stuff. Usually you kill them just before the main villain guy.

 

Nothing beats finding a valuable ring or a +2 Greataxe inside of unlocked barrels sitting in the streets in NWN.

 

I think he was making a point about families sticking together, that they should die together instead of having one survivor all the time. Which makes for no NPC. Hence my point about the it being a device.

Most fantasy games tend to be about the past, ie their worlds tend to be more backwards than progressive. There are theorists out there who see this as a sign of nostalgia, of longing for a bygone era that was "better" in some sense. Hence my point about the tendency to glorify ancient civilizations, as if fantasy worlds followed the opposite timeline as the real world, where the older something is, the more advanced it is.

And yes, it is a cliche, but there's a reasoning behind the cliche that's in some ways inherent to the genre. It's even more interesting if you look at fantasy worlds thematically as they relate to post-apocalyptic worlds - they tend to be quite similar in many cases.

Good point.

I don't see what's so cliche about the setup that does not relate to the fact that every such artifact tends to be guarded. The device is cliche because you *expect* that the item is guarded, and so are not surprised when the monster pops out. The only way to avoid that is to avoid the guard altogether.

 

Yeah, seriously. Or 30 Steel Lightningzapper Throwing Knives of Doom in the numerous crates in Balmora in Morrowind. I made vast sums of money just flogging the random crap from street crates in that game.

 

I wish they had barrels standing around in my hometown...

 

Think about books. Aren't they just recycled stories? They are so cliché that they are already separated in categories (romance, sci-fi, historical fiction, fantasy, drama, thriller...).

The originality is trying to tell the same thing in different ways. The objective is to waken up certain emotions from the reader, and those emotions are always the same, so they ways to awaken them will always lead to the same.

There's nothing wrong with a cliché, as long as it's made in a way that touches our emotions. For that, good characters and nicely told story are important.

 

No, clichés are wrong because seeing one I definetly dont take the game/book/movie serious anymore. Like that whole SW games thing - all of them are ripoffs of original concepts from movies. I find them plainly stupid and definetly not emotionally touching.

Bard's Tale or Shrek or "The order of the stick" might be good examples of dealing with clichés.

 

Actually after re-reading it with my sarcasm-detector on, now I believe he meant it metaphorically. I don't think "overused plot device" and "cliché" are contradictory.

So what does backwards-nostalgic mean compared to just nostalgic?
Besides that, I disagree with the reasoning, since the civilizations we are talking about were advanced and thus progressive in contrast to the setting. How's that nostalgic?

I don't really think the cliché is that they are ancient and powerful, but that they mysteriously disappear.

Nah, a guard guarding a valuable object isn't a cliché. The cliché is a specific setup.
But then the real point is that it's not necessary. There are many ways to avoid it, simply by replacing the guardian by a different obstacle.

 

Fighting cliches is as stupid as trying to build games exclusively out of them.

They exist in every game, and this is not a bad thing. It's not their existence in a game that should attract our attention, it's the game as a whole.

For instance, Torment had a cliche: amnesiac protagonist. So what? Yes, it could be a reason for nay-sayers and Torment-haters for nagging, but would it actually make the game worse than it is? No.

Baldur's Gate 2 had a similar cliche, albeit the protagonist's amnesia was only partial. Again, I didn't even notice this when I played the game, and enjoyed it to the fullest.

It's plain stupid to try to rewrite the game just because it contains some feature taht is popular.

Imagine: you have all RPG developers on different planes/planets, and they don't have ANY contact with each other, thiey can't play each other's games etc etc. And they all start making RPGs. I'm pretty sure there will be at least a dozen of games which share one or more cliche, even though the devs couldn't "steal" it.

 

Nostalgic is too generic of a word, but backwards didn't make as much sense as I thought it would've on a cursory glance. A better word, if I weren't so hasty to make the post, would've been traditionalist.

Because human history hasn't exactly been a progression from primitivism to enlightenment. People look back to the Greeks as being a fairly progressive civilization even compared to many areas of the world today. That which makes it nostalgic is the fact that it's looking backwards to a past culture, implying that the past was a better time than the present. Nostalgia does not have to be for a more primitive state - in a post-apocalyptic backwater world, for instance, people might feel nostalgia for a time when civilization was advanced and progressive.

Fantasy, as a genre, tends to be about recapturing and reimagining the past. You can see this from the fact that most societies depicted in fantasy are riddled with influence from ancient cultures. Even when the society's technological state is advanced, ie their mastery of science and automation, their mode of *culture* tends to remain a traditionalist one. There are exceptions, but few and far in-between. This is why people call fantasy a nostalgic genre.

I think it's both. The mystery part tends to be a cliche device (ie "players must venture forth and discover the causes of its legendary demise!"), true, but the disappearance of the civilization (at least the part that was powerful) is usually implied by the fact that it's ancient, for otherwise it'd be contemporary.

Another alternative that appeals to a player's sense of the sublime would be to display a gigantic creature's skeleton in the same area as the item, implicating that there once was a powerful guardian but that even it could not stand against the ravages of time.

But yes, there are alternatives, though you'll find that it's usually harder to come up with a good obstacle that does not involve combat. Most games fail in the area of puzzles, if only by the fact that they break the tone established by a heroic atmosphere through introducing blatantly stupid devices that couldn't have been utilized by any ancient civilization worth its salt.

 

For the ancient civilization thing, I meant the cliche to be the whole package: ancient, more advanced then present day society, and invariably dead. The mere existence doesn't necessary trigger the "Oh no, not this again" response from me. Its just when they start making a big deal out of it, and I find myself checking off stereotypes in my head. Overly arrogant, check. Relics lying around, check. Powerful weapon of said civilization still making the rounds, check.

You get what I'm saying? Metal makes a few good points about a good game not being any worse for having a cliche, but Planescape is the exception, not the rule. I don't know about you, but it really bugs me when I start playing a game that just offers some development I've seen before and expect that to make the game interesting. With Torment, that wasn't the case. They threw in plenty of other stuff to make the game very interesting indeed.

 

Well, even the worst cliche can be done well. Such as in wiz 7 when you loot and loot the dragon's lair for an hour or so...then the dragon returns.

 

Cliche!

 

Allright.

No, it's not. I would say that the Dwermer would be ancient even if not gone, as are the Vorlons or even Minbari in Babylon 5.
But I think the crux is not the fact that they are gone, but the presentation, and I think greatatlantic said it well enough.

Yeah, that's a good one actually.

Heroic atmosphere? That sounds like a phrase from an advertisement for Oblivion on the X-Box.
And as for most games failing, I would say that their failure means nothing beyond the fact that others should do better.

 

Err, what I meant by heroic atmosphere was the idea that the game has thus far been about action, as it's usually in combat-based RPG games that we find this kind of find-artifact-guarded-by-boss sort of setup. It usually breaks the entire tone to throw in a puzzle at such a junction because solving a puzzle is most definitely not what we'd expect from an action-oriented atmosphere.

I guess it all comes down to my premise that puzzles are lame, however, and the only reason I say this is because most puzzles in RPGs and action games *are* rather primitive and annoying. They're designed this way, I suppose, so that everyone can solve them. But this defeats the whole purpose of having them as anything more than a irritating side-track: why would ancient civilization X, that built floating cities and weapons that could destroy the world, guard them with multiple-choice math riddles and connect-the-dots (ie DS 2)? And how is the player's game experience enriched by solving them? That problem with puzzles is itself a cliche, I suppose, and I'll thus contribute it to the thread.

 

My neighbor has an oversized crate called a "shed" that had all sorts of goodies in it. I found two jet skis and a motorbike that netted me $6000 cash! If real life were an RPG, I would have to sleep for 24 hours before my hook-up could get all the money to pay me.

 

I also remember seeing at least one Hong Kong action movie where The Guy dropped his guns in a flowerpot to pick them up later. Oh, and in Ronin The Guy picks up his gun from behind some kind of crate when he leaves a coffee shop. And RPG worlds are dangerous, so lots of adventurers probably drop their magical weapons all around town in case they need a little something after having been drugged and stripped and imprisioned by The Badguys. You know, for after they've escaped, and are naked in the streets. It's kind of like squirrels, who collect nuts and then forget where they stashed them, and then other squirrels come by later and find such nuts. Altruism or failed foresight - you decide!