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genderlich
2012-06-29, 05:35 PM
So I've been working on this Pathfinder campaign in one form or another for the better part of a year - it started as a setting but quickly grew into just a campaign, at which point I converted it to Eberron. It's very close to being ready to run, but I've been looking over it again and parts of it seem very cliched. I can't go into a lot of detail because some of my players may use this forum, but the main plot involves three crystals with godlike power (responsible for the Day of Mourning) that have to be collected/destroyed/protected/whatever. There's some pretty great side storylines going on too, but this awful plot is what ties them together.

I don't want to run a game with such an overused concept, especially since my group's regular GM is very original and creative. I need a way to rework it. But I want more general advice that wouldn't just apply to this one campaign. When you build campaigns, how do you come up with original concepts that haven't been done a million times before?

Lord Raziere
2012-06-29, 05:38 PM
Ok, first:

Don't think it in terms of cliches or not cliches.

Think of it in terms of things you like, and don't like.

Use all the things you like.

Get rid of all the thing you dislike.

Doesn't matter if its what matters is whether its something you like and want to play with, or something you dislike and don't want to play with.

So just find stuff you like to do and play those.

Friv
2012-06-29, 05:45 PM
Generally, I start with a pretty archetypal concept, and then I apply some modifiers to it until it's not cliche. Leave it core enough to have recognizable elements, and strange enough to have original ideas that leave the players impressed.

So for your main plot, you have three MacGuffins that can solve or cause the world's problems. So why were they created, and what have they been used for? Have they been popping up throughout history, changing the course of nations, instead of just being kept in crypts? Maybe one is the royal treasure of an empire, which has used the threat of it to great effect, and it won't be a normal dungeon crawl to get ahold of it.

Do they actually do what people think they do? Maybe the original legend is kind of messed up, and the crystals work very differently than expected. (If you go this route, including other situations in which legends are wrong is probably a good idea. Players are used to prophecies and myths being rampantly true.) Maybe they're actually fragments of a powerful being's soul, and it has been quietly helping people in the hopes of gathering them together, after it accidentally shattered itself in the Last War.

Malak'ai
2012-06-29, 06:07 PM
It doesn't matter if your base storyline is has been done millions of times before, what matters is how you put YOUR spin on it, how YOU make the world and how YOU play it, thats what makes it different from Dungeon Crawl #158751.

So if you start with, lets say, some crazy cleric trying to bring Belial and Fierna into the mortal realm by causing mass distruction, enslaving the populations of mulitiple kingdoms for the power generated by their suffering and what not, have the world as a dark, foreboding place where everyone is paranoid about when one of the cleric's men is gunna jump out from around a corner to drag them off to the slave pits. Have resistance groups who are actually compitent or incompitent depending on who's in charge at the time... Also put a big twist in, like, maybe Belial and Fierna's actual plan isn't to be brought to the mortal realm, but to have the mortal realm sucked down into the 4th circle of Hell..

So basically, all the matters is how you spin the story, how your world feels and acts. Remember, the PC's have to react to your world, not the other way around.

Jay R
2012-06-29, 07:26 PM
Romeo and Juliet, Oliver Twist, and The Prince and the Pauper are all based on cliched plots.

If Shakespeare, Dickens, and Twain can use cliches, so can you.

Make it fun, and it won't be a problem. Don't make it fun, and eliminating cliches won't help.

Kurald Galain
2012-06-29, 07:55 PM
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TropesAreNotBad - recommended reading material.

navar100
2012-06-29, 08:58 PM
1) Don't start the campaign in a tavern.

2) Don't have a "mysterious stranger" offer a quest.

3) Don't have a corrupted constabulary.

4) Don't have an all powerful thieves'/assassins' guild that knows everything and has spies everywhere.

5) Don't have druids be enemies of urbanization. They work with the populace to care for city parks and animals, like pigeons and squirrels, and teach responsible hunting and logging in the forest.

6) Nobles are not snobs and are concerned about the people's welfare.

QuidEst
2012-06-29, 09:23 PM
I find avoiding clichés to actually be very helpful. You don't have to do it perfectly, but it does force you to think harder.

The following would be my approach. You don't have to use it, but feel free to take bits and pieces from where you like.

1. I would rule out a MacGuffin plot. Lord of the Rings is the ultimate MacGuffin plot, and it is the first thing everybody thinks about in association with fantasy.

2. The setting/backgound is the easiest place to make your campaign more original. Consider whether you can make some modifications to it. The first thing that comes to mind is leaving the setting the same, but making the PCs refugees from another plane. The BBEG on their world, whom they had nothing to do with, succeeded at his world-destroying ritual, and the only survivors were scattered groups of refugees sent out by wizards and clerics to whatever planes were accessible in the hopes that some might survive.

3. Pretend it's another genre. Plots from other genres fit very nicely into a fantasy world. Crib off of Shakespeare, Roman history, Noir, or sci-fi, but refluff everything to fit your world. Invaders from another world should be sneaking in from other planes, or simply be another nation. Roman history is much harder to spot if you change all the terms. And so on and so forth! Personally, I think secretly running it with superheroes and villains in mind could be interesting.

4. On that note, work on your villains! Give them clever or unusual tricks- creative illusion use, support from a Bard, etc. Their henchmen should be unique.

Hiro Protagonest
2012-06-29, 09:48 PM
Romeo and Juliet, Oliver Twist, and The Prince and the Pauper are all based on cliched plots.

If Shakespeare, Dickens, and Twain can use cliches, so can you.

They wrote those stories before the cliches existed. Except maybe Twain.

When it was made, Romeo and Juliet was probably the most un-cliched story of its time.

Lord Tyger
2012-06-29, 10:06 PM
They wrote those stories before the cliches existed. Except maybe Twain.

When it was made, Romeo and Juliet was probably the most un-cliched story of its time.

Nope! Shakespeare had great skill with wordplay and the technical aspects of writing (there's a reason he's THE bard) but originality was hardly his strong suit. Romeo and Juliet was a long way from being the first tragic romance, and Shakespeare's play wasn't even the first version of Romeo and Juliet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragical_History_of_Romeus_and_Juliet).

Oracle_Hunter
2012-06-29, 11:13 PM
I don't want to run a game with such an overused concept, especially since my group's regular GM is very original and creative. I need a way to rework it. But I want more general advice that wouldn't just apply to this one campaign. When you build campaigns, how do you come up with original concepts that haven't been done a million times before?
I'm going to echo Lord Raziere here and say: don't think in terms of cliches or no.

There is nothing new under the sun including that statement (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1%3A9&version=NIV) and every Trope has its subversion. It is not at all about the Trope you use, but how you execute it.

Collecting MacGuffins to save the world is a fairly common frame for a story but it need not be boring. You can make the MacGuffins more engaging through any of a variety of treatments (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MacGuffin) or decide to make the adventure more engaging by focusing on elements aside from the MacGuffins. The real trick is not to do the same thing too often with the same group -- repetition leads to boredom, not "cliches."

* * * *

Personally, I focus more on what I want to accomplish with the campaign rather than the story elements that make it up. Do I want a campaign that focuses on the characters' private motivations, or one in which they can discover their own destiny? Do I want a talky game with a lot of roleplaying or one with more trap-springing and monster slaying? Once I've settled on the major themes of the campaign I select framing Tropes suitable to the Themes and work from there.

To be honest, I often just pick Tropes that I feel like playing with and make a story out of them.

QuidEst
2012-06-30, 08:44 AM
There is nothing new under the sun including that statement (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1%3A9&version=NIV) and every Trope has its subversion. It is not at all about the Trope you use, but how you execute it.

There's a difference between a trope and a cliché (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Cliche). You can't avoid tropes, since doing so usually means running into another one. Plenty of them, like Xanatos Gambit, are ones that you want to include. Clichés, on the other hand, are things that have been overused to the point of generally being tiresome. For a fantasy roleplay, I would say that (in descending order of clichéness) most "find X number of MacGuffins", "prevent the Ritual of Blah from being completed", and the "sealed evil in a can" plots count unless they're handled particularly well.

Or, if you want to use the MacGuffins of power, play it out a little more realistically- if they're really that powerful, somebody would have taken the trouble to find them. There might be a dynasty that uses one of the MacGuffins to prop up its leader as a god-king. One might be used to power a city. One might have just been discovered by somebody else. Come up with the three histories, start the PCs with the knowledge they would have, and try to arrange them in order of difficulty. (A MacGuffin powering a city would be easier to steal than a MacGuffin in the hands of a war general.)

Anxe
2012-06-30, 11:24 AM
They wrote those stories before the cliches existed. Except maybe Twain.

When it was made, Romeo and Juliet was probably the most un-cliched story of its time.

Un-cliched yes. But not original. The Greeks had a version that Shakespeare probably read and worked off of. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramus_and_Thisbe

Glimbur
2012-06-30, 11:40 AM
To my way of thinking, the problem with cliches is they remove the sense of discovery. Of course the three X's will get stolen by a lieutenant after you go to the trouble of collecting them. Of course you interrupt the bad guy in the middle of his World Conquering ritual. And so on. Therefore, the solution is not throwing out your established fluff, but making it interesting. One of the previous posters suggested more details on the items, which makes them more interesting than just fetch quest fodder. Rather than worrying about "this is a cliche", instead put in some plausible NPCs with reasonable goals (barring madness, of course) and reasonable resources. Would the head paladin of an order who is acting on a bad prophecy steal the crystals? Probably not. Would the manipulative king who ascended the throne after the mysterious deaths of everyone with a better claim steal the crystals? Check your bag, they might already be gone.

Yora
2012-06-30, 12:43 PM
Things are feeling stupid and boring when they appear in situations where it's not clear why they would happen.
People do X or X happens because at that point of the plot, it makes sense. Not "because X is cool" or "I just wanted to have X happen".

Leshy
2012-06-30, 01:17 PM
1) Don't start the campaign in a tavern.

2) Don't have a "mysterious stranger" offer a quest.

3) Don't have a corrupted constabulary.

4) Don't have an all powerful thieves'/assassins' guild that knows everything and has spies everywhere.

5) Don't have druids be enemies of urbanization. They work with the populace to care for city parks and animals, like pigeons and squirrels, and teach responsible hunting and logging in the forest.

6) Nobles are not snobs and are concerned about the people's welfare.

I had 4/6 in my first campaign :smallbiggrin:

Funkyodor
2012-06-30, 02:56 PM
You could always include a cliche that appears one way, but is really another. Like a Romeo and Juilet that in reality is Romeo and Romeo...

Dienekes
2012-06-30, 04:24 PM
They wrote those stories before the cliches existed. Except maybe Twain.

When it was made, Romeo and Juliet was probably the most un-cliched story of its time.

No. In fact very few of Shakespeares stories plots were original. He commonly took elements or even blatantly stole from past works. Roms and Jules is Pyramus and Thisbe and about a hundred other works in between.

The character of Edmund from King Lear is pretty much the stereotypical evil bastard that was common at the time. The play itself is based off of the legend of Leir. And you can just go on from there.

What made the Bard the Bard was that his plays were the most beautifully written, and his characters explored the cliched roles they were given. Such as Edmund actually explaining that his treatment as a bastard is what is making him become what he is called. And the stupidity of Rom and Jules romances is actually pointed out to them by the Friar who helps them out for non-romantic reasons.

Which brings me to my point. It's what you do with the cliches that makes something original.

GolemsVoice
2012-06-30, 06:02 PM
I'd recommend not trying to hard to actively avoid cliches, because the total avoidance of cliches is often just as much of a cliche as the original. I'd suggest just doing what feels GOOD to you and your players, and if that means using a few cliches, why not. Nobody's judging you there, beside yourself.
Also, many cliches tend to have at least some basis, so doing it the exact other way round can look silly.

Instead I'd recommend to give everything some background and a bit of character. It doesn't have to be much, but just a small glimpse into the everyday life of other people makes them actually seem like people, instead of just sock puppets that say their lines when prodded.


And last: allow yourself some slack. As a GM, you simply don't have the time to flesh out every person and every place the players might encounter, especially if your players tend to do suprising and unplanned things (and they will. Thy always will). So either you're a good enough improviser to make every minor NPC up on the fly when needed, or you can fall back to small, harmless cliches and your players will instantly know what kind of person they're talking to.

Man on Fire
2012-06-30, 06:46 PM
You could always include a cliche that appears one way, but is really another. Like a Romeo and Juilet that in reality is Romeo and Romeo...

No, it's Romeo and Bob, only Bob is really Julia dressed as a man so she can join the army. Julia is in love with Romeo, but he is in love with Bob.

Dienekes
2012-06-30, 09:28 PM
Sure, just change the name Romeo to Blackadder and you got yourself a show.

Lord Tyger
2012-06-30, 10:07 PM
No, it's Romeo and Bob, only Bob is really Julia dressed as a man so she can join the army. Julia is in love with Romeo, but he is in love with Bob.

See Marvel: 1602

Man on Fire
2012-07-01, 08:51 PM
See Marvel: 1602

I'm that easy to see through?

Sudain
2012-07-02, 02:26 PM
Pervert it. Use the cleche but pervert it in a fun and twisted way.

They have 3 Crystals they need to find; awesome. Twists on the 'fetch crystal from hard hard dungeon' theme. Have the crystal be reclaimed, and put back into the earth; stratosphere or where ever the base component came from. Make them carefully dig it back out, all the while it's trying to hide.

Make it sentient and it won't obey/cooperate until they do a task for it. For extra giggles make it a quest that directly violates one of the things the party holds dear.

Give it to them, free and clear. But don't tell them what it is; and instead hide in a mountain of junk they need to identify one piece at a time. I did this with a sphere of annihilation, just gave'm a box and said "Move it from here to there" with no explanation of why. When people kept trying to steal it from them; they got interested and ****-a-brick when the monk stuck his head in and didn't pull it back out. Now they've got this super powerful thing and no idea what to do with it. Do they trust whoever gave it to them? Whoever they are giving it to; are they trustworthy?

It's out of power. How does one power up a legendary artifact?

DaMullet
2012-07-02, 06:00 PM
One I like to use is to take the cliches from some other genre and stir them in completely straight. Make your gladiatorial arena a high school sports movie, transplant Mission Impossible completely straight when you need to sneak into the dragon's keep, or go the other way and make a shining and clear-cut "Fantasy hero" good guy in an otherwise morally grey modern world.

For your Three Crystals idea, try stirring in some out-of-context cliches from an anime series or genre of book that you like. It has the dual virtues of being easy to do, and will be mistaken for originality by anyone who didn't think of combining the two before. I'm convinced that something similar is exactly how steampunk happened.

Man on Fire
2012-07-02, 10:04 PM
One I like to use is to take the cliches from some other genre and stir them in completely straight. Make your gladiatorial arena a high school sports movie, transplant Mission Impossible completely straight when you need to sneak into the dragon's keep, or go the other way and make a shining and clear-cut "Fantasy hero" good guy in an otherwise morally grey modern world.

For your Three Crystals idea, try stirring in some out-of-context cliches from an anime series or genre of book that you like. It has the dual virtues of being easy to do, and will be mistaken for originality by anyone who didn't think of combining the two before. I'm convinced that something similar is exactly how steampunk happened.

Steampunk started because creators of cyberpunk needed name for those other books they were writing.

As for idea, that actually may work.How about wrestling cliches? One of crytals is reward on the tornament and world's greatest warriors fight over it. And the tornament is called...Fightermania!

Fatebreaker
2012-07-02, 10:30 PM
One I like to use is to take the cliches from some other genre and stir them in completely straight. Make your gladiatorial arena a high school sports movie, transplant Mission Impossible completely straight when you need to sneak into the dragon's keep, or go the other way and make a shining and clear-cut "Fantasy hero" good guy in an otherwise morally grey modern world.

For your Three Crystals idea, try stirring in some out-of-context cliches from an anime series or genre of book that you like. It has the dual virtues of being easy to do, and will be mistaken for originality by anyone who didn't think of combining the two before. I'm convinced that something similar is exactly how steampunk happened.

Steampunk came about when the author of Neuromancer (Gibson), one of if not the creator of cyberpunk, asked what cyberpunk themes would look like in, say, Victorian England? What if the information revolution had occurred during the industrial revolution?

Cyberpunk, it's worth noting, was still new then. It didn't need to be re-imagined. But Gibson did it anyway, and good on him for it! It's a good example of "Thing A + Stuff B = ORIGINAL!"

Don't avoid cliches. Embrace them, spin them, use them, twist them, subvert them, play them straight, use them as red herrings, bait and switch them, in short, do everything but avoid them.

The "old wise man" quest giver who is really a super-powerful dude is well recognized. So when I dropped one into my game, my players recognized him for what (they thought) he was. So they were completely surprised when it turned out that the "vitally important quest" was actually something completely frivolous. They were even more surprised when that series of frivolous events turned out to have far-reaching and vitally important consequences. They believed the old man was a god who would send them off to Save the World. They were right... but not in the way they expected. My players still talk about it. To them, it was wildly original.

Your players will know, and maybe even expect, a certain degree of cliches in their game. So use them. Just make sure you integrate them smoothly into your game and you make them memorable. Make them iconic. Make them your cliches, and your players will love you for it.

Good luck!

ExtravagantEvil
2012-07-03, 12:24 AM
Fatebreaker makes a good point, Cliches exist regardless of whether you want them or not, so playing with perceptions based around these cliches can be original in and of itself, and can be a fun way to both create interesting experiences for your players, and efficiently and suprisingly challenge your creativity.

Or, just use the Cliches, and add original ideas surrounding the cliche, to create an interesting series of events. Cliches exist because they work and they are simple. Tropes are seen in similar like but more often they are not as stigmatized, due to them being facts, with Cliche's being trends and pre-existing notions, and are thus predictable. You can use these very notions and make it surprising, by toying around with the cliches and expectations of your PC's.

Let me provide an example, from my adventure writing.
I have, for new players, designed something simple and not TOO surprising, but some room for development, largely by adding detail.

It starts off in a village being attacked every night by "demons". Later investigation proves this to be goblins with a wolf religion.
They seek to conjure their Lupine patron, a wolf god that will plunge the world into chaos and darkness upon release. Through a magic ritual.

It smells of cliche, I know. But I built it up to where, the beast is imprisoned by the gods in Hades (the plane of permanent Apathy), so I decided they needed to do something else seemingly cliched, the killing of holy person for the Positive Energy. That bored me as a writer, so I decided to think of otherwise to let this work.
I did some wandering and thinking and realized, the Boisterous Brusier Trope.
I decided to make that the object of Sacrifice.
That's unexpected. Having to rescue Hercules because his very gung ho attitude and zest for life borders on the supernatural, and thus made it interesting.

I turned seemingly lazy writing into a seemingly decent and surprising narrative.

The things to keep Cliches from being boring is detail, subtlety and several original ideas surrounding.

Man on Fire
2012-07-03, 07:56 AM
Making players think that cliche happens and then put it on it's head, even if you took the twist from somewhere, is actually quite good idea. For example, have the evil cult want to ressurect God Of Evil And Chaos who, according to the myth, kileld King Of Gods thousands years ago and gods now rulling the pantheon defeated him and send to hell and once he'll be free, he will destroy everything.

Only it turns out that the guy isn't really evil, he never did what he was said to - other gods killed the King and pilled the blame on him. He wants revenge, sure, but doesn't want to destroy the world - he actually likes mortals and doesn't want to see them suffer for his vengenace.


Yes, I watcher Asura's Wrath.

Grelna the Blue
2012-07-06, 11:42 AM
How many adventure themes can really play out in a fantasy game? Off the top of my head I can think of five: the Commando Raid, the Rescue, the Caper, the Puzzle, and the Quest. If the players are Good (and maybe if they are Neutral), then at some point they will probably be doing the Quest, in which they have to do something timeconsuming, difficult and lifethreatening, or else something very very bad happens. Total cliché! How bare would the shelves in the fantasy section be if books with that premise were taken out? But so what? The real question is whether you can make it fun.

Since the Quest seems to be the kind of adventure you are talking about, I have only one piece of advice, which might not be universally accepted: make it really really hard. In my opinion one of the very most important elements on a Quest adventure--something necessary to keep it from getting that same old same old feeling--is that the players should be overmatched and alone. The quest should be beyond their capabilities according to the normal rules. Unlike every other kind of adventure, they should not have a reasonable chance of success in most encounters if they only play their characters competently. They should have to sweat blood to succeed, frequently avoid combat, strategize, scheme, and if they ultimately fail, that failure should have real consequences for the gameworld. Let the players know that you are perfectly willing to rewrite the campaign world if they fail and that you have already got notes for what it might look like in that event. And there should be some reason that they cannot count on much outside help. It could be there are opposing forces who would be able to find them if they accepted assistance. Perhaps they are truly the only people who realize or accept what must be done. Perhaps a preemptive surprise strike from the forces of evil took out or sidelined the most powerful forces of good and and as a consequence other potential allies are too cowed to step up. Or perhaps there are multiple ongoing calamities and the PCs are the people relegated to the one that won't actually destroy the world if not stopped, but only wreck it. Whatever it is, have some reason plotted out ahead of time why the PCs will not be able to get the assistance they would normally be able to count on.

Quests are for Heroes. Make sure they feel like Heroes if they manage to succeed and even if they die trying.

Clawhound
2012-07-06, 03:17 PM
Cliches are cliches because they are hammers used on everything. However, when a hammer is used on a nail, it is fully appropriate.

Even little things can change a cliche and make it cool. A necromancer building a zombie army is a cliche. Kill necromancer, move on.

That a necromancer has a REASON to build an army, such as defending his uncle's kingdom from an orc invasion, and now the PCs get too choose what to do, isn't a cliche.

It could also turn out that he built the army solely to get the orcs on his side. Once they invade, they leave their homeland under-strength. Having full confidence that the humans will beat the orcs, he plans to move into their homeland to seize some artifact, then use that to animate all the dead orcs that he humans just killed.

So yeah, there are cliches, but that's only when you don't think.