Abstract
Problem: RPGs rely on recurring tropes — some effective, some lazy. Which ones work, which don't, and how can they be subverted?
Approach: Tim Cain walks through seven common RPG tropes, sharing his personal experience using (or refusing to use) each one across Fallout, Arcanum, and The Outer Worlds.
Findings: Amnesia is lazy and should be avoided; the Chosen One works best when subverted; unrealistic mechanics are fine if consistent; gray morality was pioneering 25 years ago; talking bosses to death needs prerequisites; heroic monsters subvert expectations; romance options require massive resources to do well and are easy to botch.
Key insight: Tropes aren't inherently bad — the key is to subvert, earn, or commit to them fully rather than using them as shortcuts.
Amnesia — The One He Hates
Tim opens with his most despised trope: the amnesiac protagonist. He considers it a "hacky, lazy way" to start an RPG. The intent — making the character as ignorant as the player — can be achieved through better means. In Fallout, the player leaves a vault and genuinely doesn't know the outside world. In Arcanum, the player arrives on a new continent by blimp. Both achieve the same narrative blank slate without resorting to memory loss.
Tim famously told Chris Avellone about Planescape: Torment: "You get to use amnesia once." After that one use, he considers it spent. Notably, Fallout 2's original design had the player waking up after a bandit attack with amnesia — a reset to level one with no skills, perks, or items. Tim disliked it so much that it was part of why Fallout 2 got reassigned to him.
The Chosen One — Best When Subverted
Tim has used the Chosen One trope in multiple games but always subverts it. In Fallout, the vault dwellers drew straws and the player drew the short one. Exiting the vault, you find a dead body in a vault jumpsuit — you weren't even the first person sent out. If you're playing a low-intelligence character, you're probably not the last either; they'd just send someone else in a few weeks.
Arcanum ramps this up further: Virgil runs to the crash site declaring you're the prophesied one. Tim loves that a dumb-dialogue character can later tell people, "Virgil said I was impotent." The lesson: it's fine to use a trope if you play with it.
Unrealistic Mechanics — Commit and Be Consistent
Fallout featured radiation creating newts, mutant scorpions, and the Bloody Mess perk that makes people inexplicably explode. Tim doesn't mind unrealistic elements — he calls it "taking artistic license." The rule is simple: once you establish that radiation mutates everything, you can't then have normal animals living untouched around radiation. Pick your unrealistic premise and run with it consistently.
Gray Morality — Before It Was Cool
Tim notes that 25 years ago, gray morality wasn't a trope — nobody was doing it. His teams pioneered letting players be villains when everyone else forced them into the hero role. He likes that players could be bad and NPCs would call them out for it. He's not trying to be "hipster" about it, but acknowledges they did it before it became standard.
Talking a Boss to Death — Earn It
A signature feature of Tim's games: the ability to resolve boss encounters through dialogue. This was always a core design pillar — multiple solutions to main story quests, with dialogue as one path.
In Fallout, you can talk the Master into killing himself, but it requires prerequisites. You can't just walk up and say "kill yourself." You need to have spoken to Vree at the Brotherhood of Steel, gathered data for her, received the holodisk proving super mutants are sterile, and have a very high Speech skill. Only then can you convince the Master his plan is doomed. Tim considers this doing the trope justice — dialogue solutions should be earned, not handed out for free.
The Heroic Monster — Subverting "Always Evil"
Harold in Fallout was a ghoul who was genuinely heroic — well-meaning and helpful despite ghouls being positioned as monsters. Arcanum had Gar, the "world's smartest orc," who turns out to be human if you dig into it.
These characters serve the broader gray morality design: some orcs and super mutants are heroes, just as some elves are villains. The trope of the heroic monster actually subverts the deeper trope that certain races are always evil.
Romance — Too Expensive to Do Poorly
Tim compares romance to amnesia in terms of caution, though without the hard "one use" rule. He never personally got into romance options and didn't include them in his games. He and Leonard Boyarsky discussed this extensively before The Outer Worlds and concluded that romance requires enormous narrative, quest, and level design investment to do well.
The cascading design decisions are brutal: Can the player only romance opposite-gender companions? Same-gender? Multiple partners? Every choice alienates someone. Games that let everyone romance everyone end up feeling like "a bad dating simulator." The Outer Worlds solved this by letting Parvati have her own romance arc that the player can facilitate — romance exists in the world without the player being the center of it.
His advice: if you want romance options, commit the resources. It's very easy to screw up.
References
- Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBaZHtlcHAU