Before you get to start slaying dragons or thwarting the plans of evil deities, RPGs tend to test your mettle with more mundane fare. Typically this involves a filthy tavern with a rodent problem. It's such an ancient trope that RPG designers have been poking fun at it for decades, like 2004's The Bard's Tale, which sees you slay a single, solitary rat, celebrate your heroism, and cowardly run away after a much larger rat appears and sets you on fire.
So making fun of the trope has become a trope itself, and most prospective adventurers are probably just a little bit sick of these cellar antics. Often RPG designers will try to spice things up by making the rats very large, but that's always felt a bit half-arsed to me. You can't just make a tiny thing big and then call it a day.
