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"If it exists as a living creature in an MMORPG, someone, somewhere, will try to kill it."
In short, if you as a game designer want an invulnerable NPC, make sure that it actually is.
The Lord British Postulate was coined in this WoW Insider post, and is the cornerstone of the creativity and ingenuity of the more cunning player. In short, if a NPC cannot be killed through normal means, then there must be some abnormal way to do the job. Quite often, if a character's weapons fail to do the duty, then the task falls upon other NPCs, world objects, or the environment itself to assassinate the relevant target, with some prodding from the player characters. The Lord British Postulate is not restricted to MMORPGs, but can be applied elsewhere: C RPGs, FPSes, even Tabletop RPGs.
That said, the Lord British Postulate has less grounding in reality than one would assume. A great deal of NPCs are free to walk around unmolested, safe in their invulnerability. However, the more important the NPC is, the more likely it will be the attention of a creative assassination attempt. A king is a bigger target than the common baker, and much more satisfying to dispatch.
Contrast with Invulnerable Civilians. A Hopeless Boss Fight and Invincible Minor Minion is seen as a challenge to these people.
Examples:
- Lord British, of course, from the Ultima series, who just happens to be one of Richard Garriot's two in-game AuthorAvatars. Note that in most of the original single-player RPGs, he's not invulnerable — just very, very, very tough with limited invulnerability to all but certain weapons. His "death" in Ultima VII, where the player can drop a plaque on his head, was based on a real-life incident where Garriot was injured by a falling metal bar at the Origin offices.
- The postulate itself stems from a time during the Ultima Online beta test where, following a crash, Richard Garriot's in-game character (Lord British, natch) was left without his natural invulnerability, and a player killed him with a hastily-stolen firefield spell on the spur of the moment during a public gathering.
- A special pair of leggings were introduced to "commemorate" the event.
- There was an event during the early weeks of Tabula Rasa that was about killing General British. Well, clones of him, actually, there were dozens of them.
- For the curious troper, this article details all of the ways that Lord British can be turned into a horse and shipped to Nebraska in the Ultima series.
- Most NPCs in World Of Warcraft are actually killable to players of the opposing faction, including racial leaders such as Thrall, Jaina Proudmoore, and the like. However, most NPCs in the neutral city of Shattrath should be invulnerable, as combat from players is forbidden there... unless, of course, one pulls an enemy from outside of the city into it and lets them run loose on the population. The main NPC of the city, a massive Naaru named A'dal, was killed in this way several times until he was buffed to nigh-unkillable levels. It seems that the original A'dal had very few HP.
- The big boss of the Scourge, the Lich King, is not currently supposed to be in-game in a killable form. He is, however, in-game in a targetable and damageable form. Only players on a specific quest can see him, he has approximately three million HP, and exists for only 7 seconds... but is theoretically killable. Any bets on how long?
- At least in the German version of Baldurs Gate, children are supposed to be invincible, possibly out of fear of Media Watchdogs. This can be annoying if they turned hostile to the players for whatever reason. However, if you polymorph them into squirrels by magical spell or wand, you can kill the squirrels - and watch them polymorph back into dead children.
- The Elder Scrolls games were notorious for this, especially Morrowind, where everyone and everything was killable. Including plot-requirement NPCs.
- Which may have spurred Bethesda to make pretty much every "important" NPC in Oblivion unkillable. If they die, they drop to the floor unconscious and rise again when the coast is clear. With very little health. And often the coast isn't that clear. Plug-ins remove this invulnerability, as do certain console commands.
- In some cases you can simply wait until they're no longer relevant to the plot, in which case they're fair game. Other NPCs never have their 'essential' flags expire.
- It's also possible to use the Sneak skill to plant an item in their inventory, such as a ring, that does constant damage while worn. They put on the item, and it'll keep their HP at zero even when the "important" flag resurrects them.
- Dropping them into lava, which always results in an instant reduction to 0 HP, will kill them permanently. Just don't let this happen to Captain Burd.
- Under normal circumstances Mehrunes Dagon, when he appears at the end of the main quest, is impossible to kill, hitting him with weapons will only stagger him. Except when you use Wabbajack on him, which while it won't induce Involuntary Shapeshifting like it does with everyone else, will alter his stats, making it possible to kill him. He has no death animation, though, so when he dies he just melts into a wierd lump of Dagon-colored goop.
- The Fallout series is pretty creative with this, even allowing you to passively overdose NPCs with various harmful drugs.
- You can kill the children who pickpocket you without gaining the Karma title "Child Killer" in the second game by unloading your entire inventory save for armed explosives. That'll show the little bastards.
- Another way of killing people without "being responsible for it" is to pickpocket THEM and use the interface to move an armed explosive to their inventory, then leave the area and wait. Once you return after waiting long enough, you'll find a dead NPC and nobody's blaming you. Clearly it was a freak case of spontaneous detonation.
- In Fallout 3 there's even an Achievement/Trophy for doing this, and the game keeps a tally of "Pants Exploded." On the GNR program "The Adventures of Herbert Dashwood," Argyle calls this technique "the ol' Shady Sands Shuffle."
- In Guild Wars a well-placed herd of Necromancer minions can sometimes kill exactly the wrong person during a mission cutscene.
- The Eye of the North expansion is far more explicit with this. If an allied NPC is killed, it will either return hale and hearty on the next dungeon level or, more commonly, wait until its aggro circle is clear before standing back up, dusting itself off, and running back to your location. Quite a few NPCs will rubberband back up to about 30% if their health drops below this threshold, even if the damage they receive puts them deep into negative health. Of course, it was possible for decorative player minipets and certain resurrection NPCs to be accidentally killed by rolling ice boulders when they shouldn't, but this was quickly patched.
- In Fable, your weapons are taken away from you in Bowerstone, which is merely cosmetic because you can't beat anyone to death there, either (naturally, that's where the game puts all the children). Unfortunately for the people of Bowerstone, the game is only nerfing your damage, and if you can bring in and subsequently protect a mercenary or two, you can murder your way across town all you like!
- In addition, you can always pick a fight with the guards and navigate the town in a way that gets the townsfolk killed by friendly fire.
- And also, one of the simplest mods to make for Fable is one that lets you keep your weapons in Bowerstone, with predictable results.
- Fable II has so many Lord British-type NP Cs, it's not even amusing. Notably, you cannot attack when anywhere near Theresa, and if you find a way to snipe her from range with Skill or Will, she will tell you that your weapons have no effect on her.
- In Torneko: The Last Hope: there are priests in Toro Ruins, and they are treated like monsters, except you can't attack them directly. But you can shoot arrows, magic thunders, or even turn them into items. When this occurs, though, a message appears and says: "Divine retribution!" and a giant lightning bolt drops your HP to 1. Oddly, this is recorded on your adventure log.
- An old adage in tabletop RPGs, and similar to this trope, is "If you stat it, they will kill it." This is probably a take-off of the Predator quote, "If it bleeds, we can kill it."
- Similarly, the tongue-in-cheek First Law of Munchkinism: "Any finite number can be reduced to zero."
- D&D 3.5 made munchk- optimization-minded players take that very literally: When you reduce an ability of a monster to zero, it'll either die (Constitution and sometimes Strength) or unconscious (all others). The obvious target is Intelligence, since most animal and insect monsters have at most 3 in the stat, but most int-debuffs note that you can't reduce the stat below 1. So what remains when you go through the splat book lists of slobbering beasts, madly cackling overlords and ogre brutes? Well, do any of them seem very charismatic to you? And may I introduce the psionic power named Ego Whip?
- The first edition of Dungeons And Dragons gave the gods stats. This led a lot of players to treat them just like really tough monsters and try to kill them. Later editions generally avoided statting the gods themselves, and if they needed to make a personal appearance, would send an avatar with a fraction of their powers (but still really tough).
- The 3rd ed book Deities and Demigods contained almost exclusively stats and info on most gods in the game, including the Faerunian pantheon and the Greek, Norse and Egyptian pantheons. A majority of them are grossly underpowered and badly built, ripe for having player parties kill them and steal their divine powers unless the DM enforces the special rules for deities.
- Diehard Planescape afficionados refuse to stat the Lady of Pain for this very reason.
- In the online novel "Fire and Dust", the villain is convinced her gamebreaking macguffin will allow her to defeat even the Lady, although we never see that plan played out.
- Kingdom Of Loathing had a rumour/legend that the Hermit NPC was killable, via some sort of trickery. As a browser-based not-so-multiplayer role-playing game, he has no stats and no way to be encountered as an enemy. He's said to 'drop' most non-obtainable (or even nonexistent) items in the game.
- The final boss of Kingdom Of Loathing is the Naughty Sorceress, who is supposed to be killable only with a certain item in the inventory. Two players, Cobain Dougans and DarthDud, managed to beat her without the special item and were rewarded with custom Golden Sausage and Silver Sausage items. The description on the Golden Sausage reads, 'Congratulations on your surprising victory, and darn you for forcing us to come up with a way to keep that from ever happening again.'
- Cobain Dougans has also managed to defeat the Guy Made of Bees, who is also supposed to be unkillable without the use of a certain (different) inventory item.
- The Sorceress has been beaten a third time by MimiRiceCat. No Bronze Sausage yet, but the Sorceress has been upgraded again.
- It should be noted that while the others had to get crafty about it, Cobain was one of the highest leveled players in the game, and accomplished this through SHEER FORCE. In a game where the average player ascends at 15, and there are trophies for those that get to 30, and most clan-quest people hover around 40, he was 117. Stat requirements just about double each time you gain a level sooo...
- Kerafyrm the Sleeper, the Sealed Evil In A Can from the "end" of the original EverQuest. He was supposed to be unkillable, but on one server he was eventually taken down by a group of over 200 allied players in a battle that lasted three hours.
- Also a particularly lasting example of Lost Forever — Kerafyrm could only be awakened once per entire Server, meaning a failed attempt prevented all others on the server from ever being able to do the event.
- In the last level of Net Hack, a player will meet the Riders, three immortal beings who, when killed, will always rise from the dead again. There are only two known ways to dispose of them permanently: kill them, and fill the level entirely with monsters so they have nowhere to reappear, or turn them into green slime. Neither is considered a bug, although most players consider them much more of a hassle than simply finishing the game.
- Amusingly, it's also possible to level-drain two of the three until they become weak enough to enslave with Charm Monster. Now you're playing with power!
- For extinctionist and genocide-happy players, Juiblex is the only enemy that can only be killed once.
- In earlier versions, it was possible to tin Death. Eating him had the expected result. (With the bonus of having a Hall of Fame scoring: approximately, "Died by eating Death".
- The Jedi Heroes in the first Star Wars Battlefront game were invulnerable to normal weapons; they would deflect blasters and simply get knocked down by splash damage. It is possible to kill them by using grenades or heavy weapons to knock them into environmental hazards: off the edge of Cloud City, into the Sarlacc pit, or into the Carbonite Freezing chamber. It is also possible to kill them by landing aircraft on them or ramming them them with a speeder bike.
- An even easier method is to get them between a few turrets firing at the right rate. The flinch effect will keep them immobilized long enough for you to take them out.
- In the webcomic Kid Radd (which plays with and lampshades a number of videogame tropes) the final boss of the game Mofo was supposed to be only vulnerable to a special ability none of the characters had. It turned out that he just had a lot of hit points and regenerated them each turn, which allowed the team to defeat him.
- In an in-universe nod to the Postulate, this unlocks a tongue-in-cheek ending to the game where they are chided for "cheating".
- Said game was a Lawyer Friendly Cameo of Earthbound (Mother), and there's similar protection around its final boss, Giygas.
- Giygas himself has a code that makes him completely immune to damage, as well as Master Belch in later versions of the game without using fly honey. However, they are not immune to poison damage, and can be killed that way. Sort of. Giygas will disappear as an enemy but the battle will not end until you pray.
- Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates has El Pollo Diablo, the black ship that appears if players attack ships weaker than themselves too often. It can't be shot, and it's crewed by (noq) 150 skeletons, but it has been defeated multiple times, each matched by a severe upgrade by the developers...
- ... Except the one time they accidentally botched the ship to be crewed by just 8 skeletons.
- Further, the hardest defeat so far, 100 skeletons versus a full Grand Frigate of top players, had one of the GMs fighting on the Black Ship, for full Lord British Postulate goodness, no less!
- The first Valkyrie Profile game has Brahms, Lord of Vampires. You are not supposed to beat him. If you do through luck, Level Grinding, or cheating, the game just deposits you back into the Overworld without ever mentioning it again, and the game pretends that you had chosen the "don't fight him" option. He appears again in the Bonus Dungeon, but by that time you are expected to be strong enough to match him.
- In the MMORPG Runescape, one update brought a seemingly invincible enemy called the Vyrewatch. They've got a combat level, they must be killable somehow, right? Someone went to the trouble of getting one to attack him while a group of friends dropped him rings of recoil and massive amounts of food. Eventually, the Vyrewatch died, with no death animation and no drops, proving that they really were intended to be invincible.
- They're now killable if you use a weapon you get from the Legacy of Seergaze Quest.
- In the original NES version of Final Fantasy III, you have what is supposed to be a Hopeless Boss Fight against Bahamut early in the game. He has 65536 Hit Points (an absurd number for that game), and fully heals every single round, but it is still possible to kill him. If you do, not only do you get no reward, but you get punished — it becomes impossible to get him as a summon later in the game.
- Note that 65536 is obviously 2^16, and so is likely the maximum possible health the technical limits would allow the devs to give him.
- The World Of Darkness has a section called "Rules for Fighting Caine", the first vampire, specifically for this purpose. It consists of the words "You lose."
- The third edition of the book made sure to give all vampires of third generation and below at least one Plot Device power to keep the players from just killing them willy nilly.
- Which is amusingly inverted in the Time of Judgement, which has a couple of scenarios that go out of their way to give players ways to kill (or help kill) 3rd generation vampires (and Cain!) willy nilly.
- The same "rules" are used in the LotR RPG to describe fighting Sauron.
- Similarly, in Call Of Cthulhu RPG the first of the combat abilities of the titular Cosmic Horror reads: "Each round 1D3 investigators are scooped up in Cthulhu's flabby claws to die hideously". (Through Memetic Mutation, or perhaps from an earlier edition, this often gets quoted as "Cthulhu devours 1d6 investigators per round" or the like.)
- No no no, it gets better. Early editions had Cthulhu eating 1d4 PLAYERS a round.
- Just seeing Cthulhu forces a player to lose 100 SAN. The maximum SAN is 100. Do the math.
- No. Seeing Cthulhu costs 1d10 SAN if the SAN roll succeeds, and 1d100 if it fails. It is possible to see Cthulhu without going insane.
- Rifts being Rifts, when it added "Pantheons of the Megaverse", the first thing many players tried to do was take on Odin, Ra, Marduk, or whoever was handy. But the book also described beings far more powerful with lines as succinct as "tick them off and it's time to roll up new characters." No stats or names were provided, but presumably the writers were referring to capital-G God and distinguishing Him from those wannabes on Olympus. (It also suggested that GMs didn't including Him in the campaign, since constant divine intervention makes the game kind of boring.)
- The MUD Alter Aeon seems to enjoy tormenting players with this: in the starting city, there is an NPC called "The Captain of the Guard". The message for the area explicitly tells the player (paraphrased) "This is the Captain of the Guard. He cannot be killed. No matter how many players you bring, you will not kill him". Naturally, many see this as a challenge.
- Final Fantasy XI has the ostensibly killable Absolute Virtue, which does in fact have death animations, text, and very valuable (and exclusive) drops... but every time it's been killed so far, SE (the developers) responds with something along the lines of "No, that's not how you kill it" and patch it.
- City Of Heroes has the Hamidon, a giant blob monster, which was similarly very difficult to kill. For the first year or so, players kept coming up with strategies only to have the Devs change the rules. Eventually the players found an "acceptable" strategy and raiding began in earnest.
- Co H also has Riechsman, who's supposed to be completely invincible... however, when he first came out, he was still susceptible to Sleep abilities, which, while not killing him, completely mitigated him. Also, later on in the same set of missions, you get the means to defeat him... which you can keep, then do the story over again, and use the same weapons to defeat him when you're supposed to be helpless against him!
- Immortal Defense has a boss at the end of the second campaign who's supposed to be a Hopeless Boss Fight, but players who are just that good have gotten him. The developer didn't think anyone would be able to do it and the game assumes the normal events happened where the boss wins and continues from there. The rest of the game, heavily psychological, goes on to make near-record amounts of no sense.
- In Sly Cooper, the Inspector Javert is a fox named Inspector Carmelita Fox is invulnerable... except in Sly Cooper 3, the Gadgeteer Genius's "Shrink Bomb" works on her, and takes away her infinite HP.
- Deus Ex has plenty of invincible NPCs, but many can be killed due to a collision bug. Get one to stand on the edge of a piece of furniture, then push the furniture against a wall; they will pass partially through the wall, and then die instantly as they game seems to think they've been crushed.
- In The Legend Of Zelda Links Awakening, chicke... er, Cuccos and dogs can't be killed with the sword, attacking the former enough causes a whole flock of Cuccos to start swarming Link (as is the norm in Zelda games), and attacking the latter triggers a counterattack. Use the Fire Rod, however, and not only can you kill them, but an active Cucco swarm will stop. (There's loyalty for you!)
- In Homestuck, the leader of criminal gang The Felt is named Lord English, after a particular spin put on a cue ball in pool. Creator Andrew Hussie hadn't even heard about Lord British until later and, when he was informed about similarity between the names, decided to make Lord English a Lord British Postulate, mentioning in-universe that he can only be killed by exploiting "numerous bugs and glitches in spacetime."
- This particular Ret Con surprisingly fits very well within the Time Travel-related powers that the rest of The Felt possess.
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