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"An intelligent guard! Didn't see that one coming." — Titan AE
Black Mage: Ah, the perfect disguise. Cultist 1: Hey, the new guy killed Suh'zanne and now he's wearing his face. Cultist 2: Like we wouldn't recognize it? Cultist 3: Tsk. What a poorly conceived disguise! — 8-bit Theatre, strip 744
Being a guard for an Evil Overlord is a low-status, low-pay, high-risk job in an unsafe workplace, with very little long term job security, but hey, they normally have a brilliant pension plan. So it's hardly surprising that most applicants aren't exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer (not that their bosses tolerate incompetent underlings), and could be fooled by tricks that wouldn't bother an average six-year old.
Common issues are
- When searching for people, not looking in ridiculously obvious hiding places
- Dismissing odd sounds as nothing
- Examining thrown stones where they land, not where they came from
- Assuming anyone in a guard outfit must be a guard, even if they don't recognize them.
- Attacking heroes one at a time
- Leaving important keys dangling from an easily accessible chain, and walking very close to prisoners
- Examining unwell prisoners whilst unarmed, and having left the cell door open
- Never watching prisoners locked in a room with a bed
- Not raising an alarm upon seeing something suspicious, especially the corpse of another guard.
- Particularly in stealth-based video games, staring at the wall or otherwise ignoring key entry & exit points.
- Getting easily distracted, especially by prisoners getting it on.
- Ignoring the fact that Joe just put that box in the storage closet.
Examples:
Live Action TV
- Played with in Doctor Who, when the Doctor distracts a guard by engaging him in a philosophical discussion on the nature of existence.
- The A Team. Many a villain has been laid low by not paying attention to machine sounds after Locking Mac Gyver In The Store Cupboard. This troper recalls a particularly egregious instance where Hannibal and Face are arrested. Hannibal seems to have escaped, so the sheriff unlocks his cell and checks inside, then both he and the other officer in the building leave to find him... when Hannibal turns out to be hiding under the bed and promptly lets Face out and escapes.
- "Schuuuuultz!"
- The Chasers War On Everything proved this was Truth In Television at the APEC summit, getting past two security checkpoints in a fake motorcade, with "insecurity passes" that stated they were NOT official delegates.
- Merlin. In the first episode, two guards go chasing off after some enchanted dice.
- In the fourth episode, they fail to notice a servant girl riding off into the night. What temp agency do they get these guys from?
- That may be justified - later in the episode they said she'd been using magic to prevent anyone from recognizing her, so the could have used magic to escape unnoticed.
- It seems like every episode, the guards are doing something even more retarded than the last one. This Troper}} has no idea why they even hire them.
- Subverted in Dark Angel when Max tries to distract a guard with a rock, but he isn't fooled. She laments, "Why did I get the smart one?"
Anime
- The Britannian guards in Code Geass frequently wait until Lelouch has geassed them before actually doing their job. Twice they have waited for Lelouch to give a long pretentious speech before he geassed them into killing themselves. Also the entire royal family seems to be guarded by guys with easily breakable spears.
Comic Books
- An old Fantastic Four story saw the government imprisoning them in specially designed cells. Reed Richards and Johnny managed to find tiny flaws in the prison design. The Thing found that the door was strong enough to take one punch from him, but not multiple blows, which makes the prison designer crazy. Sue Storm turned herself invisible. And yes, guards set to guard The Invisible Woman opened the door because they couldn't see her.
- In Asterix the Gladiator Asterix and Obelix find a guard who works at the prison where they are holding Cacophonix prisoner. Asterix tells Obelix to ask him some "clever questions" to find out his exact location. Obelix, to Asterix's astonishment simply asks "Hey you! Where is Cacophonix imprisoned?". The guard replies in detail adding "but it's a secret" while Asterix sits there befuddled.
Film
- The ultimate and truly memorable subversion in Titan AE: Preed, Stith, and Korso are trying to free Akima from a slave prison. They see a large, brutish guard around a corner, and Stith offers to take him out. Preed refuses, saying "this requires cunning and deception". They then walk up to the guard, and Preed spins a tale that he and Stith are traders, and that Korso is his slave. After delivering his story, the guard says these exact things: "You're lying. He's not a slave and you're not traders. Look at the way he stands. He doesn't carry himself like a slave. Probably ex-military. Akrenians always threaten before asking a favor, it's tradition. And your robes are made out of bedspreads!" Preed then asks if they had a Plan B, and Stith makes short work of the guard. Preed finally delivers the quote at the top of the page while zapping the guard.
- Consistent in all the Austin Powers movies. One even manages to fall into the lava flow when he's outwitted by Felicity Shagwell's boobs.
- Partially subverted in Goldfinger after James Bond is recaptured after escaping his cell. The next scene shows Bond back in his cell with three guards inside with at least one with a gun trained on him at all times to make sure he stays put.
- Double subversion: In Mom And Dad Save The World, a guard, despite being from a planet of idiots, doesn't assume Dad is a guard just because he's wearing a uniform... however, she unquestioningly accepts the laughable answers he provides in response to her questioning and lets him go on his way.
- Played with again in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, when the racist white prison guards attack a peaceful African American prisoner, thus allowing Kumar to escape with an enormous bag of marijuana.
- The security guards on the Death Star in Star Wars: A New Hope.
- Although Vader did actually order them to let the prisoners get away.
- And Princess Leia notes afterward that Vader had to have let them go deliberately, because their escape was entirely too easy.
- Ben uses a Jedi Mind Trick version of this after turning the tractor beam off. This is actually an inversion of Its Probably Nothing. Presumably, Ben made the guards think they heard something off in the distance, and like intelligent guards they go to investigate. Unfortunately for them, it really was nothing.
- The guards of Swamp Castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
- Subverted in The Incredibles, where a guard effectively fights against a girl whose powers are to become invisible and to make forcefields by chasing her into water and throwing some dirt into it. He loses anyway, but that's still pretty smart.
- To be fair, he really lost because heroes don't believe in Mook Chivalry.
Literature
- The Discworld books have a lot of fun with this. In The Last Hero, Evil Harry Dread (the archetypical Evil Overlord) hires his henchmen on the above criteria.
- And Guards! Guards! opens with a dedication to those people "whose job it is, round about chapter three, to rush at the hero one at a time and be slaughtered."
- In Thud!, the text mentions how when Sergeant Colon is on guard duty, he "kept the cell keys in a tin box in the bottom drawer of his desk, a long way out of reach of any stick, hand, dog, cunningly thrown belt, or trained Klatchian monkey spider (making Fred Colon possibly unique in the annals of jail history)."
- In one of the Get Smart novels, one guard is particularly immune to this. Instead of entering the cell when Max sets fire to the bed as a diversion, the guard merely opens up on him with the firehose.
- However just a few pages later the rest of the guards in the prison are fooled by Max writing "out of order" with a piece of chalk on a death ray!
- Subverted in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy: Ford attempts to save himself and Arthur from being chucked out an airlock by talking a Vogon guard into questioning the purpose of his life, but the guard is too dumb for Ford to get through to him.
- That, and the guard really enjoys shouting at people, something his job supplies in great quantities. RESISTANCE IS USELESS!!
Western Animation
- Jonny Quest used this one a lot.
- Used, played with, subverted and lampshaded frequently in The Venture Brothers, most often through the misadventures of Number 21 and Number 24, two guards who somehow manage to survive the carnage of the series, and give plausible voice to the wit and social skills necessary for career henchmen.
- Subverted in the Gummi Bears episode when trolls are holding the Gummi hostage in Gummi Glen to force the colony to recover a treasure hidden in a tree they uprooted and put in Castle Dunwin. Unfortunately, when Gummis get to the tree they find it empty, because the castle guards were apparently smart enough to discover the treasure and moved it to the castle treasury.
- Used and slightly lampshaded in an episode of Duck Tales where Huey, Dewey, and Louie are imprisoned in a room with a guard looking in at them once every hour or so. While two of the identical triplets work on the means of their escape, the third one sits in front of a trifold mirror, giving the impression — sort of — that there are three boys sitting there. Lampshaded in that one of the boys asks whether the guard won't notice that they're all wearing the same clothes, only to be told by the one devising the plan that "he's so tired, he's not going to care WHAT we're wearing, just so long as there's three of us." Improbably, this turns out to be true.
Video Games
- The guards in the Metal Gear Solid series exhibit most of these traits at lower difficulty levels... and don't when you play the game on "extreme" difficulty. Also, the enemy AI seems to improve from game to game, leading to a rather strange situation wherein genetically-engineered super soldiers (the Next-Generation Special Forces) in the first game are dumber than Russian special forces in the second and third games.
- This is justified in that the Genome Soldiers, despite being flaunted as genetically enhanced Super Soldiers, have no actual field experience. All of their experience is in VR Training, and Snake in the second game commented on how it is a poor substitute for experience. That, and the soldiers also have an apparent flaw in their genes, which the terrorists need to correct with Big Boss' DNA.
- In the various games of the Thief series, guards are notoriously brain-challenged. They carry obviously important items dangling from their belts, they take a remarkably short time to go from "I saw something" to "must've been a rat", and they ignore fires and candles that get doused by water arrows (that would presumably leave a mess all over the floor). Heck, they don't even try to relight them. At least they go into full-alert mode if they notice a dead mate lying on the floor, which is more that can be said for some other games...
- Lampshaded in the first of level of Thief 2: The Metal Age, where dousing one of the torches prompts a pair of nearby guards to argue about who should relight it, and then ultimately doing nothing as it transpires that they forgot their tinderbox.
- And lampshaded in the Gold and Platinum releases of Thief 1, where one of the added levels has you infiltrating a thieves' guild: you watch two people go up to the guard at the front door (you'll probably use the back) and be challenged for a password. One points out that they've known each other for years - no dice, the guard wants the password. The first visitor recites it exasperatedly, tries to enter and is stopped, as the guard points to the other man (who is standing right there) and complains, "Well, now he hasn't given me the password!" And yes, the first man comments on this.
- Hitman relies on this trope for gameplay, as 99% of guards hardly notice the bald man with the barcode on the back of his head, unless you really screwed up in Blood Money. The exception are the lovers in the Mardi Gras level, assassins, and certain people in the Heaven/Hell party.
- Particularly in the level in Blood Money where the Hitman can take the outfit of the clown at someone's birthday party. Apparently the guests don't notice that the "clown" removed his facepaint, and suddenly has a barcode on his head, not to mention he doesn't smile, just keeps his face in that permanent expression of badassery.
- In a memorable early-game sequence in Breath Of Fire 3, your characters must sneak into a mansion guarded by a wide variety of inept guards. It's a puzzle sequence, so almost every single one of the types listed is played with, including a few who just don't care and will let you go by if you bribe them or even find their lost wallet. So hard to find good help these days.
- One particularly egregious example is a guard that admits he would be completely unable to stop the party, then orders them to go kill a guard dog to cover his ass, or he wouldn't let them pass. Wait a minute, couldn't we just kick your ass?
- The guards in Assassins Creed suffer immensely from this trope, though considering the nature of the game, it is actually justified. Examples include:
- The inability of any guard to comprehend that the guy in a white robe who just hugged their patrol partner, who collapsed less than a second later, could be... you know... a suspect.
- And that's even if the robed guy follows up the first hug of the death with half a dozen more, stealth-killing bystander after bystander right in front of the guards' faces, occasionally stabbing them so hard that his hidden blade visibly goes all the way through them and sticks out the other side. Just don't run, jump, or climb a wall in front of them, or they'll be on you like stink on a camel.
- Not looking inside of the curtained frame directly next to them on the roof that the assassin was just spotted on.
- The inability to conceive the notion that the man in a white hood and covered in weapons might be the source of the numerous mysterious (or, if open combat breaks out, not-so-mysterious) recent guard deaths.
- The inability to spot the only "praying scholar" that's loaded down with weapons.
- To make up for this, if they ever see the main character galloping on his horse, even before people start mysteriously dying, they immediately realize that he's an assassin and chase after him. Curse those medieval speed limits!
- Similarly, the NPCs in Oblivion have an amazing ability to mistake loud clanking sounds and arrows sticking out of their head for the wind, or their own imagination. The last words of many a bandit have been, "Damn rats, always sneaking about in the shadows, making me-ARGH!"
- Also, guards in the game will only ever react to a corpse by muttering to themselves about a killer being on the loose, and resume patrolling. They'll also not react much to seeing their buddies being assassinated right beside them other than blankly staring and said muttering.
- In City Of Heroes, mobs of enemies will usually ignore fights going on in plain sight halfway across the room with automatic weapons.
- Justified in that otherwise the hero(es) would be overwhelmed and it would get really frustrating really fast.
- It's best to remember that the MMO convention of hitting an enemy a few times doesn't translate into the mythology of City Of Heroes. A low level hero carrying an assault rifle should be able to drop a Mook with a single shot or burst, but because of the requirements of the game, it takes a few shots. Likewise, clearing a room would theoretically take a few seconds for the same assault rifle guy just going buckwild on the auto-fire, but because of the game requirements...
- It's a convention of MMORPG in general that the aggro radius of the mobs is much smaller than their line of sight. It always lead to egregious situations where the guard twiddle their thumbs while you slaughter their colleagues in front of their eyes, waiting for their turn to die. World Of Warcraft made a commendable effort to give the players the impression that they were really storming an enemy stronghold in the Shattered Halls instance, with constant reinforcement coming to face you and guards lining up in formation. Sadly, they still included a room where a bunch of guards kept training rather than facing you, and another where they managed to sleep through the whole ruckus.
- And in another dungeon the boss greets you when you get close to him, but makes no attempt to stop you slaughtering his remaining guards, who all just stand there.
- In Beyond Good And Evil, the heroine can shoot a projectile into a guard's air tank - and unless she's in plain sight or really unlucky, the other guards present will just fix the tank, then declare "false alarm" and get back to their business.
- And even if she is seen, she can just run around a corner where they can't see her, and after a few seconds they'll do the same thing. Repeatedly.
- And if you shoot the tanks of all the guards in the room, there will be no other guards to fix the tanks, so they'll simply run around like headless chickens. You can then kick them for a satisfying finisher.
- Alternatively, fire a projectile at their groin and watch them double up in pain. They're apparently so distracted by the pain that they fail to realize someone is shooting at them. Unless, of course, you're standing right where they can see you...
- Perhaps the only (moderately) justified action they take is when Jade runs out of sight, they dispatch a droid to clear the area. Of course, they usually clear the area just out of sight and ignore any areas slightly farther out of sight.
- In many areas, but particularly notable in one guard-riddled passage in Alpha Sections HQ (roughly 6 guards in a 50-foot stretch of open balcony, plus about 4 more immediately above and below it), the guards will look around everywhere except entrance points. In the referenced area, one guard faces in a direction no attack could possibly come from, and if he stayed in place but turned around the mission would be impossible.
- In the early stealth portion of the Forsaken Fortress in The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Moblins patrol small areas of the fortress, and if they see you, it's into the prison with you. However, there are barrels that you can hide in. You can even move about as long as they're not looking, because the fact that a barrel is somewhere that it wasn't tells them absolutely nothing. This is possibly justified by their being explicitly stated to be really, really stupid.
- The smartest one in the game is an automated statue that spits lasers at you with alarming accuracy (well, alarming when you account for the fact that they're only about a second slow, and in real life, that would be close enough to scare the piss out of most anyone. Certainly a twelve-year-old like Link).
- Vaan has to infiltrate Rabanastre palace early on in Final Fantasy XII. In advance it sounds like an annoying Stealth Based Mission. Then you get there and the guards are apparently blind, as they never notice you unless you bump into them or yell at them.
- Pokemon games all have an evil team of some sort. You can infiltrate their base, but the guards will only see you if you walk in front of them.
- People only see you if you are directly in front of them... so groups of trainers are like a laser wire maze.
- Also, no one in the Pokemon universe ever has any sort of weapon or armament except for a team of Pokemon. You can blatantly walk around the suspiciously Mafia-like organization's lair, and all the guards will do is challenge you to a trainer battle. Once your Pokemon beat theirs, they just kind of go "aw, shucks, well, the leader will beat you for sure" and then let you go on your way.
- Not only that, but the random guards usually have completely awful Pokemon. Whatever Mafia don decided it would be good security to give their patrol guards standard-issue Magikarps deserves to have his entire syndicate taken down by a single ten-year-old. At least this was lampshaded in Diamond/Pearl, where the grunts complain about how useless their issued Pokemon are after being beaten and before letting you continue.
- Yet at some points, the guards will inexplicably smarten up and refuse to battle you, simply standing there and blocking your path. Conversely, at one point you can enter an occupied building because the guard has fallen asleep.
- The guards in the Tenchu series are not the brightest folk in medieval Japan. While they will look around for you for a while if they spot your shadow or see you moving just out of clear sight, the fact that a dead guard causes no more than a few minutes searching, and no call for backup, seems to indicate that broken necks and gaping sword wounds weren't considered too unusual in an average night's work.
- Although, to be fair, in the Tenchu universe, it's sort of implied that this happens all the time.
- The guards in Splinter Cell are a pretty surprising aversion of this; they can be remarkably thorough, especially when they've detected the player, and if entering an area of low light, they'll often whip out flares or flashlights. Later in the series, enemy troops also start carrying night vision goggles, and in Chaos Theory Douglas Shetland's personal bodyguard are equipped with thermal goggles. They even notice broken lights, cameras, locks, or anything else you broken really. Speaking of cameras, the cameras will detect any dead body left in their vision, and some of them are bullet proof. Strangely though, whoever is watching the monitors of these cameras doesn't seem to notice them going out one by one through rooms that'd leave a very specific trail of which room Fisher is hiding in.
- However, they still call a false alarm after searching for a while. Yep, definitely a false alarm. All those dead bodies, shattered lights and eye witness viewings of the mysterious commando running around? Guess it was the wind. To be fair though, they do spend a lot more time searching for the player than most other games do, and after the alarms are turned off, the guards still tend to be more alert.
- Not in the later games. A guard who finds a dead body or sees Sam Fisher will not forget even when he returns to his post, and when confronted with a suspicious sight or sound, is more likely to investigate with bullets instead of a flashlight.
- Averted in Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. If the guards see you with a weapon out, they start shooting. In Beyond, you can sneak up behind them with a knife and stab them; if the other guards see the corpse before you drag it out of sight, they'll head for the alarm and set it off. They'll also ask you for a pass periodically. In the original Castle Wolfenstein, you could steal a uniform and wear it; the regular guards would generally ignore you, but the SS would find you out.
- When playing as a Spy or the occasional Scout in Team Fortress 2, opposing players in general and Engineers in particular ARE the guards. This troper has seen competence at this role go from extremely genre savvy to playing it completely straight, often failing to notice the deaths of their allies as they charge to the frontlines.
- Then you go to another server, and find that everyone shoots their teammates JUST IN CASE.
- As someone who mains the Spy class, this troper is amused to see this trope's relevance. On public servers, you can get away with all sorts of suspicious behaviors, such as standing around conspicuously around sapped sentries, making beelines at your targets in full view of the opposing team, and running away from the frontline for no apparent reason. Play on a clan server or some other place with TF 2 veterans, and, as the above troper said, the dynamic changes to a subversion. Simply being seen, even with a disguise, will get you shot at as a caution, and so much as looking at a enemy will revel your true role to them, and being within twenty feet of a sentry or a heavy-medic combo will result in horrific maiming by the respective engineer and medic, and people chasing you will never, NEVER let up, no matter how far you run. But even against competent opponents, it's surprising to see how powerful the trope still is. People standing around the bombcart have a nice habit of following it's path slowly while all facing the same direction, a single scout running around 100 yards away will steal the attention of an entire group of people and make them oblivious to their teammates cries of spy-inflicted death, and if they see you run around a corner, they'll blindly charge down the hall, allowing you to fake them out by cloaking outside their line of sight and running the other direction.
- Guards in Golden Eye must be blind and extremely nearsighted, because a patrolling guard will not bother to investigate the sound of gunfire even if you are using the loudest weaponry and they don't seem to notice you until you're almost right in front of you.
- In Deus Ex, you can shoot someone in the face with a tranquilizing arrow (which usually takes two or three hits to knock them out) from a small pistol crossbow, and they will, if you're not in plain sight in front of them, briefly run around waving their arms... then go back to whatever they were doing.
- Not to mention they can walk to the source of a noise, look straight at one of their colleagues' body lying dead on the floor and promptly declare it was "probably just a cat".
- In Stubbs the Zombie: Rebel Without a Pulse in one of the first levels the player may gain control of a policeman by using the protagonist's arm. Other policemen won't notice the odd one unless he has a gun out, despite wearing a zombie arm as a hat.
- The guards in Perfect Dark 64 are pretty smart. Blast a couple, the survivors will run for the alarm button. Snipe one, his buddy will run up and yell in despair (at which point you slay him also). But the good guy guards aren't always the smartest. You can tranq a stewardess for Air Force One (!) with a crossbow bolt (huge, works if it goes in her brain) and steal her uniform. Nobody checks your ID, even though your guard detail is long gone. In an earlier level, helicopter pilots will shoot through their (female) colleagues to get to you.
Web Comics
- Lampshaded in Exiern
- And of course, El Goonish Shive has an example: Even by the ridiculously low standards of this page, Guineas? You FAIL. So very, very badly.
- The Guardbots in Gunnerkrigg Court were apparently designed to keep obedient robots in line. Hence, they're at a complete loss when Antimony runs away.
- Subverted in The Adventures Of Doctor Mc Ninja, where in one strip the good doctor attempts to disguise himself as a guard, but leaves his mask on. The guards catch on immediately.
- On one occasion, his father tricked the bad guys into mistaking someone else for him by putting his mask on someone else's head.
- Actually, this was Lampshaded and explained later; all of the Mc Ninja's wear masks, and have never see each other's faces. This is so they can simply take off their mask and walk away in the event of a betrayal, or their clan being destroyed.
- Averted in Goblins here: the titular goblins try to sneak into the city and random low level town guards have enough sense to both check where the rock came from and summon help, resulting in a city riot about an army of goblins hiding in the sewers.
- Spoofed to hell and back in The Last Days Of Foxhound. Not surprising, considering what the comic is based on.
Web Original
- The LifesBlood Labs goons in LG15: the resistance are pretty incompetant. The "Mace in Yo Face!" and "Done Dirt Cheap" incidents are particularly shameful.
Real Life
- Alcatraz's guards were fooled by one oldest trick in the book after another: dummy heads in the bed, digging a hole with spoons, and climbing up the ventilator shaft, making this trope not only Genre Blindness but Truth In Television. Since the Alcatraz escape was done some years ago, it might be Seinfeld Is Unfunny too.
- To say nothing of It Only Works Once...
- Thing is, this isn't a bad escape plan, which is why it worked. Basically it relies on the fact that it simply isn't practical to monitor prisoners TOO closely, so if you're clever enough... plus, after this happened I suspect it became a lot more popularized anyway.
- Truth In Television: A convict in a US prison was able to escape by dressing up as a guard, because the guards were more familiar with the prisoners than each other.
- There has also been at least one case where an accomplice faxed realistic-looking release papers from a nearby Mc Donalds fax machine, resulting in a convict walking out scot-free, without anyone thinking about double-checking even the clearly visible fax-number.
- There is a Ninja technique, the name of which translates as "throwing the toothpick", to distract guards. Yeah it's that old, at least. To be fair, if it's done properly, the guards never see anything, they just hear a sound.
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