Tropes common to Tabletop RPGs:
Categories
- An Adventurer Is You: Adventurers and typical adventuring classes.
- A God Is You: Players take the role of gods.
- Alliteration & Adventurers: Dungeons & Dragons-style Alliterative Titles.
- Balance Buff: Increasing the effectiveness of a game element or mechanic to make it more useful.
- Black Mage: A class focused on damage output.
- Character Alignment: An abstracted system used to simulate the ethical nature of characters.
- Unconventional Alignment: Unusual character alignment systems.
- Character Customization: When a game allows you to customize its protagonist to your tastes.
- Character Level: Representing a character's increasing prowess by moving them through abstracted levels of greater strength.
- Character Tiers: Ranking lists of what characters are the best, for varying values of "best".
- Chunky Salsa Rule: Sufficient bodily destruction kills you regardless of however many hit points you still have.
- Class Change Level Reset: When a character changes classes, they've got to start leveling again from the bottom.
- Combat Medic: A healer character who can also fight.
- Convenient Questing: The party's next destination will be the closest area that hasn't been accessible already.
- Critical Failure: A random chance of dramatic failure.
- Critical Hit: A random chance of dramatic success.
- Critical Hit Class: A gameplay class focused on using critical hits.
- Damage Reduction: The ability to reduce how much damage you take from attacks.
- Damage Typing: Classifying damage into distinct types based on nature, source, and severity.
- Dump Stat: A character stat that players skimp on in order to have more points to spend on others.
- Dungeon Crawling: Gameplay focused on killing monsters, taking their stuff, and doing it again somewhere else.
- Dungeon Maintenance: Dungeons are deliberately kept in a state fit for adventurers to explore.
- Dungeonmaster's Girlfriend: Gaining an advantage in gameplay because of a real-life relationship with the person running the game.
- Elite Tweak: Tweaking the rules for a character or item to make them much more effective than they are by default.
- Empty Levels: Leveling up a character offers few practical benefits.
- Experience Points: A point system used to abstractly represent a character's growing experience and skill.
- Failed a Spot Check: A character fails to notice something obvious.
- Fantasy Character Classes: Recurring types of gameplay classes used in role-playing games.
- Fighter, Mage, Thief: Three basic character classes: the brawn/melee damage-dealer the brains/ranged damage-dealer, and the bluff/sneaky damage-dealer.
- Game Master: The guy who serves as a referee and storyteller for the game.
- GMPC: A GM-controlled NPC who travels with the rest of the player characters.
- Killer Game Master: A GM who seems to have more fun screwing with the players than running a fair game.
- Gameplay Randomization: Gameplay mechanics that involve explicit randomization in some way or form.
- Game System: A system of mechanics used to regulate gameplay and simulate actions.
- The GM Is a Cheating Bastard: The guy running the game can do whatever he feels like doing.
- Grand Tabletop Rules List: A list of rules meant for people new to tabletop RPGs.
- Grappling with Grappling Rules: Rules meant to simulate grappling other characters are usually weird and frustrating.
- Heavy Equipment Class: A class that can use weapons and/or armor too heavy for others.
- Honest Rolls Character: Stats are randomized, so PCs get gimped by their player's honesty
- Horny Bard: The tendency for The Bard to also be a shameless seducer.
- House System: A custom system of rules used by an established gaming group.
- Hybrid-Overkill Avoidance: A tendency to avoid making too many hybrids of gameplay classes and/or races.
- In and Out of Character: The game's events are put on hold while the players chatter over decisions and mechanics.
- Junk Rare: A rare item that's useless in gameplay.
- Lawful Stupid, Chaotic Stupid: A tendency to exaggerate character alignments into self-defeating idiocy.
- Chaotic Stupid: Being random and contrarian even when it's stupid or pointless to be so.
- Lawful Stupid: Obeying laws inflexibly and mindlessly, without reasoning about why the laws exist or what they're meant to do.
- Stupid Good: When being good means being an ineffectual doormat.
- Stupid Evil: When being evil means being a mustache-twirling dunce.
- Stupid Neutral: When being neutral means having no ambition, beliefs, or character depth.
- Level Drain: The ability to remove character levels from other players and/or NPCs.
- Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Magic-user classes gain more power at high levels than melee-focused classes.
- Limited-Use Magical Device: A magical item can only be used a few times before becoming useless.
- LitRPG: A story about characters playing an RPG, complete with details of their game progression.
- Live-Action Role-Play: Acting out the events of an RPG in real life.
- Loads and Loads of Rules: Games with extensive, comprehensive, absolutely all-exhaustive rulesets.
- Magically Inept Fighter: Melee-focused classes have an explicit disadvantage in using magic.
- Maximum HP Reduction: The ability to reduce the maximum health cap of other players and/or NPCs.
- Mega Dungeon: A dungeon extensive enough to run a whole campaign in.
- Mechanically Unusual Class: Classes with odd mechanics or ones that have little in common with other classes'.
- Metaplot: An overall plot connecting many different installments in a work.
- Miniatures Conversions: Modifying and personalizing a gaming model to make it look different than the way it did when you bought it.
- The Minion Master: A class focused on controlling other characters and/or creatures.
- Minmaxer's Delight: A character option with advantages that far outweigh its disadvantages.
- Min-Maxing: Tweaking and adjusting a gaming character to maximize strengths and minimize weaknesses.
- Monty Haul: Loot is plentiful and easy to grab.
- Nerf: Weakening a character or class' abilities to reduce its advantages over others.
- No Cure for Evil: Evil characters, factions and classes have their ability to heal themselves and allies reduced or removed entirely.
- Non-Player Character: A character in a game not controlled by the players.
- No Saving Throw: A power or ability that cannot be defended against in any way.
- No Sneak Attacks: Even though they can, villains won't sneak attack the hero.
- Off the Rails: When players force the campaign off of its intended course.
- One Stat to Rule Them All: A character is objectively more useful than the others.
- Overused Copycat Character: A character that everyone makes expies of.
- Play-by-Post Games: Games played over long distances, with players informing each other of their moves by post or email.
- Player Archetypes: Common categories that players fall into:
- The Real Man: Someone who plays in order to kill things.
- The Roleplayer: Someone who plays in order to tell a story or develop a character.
- The Loonie: Someone who plays to have fun and do crazy things.
- The Munchkin: Someone who plays to make their gameplay avatar as strong as possible.
- Player Character: The players' in-game avatars.
- Player Party: A group of player characters who does things as a group.
- Point Build System: Generating traits for characters by allocating points from a budget.
- Prestige Class: A class unobtainable at character creation, which must be taken up during the course of gameplay.
- PVP Balanced: A game optimized for conflict between players.
- Railroading: The rules or the GM forcefully keep players following a specific story track.
- Random Number God: The depiction of probability in game mechanics as a sapient being that must be appeased.
- Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: The GM's fed up with you, so now your character is dead.
- Role-Playing Endgame: When a Tabletop RPG includes explicit rules for retiring player characters and/or for ending a campaign.
- Role-Playing Game Terms: Games in which players take on the role of individual characters.
- Role-Playing Game 'Verse: A setting designed to have role-playing game rules as an explicit part of its cosmology.
- Rules Conversions: An attempt to run a game built for one roleplaying system in another roleplaying system.
- Rules Lawyer: When a player or the GM tries to use extensive knowledge of the game rules to their advantage.
- Rule Zero: "The GM is always right." (The guy running the game is allowed to overrule formal rules when common sense so demands.)
- Schrödinger's Gun: Anything not yet explicitly revealed can be seamlessly retconned, with the players none the wiser.
- Schrödinger's Suggestion Box: Players customizing abilities with the GM's permission.
- Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Making enemies fight each other.
- The Six Stats: The six archetypal stats of RPGs — Charisma, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Strength, and Wisdom.
- Sliding Scale of Turn Realism: Varying degrees of abstraction in the representation of time.
- Sourcebook: A book describing some part of a game's setting and/or rules.
- Special Snowflake Syndrome: The desire for players to make their characters stand out.
- Spell Crafting: A mechanic allowing players to tweak, modify, or invent spells or similar abilities.
- Spell Levels: Increasingly powerful spells are sealed until your character levels up to a certain point.
- Splash Damage Abuse: Exploiting splash damage rules for fun and profit.
- Splat: A group or character classification.
- Squishy Wizard: Magic-using classes are usually physically frail to compensate for their high damage output.
- "Stop Having Fun" Guys: Players more focused on winning games than on puerile notions such as "fun".
- Support Party Member: A character option focused more on supporting other characters than on damaging enemies.
- That One Disadvantage: A single disadvantage that ruins a character or tool.
- That One Rule: A frustrating or highly disadvantageous rule.
- Total Party Kill: All the player characters die at once.
- Treacherous Quest Giver: The guy giving your characters missions is also a story villain.
- Twinking: Utilizing high-level characters so that low-level characters can deliberately mooch off their efforts.
- Universal System: A game system that can, in theory, be used to play a game in any genre or setting.
- Utility Party Member: A character option focused on non-combat abilities.
- Vancian Magic: A common magic system where spells must be prepared in advance and can only be used a finite number of times before needing to be "reloaded".
- We Help the Helpless: A character's profession is to help those who can't help themselves.
- White Mage: A class focused on healing allies.
- You All Meet in a Cell: The in-universe player characters meet by being thrown in the same slammer.
- You All Meet in an Inn: The in-universe player characters meet by wandering into the same bar.
