Original post by Beer Hunter It's more important to focus on the quality of writing than the number of cliches, but try to avoid the deus ex machina.
Sci-fi (especially Star Trek) is terrible about that sort of thing. The audience is likely deep into a situation, trying to figure out how the ship might escape the event horizon of a black hole, when the captain and half klingon engineer simultaneously announce "Warp particles! We'll create a crack in the black hole with warp particles and fly through it!"
Another horrible writing scheme is making the characters refuse to acknowledge obvious solutions to a problem because the problem is important for the plot.
Similarly, another bad tasting ploy is to make characters who would normally be able to handle a situation suddenly screw up majorly to fall into place for the plot. Smallville is notorious for that: Clark has super-bullet-speed, but for reasons unknown, loses track of human bad guys because he needs to check on the wounded before chasing after them. I guess it's difficult to come up with problems for Superman.
Chrono Trigger has multiple world...or rather one world in different times. Might want to give that game a play. It's one of the best RPGs ever to most people and use similar plot points as Kingdom Hearts, but unless you look at it from a very basic stand point you can't tell.
Look at the characters of Final Fantasy 8. They are the exact same character save for gender and a personality quirk and look how different they are to each other and see how many people have actually picked up on this.
Clichés can be very useful. In movies, clichés are used to introduce secondary characters without spending precious minutes introducing them. The typical barman, the greedy merchant, the suspicious peasant, the generous healer, etc... Clichés can be used to save some time introducing secondary characters so that we can spend more time on the main characters. Using a cliché for main characters, however, is almost always a bad idea. Main characters need to be a bit deeper in order to generate interest. Note that a player-controlled character can be totally shallow (in this case, the player can more easily "slip" into the character) but the main characters around him/her must not be for the story to be interesting.
In a story, you usually have several other key ingredients. Characters is one, but there is also the atmosphere that must be correctly worked and preferably coherent (drama, humor, horror, grim, epic... mixes can be dangerous) and also a main plot. If it is the straightforward fight between good and evil, you'll have a more difficult time at hooking players than with a more elaborate story with intrigues and false leads.
The rule of thumb is that in these three categories, characters, atmosphere and plot, you are not allowed to fail more than one. A good atmosphere and good characters can make Lord of Rings a good story about the fight between good and evil. Characters and plot make up for the atmosphere in "V for Vendetta" (the comics, not the movie! Heathen!) Plot and atmosphere work fine for shallow characters that science fiction literature often produces (2001 space odyssey for instance, Blade Runner, most of Asimov's books, Eon, Hyperion, etc...)
Of course, covering perfectly all three aspects with original and well executed ideas is even better...
Clichés can be very useful. In movies, clichés are used to introduce secondary characters without spending precious minutes introducing them. The typical barman, the greedy merchant, the suspicious peasant, the generous healer, etc... Clichés can be used to save some time introducing secondary characters so that we can spend more time on the main characters. Using a cliché for main characters, however, is almost always a bad idea. Main characters need to be a bit deeper in order to generate interest. Note that a player-controlled character can be totally shallow (in this case, the player can more easily "slip" into the character) but the main characters around him/her must not be for the story to be interesting.
In a story, you usually have several other key ingredients. Characters is one, but there is also the atmosphere that must be correctly worked and preferably coherent (drama, humor, horror, grim, epic... mixes can be dangerous) and also a main plot. If it is the straightforward fight between good and evil, you'll have a more difficult time at hooking players than with a more elaborate story with intrigues and false leads.
The rule of thumb is that in these three categories, characters, atmosphere and plot, you are not allowed to fail more than one. A good atmosphere and good characters can make Lord of Rings a good story about the fight between good and evil. Characters and plot make up for the atmosphere in "V for Vendetta" (the comics, not the movie! Heathen!) Plot and atmosphere work fine for shallow characters that science fiction literature often produces (2001 space odyssey for instance, Blade Runner, most of Asimov's books, Eon, Hyperion, etc...)
Of course, covering perfectly all three aspects with original and well executed ideas is even better...
