Post your favorite trope

Post your favorite trope.

>Enemies are forced to work together

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H-HAYAI

>The evil Empire is based off Rome

Gaius, get the cross

Chekhov's guns that wait an extremely long time before firing off.

Lots of them.

The Hero gets it wrong and makes everything worse

>The villain's second-in-command, who has held out this long out of loyalty for the man his boss used to be, cannot stand the monster he has become and betrays him, aiding the heroes.

>The prophecy was just a madman's rambling

The evil empire is Ruled by an evil wisard, and his empire is being controlled .

OR

>The prophecy was translated poorly from an ancient language

>The bad guy's actually pretty reasonable, once you've cleared up the misunderstanding

why are my ancestors always bad guys with british accents damn it

>BBEG is uber-powerful but loses because he couldn't predict the actions of the heroes

OR
>The bad guy was the only one trying to protect everyone from a greater menace

Because the Italian accent isn't evil enough?

>reinforcements arrive at the darkest hour and proceed to fuck shit up
>hero arrives at darkest hour (after training arc) and proceeds to fuck up the villain
>grizzled old warrior/mentor proceeds to fuck shit up one last time, making everyone gape in awe
>good guy gets satisfying revenge
>a monster that isnt evil (hellboy, for example)

eeeh, depends

>Teaching a tribe or village of isolated peasants how to fight the new evil that threatens their lives.

>Villain acuqired his power through the use of ancient technology from a civilization now long dead

>Brooklyn accent
>"italian"

> Anonymous people raise up to heroism, even for a moment.
> Good deeds being unexpectedly rewarded.

The One Man Army is also a favorite of mine

I did this once. After all, the best way to save the world from a positive-energy-devouring monster is to end all life. A rew race of golems could live happily ever after.

A group tries hard but dies in the end...

>the guinea who came to the US as a child and still spoke with an Italian accent has a Brooklyn accent

italian accents vary a lot, my accent is completely different from that of a genoan or even of someone leaving 30km to the north of where i live, at least the "sicilian" accent is recognizable everywhere

I remember rolling my eyes at englandromans all the time, but then I watched some show where they distributed accents based on current geography and now I'm fine with them.

>hero wins using mundane shit from their humble origin rather than super shit from their hero training

Buca de beppo alfonso

that is a magnificent villain name, paesà

what show, Rome?

>The uncouth savages turn out to be the best allies a civilized hero could ever ask for.

>Unsung heroes getting their day.

Love that one. I'll run one-offs in my campaign world just for the fun of it, or to give the players some meta-insight into the world, or to explain how a thing got somewhere.

Good fun.

You never heard us swear.

>That idea's so dumb, it's brilliant

youtube.com/watch?v=-VvV4e6v4Hs

exactly

>One of the heroes long time companions dies causing the remaining heroes to go into frenzy

Ace Combat 5 did this the best

youtube.com/watch?v=MuaQflZr3Fo

>You can befriend the monster and make it fuck up its master

Fantasy settings where bits and pieces of ancient sci-fi tech dot the landscape and are hidden in obscure places. The rotting remains of a mecha has become the object of worship for a mountain cult, a ray gun with three shots left turns up in a desert bazaar, the water dungeon leads into an old submarine, stuff like that.

I'm working on a setting like that where the bad guys are able to conquer everything soo quickly because they find a functional Battleship

>BBEG has 4 themed generals

That pic is fucking cool

This often feels too much like a badly justified asspull.

>Corrupt nobility
>Corrupt church
For some reason, i also like the subversions of these tropes.

>one of the generals betrays his boss.

Numenera is based on a setting like that if I'm not mistaken.

I once homebrewed a skirmish game like that where Bronze Age-like civilizations worshipped war walkers from past ages as mysterious oracles and demigods of war.

>mfw they make the church look corrupted and evil but in the end they are the only force holding this world from the brink of darkness

Damsel out of distress?

But then again, the very first "adult" film my parents let me watch was Dead Calm, which is all about this stuff, so go fucking figure

I would let the monster eat the world if I'm gonna die anyways. Fuck golems.

Meanwhile I'm fucking sick and tired of this shit. EVERYONE has it. Sometimes the corrupt church exists solely fro some one-line quip or shit-tier plot device that required a vast, old institution being blatantly evil. Why not church, right?

Shit's more dead than the horse from The Godfather.

>the monster, golem, giant, animal, big simpleton, etc dies helpibg ir saving the protagonists

I hate this one actually. Its right up there in shitty tropes with

>hero's adventure comes to an end and now they are forced to return to their shitty mundane lives of being a nobody in real life but its okay because they 'learned a valuable life lesson'

If you ever fell into a fantasy workd and found great treasures, learned magic, saved princesses, befriended giants, etc, could you ever go back to this, Veeky Forums? I sure as fuck couldn't.

Nah I always see it as a prank pulled in the players for believing too strongly in poorly worded riddles

>the raised/cloned dead friend came back wrong and eeeevvviiilll

Hero and Villain are both supernaturally augmented or effected in some way that makes them different from everyone else and both are being hunted/feared by normal people.

>the bad guys hate each other more than the good guys preventing them from ever winning

>the good guys also hate each other more than the bad guys preventing them from winning

It's okay if the prophecy is badly interpreted. It's shit if it's a bad translation of an invented language the players can't even translate themselves. You make them commit "mistake" they can't prevent or predict.

Make tehe prophecy false or propaganda if you're gonna just gonna go all "nope, don't trust shit people tells you just because".

Hero doesn't get stronger, he gets smarter and undergoes character development.
Villain doesn't get smarter, he gets stronger and refuses to change.
When next they meet, hero kicks the shit out of the villain. (Josuke v. BTD Kira, Jojo pt 4)

Character calls for aid against an apparently invincible enemy- and because he was actively involved in helping solve his allies' problems, the "invincible enemy" quickly gets its ass handed to it. (ME2, "nobody dies" ending)

what does it mean, "asspull"?

youtube.com/watch?v=t30JzS0LHpk

Well, you can also have the prophecy being explicitly dubious, I think it's ok if you aren't planning to use it as a twist.
Or you do something like in HP: is the prophecy true or not? Well that other guy is acting on it so it still matters anyway.

hah. Frankly for prophecies I like to start with something simple and straightforward, like an instruction manual for what to do when the magical death laser doom cannon starts malfunctioning. something simple like a straightforward instruction list of how to safely disable it and dispose of the resulting hazardous waste, and where the appropriate tools to do so are stockpiled.

So then ten or fifteen centuries pass. The empire falls. The next empire falls. The storehouses are looted or relocated. The instructions are translated through three languages, section four was eaten by kobolds, half the chapters on proper disposal were misfiled three centuries ago and no one living remembers they exist, and at some point someone decided that the text on the worst case scenarios for a failed shutdown was kind of dry and jazzed it up with all kinds of blood and thunder, and once again no one living knows how much of that is accurate and how much is just hyperbole.

And now the PCs have gotten a hold of it, and they need to seperate truth from historical BS, because some damn fool has dug up one of these old mana cannons and activated it without reading the instructions, and the PCs need to stop it before something catastrophically worse happens.

>what does it mean, "asspull"?

When the writer just pulls something out of nowhere that magically solves the problem related to deus ex machina. Something like suddenly the hero reveals that he has been "holding back" and reveals some new move that came out of nowhere.

>Protagonist has impossibly tragic backstory

Asshole villain, after hanging out with and fighting alongside the heroes for a while, mellows out and becomes a morally ambiguous but friendly ally.

>dull fellow with Giants blood
>he has the same mindset as a child and is dependent on a parental figure
>party member is overly sweet motherly type and helps him learn basic life skills and sticks up for him
>goes full Giant Rage mode when his mother figure gets wounded in combat

I'm a sucker for gentle giant types who go postal only when absolutely necessary.

Don't worry not all of us do it

Well, can't deny that this concept is overused. Though i would prefer if it's just corrupt people, not institution as a whole.
Also
>Protagonists are sticking up for the small guy

that's reassuring

Reminds of a game I played in years ago, just after 3E had come out. PCs come across an Ogre in a cell. The Ogre was one of the BBEG'S mooks, but had been locked up for being unusually moral for an Ogre. PCs ask "If we free you, will you help us get out of this dungeon?" Ogre responds "OK" and proceeds to free himself by bashing down the door and going with the party. Ogre and halfling sorcerer become best Bros and get up to all kinds of shenanigans. Halfling is the brains, Ogre is the muscle.

>Characters that are extremely anti-skub to hide the fact that they are secretly pro-skub, but embarrassed about it.

>note; skub is a stand in for almost anything. Magic/Religion/Elfs/etc

This my man. My current BBEG, a horrendously powerful immortal wizard, was accelerating technology artificially so that the world would be ready for an invasion from the frozen south face of the world-cube. Then the players kicked him off to another face. It's their problem now!

My players usually manage to pull stuff that I didn't plan for, so this happens a lot.

>when the enemy pilots start panicking because no one can hit you after it happens

almost as good as the "you're not gonna believe this" chatter from ace combat 4

what are they arguing about

What about brick jokes that pay off half a decade later?

...

3 or more combatants are involved in a fight and none of them are on the same side

>collect the X number of Macguffins
>defeat the big insert number bad guy team

my nigga

>Anonymous people raise up to heroism, even for a moment
This is the fucking best. Better still with weak NPCs standing their ground.

>People you've helped throughout the campaign show up to aid you in the final fight.
>Main characters only kill when absolutely forced to, and even then with great reluctance.
>Calm character goes apeshit.

Fucking This.
Nothing cooler than a hero saving the day with modest equipment and wit

Time Travel being employed to erase past sins.

And of course, bootstrapping the sins in the first place.

I had a prophecy in mind but I don't like it anymore. What could I do? I know, it was a bad translation and the correct one is what I like now! God, I'm a genius.

>half a decade

Why not longer? nuklearpower.com/2010/02/20/episode-1221-longest-set-up-in-webcomic-history/

I always like when Superman or someone ends up being a farmer when they're old. Most of my DnD characters who were heroes ended up just being crazy strong farmers/blacksmiths when they retire so they can live a simple life without worry again.

>mana cannon

there goes the whole fucking planet

Seems like italy

Life is nothing but worties, and when upu have the power to change things, you feel the desire to, if not the responsibility for it.

Soon as some young buck bandits ride into town or anotger orc army invades they will be pulling their old adventuring gear out. You can take the man out of the wild, but you can never take the wild out of the man.

>BBEG has seven themed generals
>BBEG has THAT ONE general who is more competent, more talented, and more powerful than them, but will not betray anyway

Anti-nihilism where characters who consider everything ultimately meaningless and accept that all of their actions do not matter in the grand scheme of things are good people regardless, because why not ? Also heroic sacrifice, if done right.

>Generals and BBEG all have their own distinct theme song

MEOW

>Hero has a single rival/nemesis with a similar/identical powerset to him.
>In order to defeat the rival, it takes everything out of the hero, using every power and trick he's learned since the start of the series, even skills and abilities he wasn't used in several episodes/installments, whatever.

>In a whole of demigods, supermen, and people strong enough to take on armies of nations single handedly and not break a sweat, the greatest and most personal of all of the reoccurring villains is just a man.

Lex Luthor is my go to guy for the last one.

Why is he white?

>The Boss finds out about the plot and manipulates the PCs to find out about his general's location, get them to attack the traitor, manipulating events so they ultimately destroy each other.

>the first character you meet is secretly the true BBEG

A better version: the villain doesn't reform, he just becomes an ally to the hero.

>An invincible warrior, training all his life for a duel with an equal

>Party has to retrieve unicorn hair/horn/mount/whatever for a quest
>The Unicorn is not attracted to the delicate and beautiful PC/NPC but rather it is attracted to the burly manly Lawful Good PC/ random NPC.

Always good for a laugh.

>gentle giants partnered with firecracker shorties
>gentle giants who then go ballistic when their partner gets injured

hell fucking yes.

Playing a team like this in a current game now with the wife. I'm the tiny caster, she's a huge combat golem

always love that shit

>the pc/npc develops a relationship that cannot nor ever will be

>BBEG willingly becomes hero's waifu after being defeated