The Cliché Character

[Chimaera182]

As someone who posted regularly in the Knights of the Old Republic forums, I noticed people who liked certain characters and who didn't like others, and people stating their reason why or why not. fable and myself, as well as others, felt several characters were just cliché; the whiny, self-important Jedi who preaches virtue and blah blah, the brutal warrior looking to relive his glory days, the bratty street smart punk kid, etc. As I was trying to think of a character type that was not cliché, I hit something of a brick wall: I couldn't think of any (well, aside from Kreia).

What do you all think constitutes a clichéd character type, and what kinds can you think of that are *not*?

[Luis Antonio]

Clichê characters constitute, I guess, beliefs and pre-concepts we all have. They are a set of "needed social figures" that we can use (inefectively) to compare people. But no person, in my opinion, fully adjust to clichês.

Regarding games, some clichês are cool. Jan Jansen, for example is a funny short people (gnome) clichê. Jon Irenicus is the mage who fell because of his thirst for power and that will never recover; Gordon Freeman is the scientist who save the world (he's becoming clichê now, if he wasnt before).

Even Harry Potter (the kid who survived, the one) is clichê. They are important to teach kids values, I guess. Notions of right and wrong. Who you want to be is guided by clichês you've seen during your whole childhood.

I guess CE will be able to pour a lot of wisdom here, not to mention Fable, of course.

[dragon wench]

I think the reason it can be so difficult to think of characters that are not clicheed is because we often have what seems to be an innate need to classify or categorise. And this is what so often, unfortunately, leads to sterotyping.

I try to avoid this, but I frequently will find myself subconsciously slotting people I meet into loosely defined groups.

In terms of games, about the only RPG I have ever played that somewhat avoids typecasting is Planescape Torment, though even it contains some.

IMO, some examples of clicheed character types are:
*the streetsmart, wiseacre, savvy thief
*delicate, wimpy mages
*Holier than thou clerics

To name just a few

Characters that avoid stereotypes tend to have interesting quirks and unexpected skills, abilities, personality traits etc. Moreover, they are multidimensional with many complex layers.
IMO, Jan Jansen from BG2 fits this idea well. Unlike many thieves, he's not a punk with a dangerous edge, he has an extremely warped comic aspect, yet he also possesses a very serious, sensitive side.

Just my two cents anyway.

[Hill-Shatar]

You can rarely find a perso who has not at least been sterotyped once or twice. People on the street see me as some punk guy, I guess, cause I have spiked hair. People who know me put me into the wimpy scientist slot. Other people refer to me as a nerd.

People tend to put traits together much to easily. A cliche is just that. The combining of a trait and what they look like or what they do.

If I see a girl in line at a club with a bunch of friends with her, looking pretentious, I will most likely, unconciously, label her a snob and remeber not to find her and talk to her if I see her in real life. It fits the same way into gaming. Do you expect to find a short and stubby human soldier with balding hair and arotund waist, who is set aside and quiet? The whole point, I guess, of a cliched character, is that they add a level of predictability to the game. Also a level, somewhat, of static characters. Charatcers who you can rely on and memorize the traits and abilities of, without to much difficulty, compared to if the soldier turned out not to be able to run or dodge and be completely useless in combat.

Same thing with all the rest. If you want to break a lock, you wont want to breing out the heavy warrioir, youll want to bring out the street kid, casue she probably knows what shes doing, and does it back.

Anyways, what other traits can Mission(the street punk) really have. If they grew up on the streets, they can really only have to personalities, from some experience. The nice kid who tries to make it better for everyone involved and the other personality who just wants to survive. Either way, they have to be tough, or they wouldnt survive, and the certainly wouldnt be much use in the game if they were breaking a lock and suddenly there comes balster fire, they give up and run, they would not be as useful, would they?

But to some level I guess, they do overdo the stereotypes. I highly doubt that that warrior really only wants to fight. I guess we expect them to be deeper than the stereotype. It takes a certain type of person to be a soldier, but they have to have quirks, so they dont TOTALLY fall into the stereotype. Is the man friendly or aggressive. Did he become a soldier to kill or save people? In any case, no matter what you really do, there will most likely always be some sort of stereotype. You can just ask that it wont be too obvious.

[Dottie]

A Clichê character is imo a character who closely fits a certain "Theme", and is nothing more than that. It is perfectly possible to make characters that fit the same theme but are not clichê.

I think that the extremely lousy characters in most CRPGs are caused by the fact that game designers think that a proffesion + a race + a quirk equals a character. If you only have this 3 variables to play with you get a very limited number of quite boring options and they all quickly become just clichê.

It could all be very easily avoided by just adding a personality.

[Xandax]

Originally Posted by Dottie

<snip>
I think that the extremely lousy characters in most CRPGs are caused by the fact that game designers think that a proffesion + a race + a quirk equals a character. If you only have this 3 variables to play with you get a very limited number of quite boring options and they all quickly become just clichê.
<snip>

It is also easier and cheaper to go cliches then having to develop an actual personality for all the NPCs. Meaning more money and ressources for fluff and graphics.

[Chimaera182]

Originally Posted by Xandax

It is also easier and cheaper to go cliches then having to develop an actual personality for all the NPCs. Meaning more money and ressources for fluff and graphics.

lol so true.

I should've been a bit more specific. I meant which types specifically do you think fit the cliche, like the old warrior out to relive his glory days, the street-smart punk kid. And what kind of character type would you find un-cliche?

[ektoplasma]

thinking hard i came up with virgil from arcanum as pretty non-cliché. he's a newly examinated monk, who doesnt know anything about religion but with anonoying morals, and have a "dark" historty as a thief.

[Cuchulain82]

Originally Posted by Dottie

A Clichê character is imo a character who closely fits a certain "Theme", and is nothing more than that. It is perfectly possible to make characters that fit the same theme but are not clichê. ...I think that the extremely lousy characters in most CRPGs are caused by the fact that game designers think that a proffesion + a race + a quirk equals a character.

Amen to that. I think that Tolkien laid the tracks in many ways- surly, scottish dwarves who live in mountains; dextrous, arrogant elves; chosen, hero types; true love threatened by circumstance and society; etc. He was, however, trying to invent a mythology, so I suppose we could argue that we should be going back even further...

In any case, think about non-Tolkien stereotypes in your head: island-dwelling sea dwarves, or whole nations ruled by benevolent Hobbit-mages... it seems strange, doesn't it? Like it doesn't fit? That is Tolkien, imo.

[GA_Havoc]

On World Of Warcraft there are at least two servers dedicated to roleplaying and not questing/lvling/dueling etc., in these servers you'll notice alot of cliché like beer-drinking Dwarves.
When you visit a more conventional server you get characters like little gnome warriors slaying huge Taurens.
Also on Diablo II and Morrowind you get many options that allow you to avoid cliché, Diablo II example: a Necromancer that doesn't even summon, Morrowind example: a nude hand to hand fighter overpowering burly axe-swinging Orcs in full gear.
My point is that so long as you're provided with enough options you can avoid the cliché.

[Lestat]

Originally Posted by Cuchulain82

Amen to that. I think that Tolkien laid the tracks in many ways- surly, scottish dwarves who live in mountains;

One of my favorite non-cliché characters is in fact a dwarf. It's Casanunda*, a character from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. An extremely roguish, wedlock breaking, charmeur type of guy, who is into courtship, candlelight dinners and a quick escape through the window when the husband comes back. (and occasional Lowwayman** when he is down on his luck)

*Yes, it is a very speciest pun on Casanova.
** Another speciest pun

[Denethorn]

Lestat my thoughts were similar. A non cliched character would be a dwarf who doesn't use an axe, isn't a heavy drinker and isn't very rough and tumble (throw isn't a smithy in there too)

[Cuchulain82]

Sometimes you can have a lot of fun with a cliche, you know. My favorite was a friend who played a battlerager dwarf, axe-weilding and all. However, he was a battlerage who didn't want to be one, but was forced to essentially because of family and clan and such. The only thing that really made him made was foul language, and he would always say things like "Aye, there's no need for talk like that!" and then fly into a fit!

[Lestat]

@ Cuchulain: but you see, the character you mention has just that little twist that makes him unique and thus, not cliché anymore. Nice idea BTW, must remember it for one of my sessions.

You're right of course that cliché characters sometimes can be fun or serve a purpose. Where would we gamesmasters be without our thoroughly evil necromancers bent on turning the world into a wasteland populated by ghouls and zombies?

But it's so easy to fall back on the clichés with every barkeep a burly, "what ho" shouting red nosed alcoholic, every young knight an arrogant prick that needs to go through a catharsis to understand the true meaning of the chivalric code, and every barbarian warrior of a monstrous race actually being a big softy (while still ripping off the heads of his enemies with a grin on his face).

I like the technique you describe for the dwarf: take a cliché and twist it a little bit. Oh well, as long as its memorable for the players.

[fable]

A number of years ago I worked for a then-popular MMORPG, the most successful of the ones to ever produce text-based fantasy environments. We had stuff in that game you still can't find the latest graphical types, because the coding (lacking images) was more flexible in what it could accomplish.

Every now and then, up on the game's forums, we'd get complaints from people who were obviously young and enthusiastic, but also very, very down on what we were doing. It seems our elves weren't standard according to AD&D. Our dwarves didn't always follow the professions they were supposed to, etc.

My point is that people are trained to like the comfort of everything being in its place. All stories are told, all the characters act in a certain way, and just the faces are changed over time. That's what's behind the endless cliches of the entertainment industry, and why the big game corporations, IMO, won't pay these days for genre-breaking titles, but will pay for unimaginative, attractive, big budget clones that do everything which has been done before. And they will point to titles that have dodged the cliche bullet--Planescape: Torment, for example--as proof that they won't deliver the huge sales the industry wants.

Personally, I have no problem with a character that meets many of the requirements of a cliche, provided that character is also fully developed, rather than just a cut-and-paste. This fleshes the character out; the cliche has life breathed into it. Korgan from BG2 is a good example. Scots dialect, short, irascible, abusive, great weapons user--but also a sad, grim veteran of countless battles that's had to kill his own friends on occasion.

So while the industry will understandably prate about the need for high sales, I think they miss the boat by focusing solely on the viability of cliches. They could do a lot better by demanding that their developers give those cliches extra dimension through good, solid writing and thorough, intelligent backgrounds.