History Main / CommonPlaceRare

A related phenomenon occurs in scale modeling, where RuleOfCool factors into kit manufacturers' decisions, therefore your WW2 German aircraft kit will be the last version of which only one was completed before the Allies took the factory rather than the one that had been built in the hundreds since '40; and your '60s American car kit will be the stunningly rare top-fo-the-line that combined a NASCAR-ready engine with a bucket-seat interior rather than the small V8/automatic/nice cloth bench seat version that sold in the hundreds of thousands. "What's rare in scale is common in real life".

* ''ChronoTrigger'' has jerkey, which appears twice in the game. The first time it is used is as a minor plot advancement point. The second time it is part of a ChainOfDeals for getting some optional equipment in one of the zany [[SideQuest sidequests]]. About 2 minutes into the game you can find the shopkeeper selling it, for 9900 gold. A trifling when you will need it (much later in the game), but at the beginning it seems insanely overpriced.

[[quoteright:256:http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Chrono_Trigger_jerky_9151.jpg]]

** Grease is mostly valuable because it is rare--its effects are important but mostly supersedable (armor can be made permanently damageproof and there's a cloak and a bag that are permanently greased. You'll still have to avoid melee with mind flayers). Magic markers, however... let you write powerful and valuable magic scrolls on junk parchment. So yeah, you'd think demand would be pretty high.

** Said carrot however provides an effect that is quite rare (mount speed increase). When I stopped playing WoW there were only 3 such sources of that effect. The carrot, a riding crop (that provided a larger bonus) and an attachment to your boots.

** It's also worth noting that some kinds of pets are incredibly rare to acquire. Rats, for example. Some others can only be bought from vendors of one faction, so they will be fairly expensive for players of the other faction wanting to buy them over the neutral auction house.

* RealLife example: lobster used to be really cheap, until the invention of the railroad - and the ability of merchants to market "sea rat" to people who'd never encountered it - created demand for it in the central United States.
** To be fair, lobster started becoming a rarity long before railroads. Fishermen in colonial Maine caught '''too''' many lobsters, causing the species' once-prodigious numbers to dwindle precipitously. The lobster population has never fully recovered.
* And another: Salt and Aluminum have both, at different times, been more valuable than Gold. Salt because for a long time the sea was pretty much the only source for it and so it was very valuable in inland regions. Aluminum, on the other hand, was just extremely difficult to extract from its ores until someone figured out a trick involving lots and lots of electricity.

*** Silver itself is an aversion of this. There is far less silver on the planet than there is gold. Yet gold is more expensive. The reason being that there are more practical uses for gold and, unlike silver, it will not tarnish in hostile environments.
*** Also, most of the world's gold supply is kept in high security storage to regulate the price VERY closely.

** [[RidiculousFutureInflation The Year is]] [[MemeticMutation 199X.]]

* Pokemon has this quite often. There are numerous Pokemon which you can only get one of (like the starting pokemon), yet you'll find several trainers in each game with multiples of that Pokemon.
** At least justified in that you can breed them, starting in the second generation.
** In ''PokemonGoldAndSilver'', a road is blocked by a 'tree' (actually a Pokémon), so nobody can pass there. You have to defeat the (hard) gym leader in order to acquire an item that will allow you to remove said tree: a squirt bottle.
* ''LandsOfLore 2'': The silverleaf, my goodness, the silverleaf. The silverleaf is supposed to grow in the Dracoid Cemetery. Except that it doesn't. Instead, you have to find glass orbs, charge them at three different machines (One of which is located in a completely different and '''HUGE''' level, the Dracoid Ruins) to open the various crypts. (The orbs can be charged with white, blue or yellow sparks to open crypts with corresponding doors. If you you don't have the right kind of orbs, you may have to go all the way back to the right machine.) In one of those crypts you will find the ghost of a dracoid priest who wants you to cremate his body for him and bring him the ashes. And where might his body be? In the farthest corner of the Ruins. So after this incredible endeavor, he opens the door into the dracoid king's crypt for you. (This is back at the Cemetery, mind you.) What does ''his'' ghost want? To destroy what's left of the Ruins of course! So he gives you his bones in an urn that you have to take to a statue somewhere in the ruins, which will come to life and fight an ice worm, causing the ruins to flood. So you have to get the hell out of there, end up back in the jungle, head back toward the Cemetery... and ''then'' the king will make the silverleaves grow. '''AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!!''' And to top it off, whole piles of silverleaves turn up later at the Ruloi Citadel.
* [=MMOs=] period, sometimes. [[TwentyBearAsses You'd think collecting centaur heads would be easy (or at least, as easy as killing a few centaurs),]] but apparently centaurs that actually possess heads are an aberration and the heads you see are just your WeirdnessCensor keeping you from freaking out, what with your curious prejudice about living things having heads.
** It's possible that in killing the centaur, [[YourHeadASplode you can obliterate the head by accident]]. This must be especially easy with the trend of [[BigFancySword goofily oversized swords]] and [[KillItWithFire large]] [[BallsOfFire fireballs]] being weapons of choice.

* In ''FarCry 2'', one mission requires you to go to a diamond mine to steal some dynamite, which you're told you'll need to destroy a water pump. The only practical way of getting the dynamite is killing all of the mercenaries guarding the mine, and there are at least a ''dozen'' of them, meaning that this little fetch task inevitably turns into a full blown firefight. This all seemed very pointless to this troper, since he had [=RPGs=], hand grenades, improvised explosive devices and M79 grenade launchers available to him at this point, and any one of those should have had no trouble with the fragile-looking pump.

** It helps if you put a decimal in front of the last two numbers.
*** This is because 100 yen is approximately one dollar. When localizing the game, they must have just switched the currency symbols.

** While the only bow in the land is always locked in a dungeon, shops still sell arrows and enemies with bows still exist.

* In ''KingdomOfLoathing'', many kinds of fruits suitable for cooking and cocktailcrafting can be bought from NPCs for 70 meat, but others like cherries, limes, and jumbo olives can only be found as loot on monsters, so they go for roughly 1000 meat at player-run stores. Bananas are limited-edition fruits that sell for around 30,000 meat. However, this is nothing compared to beets, which were discontinued so long ago and dropped so infrequently that they can't be bought for less than 100,000,000 meat, despite being completely useless.

*** Silver itself is an aversion of this. There is far less silver on the planet than there is gold. Yet gold is more expensive. The reason being that there simply are more different uses for gold than for silver.

* In ''StarOcean 2'', you have to go into a dangerous cave filled with monsters as a test of strength - the proof of your journey being to bring back a rare and undiscovered herb. It turns out to be [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvia_sclarea clary sage]], a fairly common, hardy and widely-distributed medicinal plant.

** It's the same with larger quivers and bomb bags.
*** Although in the case of the bomb bag, several games state that they're crafted by Gorons and made of odd or rare materials like dodongo stomachs and/or the woven fibres of bomb flowers.
** And while the only bow in the land is always locked in a dungeon, shops still sell arrows and enemies with bows still exist.
** If you think about it, the Zeldaverse is really something about that. You can find ''jewels about the size of your head everywhere'', but they're worth almost nothing; and what are the most valuable items in the entire world? ''Empty bottles''.
*** [[JustifiedTrope Justified]] in supply and demand economics. If you can find them everywhere, [[WorthlessYellowRocks why would they be valuable at all?]]

-->White Dragon: "Why do you humans value these things so much? Don't you know they're made from my shit?"

* Real Life gaming example: ''{{Yu-Gi-Oh}}'', aside from the regular rarities, actually as two "Short Print" varieties of the Common rarity cards; they look, act, and essentially are exactly like regular Commons, but you'll be busting your butt and your wallet going through hundreds of packs just to get ''one''.

*** [[JustifiedTrope Justified]] in supply and demand economics. If you can find them everywhere, why would they be valuable at all?

* ''SecretOfEvermore'' has the alchemy system. Oh, sure it makes some sense to have trouble gathering things like Oil, or Wax, but...water? It's not even like it has to be purified water, you can literally scoop it from a river in the middle of a swamp. But only in certain spots that are sniffed out by your dog.

* ''LandsOfLore 2'': The silverleaf, my goodness, the silverleaf. The silverleaf is supposed to grow in the {{Dracoid}} Cemetery. Except that it doesn't. Instead, you have to find glass orbs, charge them at three different machines (One of which is located in a completely different and '''HUGE''' level, the Dracoid Ruins) to open the various crypts. In one of them you will find the ghost of a dracoid priest who wants you to cremete his body for him and bring him the ashes. And where might his body be? In the farthest corner of the Ruins. So after this incredible endeavor, he opens the door into the dracoid king's crypt for you (This is back at the Cemetery, mind you.). What does ''his'' ghost want? To destroy what's left of the Ruins of course! So he gives you his bones an an urn that you have to take to a statue somewhere in the ruins, which will come to life and fight an ice worm, causing the ruins to flood. So you have to get the hell out of there, end up back in the jungle, head back toward the Cemetery... and ''then'' the king will make the silverleaves grow. '''AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!!''' And to top it off, whole piles of silverleaves turn up later at the Ruloi Citadel.