Writing

A party joining together in D&D collaborating on goals and objectives will traditionally sort themselves according to their class.  Like any entity wishing to get something done, the players will view their particular class in terms of the "role" they play ... and that role is almost always defined by familiar and often inflexible standards.  A fighter fights a bold forward action; a mage stands behind the fighter and casts spells; the cleric fights a little and heals the party; a thief circumnavigates the enemy and looks for opportunities to attack from the rear, or goes for the enemy's baggage.  If we set up a standard encounter with different groups of experienced D&D players, we'll watch them play out these parts over and over, with some variation but yet conventionally.'

As a result, the single action and trait of the character class becomes exaggerated amongst players who look to create a persona for the character.  Flanderization describes how this happens in television shows with long runs; as the site explains:

"Ned Flanders, who was originally depicted as a friendly, generous Christian neighbor and a model father, husband and citizen ... became increasingly obsessively religious to the point where he embodied almost every negative stereotype of the god-fearing, bible-thumping American Christian evangelist."

Over the years with D&D, every thief is played as the Grey Mouser, every mage is Gandalf, every fighter is the Hulk, every cleric is Father Mulcahy, every elf is Legolas, every dwarf is Gimli, every halfling is Bilbo and so on.  By and large, players enjoy slipping on these roles like suits of emotional armour.  It's what's expected.  The roles don't require a great deal of "role-play" or creativity.  There's no troublesome nuance to get in the way of game success and generating experience, such as occurs with those players who deviate considerably with the creation of annoying, obstructionist rules of behaviour, such as refusing to enter a town, or insisting they won't ride a horse under any circumstances, or portraying themselves with tourette syndrome.

These "character flaws" are often sold as "creating a unique character," but in reality they're just a different symptom of Flanderization, in which every meeting has to start with "Hi diddly ho, neighborino."  They're not persona, they're tics — sudden twitches, movements or sounds that inserted into the players behaviour in lieu of real individualism.  Confronted by such displays of shallow pretense, most genre-savvy players have retreated to the Legolas/Gimle/Bilbo model.  At least it isn't annoying.

Unfortunately, we're still talking about personalities designed for supporting characters or pulp literature, where the character is designed to advance the plot and NOT especially to promote self-examination or broad ranges of thinking, feeling or behaving.  As such, if the player insists on expressing their fighter as nothing but a hammer looking for the next perpetual nail, the DM has little choice but to provide nails.  Everything that isn't a nail will be treated as one ... and this will mean that however innovative the DM might hope to be with his or her campaign, in short order it will become a sad reflection of the same tiresome tropes repeated ad nauseum.  For those without a grounding in Latin, my recently employed grammarian describes this as eventually vomiting on our shoes.

Unfortunately, there's little a DM can do.  Players are notoriously stubborn in their enthusiasm for ignoring the game as an exploration beyond the satisfaction of their baser instincts.  "Hulk smash," or some equivalency, becomes the battle cry of the one player who proceeds to ruin not only the experience of everyone present, but the self-experience of the player as well, since nothing is achieved from running to running that hasn't been achieved already.  In effect, the battle cry in the D&D setting becomes the equivalency of those folks who work to make money to buy enough drugs to make them high until they have to work again ... who then wonder how they got to be 40.

What's particularly strange is how some players will start out with a bold new desire to invent a resourceful, out of the ordinary character — only to become increasingly dispossed by the campaign, or perhaps more comfortable in it, so that the bits and pieces of blue-sky thinking are flanderized exactly as it occurs in serial literature.  The reason why we have flanderization is because writers run out of ideas ... and because it is safest to produce work that relies on things that have worked in the past than to risk creating something new that might fall flat on its face and be hated.  The voices of the public dictated what parts of Ned Flanders character was found funny; and the writers pursued those parts, because writers enjoy being liked.  Unfortunately, those parts eventually became the whole character ... which in turn became a zombie-like shambling assemblage of crap and tiresome phrases that few liked — and those few fell into the categories of "the moron" or persons with an intense need to viscerally experience their real-life neighbor vilified weekly on television.

D&D players aren't generally writers.  This means they run out of ideas very, very quickly, often by the end of the first session.  After this, like all writers, they steal.  Unlike writers, however, players tend to have less than a score of sources to steal from.  After Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Marvel, Stranger Things, Dragonlance and the Witcher have been plundered for their genius, there's not much left.  And let's be honest: if we threw something as pedestrian and pulpy as Mickey Spillane at them in the hopes of expanding their repetoire, they wouldn't know how to translate.  By and large, unfortunately, as DMs we're stuck with the stock range of titles most players manage to consume between grade school, slack jobs and video games.

I don't have a solution for this problem except, perhaps, shame.  It's up to the reader, of course, but I feel most players are unconscious regarding the tropes and recurrent memes they spew in moments of innovative crisis.  Like TV writers, when they latch onto a really, really good idea in their minds, it takes someone else to point out the story idea they've pitched ran for five seasons as Breaking Bad.  And their other idea ran for six seasons as Oz.  No wonder they sounded like such good ideas that night we sat around brainstorming while polishing off two bottles of Jack.

Dry writers make this mistake all the time.

So, when the player acts like the Hulk, mock him (it's always a guy).  When he shouts, "I slaughter them!" at a really stupid moment in the campaign, shout back, using the character's name, "TOKUR SMASH!"  Then stand up, hit your table, walk around the space and pretend to be the hulk, calling yourself Tokur or whatever the character's name is and put on a show.  Then sit down, return to normal and tell the player in an ordinary voice that he can "roll to hit."

Two or three displays like that will shake the player's perspective.

I promise.