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Most video games take place in a No Man's Land, with monsters aplenty and not a friendly or neutral face in sight. When they do show up, they live in houses or towns, far away from the monsters.
But sometimes these friendly faces show up where the monsters also live. Sometimes they don't, but follow you there. But the funny thing is, the monsters often just seem to ignore them. They only care about hurting you. Even attacks that catch the friendly characters in their wake don't seem to hurt them at all. Why is that?
Why, because these are Invulnerable Civilians.
A number of games have these. It's often a compromise between allowing more friendly characters to wander around the world to make it feel alive and populated, while at the same time avoiding violence that might upset Moral Guardians or come across as inappropriate. Obviously, violent games tend not to do this, allowing civilians to be killed if they are not protected. Most games avoid the issue by not allowing friendly characters and enemies to coexist in the same location.
This does not refer to the player's inability to hurt civilians, which is the norm anyway (though some games allow the player to commit such atrocities). It refers only to when enemies ignore or cannot hurt them.
See Also Hide Your Children. Contrast with the Lord British Postulate, where NPCs can't be killed by normal means, but can still be offed using some rather..."creative" methods.
Examples
- In The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Dampe the gravekeeper wanders around the graveyard at night. As you pull gravestones and ghosts come out of some of them, the ghosts attack you, but kindly ignore Dampe, who in turn ignores them. Always wondered why the hordes of skeleton monsters wandering around Hyrule field at night didn't march into Lon Lon Ranch and go on a stabbing rampage. Its door was always open.
- Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Tingle, the map selling fake fairy, can be found deep in the well-defended Clock town, on the peaceful road to Milk Ranch and...in the horrible, death-shrouded, fairy-frightening, blood-streaked, zombie-filled canyon/death temple found later in the game. Sure, he has unlimited balloons but there are heat-seeking flaming bats and death-birds everywhere.
- In Guild Wars, a young girl you meet in an early area playfully follows you around. Enemies ignore her and only try to hurt you. This is more a case of Infant Immortality, since most other civilians can be killed if you lure monsters close to them. And when the same character shows up as a teenager in Eye of the North, she is most certainly not invulnerable (though she's not a civilian anymore either).
- Comedic example: In Crazy Taxi, pedestrians jump out of the way of your taxi when you drive towards them. It's impossible to hit the pedestrians, even if you realistically should be able to. The only exception is that it is sometimes possible to reverse and turn into a passenger that you've just dropped off, but the game doesn't register the collision (the person's body passes right through the car).
- The same in The Simpsons: Hit and Run
- Same for the earlier Driver games.
- The pedestrians in Midtown Madness also have incredible dodging skills.
- Though in the first game, you could turn the weather to snowy and drive down the sidewalks of Lakeshore Drive to force them to dive into Lake Michigan. They would welcome death after that.
- Non-violent partial subversion: In Super Mario Sunshine, the Piantas will sink in the paint/mud/whatever-that-stuff-is if it gets on them, and thank you for rescuing them if you spray it away. They are technically not harmed by enemies, but they can't swim in the paint.
- Used and subverted in City Of Heroes. Civilians will often find themselves struggling over purses or ancient artifacts, but most of the time, they'll walk through groups of evil body-possessing mages without a problem.
- Also in the villain-side Mayhem missions. These are the only times they are attackable by players, just like enemies and scenery. However, the same attack that puts a dent in a SWAT officer's armor or destroys a car does absolutely nothing to a citizen.
- The civilians evacuating the planet in the second campaign map in Warhammer 40000: Dawn Of War are completely ignored by the attacking Orks.
- In the Orks' defense, killing fleeing civilians it a lot less fun than killing Space Marines.
- Final Fantasy XI has a few areas with NPCs in dangerous areas. While most of them are in areas that don't have monsters spawn there, if you run a mob over there and manage to lose aggro, do they attack the NPCs? Nope. The only time the mobs seem to notice the NPCs is when you are supposed to escort them somewhere for a quest. In fact, during the early years of the game, there were almost no player-race enemies whatsoever. In fact, the only player-race enemy you fought at that time transformed into a monster.
- While this trope technically does not refer to your inability to hurt civilians, there is an interesting note for Harvest Moon. In HM, if the player were to accidentally strike (or all-out attack) a livestock animal with a farming tool, they will lose a "heart" of affection, and may become sick. It would have been easy to cost the player a similar heart of affection if they strike a civilian, but this does not happen!
- Half Life 2 features civilians who won't take any damage if you shoot or bludgeon them, but can be killed by the Combine. The Gravity Gun and a large enough object or Hopper mine will work on the other hand.
- A rather curious version of ignoring civilians ... the police in the Grand Theft Auto games are quite willing to let nothing stand in their way as they rush to apprehend the player. This includes pedestrians, who tend to be left not standing after being run over by a police cruiser at full speed. It's like the cops don't bother to notice them. The game rewards you for this kind of thing. The original GTA was score-based and certain events could multiply your score e.g. Running someone over gave you 100. Shooting them, x2. Using their own car to kill them, x7. A cop shooting them - x10. No higher multiplier was possible. The game welcomed all forms of mayhem, including you being responsible for innocent bystanders. Good times...
- The cops don't give a crap about anyone. Players have been in process of being busted, with 8 cops surrounding the car... when another cop car comes screaming in and mows down four of the arresting cops.
- It even works in reverse. Walk by some gang members, and they'll start shooting. The cops don't get involved. You start punching them to encourage them to stop? Wanted level.
- This gets inverted in Grand Theft Auto IV. The car's owner pull Niko out of the car and start punching him, and the cops arrest the other guy.
- Averted in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Monsters never (well, hardly ever) invade towns in order to kill civilians, however bodies of several dead travelers are seen, as are travelers in the process of being attacked.
- While monsters never invade the major walled towns, I have seen them attacking some of the smaller farmsteads and settlements. This usually occurs when a monster is traveling along the main road, and happens to spot an NPC working on their farm. Additionally, some NP Cs commute between cities, leaving them open to monster attack while traveling on the main road.
- Additionally, all NPCs in Oblivion (except for patrolling imperial guards) are unique individuals (many of whom give sidequests) rather than randomly spawned characters. Each NPC killed randomly by monsters is one less person in the game world, who will not be replaced, and if they were part of a sidequest, their deaths make that quest unfinishable.
- The death of a NPC does not always make a sidequest unfinishable. If you accept a sidequest to kill a NPC before the NPC dies, once the NPC dies you will be credited with performing the kill, even if a wolf or bandit killed the NPC instead of you.
- Some of the time, an Oblivion NPC who needs you to guide him or her somewhere becomes invulnerable during the course of the trip. For example, Martin is invulnerable from Kvatch until you arrive at Cloud Ruler Temple, so you could use him as an invulnerable sidekick for quite a lot of the side quests. When doing the Main Quest, the Jemane brothers from the quest "Separated At Birth" are invulnerable until you take them to their family farm, making them useful in the Main Quest section The Great Gate as additional soldiers.
- Not a game, but the concept is played with in the webcomic Kid Radd. "NPC Invulnerability" possessed by former NPC's makes them useful in dangerous situations, as they don't possess the ability to be hurt. Characters that have both NPC Invulnerability and offensive skills are quite rightly considered some of the most frightening things in existence.
- Neverwinter Nights features one of the most frustrating applications of this trope. Some Invulnerable Civilians will ignore your attacks, but God help the adventurer who takes a swing at an NPC only to discover that a.) he's invincible and b.) he's pissed off.
- Subverted with the Crusader games. Friendly fire is in fact quite possible if there are enough enemies, and since there are civilians present in many dangerous areas of the game...
- Justified with Namingway in Final Fantasy IV's DS remake: he has the ability to always appear in whatever location the story mandates your party to visit next, complain about his current situation, find a new calling, change his name to <Insertcurrentsituationhere>way and ask Cecil to help him out in some way and possibly reward him somehow, in no particular order. Said locations are invariably filled with lots of dangerous monsters, and the one time you actually need to fight him a good way into the game, he only has a measily 32 HP. So how does he survive? Simple: after you complete his subplot and find him in one of the randomly chosen locations afterwards, he gives you his good luck charm that he's apparently carried with him the entire time: a Safe Travel augment, which eliminates all random encounters. The game doesn't bother to elaborate if the very first monsters he runs into afterwards kill him brutally or if he barely manages to escape to a nearby town, realizes the danger he's been in the entire time and spends the rest of his life sobbing in the corner of a nearby inn.
- The webcomic RPG World lampshades this trope (just like it does for every single other video game trope in existence), in this comic
 .
- In Might & Magic VI, if you lured monsters into town, they'd continue attacking you, but would completely ignore the townspeople walking around (funnily enough, the townspeople would be happy to attack you if you start killing them).
- This was corrected in Might & Magic VII, where townspeople and monsters would fight each other if they ever crossed paths (all townspeople were randomly generated; all plot important NPCs were unkillable signpost conversations safely tucked away indoors).
- Certain areas in World Of Warcraft have wandering predators and wandering herbivores passing right by one another...but so help you if YOU should happen to walk near either of them.
- That specific case (herbivores and carnivores walking right by each other) was actually addressed in the games latest expansion pack, where in some cases you have predators ignore you to go eat something that they actually hunt (wolves on some sort of moose like animal), though they will gladly start attacking you as soon as they are done 'eating'.
- The game also has several examples of merchants who are somewhat allied with enemy forces, but you can still purchase items from. They are usually marked as traitorous, or just willing to accept anyone's coin. And Vendor Trash.
- Averted in Ultima: Martian Dreams, where roaming monsters would attack and kill members of the Martian expedition if you left the doors to their houses open after visiting them. This made the game unwinnable, so you needed to remember to always close doors behind you to keep your buddies safe.
- Averted in STALKER, where every character (including major characters) could be killed, and most human settlements were subject to random mutant or bandit attacks. Thus, it was entirely possible for quests to become unobtainable as major characters were killed in random shootouts.
- Averted in Baldurs Gate. Surrounding civillains get wasted all the time. Killed in the crossfire, killed when summoned or confused monsters attack them, killed by spells like Fireball, trapped by spells like Web and Tangle... the way they get killed all the time makes one question how there are any civilians LEFT.
- Averted in Fallout 3. The system is supposed to be similar to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, where any NPC in the game world can be attacked and killed by roaming monsters or bandits at any time. However, it seems that NPCs drop dead completely randomly when you're not looking, and when you do return to them you just find their corpse with no sign of whatever could have killed them. Thus it's good not to get attached to anyone, not even the more developed quest-related characters.
- Note that NP Cs can be harmed by fall damage. Remember all those missing handrails on the high, high gantries of Megaton? And I quite enjoy playing Detective. "But where's his head? Ah-hah! An eyeball... HOLY SHIT DEATHCLAW".
- In Rivet City certain NPC's (like Harkness) can only be knocked unconscious and not killed
- Most Fallout 3 NP Cs central to morality-type quests cannot be killed, only knocked unconscious. For example, the NPC Victoria Watts will start following your character around when her morality-type quest is activated, meaning she can turn up almost anywhere in an invulnerable state (as I discovered when accidentally Mini-Nuking her up north near Raven Rock, assuming she was an attacker). These same NP Cs often lose their invulnerability right after giving you the quest-specific message.
- All of the child NP Cs in Fallout 3 (those who aren't killed by scripted effects) are completely invulnerable.
- Note that all of this can be corrected with mods or console commands, disabling "Essential mode" on quest NP Cs and child invulnerability (if you really want to murder children...).
- Of course, one of the complaints about the game by its detractors is that all of this is contrary to the world of Fallout. Which is fair, because in Fallout, who wasn't a child killer after getting pickpocketed one too many times? Really?
- HEAVILY averted/inverted in the Superman Returns games....in fact, it's rather the entire point. YOU are pretty much invulnerable (the worst anything can do is stun you), but instead the city has a life bar when it takes damage and/or citizens get hurt. If it gets emptied, then it's game over. Nice touch of realism, but sadly it pretty much turns the entire game into one long Escort Mission.
- Played straight with the kittens, which are unharmed by all of Superman's attacks.
- If this troper recalls correctly, the invulnerabillity of the Goldeneye 64 civillains depends on the difficulty levels. Turning them from meat sheilds into bullet sponges...which the millitary doesn't seem to care about either way. Of course, hiding behind them is fine... but rolling them over in a tank is not. Eventually.
- Mostly averted in Deus Ex — the New York, Paris and Hong Kong levels are all full of NP Cs, and just about all of them can be hurt or killed... except for some plot-dependent characters such as Paul Denton and Walton Simons, who are invulnerable until the game decides otherwise.
- Simmons is always killable, although it is almost impossible to make JC strong enough to do so before his 'official' death scene, barring cheats or glitch exploitation.
- In Global Defence Force (Chikyuu Boueigun 2) there are crowds of civilians running away from the alien enemies on many levels. Even if the player is fully kitted out with a superweapon capable of killing a gigantic Godzilla-alike lizard in one hit, shooting civilians will make them fly through the air, lie on the ground for a moment, then simply pick themselves up and start running again. Likewise if they are stepped on by the aforementioned lizard. If you shoot a single civilian with a continuous-fire weapon for long enough, though, they will vanish into thin air, but this seems to be a bug rather than 'death'.
- Used as a plot point in Silent Hill 2, in which James (the protagonist and player character) wonders how Maria, an unarmed woman, and Laura, a child, could have survived for so long in a town filled with murderous monsters. Turns out that the monsters and even Maria herself are delusions created by poor James as he goes completely insane.
- In Crackdown, jaywalking civilians can repeatedly get up after being struck by a car at high speed, provided that the driver is another civilian. However, they're very vulnerable in other ways - freaks specifically target civilians, for example.
- Averted in Prototype. The zombies of the zombie apocalypse will happily chow down on the hapless citizens of New York City. And you can kill them yourself, if you want to.
- The Demon Scrolls in Okami will happily float right past any NPCs in the area, but if you get anywhere near them, they actually chase you out of Suicidal Overconfidence.
- Averted HARD in Call Of Duty Modern Warfare- notably in "No Russian", in which you get to be the one doing the killing (or not), a few very killable civilians also appear in "The Coup" in Modern Warfare 1, and the levels in Brazil and Afganistan in Modern Warfare 2.
- One level in Halo 3 contains civilian workers who are under attack by the Covenant.
- Averted heavily in The Saboteur. The Nazi soldiers occupying Paris gladly abuse and execute civilians, often just for the hell of it. It gets sadistic (as expected of the Nazis) when German soldiers pass civilians on the street and proceed punch them and beat them up for no real reason other than that they can. And if the civilians fight back, or are simply witnesses to the abuse, they get shot down as they attempt to run away, or get arrested and sent to some unspeakable fate.
- Averted in very strange ways in X-COM: Enemy Unknown: During terror missions, the aliens would often ignore your soldiers for the chance to kill a civilian, if they had to choose. And Fridge Logic rears its ugly head when you realize the aliens had hours to themselves from when you were alerted of the mission to your actual arrival on scene, and apparently waited for you to show up before starting the civvie killing. Psychological warfare?
- Played straight in Lagoon for the SNES, where the first major thing you do is explore a dungeon and do an Escort Mission with a little boy. He can't be hurt at all, but goes at quite a slow pace...
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