Tropes in your Games

[Crimson]

Gaming groups sometimes develop "tropes" over the years, reoccurring details that persist across different games and even with different DMs. I'm sure there's a million different reasons these crop up, but I'm interested in hearing about the tropes that your groups have developed. Not the super-common fantasy tropes that everyone is familiar with, just the ones unique to your group. I've a few examples here from personal experience:

---

Rufus the Pack Mule- At some point long ago, somebody with a pack mule had to come up with a name for it. "Rufus" was the first thing that came to mind. That poor beast of burden met with a horrific demise, and suddenly the ex-owner discovered that they needed a new pack mule. "Rufus mk. II" was born (or rather, purchased from town and subsequently renamed), and that mule also came to a grisly end purely by chance.

Having established a pattern, years later someone in the party always has a Rufus. It's an unspoken rule that Rufus with always suffer a fantastic death of some kind rather than simply dying of old age or wandering off somewhere, and yet, we keep naming our mules that. He's become something of a Kenney from South Park if you will.

To date, Rufus has been snatched up by a giant griffon and fed to its young, sacrificed on the altar of a demonic cult, crushed by immense water pressure when suddenly teleported to the bottom of the ocean, and had his skeleton raised as a necromantic monster while he was still alive and using it, among many other ghastly things that I can't remember at the moment.

Greasy Bob- Long long before I came to my real-life gaming group, some DM created "Greasy Bob", a pan-dimensional, fast talking swindler. His nature isn't clearly defined as of yet, even though he keeps popping up in all of our games. He typically appears as a lanky human figure with an obnoxious spray tan and the greasiest hair imaginable. He's not a god, but he might as well be due to his absurd collection of magical artifacts. The people in our settings don't worship him per-se, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a king or a community for that matter that doesn't owe him at least one "favor".

Anyway you get the idea. Whenever a group of adventurers absolutely needs something and can't figure out how to get it, a representative of Greasy Bob materializes with a phony smile and a contract consisting of 99% fine print. He'll get you what you need, at a cost...

---

That's all the time I have for this right now, but if people like this thread I may come back with some more later. Happy reminiscing!

EDIT: Just realized the title of the thread has a typo and can't figure out how to edit it -_-. Would some selfless, kind and benevolent moderator swoop in and fix it, to keep me from looking like a complete doofus?

[zevonian]

Thread title edited.

[Crimson]

Originally Posted by zevonian

Thread title edited.

Thanks Zev!

[ruffdove]

Captain Bucko: Captain Bucko became a fixture in games with my kids. I invented him based on a game my oldest made up with her friends at the pool we belonged to. They were all four or five year old little girls and much to my pleasure (and the other girls' moms' chagrin) my daughter led them in a game of Pirates. She was Captain Bucko, the leader, and she made ridiculous names for the rest of them (One-eye, Peg-leg, Scar face, and Parrot). The game consisted of them talking like pirates, jumping into the pool, and killing "scurvy dogs." So when we started playing D&D, Captain Bucko and his crew showed up in the first port city they arrived in. His ramshackle ship, the Barracuda (named for a pirate ship that serves as the 10th through 12th holes at a mini golf course down the shore that we play at), was always on the verge of falling apart but he was always ready to give the PCs a ride to wherever they needed and he was usually smuggling something somewhere. His ship would inexplicably appear in completely landlocked bodies of water, prompting speculation that it was secretly a magical flying ship, though that was never confirmed.

[Crimson]

What a great story! Captain Bucko got me right in the feels; what a sneak attack! I've got a boy that will be 3 in April, and I can't wait until we can do fun things like this. Very soon

[ruffdove]

That little girl is getting ready to go to college in the fall now--talk about the feels! We still play D&D, and she has largely preserved her sanity during quarantine by playing in a group with her friends over the internet twice a week. It's a great family tradition.

[Inverse Null]

In an effort to impress on my 3.5 party just how bad the inn they opted to stay at really was, when one character attempted to order alcohol of dwarven make, he was instead provided with a bottle of "Dorfen Mead". The label on the bottle proudly announcing that it is "Made with real bees!" As I recall, the substance was described as "only slightly less pleasant than licking an otyugh", but of course, the character in question was the most Constitution-stacking build I've ever had in a game and shook off all efforts to dissuade him from his drink. To both my dismay and personal amusement, this... did not exactly have the desired effect, and Dorfen Mead now lives on in a great many of our games as the premiere choice of beverage for discriminating drinkers who enjoy rolling Fortitude saves.

Much longer ago, with a very different group of players playing Vampire, we had a Ventrue player who we finally convinced to carry a firearm (because, seriously, sometimes you have to make the crime scene look like the normals did it, if nothing else). He was... not good at it. Six-shot revolver. Fired all six times during the campaign (he never reloaded and, come to think of it, I'm not sure we ever gave him extra ammo in the first place). Six botches. The last of which was after he'd even tried to learn to use the blasted thing; he actually had 5 dice in that pool, and rolled the gloriously improbably result of all five 1s. Needless to say, nothing good ever happened when that gun went off, and for years afterward, a weapon of suspiciously identical appearance would appear in all of our games (even if it had to do so anachronistically) as a terrifying harbinger of doom.

[Wulfnor]

Oh I thought you meant Troops, my bad!