Name something that's very common to find in a D&D setting that you really don't care for. And, if explanation is needed, why.

Dragons.

Never been a huge fan. Though a dragon can add a mythical aspect to a game world.

Burying the dead.  It makes no sense at all for that to happen in a D&D world. They should cremate.

I mean, people know the gods are real, what happens after death and so the body is not important for religious purposes. And most importantly, undead exist. Even low level undead is dangerous, much less the higher types that can reproduce. So why let it even get started by burying bodies?

Lazy history, geology and ecology hand-waved away with "a wizard did it".

Societies that look just like historical ones, making no attempt to incorporate the impact functioning magic would have on them.

Monocultures, where everyone from a particular society has all the same personality traits.

The treatment of land ownership as being the same in the setting as we typically have today, being "fee simple" ownership. All the while still having a class of nobles about as if they're really running things. Are you really the Baron of Westerly if the Count of Easterly buys up almost all of land held by Westerly's commoners?

Revolving Door Afterlife. I like the idea of bringing someone back, but it should be more than a resource drain.

"Race" as a mix of "Species" and "Culture".  When humans get a huge number of cultures, and no one else does, I think it irritates me even more.  And the facile exceptions usually aren't much better.  "Oh, let's go all cosmopolitan with a mishmash culture of every race imaginable."  

Me, I think that maybe the friendlier elves that live right next to a major human/halfling agricultural center, with frequent trade and alliance for the last 300-400 years, are going to have a notably different culture than the xenophobic elves deep in hidden wilderness.  And those latter elves get along just fine with the reclusive dwarves living in the mountains nearby, because both groups respect boundaries.  The more mercantile dwarves  to the south, not so much with either of them.

"There must be Balance between Good and Evil."

Quote from: Dr. Ink'n'stain;1031606Revolving Door Afterlife. I like the idea of bringing someone back, but it should be more than a resource drain.

+1 to this. The killing/assassination of important/wealthy people would require complete disintegration. Just poisoning the king is no longer effective provided his court has any wealth and means at all.

Modern mores and social norms in pre-modern societies. Basically modern middle-class North Americans in ren faire clothings. Paizo's stuff is the worst for this.

Settlement patterns that are closer to the American West in density than medieval Europe, often with 15 or 20 miles between settlements. In medieval France of England, a 30 mile by 30 mile area would have more than a dozen villages, several towns, and a city or two. If your settlements is two days walk from the next closest settlement, you've got a god-forsaken backwater, not a bustling medieval town with taverns and other signs of healthy commerce.

As mentioned above, the superficial trappings of feudal society without the social structure.

Lazy real-world analogues (fantasy-Arabia over here, fantasy-Russia over there, fantasy-Aztecs down there, etc) instead of original cultures.

Humanoids as pests rather than horrifying monsters. Goblins should do far worse than steal an occasional sheep. Humanoids should have a niche distinct from small and ugly bandits.

Nations of good people worship good gods and nations of evil people worship evil gods. A religious pantheon, and the culture that sustains it, should accommodate the full sweep of archetypes and deities.

Far too much focus on high-level politics and history, and far too little on boots-on-the-ground geography, lairs, ruins, and NPCs.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1031608"There must be Balance between Good and Evil."

Agreed. Also, "there must be Balance between Law and Chaos".

I've got news for all the "philosophically superior" "anti-Extremist" Neutrals: Balance is itself an Extreme. The opposite Extreme is Imbalance, aka "Entropy". Welcome to the Extremist camp!


(Yes, I just demonstrated a third axis on the Gygaxian alignment chart. Implications are left as an exercise for the reader.)

I find that the world building is often arbitrary and neither holistic nor organic.

The terminology and classification of things is ad hoc, such as dragons and dragon-kin or elementals and elemental-kin.

Lots of concepts are pilfered from world mythology and mutilated into something unrecognizable. Gorgons are called medusas, catoblepases are called gorgons, minotaurs easily solve mazes, titans are the children of the gods, etc.

The "fey" and "elementals" are nature spirits, tricksters and the nobility of the otherworld depending on context, despite these concepts being diametrically opposed.

Nature spirits are occasionally mentioned, but there is no mechanic for spirituality like there is in Runequest.

There are separate evil gods and archfiends, which typically have little to do with one another.

Demons and devils are separate groups, but have nothing to distinguish them.

Law and chaos play second fiddle to good and evil, which misunderstands the entire point of the law/chaos dynamic.

The other planes are boring expanses of nothing and needlessly hostile to visit on top of that.

Dragons are pigeonholed into the western stereotype. We rarely see dragons with unusual body plans or different coverings like feathers or fur.

Attempts at creating ecologies for dungeons and monsters usually destroy the fantastical elements or needlessly restrict creativity.

Magic is typically treated as something separate from nature, and nature is assumed to operate the way science describes the real world.

Way too many monsters that are way too similar to one another.

Quote from: Haffrung;1031613Modern mores and social norms in pre-modern societies. Basically modern middle-class North Americans in ren faire clothings.

That one bugs me too.  I can tolerate a certain amount of that as a concession to play.  It is fantasy after all, and I'm not all that interested in more than a patina of historical accuracy.  What gets me is when people start the modern ideas without even thinking, or worse, deliberately accelerate into it.  "I'm sorry officer.  When I saw the crash was going to happen anyway, I decided to floor it and go out in a blaze of glory!"

Clerics being the primary source of hit point recovery. You can criticize 4E for whatever you like, but making it explicit that HP =/= meat points and then allowing for inspirational hit point recovery (regaining your fighting spirit) via warlords and skalds after they've been knocked around and bloodied a bit models a lot more fantasy world settings from fantasy novels, movies, television, comics, etc. than having a plate-bedecked priest accompanying just about every group of tomb robbers so they can magically knit them back together after they took a gut shot from a battleaxe.

Clerics and magical healing of meat points with no other options makes D&D awful at emulating anything other than D&D-shaped objects and gets quite ridiculous when explicitly non-magical settings (ex. a Robin Hood themed campaign) or settings without clerics (ex. Dark Sun) have to write around the fact that the game was built with divine healbots as a major setting expectation.

By contrast, 4E was able to model both of those settings perfectly just by saying "only martial classes" or "no divine classes" respectively without the game getting wonky. 5E can work if you squint and limit bards to spells that could be passed of as inspiration/misdirection/intimidation type tricks, but not quite as effortlessly as 4E did.

Shops.  Particularly the "General Store" sort of shop that sells a wide variety of adventuring gear.  In a real medieval society, you did not have shops, you had craftsmen whom you bought from directly.  Nobody would have a shop full of swords -- you'd commission one from a smith with experience making blades.  If you wanted a ladder, you didn't go to the general store and buy a ladder, you either built it yourself or you commissioned a woodworker to build you one.  The standard adventurer's shop just feels incredibly video gamey to me.