Mason Wrote:Quote:Sorry for not being clearer, that was an attempt at a joke about Drizzt clones. For those who have never encountered the phenomenon, for some reason, inexperienced roleplayers playing in settings that have Dark Elves/Drow tend to love to make characters that are almost exact copies of the character Drizzt Do'Urden from R.A. Salvatore's massively popular series of novels set in the Forgotten Realms D&D setting. It's so common to see a chaotic good Drow dualwielding scimitars that the Overused Copycat Character trope used to be called Drizzt Syndrome.Oh okay, haha. You can see how without this background info I was like :shock: orly? picking on names?! xD
I agree with Kier to an extent. Sure people will have cliche elements, and cliche in itself shouldn't be perceived as bad. I think we talked about the negative, overdone, badly RP'ed cliche characters. Some people carry them through and actually make it work, while others fail to make it original. If anything it takes more skill to play a cliche/ordinary character than a completely original idea.
Since my topic started this I just wanted to clarify things:
1) "Cliches" aren't the same as "archtypes" or common story elements. Campbell proved that all ancient myths, comic characters and the "Hero's Journey" are stories that resonate with all and are a great place to start. What would be cliche is if a person lifted the story of one of the those myths and just changed the names and claimed it as the background of their character. Like the copycat Naruuuto or Driizzzt which doesn't match the lore of the world in anyway which is just feels clumsy and unbelievable.
However cliche is something beyond that is the "copy cat" character or idea that seems to be played the exact same way over and over and crop up all of the time. A similiar element doesn't make it a cliche if its not the exact same thing.
EDIT: An example of this was the "my entire family was killed by orcs after the war had already ended and I don't know why" cliche. It wasn't so much their entire familly was killed. It wasn't so much they were killed by orcs. It was admittedly somewhat strange it was after the Crystal War ended but why was every single one of these repeated so often together in a Background? Why not have your character older, like I did with Tsumi, who actually experience the War? Why didn't they make there be a reason their family was slaughtered? Why didn't Kindred, Goblins, Yagudos or some other beastman kill them why was it always Orcs? This is why after experiencing the same thing over and over people got jaded.
2) This topic isn't meant to be nit-picky. It good to be aware of the cliches just like its good to be familiar with archtypes to give yourself ideas its good to read the backgrounds of other players in the group and see if its a cliche. If I find coincidentally my backstory is too similiar to someone elses character I'll adjust it a bit. RP is an interactive thing and if no one likes your character or finds them interesting you'll het a lot less people interested in your character and RP with you. This is the truth, it might be brutal, so its nice to know that.
I've seen a lot of new rpers confused and upset that left when people didn't react the way they wanted them to when they chose the cliche. Some left discouraged so I think its only fair to forewarn the "starry-eyed" new rper that thinks that since Sepheroth is so cool everyone will love their "Seth Roth" copycat and RP with them for hours on end. When eventually they ask "why is everyone avoding me" its not fun to be honest and tell them, I've been in that position, because some are crushed and leave angry.
3) You can play a cliche well and if you do then most people will respond to you well so I don't think its an issue. I purposely have chosen "cliched" character types while making sure I spun them just different enough to make them fresh.
For instance one of the worst RP cliches on Starsider was the Twilek sex slave girl turned dancer. They generally were sex-kitten types that weren't the least bit scarred by their terrible abused background. I purposely made an escaped Twilek slave girl but made her the exact opposite, she was 100% innocent of experiencing true cruelty and was never used for sex. She was a serving girl and dancer so she was treated fairly well by her masters. Also another RPer made a 100% cliched sterotype Twilek but gave her such depth, she's an amazing Rper, Tandian is one of the most popular characters in the community there. Both she and I were expereinced Rpers and knew just what we'd initially face as a skeptical community was susupicious of our "copycat". We had to work hard to overcome the intial skepticism and a new person often doesn't understand the community reaction to their cliche.
Basically this is a cautionary thread not a beat down.
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