Tired D&D clichés: which ones need to go?

We had a fun session last weekend (a brief sojourn to Tomb of Annihilation via a fairy ring), and one of my players made a comment that stuck with me: ‘Sometimes, you just want a dungeon and a dragon.’

It made me think about tropes: the conventions of a genre that you see over and over again. And when a trope overused and tired, it’s a cliché. And fantasy has loads of them. (Incidentally, this isn’t originally what the word ‘trope’ meant, but shift happens.)

My player’s comment made me think about the ingredients of a game like D&D: what’s expected, what’s commonplace, what’s been done to death. All storytelling uses tropes—there’s nothing new under the sun—but knowing those tropes and knowing how to deploy them can be helpful.

There’s a strong element of subjectivity here, of course, and depends to some extent on the sorts of storytelling you enjoy, read, and ‘consume’ (for want of a better word). If you never read fantasy, you might be unperturbed by obvious ‘dark lord’ characters like Sauron, Voldemort, Thanos, and Darth Sidious. But if you are fully immersed in these genres, you can spot a dark lord a mile off. Some D&D players love the tradition of starting a campaign in a tavern. Others hate it.

There’s a whole discussion to be had here, and this post was really more of a shower thought than anything else. But it got me thinking about the tropes I like in my fantasy roleplaying games, and which ones perhaps need a bit of a reevaluation.

Have I missed something? Disagree? Let me know in the comments, as always.

The Good

• Dungeons! And not just because it’s half the name of the game. Sometimes the rules of D&D don’t quite marry with what you’re trying to do (eg, mystery adventures, wilderness exploration), but with dungeon crawling, the game just sings. Ever since Professor Tolkien sent nine adventures into Moria, we have had an urge to delve into dark places.
• Dragons! Is there anything that feels as momentous and badass as fighting a dragon in D&D? The loot helps, sure, but dragons tap into something primal. Everyone loves dragons, right?
• You meet in a tavern. Part of me is surprised I’m not putting this in ‘the tired,’ below, but honestly? I don’t hate it. My two longest and arguably most successful campaigns both started in a tavern, and there’s something creatively interesting about starting every game in the same way and watching them spiral out from there.
• The wise mentor. Gandalf, Merlin, Deckard Cain—I don’t know why, but a good D&D campaign needs a wise old person to consult. Doesn’t have to be male, of course.
• Mirth and mayhem. This is the tagline of another fantastic game, Dragonbane, but it captures something important in D&D as well. At some points in D&D’s 50-year history, it has felt like the game has wanted to take itself more seriously, but I think 5e has been right to lean into its random, chaotic, and downright silly aspects.
• Goofy dungeon monsters. I’m thinking rust monsters, gelatinous cubes, mimics, that kind of thing. They feel very ‘D&D-ish,’ and there’s something comforting about them.
• Epic battles. Can you imagine a D&D campaign without this? I’m currently running The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, and it’s a fun change of pace, but . . . I keep feeling like there’s something missing. There’s a reason why ‘roll for initiative’ is such a catchphrase in the game, and there’s a reason I named my blog after it.

The Tired

• Tragic backstories. I remember when we played as teenagers, every person’s character was an orphan. It’s . . . been done. There are plenty of great fantasy characters who don’t have a tragic backstory. And honestly, if the most interesting thing about your character is something that happened before the campaign . . .
• Evil for evil’s sake. 2D villains who have no real depth or reason for their villainy except ‘because.’ Full disclosure: I’ve done it. We all have. But it’s not very interesting, is it?
• The chosen one. See also prophecies in general (and again, I’ve done it). Prophecies can easily feel like a form of railroading—like the ending of the campaign has already been written—and need to be handled carefully.
• Fetch quests. There are some pretty egregious examples of this in official WotC adventures, and UGH it’s just so tedious as a player. Nine times out of ten it just feels lazy. (Part of me wonders whether ‘find the parts of the artifact’ can feel a bit like this, too.)
• Monolithic cultures. It can be a convenient shorthand to say ‘the citizens of Bilbareth are superstitious’ or ‘everyone in Thrintal knows a bit of magic,’ but it’s easy for it to become lazy and two-dimensional. World-building gets more interesting when cultures have a bit more depth.
• Random encounters? This is probably sacrilege, and someone’s probably going to tell me that I’m just ‘doing them wrong.’ But honestly, I’m never sure these are as fun as DMs think they are. Maybe there’s a whole blogpost in here somewhere.

The Problematic

• Evil races. Every time I write about this, there’s a whole cohort of D&D players who get angry and call me woke etc, and it’s tedious to engage with them. I’ve written about it elsewhere, as have others (Forge of Foes is brilliant on this).
• Traitor NPCs. Problematic in the sense that it just feels like a gotcha, a massive f— you to the players. I like how Mike Shea describes it as going against the social contract of the game. There are some truly terrible examples of it in published adventures (Vecna: Eve of Ruin, I’m looking at you) and the more I run and play games, the more it just feels like a complete no-no.
• Slavery. I don’t think it’s exactly taboo (there’s an interesting discussion on this point here), but it’s very tricky territory. I like what Joshua Brickley has to say about it at Nerdarchy:

If I watched nothing but things that made me hate being a human being, I wouldn’t be able to have any perspective. Not to mention that part of narratives are to reinforce positive values. While shining a light on the negative aspects, and making sure we understand why they’re bad, there’s only so much of it we can really take in at a time.
Make sure when you’re presenting something dark like slavery in an RPG that you do it justice. Please do the research. These are things real people have had to go through in the past, and things many still do. Slavery, in all its forms, just like the other truly evil aspects of humanity, needs to be taken seriously in your game.

• Gender stereotyping. It’s 2025. I shouldn’t need to go into this.
• The horny bard. Ugh.
• Disabled = evil. See also deformities = evil. The James Bond franchise is terrible for this.

Final thoughts

In the end, most tropes aren’t inherently good or bad: they’re building blocks for our stories at the table. How we use them, subvert them, or reinvent them is where the magic happens. Perhaps the better question is, if we’re leaning on a trope, does it add richness to our stories, or is it just shortcuts? Which ones make our games more fun and meaningful? Which ones might deserve to be left behind? Perhaps all we really need is a dungeon and a dragon. Let me know in the comments below.