‘Rainy Day 1’ by freeimages.com / Krisztián Hoffer

There are two different visions of a typical winter’s day. If altitude and latitude permit, you have your snowy day with bitter winds and flurries and whiteouts and snow getting down your back; if not, then cold and wet with howling winds and driving rain that sheets horizontally and in which the only cover is being fully enclosed in four solid walls and a ceiling.

These are cliches of weather, and today is the latter kind of winter’s day in Sydney. The strange thing is that I was only thinking as I went to bed how it had been quite a while since we had experienced that sort of “cliched winter’s day”.

Historically, I know that in Sydney, those cliche days are relatively rare. Spring and Summer are actually wetter seasons than Winter, and it rains overnight twice as often as during the day. Nevertheless, when you think of winter, it’s the iconic cliche that comes immediately to mind as being “typical”.

Nor is this the only phenomenon where this pattern holds true. Runs of luck, Patterns of personalities, corporate practices – whenever there’s a cliche, you will tend to find that they are actually relatively rare in real-life occurrence.

That begs the question, then, of why these occupy the roles they enjoy in the zeitgeist? It can only be the result of one of two phenomena: an echo chamber reinforcement, a sort of verbal shorthand that encapsulates a broader pattern, or some form of appropriateness to the cliche that makes it a quintessential representation.

The weather example is a case of the first. If you describe that sort of day – cold, windy, and wet – the actual label of “winter” becomes a redundancy, even a tautology.

Examples of the second would include “greedy taxman” or “greedy banker”. Because “greed” is seen as reflective of the qualities that make such people more effective in those positions, the quality enters into a cliched relationship with the popular perception of the role.

Cliches are critical to RPGs whenever the GM goes into improv mode, because they leap so readily to mind. When that happens, the GM always has four choices: to Embrace, Flirt with, Subvert, or Reject the Cliche.

Embrace

Embracing the cliche is often done without thinking. And that’s a real problem, because cliches are rarely the most interesting of choices. This can be the right choice in only three circumstances, to my way of thinking:

1. The cliche avoids distracting from something more interesting that the GM wants to focus on;
2. The cliche will provide a moment of levity and otherwise be unimportant in terms of the plot; or
3. The GM thinks of a way for the cliche to manifest in an unusual or non-cliched situation.

The first is easier and more common. Being able to put the NPC in a box like that permits the GM’s creativity, and the players’ attentions, to focus elsewhere. This is using a cliche as a cardboard cutout and being fully aware that you are doing so. Unfortunately, so many people resort to cliches when they run out of creativity that this can still undermine the quality of the adventure or campaign. For that reason, however legitimate this approach might be in theory, I find it better to avoid the baggage that comes with it, and so will refuse to embrace a cliche when that’s all I get out of it.

The second therefore becomes the most common reason for me to embrace a cliche. It doesn’t happen very often, but when the circumstances are right and the introduction of a cliche will provide a brief and insignificant diversion from the prevailing trend, I will occasionally use one for humorous purposes. This is the cliche in the service of the principles of emotional pacing ? refer

• Swell And Lull – Emotional Pacing in RPGs Part 1;
• Swell And Lull – Emotional Pacing in RPGs Part 2;
• The Further Thoughts On Pacing Series (4 articles);
• and, from a bit left-field, The Yu-Gi-Oh Lesson: New Inspirations In Pacing and Style.

But the third is my favorite reason to embrace a cliche – because you’ve thought of something new to do with it.

The city is locked in the heart of a bitter winter, snow falling with monotonous regularity for much of the past week. Only those with the most urgent of business vacate the warmth of fireplace and hearth to venture outside. You hole up in the inn, delaying devotions and business to the point of rushing to complete these tasks, but also growing more bored by the situation day after day. Surely, the weather can’t maintain this monotony for much longer? Surely, something will come along to fill these empty hours? You are often reduced to idly watching through the windows as children play, chased out from underfoot by exasperated parents, tired of them being perpetually underfoot. Makeshift toboggans slide down snowdrifts into the street, displaying a variety of levels of skill on the part of the pilots; snowmen adorn several corners; several children have combined forces to construct a pair of snow forts, from which they emerge to pelt the opposition with snowballs from time to time, and one young girl has clearly just been told that all snowflakes have absolutely unique patterns, and is catching them to peer closely at this strange phenomenon. Suddenly, she screams in fear and drops the flake from her hand before fleeing toward the nearest cover – as chance would have it, the very inn in which you are ensconced. “The face, it bit me,” she explains after the cleric calms her hysteria. The face? What face is she talking about? “The face in the snowflake,” she explains, looking around warily.

Before too long, the PCs will discover that many of the snowflakes are in fact teeny-tiny ice Elementals, capable of joining together to become larger representatives of their kind, of animating ordinary snow as they see fit, and of turning ice into something more akin to hardened steel. Suddenly, the significance of all those snowmen changes abruptly – this isn’t just a snowstorm, it’s an invasion from the elemental plane of water….

Such inspirations don’t come along every day, but when they do, it’s worth embracing the cliche that spawned them! In fact, every time a cliche comes to mind, the first question I ask myself is whether or not I can do something original with it…

Flirt

Flirting with a cliche is giving the impression that the cliche is present, when the reality is quite different. There are, it is often said, two sides to every story (and yes, I know that the quote is another cliche!) – one of those sides, the one initially presented to the PCs either through direct experience of the consequences or indirectly through the testimony of a third party, casts a protagonist in the cliched role, inviting the PCs to act accordingly – only to discover that as a result they have completely misjudged the situation.

For example, the PCs come to a small village nestled at the base of a mountain range. Planning to stop overnight, they are surprised to find that a ruinous tax-collection regime is in place. Ten percent of any ready cash and three percent of the worth of any valuables are payable upon entry to the town, and there are inspections at the gates. A thirty percent tax surcharge has been placed on absolutely everything – whether it’s a nail, a meal, or a service like lodgings. There are spot-fines for the most trivial errors of behavior, custom, or propriety.

That’s all right – the PCs can afford all that, even though it depletes much of their ready cash. But it prepares the ground for the tales of hardship that they will brush up against – the poor boiling old bones and boots for soup (cliche alert!), the child complaining that the cold gets through the holes in their clothing only to be told that the family can’t afford the tax on new clothes, the tenant being evicted even though his rent has been paid because he can’t afford the tax on the rent, and so on.

At the inn, over watered-down mugs of cut-price ale that cost way too much, the PCs learn that all this started when a new exchequer took the reigns of taxation authority some six months earlier. The only positive thing that he’s done, according to the locals, is that he has abolished the Debtor’s Prison; instead, unpaid taxes result in the citizen being forced to perform public works that save the expenditure of cash from the exchequer’s books. All sorts of dark rumors circulate about the Exchequer, Danevan Scrimp – everything from being in the pocket of organized crime to plans to extort as much as he can before disappearing with the cash. But all discussion paths inevitably lead to reminiscing about the good old days.

Clearly, this situation flirts outrageously with the “greedy taxman” cliche, and the fact that they’ve been extorted as shamelessly as everyone else will persuade the PCs to do something about this greedy villain.

When they do, they will discover that he’s not at all what they would have expected. He is old, and tired, and losing sleep over the harsh measures. It seems that former exchequer coddled the townspeople and reduced taxes to the bare minimum and beyond – small wonder that they they remember it as a golden age – but this forced him to skimp on essential maintenance of the dams and water-management services high up in the mountains that protect the village during the summer thaw. He’s hired the best, and been forced to pay top dollar to get them, but to pay for them he’s had to be draconian, and even so it’s a race against time that might not be won. Of course, he could tell the villagers none of this, or they would have left in a panic, and the village would never have recovered. He only prays that the terrible price everyone is paying is only temporary, and will not need to be extended to pay for expensive reconstruction if his gamble doesn’t pay off!

And now that they know, the fate of the village is in their hands – they can reveal the secret and destroy it, or they can join the desperate struggle to save it…

This is essentially a plot twist built on the foundations of the cliche. For more on plot twists in RPGs, see

• The Unexpected Creeps Up Behind You;
• Pretzel Thinking – 11 types of Plot Twist for RPGs, Part 1;
• Let’s Twist Again – Eleven types of Plot Twist for RPGs pt 2;
• and finally, The Final Twist: Dec 2014 Blog Carnival Roundup.

Subvert

Subverting a cliche means to deliberately go against expectations, doing the exact opposite of whatever the cliche suggests. This can be interesting at times, but it’s done so routinely these days that it can often be considered embracing an alternative cliche!

While I will always look at the possibility of subverting the cliche whenever one comes to mind, the choice to do so has to meet the same standards as embracing the cliche would do – either it advances an existing plotline, or it avoids distracting the PCs with side issues, or it provides relief from prevailing moods, or I think of something new and interesting to do with the resulting “square peg in a round hole” or “fish out of water” cliches that subverting the main cliche embraces.

That said, there is more creative potential here to be exploited than there is in blindly embracing the cliche; in particular, if you can find a way to turn the break from “tradition” into an advantage for the character in performing the functions of the job that create the expectations if cliche suitability

The PCs are shortly to travel through a town they’ve never visited before. They stop to ask directions at one of the neighboring towns, and uncover a swarm of stories and legends, always starting with the question, “Why in the world would you want to go there?” or variations on that theme. From that beginning, each time they will get another cautionary tale about the place – the suggestion that it has the lowest crime rate of any town in the Kingdom of similar size; .the sheriff must have eyes everywhere; and so on.

From this foundation, build up an impression of the town as a totalitarian extreme – but never from anyone’s personal knowledge, they all avoid the place because of its reputation, and NPC after NPC will tell the PCs that they should do the same. “They really make travelers feel unwelcome!” is the only piece of first-hand information they can pick up.

But – for whatever reason – the PCs have no choice; to this particular town, they must go.

Upon arrival, they find the behavior of the locals to bear out these fore-warnings. None will willingly have any dealings with the PCs, and all eyes are perpetually turned in their direction. They can’t go anywhere without at least one of the locals following and trying to look unobtrusive and disinterested, and failing miserably. And several times, they see the Sheriff – there needs to be some way they can visually identify him established before they arrive, perhaps description during that advance “briefing”.

The cliche is of the “ruthless cop”. You’ve built it up in the minds of the players, and seem to have backed it up with actual experiences.

But the reality, that the GM has been keeping in the back of his mind the entire time (having decided to subvert that cliche), is quite different. The sheriff succeeds in keeping the crime rates low because he’s everybody’s best friend, knows everyone by their first name, is always fully aware of everyone’s business and what they are up to, and “How’s the lumbago today, Miss Dawshamp?” Because of this relationship, everyone shares all the town gossip with him; this is a town in which the sheriff is the keeper of everyone’s secrets, and he uses that knowledge to always be there to intercede before anyone does anything they shouldn’t. And the locals have grown to like it; to them, it feels like the sheriff is always watching over them, keeping them out of trouble, and they are all anxious to return the favor whenever they can. Obviously, the only people he doesn’t know like the back of his hand are outsiders, and so the most certain source of trouble is always those outsiders, and everyone knows it. This turns the entire population into informers and spies and amateur sleuths aimed squarely at the PCs (and any other outsiders who happen to come to town).

Having milked the groundwork for all it’s worth, the GM now needs a way to bring the PCs into the secret. The best answer: some NPC outsiders who will adopt a particularly poor attitude to this treatment at the hands of the locals, who will do all the things that the PCs may have been tempted to do (but thought better of), who are up to no good and who try to frame the PCs for their misdeeds. Perhaps they are criminals, who – from the town description – figured that they would have no competition, and that perhaps the locals were lax in locking things up because they had been too comfortable for too long. This naturally divides the community into “us” and “them” – with the PCs on the side of “us”, whereas until now, they had been treated as “them”.

.

I was only going to offer the one example, but another one suggested itself at the last minute that was too good to ignore. Take the cliche of the happy little community, ignoring the world and content to have the world ignore them, and subvert it – everyone in town is a wanted criminal, and over the last hundred or so years, this has become the retirement community of choice for thieves, murderers, and rogues of all descriptions. The biggest criminal of the lot is the Count who rules the town (whose great-grandfather blackmailed his way into a patent of nobility way back when), and he maintains the peace with an iron fist and the declaration that all feuds, enmities, and rivalries stop at the town borders. As a result, this town has gained a reputation for being the politest, quietest, most peaceful town in the world. Exactly the sort of town that a cleric might prescribe for a PC whose nerves have become stretched too taut….

Reject

The fourth choice is to reject the cliche. That means not only not embracing it it any way (including to subvert it), but also not embracing its opposing counterpart. It means avoiding the cliche entirely. This is often the hardest choice – but can also be the most rewarding. And, if you make a habit of this choice, the rare exceptions when you do choose to embrace, refute, or subvert a cliche because the plotline is irresistible, always tend to be surprises to the PCs – making those plotlines all the more effective.

Shortcuts to Creation

A cliche is a shortcut to creation. They should never be embraced likely, but knowing when not to reject them can be just as useful to the GM. Never ignore them – the fact that they have come to mind is your subconscious telling you something about the current in-game situation. Instead, use them to your advantage!