Do any of your games use an overly used plot device?

According to IGN(who believes them anyways), they have a list of the top 10 overused plot devices. After reading through it, you have to wonder where the originality in games are these days.

http://ps2.ign.com/articles/937/937748p1.html

Similar lists exist for the top 10 RPG cliches used as well.

What are some new plot devices that can be used to make your game stand out from the rest? Or are these overused plot devices just unavoidable?

Furthermore, what is your most hated plot device used in an RPG game(doesn't have to be on this list)? This question will hopefully prevent OHR devs from creating games with the most hated plot devices, or maybe not...

All that matters is telling a story well, using or avoiding archetypes and common themes doesn't matter.

There's a reason Hero's Journey stories have been around for thousands of years. Writing one isn't bad. Writing a boring story is.

Also "World War II" is a setting, not a plot device.

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

Stole the words right out of my mouth.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

Kind of a silly thing in the first place, but... let's count them up anyway!

Okédoké has... just #1, pretty much.

FYS:AHS has (or "will have" I guess, since I haven't gotten too far on it, heh) #2 in a way, #4, and... sort of #9, though not "the main character" so much as "a major character."

Puckamon has... #1, sort of. If Team Sputnik really counts as "secret," with their loud entrances and obvious costumes.

And another game I've been working on lately has... #2 in a way, and #6 as a set of optional bosses. And #7 for one character, sort of.

...and The Kirby Lands had most of the list. Just the same modification of #9 as FYS:AHS, and no secret societies, chosen-one power-unlockings, or World War II. XD

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FYS:AHS -- Swapping out some step-on NPCs for zones + each step script
Puckamon -- Not until the reserve party is expanded.[/size]

My unfinished game Kim and Jose dosen't seem include one of this!
Neither Kim nor Jose suffer amnesia, there is no evil accidently triggert, and definitivly no world war between the monsters!
There are no alien either...
I was so sure that I did use a topic that is used often, but maybe 'getting lost in an other world and finding the way home' isn't used that often.

We could make a competeition there you have to use all of those over used plot devices in youre game! I'd like to see the plots that people come up with ... haha

1. Nope.
2. Forsaken...
3. None.
4. Noneeee!
5. Nooooope.
6. Nope.
7 None whatsoever.
8. WTH?
9. Forsaken, or so it seems.
10. Nope.

That would actually be a very interesting competition to see what comes out of it....


World War II is on the list from IGN because of the recent craze of FPS games out there, you know CoD, Battlefield, etc...

That...is an amazing idea! We could call it the Cliche Overload Contest! Players would have to make their game as cliched as possible! I love that idea!

Please, no. If you're trying to include all eight cliches and the WWII setting, then you run a greater chance of botching the writing. Remember, kids:



I don't know how well any of us can write a story about

1. The Illuminati
2. searching for the Fountain of Youth
3. to keep the President young forever, according to the forgotten section of the Bill of Rights that everyone thought had burned (double lost remnant!)
4. So he can thwart the two-hundred-year era of oppression from our enslaving alien masters
5. By using the super flesh-eating death rays he originally discovered he could shoot from his nipples
6. But having no idea that every time he uses his nipple death rays a giant man-eating cow grows in size by a foot and becomes increasingly angry with humans
7. Because he's so blinded by the rage he feels inside over having lost the recent presidential election and can only think about taking revenge on his successor by telling the media that he's secretly an alien worshiper and closet homosexual
8. And has to retreat daily to his time machine where he revisits World War II for a time of healing
9. But forgets why the war started in the first place because time travel eats away a new memory every time he uses it (a fact that he also had forgotten)
10. And inadvertently jump starts the zombie apocalypse because Einstein, whom he encounters on his WWII trips, has the last laugh and creates the Illuminati in order to subdue the eternal president so he can develop a state-of-the-art research and development facility to implant experimental nipple lasers on soldiers and then use the lasers to combine their flesh with that of the aliens' so that the humans and aliens can live in harmony, but to dire consequences.

I think most of us would be left scratching our heads by the end of it.

So, please, no.

And, it looks like most of us have forgotten this question:



In Entrepreneur: The Beginning, the main character who Must Seek Revenge doesn't fight his opponent physically, but rather economically. It also chooses a setting uncommon in video games, teen angst era 1980s. The core gameplay centers on making coffee, but also features trashcan diving, repairing and selling broken objects, and doing yard work for rich snobs in the suburbs.

The Adventures of Powerstick Man is about a superhero (fairly uncommon in RPGs) who goes on a series of loosely related quests in a narrative structure similar to dimwit comedies like Dude, Where's My Car? and Harold and Kumar. It also features a number of stat building devices like ordering specific meals at restaurants or swimming in pools. Doesn't really fit into any of the cliches comfortably.

Tightfloss Maiden, about a Woman with Amnesia, is essentially "Inception in the desert."

At the Risk of Manipulation is about a guy who tries to gain "cool points" so that he can manipulate people into doing things for him so that he can eventually Win the Girl (a cliche surprisingly not on the list).

My other games haven't really gotten to the development stage where the story is actually in place.

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Place Obligatory Signature Here

1: None of my games, unless I reveal it in Maces Wild - but that'd be more like a secret money-making organization than a secret world-dominating one.

2: Nope.

3: Kinda vague. I'd say only my villains have ever relied on this...by not playing it straight. For instance, relying on the fact that people will be certain it takes exactly 1,000 years for the villain to return, and either showing up a few decades early or late. (Dark Lord Nathan does this in Densetsu no Okami).

4: Nope.

5: Wolf in Wolf's Quest (but not in DnO, where he's got an equal stake with the other heroes despite his lineage) and Rolf in RetroRPG (who is a descendant of Wolf). Heman from A Newbie's Quest gets his airship from Jesus so that he can fight the final boss, whose base is on an island surrounded by mountains.

6: Adventures of Nathan Karr and Guh. In both cases, Nathan Karr/Ronin Catholic unwittingly releases his personal inner demons on an undeserving fantasy world - in the former case, he becomes a party member in the introductory scene and helps save the world.

7: Nope.

8: Nope.

9: Starrhao Swordsmen, the ranger has amnesia.

10: Nah, my villains prefer conquering and enslaving worlds to destroying them.


Not only have I used half of these, most of my games didn't get far enough in the plots' development to show them anyway.

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Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!

Cliche Overload Contest! Yeah!

Maybe we should open up another thread to discuss this.
Exept the world war II setting, I'd like to support the idea.

My game is entirely guilty of #6.

United Aerospace Corps finds what seems to be an interdimensional gateway on both sides of Tei Tenga, and what happens when they open it? They release thousands of Hellspawn into the main facilities on the moon's surface. The interdimensional gateway is later to be revealed as the gateway to Hell, and your team stumbles into it and gets trapped there after a brutal encounter with the enemy.

You fight through the hordes in Hell, and your team emerges out the other gateway on the opposite end of the moon some time later. At this time, millions of Hellspawn have breached the area, and now your team decides to spare people's lives as you activate all active nuclear devices on the moon, causing the moon to be blown to pieces in a fiery explosion.

Upon the arrival of your team to the nearest reclamation post, your team receives the news that an additional hellgate has been found on another colony-moon. This one leads once again to Hell, but the final battle in there takes you to the ancient Hell-city of Dis. Once the last wave of demons begin to close in around the heroes, another team emerges through a self-spawned portal behind them, in which the marines that come forth are from a team on Earth.

Hell has invaded the home-planet, Earth, and you and the Alpha team are sent to finish the job. Your mission remains clear: to eliminate the Gatekeeper of Hell and rid the world of its demonic forces.

...well, there you go then. I'm probably guilty of more than one of these, but here's all I have as far as a predetermined story. Sorry for the long (non copy-pasta) post.

(Rant/slightly Off-topic)

I think that in all honesty it is impossible to not use at least one cliché in any form media. It really is important to be aware of clichés (making TV Tropes sadly a necessary evil). If you're, for example forced into using one or have used one without initially realising as such then you can at the very least look it up and try and put a little unique swing to it.

I'm guilty of at least all the sensible ones (A.K.A the ones that are actually clichés and not settings), as a kid I loved the whole "hero with amnesia" plot device and would abuse it in any doodles I did.

These days when I'm writing up characters (or settings) I literally note down each not by name, but by role and clichéd archetype then work backwards until I have a unique character (try doing that with 40+ characters and understand why I've not released my project in any form yet ).

TL;DR
Everyone's bound to use some of the most common clichés but with a little research, thinking and reverse engineering you can give it a somewhat unique twist.

Before TV Tropes, it was known as motifs, but not quite as entertaining. I'm no fan either.

The interesting aspect is how do you measure if something is overused or not?

So far as new plot devices, sure. But you can abstract them all into cliches, which is what I think people find silly.

Not a fan of amnesia, but I don't hate it.

Yes yes yes yes this. But not just these cliches, just anything that's overused.

Oh, and, uh, I haven't made any games, so I dunno. Although I've come up with concepts that overuse amnesia and world ending, so that's good.