Cliche RPG tropes that you like anyway

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>>51851304
>the city is split into distinct districts of dwarves, mages, elves, merchants and nobles
>the local guilds are in constant rivalries, protecting their trade secrets whiel trying to defame the others as coppercults

>>51851304

> experienced badass mentors local fuckup because they see their hidden potential

I didn't like this trope before, but it derailed a game I was in last year in the best way.

The game was SUPPOSED to be MTG-inspired mutiversal adventures. One of my players made Rokard, The Hero of Five Worlds an experienced traveler of the planes with an annoying habit of getting involved in local affairs.

The other derailed my whole game by making Ivy, a girl in a harry potter esq magic school whose planeswalking ability had yet to ignite. Honestly, the school was SUPPOSED to be something we left behind in the first session to go do multiverse things.

What happened instead was Ivy got fed up with being shit at magic and tried to summon a familiar to bind and boost her power. The spell fails because she is a fuckup, and Rokard (who is just passing by, multiversally speaking) detects her power and mistakes her for a planeswalker. So he drops in to see what all the fuss is about on his own, this knightly dude who can call down fire and lightning, and she is convinced that she just summoned the best familiar ever.

The teachers show up, a fight doesn't happen, and Rokard goes and has a talk with the teachers, because he is like 90% sure right now she is a planeswalker who hasn't ignited yet. He finds out that they don't think very highly of Ivy, and in fact they believe that she has basically no magical potential at all. They literally are just taking her parents money and feeding Ivy's dreams of becoming a sorceress with no expectation that she will ever be able to graduate.

Rokard fumes and flips his shit, points his finger at them, and says that they are all fucking assholes and that he is going to show them by training Ivy to be the best damn sorceress they have ever seen with forms of magic they have never even heard of.

>>51852801

What was supposed to be a mutiversal epic of planar invasion and the fate of a hundred worlds turned into, instead, a planeswalking "badass" hanging around a magic school and tutoring a spunky retard in otherworldly magic out of sheer spite for the faculty and their dream crushing policies.

They only left the plane like twice the whole campaign, and it was just short trips. The planar invasion plot sort of came back around, but only so that in the end of the campaign Ivy could use everything she had learned to toss an eldritch monster into the void.

It was the only time I ever ran a game that could be described as slice of life, but we all had a blast.

>>51851461
Has posting this image on 4chan ever given you cause to believe that it's had any effect whatsoever?

>>51851304
I don't have any feelings regarding the term BBEG.

>>51852801
>>51852860
>tfw you will never play a comfy slice of life campaign with your best friends

You are a lucky man, anon.

Will you please elaborate on your game? I'd be interested in the system you used and how you represented and handled the apprentice/mentor thing.

>>51851304
>Prophecy about an Old Evil
>Blonde barbarians living in the frozen north
>"The evil vizier was behind it all along!"

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>>51852881

>>51851461
I take it this is a cliche /tg/ trope that you do not like?

>>51855890

It was originally started in Gurps, because we expected to bounce around in different planes and wanted the flexibility to give each plane a theme by having different sourcebooks come into play on different worlds.

But as it turned into 'wizarding school and that one old guy who is weirdly adamant about following around this teenage girl' simulator, the rules kind of fell away aside from as a loose framework. It became pretty story driven pretty fast, and we reworked things because if Rokard wasn't significantly more powerful than everyone else in the school the story didn't work.

The biggest houserule was that Ivy hadn't 'really' learned an ability until she had successfully used it three times. Until then, any attempt to use it had an extra chance of random failure that otherwise wouldn't exist, no matter how simple the ability should have been.

>>51851461
that's pretty meta