Abstract
Problem: Why do so many RPGs feel familiar and predictable, even when they're technically competent?
Approach: Tim Cain catalogs the recurring tropes and design patterns that make him lose interest while playing RPGs — drawing on 40+ years of experience as both designer and player.
Findings: Most staleness comes from uncritical reuse: save-the-world plots, villain monologues, fake evil paths, amnesia protagonists, lore dumps, complexity-for-complexity's-sake, and open worlds with nothing in them. The fix isn't avoiding these elements entirely, but finding a twist that makes them feel fresh.
Key insight: Every game needs at least one thing you can point to and say "that's different — I haven't seen that done that way." If you can't identify that element, you've just glued together other people's favorite games.
The Trope Catalog
Tim presents his list explicitly unranked and not aimed at specific games — these are patterns he's seen across decades of playing RPGs.
Saving the World (Again)
Demons invading, aliens arriving, dark gods awakening, world-ending plagues. Tim understands why RPGs default to existential stakes but prefers more scoped problems — conflicts caused by humans, with stakes the player can see, acknowledge, and address without becoming a living god themselves.
Villain Monologues
Villains spending minutes explaining what they did, what they're going to do, and why. Tim's response: show it, don't say it. Do it, don't explain it.
Sarcastic NPCs
Tim calls out "edgy sarcasm" as a lazy character-writing shortcut. He recounts confronting a designer about clichéd writing, only to hear "well, sometimes clichés work" — from someone who had been tearing apart everyone else's work for being clichéd.
Empty Open Worlds
Open worlds that exist solely so the box can say "open world." Kilometers of nothingness with no real discovery. Tim suspects these often start as games that would have worked great with zones or hub-and-spoke design, until someone on the team or at the publisher insisted on open-world as a checkbox feature.
Complexity for Complexity's Sake
Systems that throw tons of mechanics at the player without producing anything novel. Tim's litmus test: if you need a spreadsheet or a web guide to spend your level-up points, something has gone wrong. Leveling up should be fun and imaginative — you should see a character concept and understand how to build toward it in the system.
Fake Evil Paths
Three flavors of fake evil Tim identifies:
- Game-over evil — choosing evil immediately ends the game
- Punished evil — evil shuts down quests, NPCs stop talking to you, everything attacks you; technically finishable but clearly not the intended path
- Cosmetic evil — you dress evil and talk evil but follow the exact same storyline as good characters
Tim contrasts this with Temple of Elemental Evil, where the team deliberately created unusual endings: you could offer to work for the villain, agree with their ideology, or assert dominance over them. That's playing evil — not "I've been bad but I'm still going to kill the bad guy."
The RPG Continuum
Tim doesn't draw a hard line on what is or isn't an RPG. Instead, he describes a continuum: each missing element — player-created characters, meaningful choice and consequence, non-linear story — moves a game further from RPG and toward adventure game. On the flip side, pure combat simulators with bolted-on skills move toward the other extreme. In both cases: if the game doesn't react to the player, it's less of an RPG than it thinks.
Combat Choreography
Referencing MMO raid coordination ("dot dot, okay stop dots"), Tim compares highly choreographed combat encounters to ballet or Dance Dance Revolution. He appreciates games that lean into rhythm-based combat honestly rather than dressing up choreographed encounters as deep RPG combat.
Lore Dumps
Walls of text or long NPC speeches to deliver worldbuilding. Tim is firmly in the "show, don't tell" camp: show the world, show suffering, show the effects of evil. Lore should be optional — books you can choose to read, NPCs you can choose to ask. If lore is required to understand crafting, fine, but only if crafting itself is optional.
Amnesia Protagonists
Tim has campaigned against this trope for decades and gotten pushback because amnesia is "so useful" for explaining why the player knows nothing. His compromise: you get one use of amnesia in your entire career. Especially tired: the "I'm actually a god but forgot" variant where amnesia becomes a level-gating mechanic.
The Misunderstood Special Teen
A whole class of RPGs Tim has avoided his entire life: beautiful, special-powered protagonists who are misunderstood and bullied. He distinguishes this from a genuinely interesting premise (a young person with powers they can't control who has done terrible things) — the difference is stakes and consequence versus teen melodrama. "Stephen King did that in the '70s. We're done."
The Core Message
Tim's point isn't that these elements can never work. It's that designers should find the twist — the thing that makes their game distinct. Every one of his own games has something he can point to and say "that's different." If a game is just someone's top 10 favorite elements from other games glued together, that's when he's bored. That's when he moves on.
References
- Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGPJJWjrymw