Both of my last two GMs proved incredibly self-conscious about not falling into the cliches of "generic" fantasy...

Both of my last two GMs proved incredibly self-conscious about not falling into the cliches of "generic" fantasy. While both of them went about dealing with this in very different ways - one added dozens of cultural traits to their Orks, Dwarves, and Halflings until they were indistinguishable from the original brand besides appearance, whereas the other jettisoned everything but humans outright and made all of the non-human races too alien to be player characters (and then set things during the age of sail to avoid knights and kings and land battles) - but both seemed to go out of their way constantly to remind us how their setting was distinct from the sort of thing we'd find in Forgotten Realms.

I've got to ask, how much does a setting being "original" matter to you when you play a fantasy rpg? Does the lack of elves, or the fact that the elves are all mongols now, or anything inbetween that make you feel more or less inclined to play? Does the fact that the game takes place outside of a medieval-equivalent era or outside of fantasy-Europe entirely actually make a difference when somebody's trying to sell you on a game? I've increasingly found that I've started legitimately longing for a chance to just play a "normal" halfling for a change, and I was interested in seeing whether or not a GM's attempts at originality even mean as much to the average player as GMs think they do?

It's 4000% about execution for me. If your setting looks and acts like you didn't care about it, then why would I care about it?

"My elves are X, uh, just because I guess" is bad whether X is "the same thing everyone keeps calling a Tolkien ripoff even though D&D elves don't resemble Tolkien elves even slightly" or it's "fungus people with unicorn horns that they use as psychic antenna."

Small things that breathe life into it. The little details and taking premises to their conclusions that show the GM gave a shit.

People have confused the statistic ("most unoriginal settings are bad, therefore try to be original") with the actual cause ("more unoriginal settings are made without thought or care because shoving something original in TENDS DO cause the writer to explore that difference more fully").

See: Star Wars, where there's five million books about the Force down to what time of day it takes a piss, but all the stuff that's still generic sci-fi boilerplate is "Errr yeah, twi'leks are an entire slave race, because the twi'lek we saw in the movies was a slave."-tier writing.

Depends on how integrated it is and how easy he makes it to keep track of his snowflaking. If elves are mongols and it never comes up until you fuck a diplomacy check because of it, then he can get fucked.
But really, execution is what matters. LoTR is popular despite being a clusterfuck of cliches (that it caused, but still cliche now in THE CURRENT YEAR)

There's nothing wrong with generic fantasy tropes. The trick is to do them WELL, and make the players care.

Generally speaking, if you want to engage a player you should avert as many tropes as you can. Not "subvert," not "lampshade," but avoid completely and entirely. The problem with most worldbuilders is that they go half-way before quitting. Their "elves" are mongols, but they're still elves. Their medieval society chooses its kings through a summit with magical talking animals, but the end result is still a fantasy king that behaves like a fantasy king.

You don't REALLY want to play as a halfling, trust me. That's just what you've gotten comfortable with. In order to move forward with fantasy as a genre, we need to be willing to talke the hammer to convention entirely. Instead of setting your adventure in not!Europe but with shrub-men instead of elves, set it in like, the magitek Wild West with armadillo men and gollums as the only other non-human races. Tell a story where there's only tiny islands and everyone lives on big city boats. The other races are mermaids and assorted fish-men. No elves, no not!elves, no D&D tropes.

Liberate yourself. Tell a story about something the Forgotten Realms manual couldn't ever give you, in any part, or else you're better off in Forgotten Realms instead.

I don't think I agree with that.

It sounds a lot like uniqueness for uniqueness' sake.

>too alien to be player characters
The proper way is to have it so players can play these characters, and that they'll get special treatment. Similarly, those characters will often be alienated by the human NPCs, or the NPCs may give them a special treatment of avoidance.

Players must recognize their heroes are rare characters, and the setting should convey that.
Not just 'Okay, you're all humans now.'

I agree with everything in this damn thread.

>Generally speaking, if you want to engage a player you should avert as many tropes as you can.
Except this.
Interest is familiarity mixed with novelty.
Generally speaking, if you want to engage a player you need to hit the right mixture of those two elements that is subjectively perfect for that player.
That's it.

Good luck out there.

Exactly. Originality is a myth. Chances are, nothing you come up with is every going to be truly new. Just because [insert popular thing here] didn't do it doesn't mean you can't fill whole bookshelves with things that did. Instead of worrying about whether something is original, work on fleshing out your setting and filling it with things that are interesting to you. Relying on common tropes when you can't think of anything better often helps with that, since each line of exposition explaining all the "original" features of your donut steel elves is a line that could have been spent going deeper into their history or culture if you'd just made them arrogant knife-eared treehuggers.

Execution is more important than originality.

Eh, as long as it doesn't get stuck on the purely superficial level, interesting cultures are fun. If the dwarves are a law-abiding lawyerocracy, that should feature in the game. If halflings are a competitive militaristic nation using slingmen to terrorize the neighbouring mountains and hillsides, their culture should reflect that.

The worst is when DM just goes "my elves are different", but that never comes into play except for one small part of the campaign.

This is something I think a lot of people don't realize.

I like low fantasy for this reason - it's not innane power play, but instead where you're introduced new spins to old concepts. You can understand things, you can understand why characters do things or why people behave like they do or why an object can catch fire like it does, et cetera. They don't just say 'Lol, it's magic, who cares.'

The best scenes aren't when a character pulls out a magic card that automatically fixes their problems, but when they're faced with an unusual situation and they use something incredibly mundane to fix it. It means real life people are on board with the solutions, and that the characters aren't just pulling out ideas out of their magical asses.

I always make it a goal to start with the most generic as fuck Fantasy and make it interesting by adding depth.

This is literally the worse way ever to DM, never do this.

>Low Fantasy

Instantly disregarded.

Thanks for letting me know you have shit taste.

Games are fun because you craft a story together.
Fantasy tropes are useful because they are easily understandable by everyone
When everyone understands the setting, they can focus entirely on the execution of the game and have fun with that.

I'm not against someone's "original" fantasy world, but if you expect them to research everything about your fantasy world and shut down all of their ideas because "oh no that's not how X race acts" or "no you can't do X because of Y in my setting", the I begin to lose interest. Established and generic settings exist so that everyone immediately understand some portion of the world and can play around in that. At the end of the campaign, no one is going to remember or care that your super special race of Stone Giants were actually mutated Elves, but they will remember that time Dave rolled a nat 20 on his attempt to kick the BBEG in the nuts.

I fucking hate that "my stuff must not be cliche" bullshit. Goddamnit, I want to play some good, old-fashioned cliche high fantasy, because for the entire time I've been playing D&D, since 3.5, NOBODY HAS RUN ANYTHING BUT SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE SETTINGS WHERE EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT!

Correlon-FUCKING damnit, I want to put on my robe and wizard hat and go sling magic missiles up and down the fucking Sword Coast, Smite Evil from Neverwinter to Netheril like I've got NWN in, is that REALLY SO MUCH TO FUCKING ASK?

Seconding this.

I just want to act like a generic action hero. I want to save the day by stopping the baddies, and be nice to people who aren't the baddies.

Just give me a "save the world" quest, or an honest-to-gods dungeon with traps and evil monsters, or even a damsel in distress who won't immediately work to make me regret saving her. I've been playing for about 5 years or so, and I've yet to see a single one of these cliches played perfectly straight. I won't call them overused because I've never even experienced them in a tabletop RPG!

This. It does not matter how old and unoriginal is the cliche. People are always trying to be too original and end up making a campaigh on rails that fails because characters dont act as planned and then the dm looses motivation.

Instead of worrying about the originality, worry about implementation. I have run 5 different stories using the starter set from pathfinder begginer box and thats just 4 pre made characters, a map and like 15 pages of a story. If I can build something on top of that and make it a new experience by changing random events, bad guys, effects of landmarks, adding doors and still let it be the same cave/dungeon exploration to fight a dragon (while not being experienced) you can do whatever the hell you want with a little of literature and gaming stories. Why do you think the adventure path sell??? They still have the same tropes and quest as they did 15-20 years ago.

Besides, all this talk about what you as a dm wants to implement and no talking about the type of people playing in your table... You throw a complete original steampunk low fantasy Xcom like game with a lot of info on everything and you just left out the fact that Im not that into steampunk wizards. So yea. I will play because I want to play, but not be as engaged as I could be if I dont find some elements that hook me.

Fourthing this.
I have other, more intelligent things to add, but I have not slept and must crash.
Party on fellow classical adventurers.

Jesus Christ

I guess we can't have kings any more then, they're too much of a trope after all.

We should also scrap the idea of protagonists and antagonists. That shit is waayyy overplayed

The "BBEG" is a toxic trope we need to subvert as a hobby.

Real evil is not the outdated idea of the big nasty demon with his army of darkness, that's just a fairy tale to otherise minorities.

Real evil isnt vanquished by stabbing it to save the - yawn - damsel in distress.

Real evil is ingrained cultural privilege, it is the thousands of microaggressions women and POC face every day. It is the "gamers" laughing as they stereotype and otherise.

Why do the privileged love the archvillain trope? Because it reflects their insecurity - their desire to see the alternative as an invading army rather than progress. Privilege is being so blind to your own evil you need to project it onto an Other that wants to take it away.

>BBEG just a fairy tale

So are elves and wizards and magic potions. We're playing games that are meant to emulate some parts of fairy-tales and heroic fiction, so I'd say it's completely appropriate to involve these things.

>BBEGs aren't real
>the REAL BBEG is privilege!
>mfw

>set things during the age of sail to avoid knights and kings and land battles

But the age of sail DID have kings and land battles.

I was going to reply to this seriously, but then I finished reading the post.

Have a (you).

Did you feel unsatisfied in these campaigns?

Go back TV Tropes and neck yourself. This post is the epitome of everything that makes the site a creative cesspool.

#
By the gods!
It is so massive and beautifully sculpted!
Could it truly be real?

>just a fairy tale
Have a handful of keks with your (you), user.

As much as Veeky Forums claims to hate reddit, you all sure do act like it.

This thread is literally a hugbox. Not a single person has claimed that 'being original is super important'. Every single person here has the opinion of execution > originality or some other dumb stance. Literally everyone in the world feels that way, not just you, but you act like there are people arguing with you and you're making a point when the opposite is true.

You are all a hugbox. You have these threads every day. Go back to fucking reddit.

I like making settings, and I dislike it when they feel overdone, trite, or wholly unoriginal. Whenever I make a setting, I try to keep close to the main books my gaming group will use to play in it, but wherever I think I can get away with it I tweak a few details.

Orcs being utter monsters is old and cliche, and so is making them noble savages. I haven't done it yet, but I've long planned on returning to their "clever machinist" roots Tolkien hinted at. I like the idea of Orcish Industrialists, and so long as they still feel "Orky", I don't see a problem with it.

As long as things are still identifiable as the things they are, tweaking and differing perspectives should be encouraged.

Let me tell you something you probably won't hear from most people in RPGs:

Cliches don't matter.

100% of campigns and stories that are created entirely to subvert or intentionally avoid falling into narrative cliches in any way, are always shit. Yes, that "super special unique homebrew world" you created where Elves are totally original tribal cannibal barbarians and Orcs are fine, educated and civilized people who are also purple and have gills, IS NOT INTERESTING.

Part two of this, is that players don't care about cliches. They never have. A story without cliches is a story that tries too hard to be complex and deep, and leaves them with a tangled mess of incoherent plotlines that never go anywhere because the writer is too muddled in trying to subvert every possible outcome.

The harder you try to be original and unique, the shittier what you create becomes.

My question is, as a DM and wanting to run something that's more Leiber than Tolkien/Salvatore, am I part of the problem?

I've just seen people save the world so many times that I just want to follow 2-5 wonderful schmucks and the misadventures they get into.

I want to marry a cute Mongolian Elf!

Fucking THIS.

"Different for the sake of different" never turns out good. If your goal when creating something is to be "different from the rest" stop and give up. NOTHING you create with that as your primary goal will be good.

This is why I enjoyed Dragon's Crown and Fifth Edition.

>I just want to follow 2-5 wonderful schmucks and the misadventures they get into.
Why do you assume anyone but you wants this?

Take your hugbox, and go back to fucking reddit.

>calling others redditors for saying trying to be a unique little speshul snoflake doesn't matter
No u.

This post is pure bait but I would 100% run a campaign where the PCs had to content with not a man or an instituion but a potent idea that could never truly be removed from society, with all the people responsible for bringing it into existance long dead with only their dark legacy to survive them.

PCs being PCs they'll just kill everyone involved and not see anything wrong with it.

Yeah, that's the catch.

I'd need to find a group of players willing to take on a more cerebrial campaign.

You can't smite a concept.

This. If your elves are cannibalistic eco terrorists you can still let players play as them, just make sure people react appropriately. Humans might react with fear and awe like rural Chinese would react to a 7 foot tall black man. Anither area might have a kill on sight law about elves so your character has to cover everything.

Likewise the player should act like one of those elves. Ally dies in battle? Begin cutting up his body and eating him as though you were carving up a turkey.

>Generally speaking, if you want to engage a player you should avert as many tropes as you can.

I like your post but this is wrong. People will enjoy the shit out of pretending to be elves and dwarves in fantastical medieval kingdoms for decades to come.

But you're spot on with the rest of it. If it's well thought-out and the setting follows an internal logic go nuts with it. I'd be much more interested in playing any one of those settings you suggest than Forgotten Realms or Golarion for the millionth time.

If you weren't such a newfag, you'd know that there is a difference between a consensus and a hugbox.
Reddit is called a hugbox because any opinions that go against the majority's are downvoted to hell and back.
Veeky Forums isn't one because there is no system similar to votes, which means that there is no way to silence a poster who disagrees with you.

If you'd actually take a look at this thread, you'll see a minority is actually expressing a different opinion, yet, they have not been silenced, only argued against. Learn why Reddit is shit, not just that it is.