My trope listings
Death Tropes
Gags
Abandonment
- Hospital Awakening - Waking up in an abadoned hospital. The hospital used for this has usually been recently abandoned after a disaster of some sort, which helps explain why the character was there in the first place (though not necessarily why they were left behind).
- Abandoned Hospital
- Abandoned Camp Ruins - The tents have been ripped to shreds, the fire has long since burnt out, leaving only the charred remains behind, the cars the campers came in have been smashed and are in no condition to go anywhere. And if there are any people left, expect them to be the partially-eaten/murdered remains.
- Abandoned Mine - Maybe there's nothing left to mine. Maybe it was closed because of safety issues. Maybe the company that owned it went bankrupt. Maybe something terrible happened there. Maybe the miners Dug Too Deep. Whatever the reason, this mine is now abandoned and has probably been that way for some time. That does not, however, mean that it is empty. An abandoned mine is the perfect place for young characters to get lost or trapped, for heroes to find a valuable clue or some sort of treasure, or for villains, outlaws, and horror movie monsters to lurk.
- Abandoned War Child - This trope can focus on the experience of either the mother or the child, sometimes both. Often these children face derision and ostracism.
- Abandoned Laboratory - You decide to head to the Abandoned Laboratory, where you are greeted by hostile security units who do not want you to enter the deeper parts of the lab. They are often however no match for whatever lies below, whether it be.
Resurrection
- Came Back Wrong - Basically, an attempt to resurrect someone from the dead will end badly.
- Burn the Undead - A very common weakness shared among The Undead is fire. Chopping such creatures into little bits may not stop them, but fire generally will. They also often burn more readily than is strictly realistic.
- Fate Worsethan Death - Think death is the cruelest fate? Think again. There are several things much worse: torture, taxes, and tofu, to name but a few.
Family
- Cool Big Sis - The character everyone thinks is cool due to the maturity, competence and style her age brings along.
- Big Brother Mentor - The character, being older (though mental age matters more than physical age) and wiser than the hero, also acts as a mentor to the hero in times of need or advice.
Royalty
- Hidden Backup Prince - So you have a setting with a monarchy, or where heredity is somehow important, and the entire royal are under constant threat of being killed in a surprise attack by their enemies. One of the King's children is raised as a commoner far away, without knowledge of their Secret Legacy. The idea being that they'll be safe in anonymity, and they may even be able to be trained or schooled in a way that spares them from becoming snobby and brings them closer to commoners. The hidden backup prince isn't always created intentionally. The kid may be a bastard child and hidden to cover up their father's indiscretions, a twin who is sent away to avoid complicated succession rivalries, or is somehow kidnapped or separated unintentionally.
Journeys
- I Will Wait for You - Someone's loved one has gone off on a long and dangerous journey: to sea, to war, to find their meaning, to make their fortune, something along those lines. They promise to wait for them, right where they are, until they returns. How long could it be, right? Years pass and they don't return. Most people would have give up by this point, assuming that something has happened to their loved one and their never going to come back. But not this person. They're going to wait for the rest of her life, if necessary.
- I Choose to Stay - What's this? The new environment has apparently grown on the character so much, that they don't want to go back? They choose to stay in their new environment and live happily ever after?
- Off the Rails - At its core, one (or more) players disrupts the Game Master's carefully-crafted plot by Sequence Breaking, employing an Outside-the-Box Tactic, killing an important NPC that was supposed to survive, revealing an important secret, suddenly turning evil or good, or just refusing to go where the plot demands they should go.
Real Life
- Land Down Under - Australia is a psychotic, cold-blooded murderer that would swallow you whole if you so much as left the front door of your house.
Altered Conscious State
- More than Mind Control - What makes this "more than mind control" rather than simple manipulation is that this can still be assisted by magic or technology. Magic forces may be at work, but it's really the despair, trickery, lies, and sometimes even carefully-selected truths, that are thrown in that successfully break the victim's spirit. Instead of the villain forcing a victim to do something against their will, the villain changes the victim's will.
- Sanity Slippage - A character has been a bit ... off for a while now. Maybe they just haven't been themselves, maybe they've been struggling with who or what they are
Battle Tropes
- Pyrrhic Victory - Few victories come without cost, but the cost of a Pyrrhic Victory is ruinous to the victor. A Pyrrhic Victory will often involve a Heroic Sacrifice or people asking Was It Really Worth It?
- Wronski Feint
- Big Damn Heroes - Any time the heroes/anti heroes get to save the day in a big, awesome manner.
Fun Subversion's
- Precision F-Strike - A Precision F-Strike is when a character suddenly swears in an uncharacteristically strong manner, or when a swear is unexpectedly used in a work with mild language. It's usually intended to show that shit just got real serious.
Messed Up Romance
- No Accounting for Taste - A Precision F-Strike is when a character suddenly swears in an uncharacteristically strong manner, or when a swear is unexpectedly used in a work with mild language. It's usually intended to show that shit just got real serious.
Intelligence
- Smart People Play Chess - A common visual shorthand to indicate that a character is smart is to have them play chess
Misc
Misc
Misc
Misc
Fun Character Tropes
- *Nightmare Fetishist - This character is happily intrigued by whatever is strange, dangerous, disturbing, and/or frightening. If this character is "part of The Team", their fellows may regard them oddly.
- No Badass to His Valet - For every intimidating loner, there's one person on whom their gruff exterior will have no effect. It could be because this person knows who they're dealing with personally
Villains
- Wicked Cultured - It's not that Evil Is Cool. Rather, this is more like "Evil is Intellectual". Evil is smart, wicked, sarcastic with a biting sense of humor. Evil is smooth and eloquent, if not outright suave. Evil dresses well, has a polysyllabic lexicon, quotes William Shakespeare, sips fine wine, listens to his favorite opera on his downtime.
- Join or Die - The Big Bad makes you An Offer You Can't Refuse, either join his organization of evil, or die right here and now. Sometimes this is accompanied by a We Can Rule Together, but not always. This offer is not always made to The Hero, it can just as easily be to a rival, or simply a promising recruit that the Big Bad can't afford to have opposing him.
Hair
- Power Dyes Your Hair - The degree in which this happens can vary; on the one hand, a character may only have their hair change a few shades, especially if their hair's already light to begin with. Other times, a character may go straight from having black hair to white. Often, this is a good way for a character to maintain a Secret Identity
Places
- Lost World - Besides islands, jungles, isolated plateaus and the frozen poles of the Earth, the Lost World can exist in even more mysterious places, such as outer space, the bottom of the ocean, or deep within the planet itself.
- Eerie Arctic Research Station - A classic setting for mystery and horror stories. A remote lab or research station out in the far north or south surrounded by ice, snow, and more ice.
- Dream Land - A Magical Land or Another Dimension made up of dreams.
Gambits
- Kansas City Shuffle - Con game that depends on the mark believing (correctly) that the con artist is trying to con them, but being incorrect about how it's going to be done. There's a reason it's called a "confidence trick", after all. Right for the Wrong Reasons manipulated to benefit the con artist.
- Defensive Faint Trap - An opponent lures their enemy into a trap by feigning either retreat or weakness. Once the attacker has moved into position, or spent most of their energy/ammo attacking, the defender turns the tables by going all out.
- Failure Gambit - Let's face it. Sometimes a villain's (and occasionally even a hero's) great big, all-encompassing master plan can be... a little convoluted. It might not even make complete sense even after it's finally been thoroughly explained, maybe through a series of flashbacks, at the end of the day. But it's a special kind of deviant who is able to conjure a plan so incredibly obtuse that it hinges on their own defeat, and will inevitably fail should they happen to win.
- Sheathe Your Sword - Any type of confrontation where the hero's only way to win it is ... to stop trying to defeat their opponent; eventually the enemy will tire himself out (become bored, etc.) and the hero will achieve a victory for their pacifism.
- Takea Third Option - In general, a Third Option has three basic requirements needed to seem plausible: time, resources, and knowledge. A Third Option is useless if you don't have time to implement it, don't have (usable) resources/power, or don't have knowledge of it. Depending on how well that rule is followed, the solution will usually either be incredibly awesome or incredibly stupid.
- Cutting the Knot - A very complicated problem that would need time to solve, time the hero definitely doesn't have. After trying in vain to solve the problem the technical way, the hero Takes a Third Option: getting rid of the problem altogether, with violence. Smash it down, break it apart, run right through it, blow it up. Whatever he does, he "solves" the problem by causing so much damage that it's not his problem anymore.
- Loophole Abuse - Someone — typically a Rules Lawyer — does something outrageous by finding a loophole in the rules, which were too narrowly written to consider such possibilities. This allows the agent to get their way.
- Outside-The-Box Tactic - The smarter and much easier way to defeat such a foe is to employ clever strategy and some often unintuitive insight.
Irony
- Cassandra Truth - A Cassandra Truth is when a character tries to warn others of some danger, or tell them something incredibly important, but is dismissed out of hand for no good reason due to laziness, prejudice, stubbornness, etc.
Gags
- Expospeak - A joke based on describing something mundane using such technical language that it takes the audience a while to work out what's being talked about.
- Heads,Tails,Edge - Put simply, a character flips a coin, which lands on its edge.
- Steal the Surroundings - This tactic can be necessary if the objective is protected by a Self-Destructing Security system. Trying to open the device at the scene without the necessary precautions could destroy what's being stolen, while taking the whole thing means someone could work on it later, at their leisure.
Angst
- These Hands Have Killed - During an important part of the story,the character in focus, kills someone or something. He looks down in a My God, What Have I Done? moment, shocked at his hands because they just became accomplices in taking a life.
Playing with Morality
- Creepy Good - The good guys don't always have to be warm and cuddly. Sometimes, they're even downright scary. Tend to unnerve allies and audience members with their methods or mannerisms.
- Debate and Switch - A work of fiction sets up a moral dilemma or other painful choice, then finds a way to resolve it without actually addressing the issue it raised. This trope is used for a number of reasons. It allows the show to resolve the tension without
- Terror Hero - I seek the means to fight injustice; to turn fear against those who prey on the fearful
A. giving an unrealistically clear-cut or Anvilicious solution to an ambiguous problem,B. alienating the half of the audience who would disapprove of the resolution if the characters did make the hard choice, orC. giving the uncomfortable (but true) moral that sometimes you're forced to pick between choices that will give a bitter taste in one's mouth no matter which you choose.
Shades of Conflict
Shades Of Cnflict: "Man has killed man from the beginning of time, and each new frontier has brought new ways and new places to die. Why should the future be different?"
- White-and-Grey Morality - A setting which features little or no truly evil characters. This does not necessarily imply that there is little conflict or that the conflict is lightweight. Two powerful forces working at cross-purposes can cause an amazing amount of destruction and mayhem even though both of them have good reasons for what they're trying to do.
