RPG concepts that make no sense

[supergoji18]

Partially inspired by the The Most Rediculous Rules in RPGs thread, I began to think of some things that make no sense to me in RPGs no matter how much I think about them. These dont just apply to D&D or other tabletop games, they apply to almost any type of Sci-Fi or Fantasy RPG out there. They are common tropes, themes, or mechanics that boggle the mind as to why they were not only implemented, but also popularized.

So far, I have a small list of 3 such concepts that make no sense to me:

1. Scaling Difficulty. As you get stronger or better at what you do, so too does everything else in the world get harder to defeat or accomplish. While this is more of a problem in video games due to a number of different factors, it can sometimes be seen in tabletop games such as D&D 4e. For some odd reason, leveling up only makes things harder for yourself. Suddenly, every enemy you encounter is tougher than they were before, every task you need to complete that should be child's play for you by this point is instead made frustratingly difficult for inexplicable reasons. It can occasionally be justified by saying that it only seems this way because the character is purposely seeking out greater challenges, but sometimes that just doesnt hold up. Let's take a look at a few examples:
- Skyrim. As you level up throughout the game, your enemies level up with you on top of you encountering higher ranking enemies more frequently (which also level up with you). You could go back to a nordic crypt you explored back at level 1 and find that you're actually having a HARDER time clearing it out now as a level 50 character, despite the fact that you are leagues stronger than you were at the start and you have much more experience clearing these places out. Eventually this problem becomes less of an issue because most creatures have a level cap of some sort, meaning they stop leveling up even as you keep increasing in level, but the one creature that doesnt becomes a pain in the butt to fight at higher levels because it has so much HP and it NEVER STOPS LEVELING WITH YOU! It's a bizarre case where becoming stronger somehow makes one worse in a fight. And that makes no sense to me.

2. Minotaurs are great at finding their way around mazes. At some point in the development of modern fantasy RPGs, some developers decided that because the Minotaur of greek mythology lived in a maze, they must be great at finding their way out of them right? These people clearly never read the original myth, because the whole point of the monster living in the maze was so that it couldn't find its way out! Daedalus built the labyrinth to contain the Minotaur and it worked! For a long time the minotaur was contained! The only reason it ever became a threat was because some butthole king who conquered people forced them to send their children into the labyrinth as a way to keep them in line. Never once did the minotaur, in all the years that these sacrifices were going on, set foot outside of the labyrinth. Somehow though, modern minotaurs are naturally good at mazes and recalling exactly the path they took to and from somewhere. Over the course of over 2000 years, the major weakness of the minotaur was somehow turned into a major strongpoint. How would you feel if, some 20 years down the line, the legends about werewolves and vampries changed so that they were best buddies that wear silver jewelry because the silver feels extra nice against their skin/fur? I'm sure lots of people would find this to be a strange deviation from the original legends.

3. High strength = hitting more often. Having trained in martial arts for over 12 years now, I can say with absolute certainty that a high muscle strength means jack squat when it comes to trying to land a punch. I don't care if you are so strong you can bench press a 10 ton bolder. If you don't have speed or hand-eye coordination, little old me will happily run circles around you laughing as all your punches end up being wasted effort. Honestly, Dexterity should be the ability that determines how often you hit, and strength should determine damage. Maybe i'm missing something about the way AC works in tabletop games, but i've always seen AC as how good someone is at evading damage (hence why the Dexterity modifier is added to AC and not Strength or Con).

That's all I care to post for now. I'd like to hear form some of you guys though. Have you ever felt that a certain common RPG trope makes no sense? If so, post it below and feel free to discuss it. I also welcome any attempt to rationalize the above three things I listed, or explain any fallacies in my logic. Have fun!

[JNAProductions]

To address point 1-a good DM will not have that happen, or rather, it'll happen because the PLAYERS make it happen. Any given goblin is a threat at level 1, but not at level 5. But at level 5, you aren't going after goblins-you're going after hobgoblins, who are much tougher.

Two and three, though. Sure, I'll give you them.

[InvisibleBison]

3. High strength = hitting more often. Having trained in martial arts for over 12 years now, I can say with absolute certainty that a high muscle strength means jack squat when it comes to trying to land a punch. I don't care if you are so strong you can bench press a 10 ton bolder. If you don't have speed or hand-eye coordination, little old me will happily run circles around you laughing as all your punches end up being wasted effort. Honestly, Dexterity should be the ability that determines how often you hit, and strength should determine damage. Maybe i'm missing something about the way AC works in tabletop games, but i've always seen AC as how good someone is at evading damage (hence why the Dexterity modifier is added to AC and not Strength or Con).

At least in D&D, AC is part being able to dodge attacks and part being able to avoid taking damage when you are hit. That's why armor increases your AC - wearing full plate doesn't make you more nimble, it makes it more likely that you can get hit without getting hurt.

[Mechalich]

Scaling difficulty is a funny thing that makes a certain degree of sense in sandbox-style games as a way of avoiding railroading - because if there's set difficulty then your open world turns into a functionally linear pathway until you reach so minimal level to wander around. Fallout New Vegas kind of has this problem, where you can't actually adventure in the northern half of the map for quite some time. This really shouldn't happen in tabletop, because a GM can dynamically re-scale areas to be appropriate and when the players go back to an area the GM can just make those areas easy and ignore standard combat encounters so that you don't pointlessly fight absurdly weak enemies (note that in Fallout 4, which can't do this all that well, you do get radiant quests to fight absurdly weak enemies late in the game).

Skyrim was particularly egregious with scaling difficulty because all your abilities were on the same scale in terms of enemy difficulty when many of them might have zero impact on combat. As a result time spent increasing secondary skills you weren't using, like learning magic when principally a beatstick, made you comparatively weaker against your enemies.

As for strength increasing to hit - D&D 'attacks' are an abstraction that are meant to represent any number of individual strikes. A 'hit' isn't an attack that makes contact with the enemy, but one that actually penetrates to cause damage. D&D presumes that combatants are armored and that most 'misses' actually strike the target but simply clang off/fail-to-breech in a non-damaging way. Simply trying to make contact with your opponent is a touch attack.

[GorinichSerpant]

The thing about minotaurs is that in the original myth, there are no minotaurs there is a single Minotaur. Originally it was a monster that was born one time in a single time and place. Minotaur (and many other greek monsters) don't make sense if we approach them from the view of their original myths. As different counterpoint many people overcompensate in certain skills they start off lacking. For example, do to having difficulty learning to read, when I finally acquired the skill I started to read a lot. I don't know if this can be applied to species however, and it seems the standard fantasy minotaur's natural home is ironically the labyrinth.

[RyumaruMG]

Assuming I'm remembering the hazy memories of nearly ten years ago properly, I recall reading the stat block for the minotaur in 2nd Edition AD&D mentioning an immunity to the maze spell. At first I was like "huh," but then realized it was that way for a specific reason: to mess with players when they try to be smartasses.

It occurs to me that a lot of monsters in D&D as a whole have had features like that at some point or another. Just as a way for DMs to deal with players getting too big for their boots.

[supergoji18]

Assuming I'm remembering the hazy memories of nearly ten years ago properly, I recall reading the stat block for the minotaur in 2nd Edition AD&D mentioning an immunity to the maze spell. At first I was like "huh," but then realized it was that way for a specific reason: to mess with players when they try to be smartasses.

It occurs to me that a lot of monsters in D&D as a whole have had features like that at some point or another. Just as a way for DMs to deal with players getting too big for their boots.

Gygax, giving players the finger for metagaming since 1974.

Yes scaling difficulty is not likely to happen in tabletop, which in my opinion is one of the major advantages of it. But the concept itself I find to be silly because as you improve yourself you only succeed in making things harder for yourself. Honestly, all it would take to rectify this problem is a simple justification of why this is and it would be easy to accept.

The thing about minotaurs is that in the original myth, there are no minotaurs there is a single Minotaur. Originally it was a monster that was born one time in a single time and place. Minotaur (and many other greek monsters) don't make sense if we approach them from the view of their original myths. As different counterpoint many people overcompensate in certain skills they start off lacking. For example, do to having difficulty learning to read, when I finally acquired the skill I started to read a lot. I don't know if this can be applied to species however, and it seems the standard fantasy minotaur's natural home is ironically the labyrinth.

Unless those minotaurs are teaching their children how to solve mazes like a pro, it wouldn't apply to the species as a whole.

And I had a feeling that would be the case for the third one, i just never really thought of it that way

[CharonsHelper]

3. High strength = hitting more often. Having trained in martial arts for over 12 years now, I can say with absolute certainty that a high muscle strength means jack squat when it comes to trying to land a punch. I don't care if you are so strong you can bench press a 10 ton bolder. If you don't have speed or hand-eye coordination, little old me will happily run circles around you laughing as all your punches end up being wasted effort. Honestly, Dexterity should be the ability that determines how often you hit, and strength should determine damage. Maybe i'm missing something about the way AC works in tabletop games, but i've always seen AC as how good someone is at evading damage (hence why the Dexterity modifier is added to AC and not Strength or Con).

In addition to what InvisibleBison said above, I think that you're mixing up Dex & BAB. In D&D Dexterity isn't the main large scale hand-eye coordination stat: BAB is. Dex is only for fine motor control & Agility.

As a martial artist myself, I think that you're also DRASTICALLY overestimating how easy it is to dodge a punch. You need to mix in blocks/parries, and if their blows are stronger, it's harder to block/parry the blow. There's a reason that boxing & MMA both have weight classes.

[Max_Killjoy]

Assuming I'm remembering the hazy memories of nearly ten years ago properly, I recall reading the stat block for the minotaur in 2nd Edition AD&D mentioning an immunity to the maze spell. At first I was like "huh," but then realized it was that way for a specific reason: to mess with players when they try to be smartasses.

It occurs to me that a lot of monsters in D&D as a whole have had features like that at some point or another. Just as a way for DMs to deal with players getting too big for their boots.

More like being *that* DM/GM.

Players like to listen at doors before opening them? There's a terrible brain parasite that lives in dungeon doors!

Players like to bulk up in as much metal armor as they can justify? Create a monster that causes metal to rust at a touch!

Etc.

There are many places in the Gygax-era D&D where I think his favorite word was "Gotcha!"

[Khedrac]

Tbh, the main cross-genre RPG concept that makes no sense is "the adventurer".

The life expectancy of people who actively go out looking for trouble, particularly the sort of trouble that the military cannot deal with, is tiny, yet such people are the basis of most games, whether fantasy or sci-fi or something else.

Now some GMs run the games in a way that make more sense, and a few games (e.g. Call of Cthulhu) are more based on the premise that the characters are (or were) normal people who find themselves in nasty circumstances, but for most games the characters have to be mad to make their career choice.

[Flickerdart]

The life expectancy of people who actively go out looking for trouble, particularly the sort of trouble that the military cannot deal with, is tiny, yet such people are the basis of most games, whether fantasy or sci-fi or something else.

The PCs are adventurers, but they are also protagonists. In my experience there are relatively few non protagonist adventurers in RPGs. It's mostly video games that put on the whole "Adventurers Guild" nonsense.

[Millstone85]

2. Minotaurs are great at finding their way around mazes. At some point in the development of modern fantasy RPGs, some developers decided that because the Minotaur of greek mythology lived in a maze, they must be great at finding their way out of them right? These people clearly never read the original myth, because the whole point of the monster living in the maze was so that it couldn't find its way out! Daedalus built the labyrinth to contain the Minotaur and it worked! For a long time the minotaur was contained!

How about snake-haired women being vulnerable to their own petrifying gaze as reflected by a mirror? Perseus' great feat was beheading Medusa while looking at her through a mirrored shield, meaning it was a plot point that her reflection did not share her power.

[PersonMan]

Tbh, the main cross-genre RPG concept that makes no sense is "the adventurer".

The life expectancy of people who actively go out looking for trouble, particularly the sort of trouble that the military cannot deal with, is tiny, yet such people are the basis of most games, whether fantasy or sci-fi or something else.

There were plenty of people who sought out situations that led them outside the world of safety and security far from the fronts (of war, expansion, etc.) - I don't see why you wouldn't have them in a fantasy world. Maybe instead of crusading armies looking to conquer and convert, or raiders out to pillage, more of these people hope to follow the footsteps of the legendary few who do survive a life of constant violence, fighting monsters and finding treasures to become unimaginably wealthy and powerful.

Sure, most of them would die horribly, or stick to the 'small game', leading mercenaries in rooting out nests of owlbears or tracking goblin burglars, but their lives aren't (generally) what stories are told about. If I run a fantasy game about heroes who go out into the world seeking glory and find it, becoming legends, I'd rather do that right away rather than spend 90% of the game going through the stories of those who tried but failed to do that.

[Khedrac]

The PCs are adventurers, but they are also protagonists. In my experience there are relatively few non protagonist adventurers in RPGs. It's mostly video games that put on the whole "Adventurers Guild" nonsense.

Oh I totally agree, and when you look at fantasy fiction it tends to split between characters with interesting events thrust upon them (Tolkein's hobbits) and genuine adventurers who look for excitement and danger (Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser).
If one removed all the "adventurer"-type characters fiction would be a lot more boring to read, and we probably would not have this hobby.

All that said, I still think the concept of adventurers does not make sense. It goes back to a comment about Basic D&D attitudes and potions:
"If I handed you a bottle of an unknown liquid and said that drinking it might make you stronger, but it also might kill you, would you drink it?"
Very few sane people in the real world would take the risk. In B/Ex D&D the main method to identify potions was to sip it (which was enough for a fatal dose of most poisons).
Other posters have commented on the lethality of new-character play (I don't say low level as it also applies to RuneQuest etc.) even with experienced players. With a high chance of being dead I'll take the boring job and read about the adventurers (or play Papers'n'Paychecks).

[Max_Killjoy]

There were plenty of people who sought out situations that led them outside the world of safety and security far from the fronts (of war, expansion, etc.) - I don't see why you wouldn't have them in a fantasy world. Maybe instead of crusading armies looking to conquer and convert, or raiders out to pillage, more of these people hope to follow the footsteps of the legendary few who do survive a life of constant violence, fighting monsters and finding treasures to become unimaginably wealthy and powerful.

Sure, most of them would die horribly, or stick to the 'small game', leading mercenaries in rooting out nests of owlbears or tracking goblin burglars, but their lives aren't (generally) what stories are told about. If I run a fantasy game about heroes who go out into the world seeking glory and find it, becoming legends, I'd rather do that right away rather than spend 90% of the game going through the stories of those who tried but failed to do that.

"Adventurers":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Livingstone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Morton_Stanley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Amundsen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ing%C3%B3lfur_Arnarson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Harrison_Fawcett
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_de_Champlain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He

[Honest Tiefling]

How would you feel if, some 20 years down the line, the legends about werewolves and vampries changed so that they were best buddies that wear silver jewelry because the silver feels extra nice against their skin/fur? I'm sure lots of people would find this to be a strange deviation from the original legends.

The original myth of these beasties are so corrupted to begin with, why does it matter? The original vampires were closer to zombies anyway. Many werewolf tales don't actually have them transform, but think they can. Also, where exactly does it say they're hated enemies?

I am not of the camp that one cannot change mythological beasties because no one even remembers or cares about the originals so someone in the past already changed them. Just change them in a way that is internally consistent, isn't stupid, and adds to the game.

Let's take the example of the 4e Dryads, who became more like treant protector of the forests. This is a change I like, because the original dryads didn't really work in DnD as they were often far too human looking for being a tree-thingy, and it stops people from trying to sleep with them constantly. It suits the game, why do I care that they are no longer demigods who usually served the purpose of damsel in distress?

[ComaVision]

1. Scaling Difficulty.
- Skyrim.

I made Oblivion virtually unplayable for myself by doing the Thieve's Guild/Assassin's guild as soon as I could. I'd run out of arrows before I could kill anything "my level".

Not much of an issue in TTRPGs though. If my players really want to muck about in Starting Forest Town they can keep fighting the giant spiders for silvers.

[CharonsHelper]

I made Oblivion virtually unplayable for myself by doing the Thieve's Guild/Assassin's guild as soon as I could. I'd run out of arrows before I could kill anything "my level".

I remember doing that. The only way to kill stuff in Oblivion itself was to zoom in with my bow from extreme range so that they didn't react, and I'd go through dozens of arrows per foe. The only way to kill stuff indoors was to lure it outdoors & then run away.

As strange as it was, the only way to make a combat viable thief was to not make any of the thief skills class skills. (That way jacking them up wouldn't cause you to level.)

[Xuc Xac]

"If I handed you a bottle of an unknown liquid and said that drinking it might make you stronger, but it also might kill you, would you drink it?"
Very few sane people in the real world would take the risk.

"Do you even lift, bro?" You think people wouldn't taste it? In the real world, macho idiots use needles to inject all kinds of questionable things into their bodies just to cause swelling and look stronger. If it actually made their muscles stronger and not just bigger, there would be even more.

[kyoryu]

I made Oblivion virtually unplayable for myself by doing the Thieve's Guild/Assassin's guild as soon as I could. I'd run out of arrows before I could kill anything "my level".

Not much of an issue in TTRPGs though. If my players really want to muck about in Starting Forest Town they can keep fighting the giant spiders for silvers.

I totally screwed myself in Oblivion. Went into the picture thing, had non-combat primary skills, and ended up leveling up so the monsters were tougher than I was capable of defeating. And since I needed to defeat them to get out....

Yeah.

[Flickerdart]

I totally screwed myself in Oblivion. Went into the picture thing, had non-combat primary skills, and ended up leveling up so the monsters were tougher than I was capable of defeating. And since I needed to defeat them to get out....

Yeah.

While you're posting on the forum, the draugr are training (mild language warning).

[wumpus]

I remember doing that. The only way to kill stuff in Oblivion itself was to zoom in with my bow from extreme range so that they didn't react, and I'd go through dozens of arrows per foe. The only way to kill stuff indoors was to lure it outdoors & then run away.

As strange as it was, the only way to make a combat viable thief was to not make any of the thief skills class skills. (That way jacking them up wouldn't cause you to level.)

First, Oblivion's skill system was so broken this tends to happen to anyone who dares to level without obsessing over powergaming tricks (i.e. efficient leveling). From what I remember about my stealth/archer character, archery was primarily a means of delivering poisons over a distance (train alchemy over archery).

They kind of swung back too hard in Skyrim. Especially if you find the bound arrow tome, you can pretty much carve through anybody and still have time to level up crafting (and eventually make a bow even better than your bound bow, but that takes a ton of leveling).

But Oblivion's leveling and skill system really hurt an otherwise excellent game. Certainly stay away from the thing on consoles, and grab a mod that fixes it (or at least the "skill notebook" that tells you exactly what you need to work on without "cheating").

[The Glyphstone]

"Do you even lift, bro?" You think people wouldn't taste it? In the real world, macho idiots use needles to inject all kinds of questionable things into their bodies just to cause swelling and look stronger. If it actually made their muscles stronger and not just bigger, there would be even more.

Not entirely the same, though - the posited scenario is a binary blind risk - you might get super strong, or you might die horribly. Things like steroids are known quantities, with a specific more or less guaranteed effect, and for users the similarly known side effects are an acceptable price to pay.

Your point is still valid, I'm sure plenty of foolhardy risk-takers exist. I'd just have used something like the Jack*** franchise rather than steroids as my example - the 'hold my beer and watch this' demographic.

[razorback]

As a martial artist myself, I think that you're also DRASTICALLY overestimating how easy it is to dodge a punch. You need to mix in blocks/parries, and if their blows are stronger, it's harder to block/parry the blow. There's a reason that boxing & MMA both have weight classes.

I wholeheartedly agree with this.
Been training in martial arts for over 20 years and the guy I end up having to spar regularly lately (I'm 5'9' and just over 200 lbs and he is 6'4" and probably pushing 350, maybe 400, lbs), mostly because no one else wants to take the beating, makes me pay for moving in on him. He has at least 8 inches of arm reach and even more with his legs. While I'm faster, mores skilled and more agile than him, I don't have a combination of all three in excess to get in without blocking or parrying something, which most of the time I'm absorbing quite a bit of energy even with a good block. So, in essence, even though I didn't get hit I did take damage, in game terms.

[ComaVision]

"Do you even lift, bro?" You think people wouldn't taste it? In the real world, macho idiots use needles to inject all kinds of questionable things into their bodies just to cause swelling and look stronger. If it actually made their muscles stronger and not just bigger, there would be even more.

Not entirely the same, though - the posited scenario is a binary blind risk - you might get super strong, or you might die horribly. Things like steroids are known quantities, with a specific more or less guaranteed effect, and for users the similarly known side effects are an acceptable price to pay.

Not to mention that steroids help hypertrophy and strength, which is why strongmen and powerlifters use it instead of just bodybuilders. I thought Xuc Xac may mean Synthol, an oil that gets injected for bodybuilders to appear bigger, but that's not causing swelling either. I'm unaware of anything that gets injected to cause swelling.

[Mordar]

Not much of an issue in TTRPGs though. If my players really want to muck about in Starting Forest Town they can keep fighting the giant spiders for silvers.

Having recently finished the National Geographic issue on the management of Yellowstone and the ecosystem including the park...I am suddenly of the mind that a great world-buildy campaign could spawn from exactly this...PCs radically change the ecosystem of Starting Forest Town by cleansing the area of humanoid-threatening beasts...does this:

• Lead to chain reaction causing proliferation of other flora/fauna that threaten humanoid-kind?
• Create a very safe and "profitable" area for natural resource "exploitation" leading to Starting Forest Town becoming a major economic hub in the world?
• Attract attention from potentates outside the expected area...be it spider gods or ancient druids...that come to reassert the "balance"?
• Form the crux of a PC-kingdom building effort that walks them into the "Halls of Power" kind of story?

Could be kind of fun to play out...

- M

[Dienekes]

On Strength and Dexterity.

You have to understand that D&D ability scores make no sense. The most obvious one is Wisdom, which is somehow a mixed bag of being religiously attuned, being good at your job, and having good eye-sight. But Strength and Dexterity are like that as well.

Strength, as D&D uses it, is how much force your muscles can exert, except when that's not at all what D&D means by Strength. Dexterity, as D&D uses it, is your fine finger manipulation, except of course, when it isn't.

For some games that use the D&D ability system, running fast was based off your Strength, because you need strong leg muscles to do that. Others have it based off of Dexterity, because they think being agile is inherently dexterous.

As to throwing punches and waving swords. If you take Dexterity to be your agility, your hand-eye coordination, and your speed, then yes it is pretty important to attacking.

If you say that the goal of all punches and attacks are to move your arm from point A to point B, and the more force you can exert on your arm the faster it will go, then Strength is your stat.

Both of these are ridiculously dumbed down versions of all the bodily mechanics necessary to move your arm. Though, I would say, the entire system places much, much too high a priority on your ability scores. Give the world's strongest man an appropriately sized sword and have him face against a moderately strong man who knows what they're doing, I'll put my money on the guy with actual skill. Give the world's most nimble acrobat a dagger and have him face against a moderately nimble man who's been training for 5 years with a dagger, and I'll put my money on the one who has been training.

I think the same can be said for most skills and abilities in the game.

[SimonMoon6]

The PCs are adventurers, but they are also protagonists. In my experience there are relatively few non protagonist adventurers in RPGs. It's mostly video games that put on the whole "Adventurers Guild" nonsense.

Well, 3.x has the suggested concept of there being high level spellcasters in every city. And since the only way to get experience is to be an adventurer, that suggests that cities are full of adventurers.

And even 1e/2e seemed to support the idea of adventurers as being fairly common when it would suit the plot. You could go to any tavern and find an "adventurers wanted" job posting... which would be very weird if adventurers were rare. It would be like having job postings for "cowboy astronauts" all over the place.

But to me, nothing is stranger than the concept of a mimic. Here is a creature that waits alone in a dungeon all by itself. It takes a form that will only fool sentient beings, adventurers in particular. However, the concept of a dungeon is usually such that the dungeon has been unvisited by any humans for hundreds of years. So, its entire life cycle is devoted to encountering humans in a location where humans are virtually never found. And it just sits there in the form of a treasure chest waiting... waiting... waiting...

It *could* change into a form that would fool the actual inhabitants of a dungeon (your basic rats and spiders and what have you), but no. A treasure chest is the only shape it needs.

Waiting... waiting... waiting...

[Khedrac]

But to me, nothing is stranger than the concept of a mimic. Here is a creature that waits alone in a dungeon all by itself. It takes a form that will only fool sentient beings, adventurers in particular. However, the concept of a dungeon is usually such that the dungeon has been unvisited by any humans for hundreds of years. So, its entire life cycle is devoted to encountering humans in a location where humans are virtually never found. And it just sits there in the form of a treasure chest waiting... waiting... waiting...

Nice one!

Another one for people is magic items in games without item creation rules (most of the items in early RuneQuest being a classic example). Where did all those items come from?
In fact, for AD&D, just why are there so many magic swords floating around? In this the fantasy fiction trope of special swords makes a lot more sene (if more complex gameplay).

[Cluedrew]

Dungeons: No really, dungeons. Your averaged dungeon manages to maintain a stable population of monsters, most carnivorous and highly violent, sentient and primitive beings who live without contact to the outside world. They do this in an environment of filled with lethal and inactivated traps. This population can remain undisturbed for hundreds of years, unbroken by attempts from the outside world. They also do this without sunlight, fresh air or water. Then about 4-6 people wander through, all they way to the bottom.

Note: Some dungeons do make sense, and even those that don't rarely check all of these boxes. They can be done right (in terms of narrative consistency) but most of the time that is hand waved for gameplay. A reasonable trade off but one that means things really break down if you look too close.