Quote from: Black Vulmea;757146How do you keep familiar tropes fresh and engaging in a roleplaying game campaign?

By remembering that the tropes are the spice. The heart of tabletop roleplaying is about the player experiencing something interesting as their characters. Without that it doesn't matter how creative you are with the settings and its elements.  The players will be bored and the campaign will flounder.

How does one craft interesting experiences for the players. Well that tricky, people been trying to figure a surefire way of making a blockbuster movie, or best selling book for years. They haven't succeeded yet.

However there are things I found that improved my chances of success. The number one rule is to talk to your players and find out what they are interested. Number two is letting go of any preconceived notion of how the campaign ought to go.

The two in conjunction will allow you to build a potentially interesting campaign for your players. With a bigger chance of clicking then some arbitrary situation you come with to throw your players into.

Now there some considerations to keep in mind when doing this. One the referee needs to have fun too. So there has to be some give and take on the player's part. Whatever is picked has to be interested to both the referee and his players.

Second, the players should expect a challenge. Which means it never going to be quite what they expect. I have found when I talk with players about what they want to do, a many of them have THE PLAN laid out in their mind about what their character is going to be and do. I have to remind them that with the dice rolls and the other players along with the fact they are in the setting things never start out exactly the way they want. However it is possible to get exactly what they want through a bit of luck and a bit of good planning.

I also remind them that the things change. Not because I don't give them what they want but they decide later that not the goal at all and elect to pursue something different.

The result is a campaign focused on the experience of being there. The tropes while of interest become more of a spice rather than main focus. "Hey we need to know what happens on this battlefield a thousand years ago." "Aren't there elves that would have been living back then?" "Yeah there is a forest of them a day ride away!" "OK lets see if they know anything."

For fantasy tropes, it helps to read mythology and folklore from other countries. Also, see foreign fantasy films. You can freshen up BOG (basics of genre) plain vanilla fantasy with just a couple cool ideas plucked from unusual sources.

And reskin monsters.

Remember the pig-faced orcs from AD&D? What if orcs were actually kinda like were-pigs? What if, orcs could transform into a normal wild pig or maybe even had to be in pig form during the day? What if the various swine in town weren't what they appeared?

Quote from: Spinachcat;757306For fantasy tropes, it helps to read mythology and folklore from other countries. Also, see foreign fantasy films. You can freshen up BOG (basics of genre) plain vanilla fantasy with just a couple cool ideas plucked from unusual sources.

And reskin monsters.

Remember the pig-faced orcs from AD&D? What if orcs were actually kinda like were-pigs? What if, orcs could transform into a normal wild pig or maybe even had to be in pig form during the day? What if the various swine in town weren't what they appeared?

Ahhh....orc. The other white meat. Pig faced orcs rock!

Quote from: Spinachcat;757306Remember the pig-faced orcs from AD&D? What if orcs were actually kinda like were-pigs? What if, orcs could transform into a normal wild pig or maybe even had to be in pig form during the day? What if the various swine in town weren't what they appeared?

Then I will definitely remember to pack the apple sauce when we go to war with the orcs...

Beyond Estar's excellent advice, I've a few thoughts:

* First off, subvert the trope:

Rescue The Spoiled, Bratty Princess Who, In The Course Of The Action, Straightens Out And Becomes Halfway Decent?  No.  She's still a brat and plans to get revenge on certain party members for slights real or imagined, but just has to wit to keep her mouth shut and pretend.  

Not All That Glitters Is Gold?  No.  It doesn't follow thereby that everything that doesn't glitter just needs the rough edges smoothed off.  Your Aragorn-clone is, in fact, a weasel who may just get tired of the slog and sell your crew out, Hidden Royal Blood notwithstanding.

And so on.  If your trope hangs on the personality of the key NPC, flip that personality.

* Secondly, there's a crucial element of RPGs that is a patented trope-buster: unlike in the vast majority books or movies, the protagonists are not guaranteed to win.  If they don't make the right decisions, if they bite off more than they can chew, then they lose.  Period.  Nothing hackneyed about that.

* Spinachcat's comment about using myth from other countries is a key one.  One of the great weapons in my arsenal is my collection of folklore, and the sharpest blade in the toolbox is my prized copy of Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Myth and Legend.  It's an awesome reference, with many thousands of articles about various folklore elements.  A parlor stunt I've done a couple of times for my players is to pick four articles at random out of the book and, on the spot, improv an adventure based around those elements.  It's decades out of print, but you can get it used on Amazon for less than $10.

* Time itself is a great leveler.  I am only now going back to a plotline that dominated the first few adventures when I started GMing again back in 2003.  Something you only visit every decade doesn't get hackneyed.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;757370Ahhh....orc. The other white meat. Pig faced orcs rock!

Otherworld Miniatures in England has a very nice line of pig orcs

James bond.

There have been 23 Bond films. They all use the same tropes

i. Evil Genius Villain
ii. Beautify Foil/Love interest
iii. Evil Henchman who is more than a match for our hero in a fir fight
iv. Gadgets
v. Car chases
vi. Secret bases
vii. Exotic Locations

you can site even more.
Some Bond films are shit some are great.
Some mix these tropes in interesting new ways of dial back some and dial up others.
Some just roll em out with no interest.
Some invert tropes, the beuatiful Foil who turns out to be the Evil Villain etc etc

Your game needs to do the same thing.

I think Ravenswing is on the right track.  Old tropes can be made fresh by subverting them, by playing them in ways that are unexpected; they should fail to conform to the expectations of players, perhaps deliberately exploiting those expectations in some way.  Maybe the villain is an Elf warrior who seems all grace and goodness on the surface but who's actually out to wipe out anyone whose bloodline has been "tainted by Orc filth" - infants included.  Or Maybe what looked like a crumbling old wizard's tower ripe for plunder is actually a monstrously overgrown Mimic that survives by luring adventurers straight into its gizzard - there's are still treasure inside, but it's all from former prey.

Quote from: Steerpike;757569I think Ravenswing is on the right track.  Old tropes can be made fresh by subverting them, by playing them in ways that are unexpected; they should fail to conform to the expectations of players, perhaps deliberately exploiting those expectations in some way.  Maybe the villain is an Elf warrior who seems all grace and goodness on the surface but who's actually out to wipe out anyone whose bloodline has been "tainted by Orc filth" - infants included. ...

This reminds me of when I ran a fantasy Gurps campaign where the party ran into the edges of a war between Ratfolk and Elves. I used and was inspired by Skaven and Eldar minis (guns being wands of some weird shape, helped by Eldar weapons looking less traditionally gun-like in many cases)).  It became quickly apparent to them that it was the Ratfolk who were the nicer (but not good) side despite using disease, poison, monstrous beasts (some enslaved/ensorcelled/beaten into submission others "created" through bio-magic and selective breeding) and other Ratfolk slaves against the Elves because the Elves were Elvish supremacists who considered anything not animal or Elf worthy only of destruction (and who were targeting the Ratfolk because they were especially vile to them being kind of half-animal).  This wasn't the focus of the campaign, it was just something that was happening at the time near where they wanted to go, which was deep into a wilderness area where no one had been in ages.  And they could go around it, but they chose to help out the Ratfolk in exchange for faster passage through.  Another route had something sort of inspired by a localized Shub-Niggurath-ish thing, but they never went there so it was never fleshed out.*  And there was a "safe" though very indirect route they could take, but the fastest did indeed take them through that war.

To me this was ramping the Elven trope as wardens of the wilds up to a genocidal 11+ (they were cleansing the natural world of a pollution in their eyes) and dialing the Ratfolk (Skaven) trope as disease ridden filth down a few notches (but still not making them nice).  As well as other tropes.

*I'm an off-the-cuff/improv GM so this was just a one-line note.  Though once it was noted something was and remained there (unless of course it was expanding then it might show up later).

"subverting" a trope is really the cheapest way of 'keeping it fresh', and is often just a tired as an old trope itself.

Quote from: RPGPundit;758007"subverting" a trope is really the cheapest way of 'keeping it fresh', and is often just a tired as an old trope itself.

It can be done well though.

The ironic approach, on the other hand, is so over, it's what will bring on the Zombie Apocalypse.

tropes are meaningless when youre actually experiencing them instead of observing them from a third person perspective.

Players who create memorable characters tend to keep the stories fresh. But, unless you're playing a pure loot-n-scoot game (and who needs tropes when ya got lootz?), then the elements of the monomyth make up strong stories, be they arcs or whole campaigns--wins, losses, sudden reversals, betrayal (my favorite), changing alliances, death, "hairbreadth 'scapes i' th' imminent deadly breach." All these things, while not "fresh" by any means are part of the core essence of human stories. You can dress up the setting in many, many ways (my newest campaign simply re-flavors orcs as an enslaved race working the mines for the evil dwarves; elves haven't been encountered yet [so players can play the "Elf" template in the B/X clone we're using as a human "Swordmage"). I don't know that I come to the game hoping for things to be completely new and different every time. I feel like I return it because it's home.

But on point: I think the setting details make the story. If you have a mixture of entities with complex, interwoven agendas, then drop the players in that, you get "freshness," so to speak. Because you just never know what players are gonna do.

Quote from: CRKrueger;758018It can be done well though.

The ironic approach, on the other hand, is so over, it's what will bring on the Zombie Apocalypse.

I think doing it selectively while retaining enough of the familiar can work. Just giving them a minor twist is often all that is needed though. I also think you want to have these kinds of changes stem from the setting. Dark Sun had some pretty unusual takes on races like elves and halflings, but they were pretty rooted in the setting.

Take a break from it. I always think about what Chris Claremont did with the X-Men in the late 80s - he scattered the team across the four corners of the globe and started writing about solo adventures and lesser characters etc instead. As a reader at the time, this was quite disappointing. But then two years later when he brought everything back together for a giant crossover called the X-Tinction Agenda, it was glorious. The crossover itself wasn't that great, but just the thrill of the old tropes reaffirming themselves was very powerful and exciting.