But never curious enough to eavesdrop on conversations between the prisoner and unscheduled higher-ups, especially when they say they want to be alone with a prisoner, if you know what I mean.
Leaving important keys dangling from an easily accessible chain.
Walking very close to prisoners.
Examining allegedly sick prisoners whilst unarmed and alone, 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 and exit points. ++
Stealth-game guards also tend to have very limited peripheral vision and a very predictable sweep of the head while patrolling, although it's a smidge unfair to call someone "stupid" for what are obvious physiological or psychological problems. Whoever hired them, on the other hand...
Ogling the centerfold in the latest issue of Hot Babes instead of paying attention to what's going on around them.
Not noticing that the other guards seem to be disappearing.
Carrying or storing weapons in a prison, in such a way that they are easily stolen by the escaping prisoners (prison guards being heavily armed makes sense, but not in a way that allows the prisoners to acquire these weapons).
Releasing somebody who claims (often without any evidence) to be on a mission for a powerful person who will punish the guard if he's late.
Dropping Full Alert Mode because the hero (who two minutes ago ran across the room in a massive firefight with everybody) hasn't been seen for two minutes.
And he keeps doing this.
When a security camera stops working, ignoring it instead of sounding the alarm, or at the very least getting a maintenance team onto it ASAP with accompanying guards.
Never questioning or getting confirmation about that mysterious "surprise inspection".
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. Reaches its peak when Lelouch just walks up and waits more than a minute while the guards attack him with spears before geassing the entire room. Britannia has got to have the dumbest guards in fiction. At least stormtroopers bring blasters.
Aside from the fact that Suzaku can also easily dodge gunfire and wallrun, it can be assumed that they had this spears mostly for ceremonial reasons, as most soldiers seen carry firearms and only a few people actually fight with swords and other melee weapons (while not in Knightmare at least).
The Chinese Federation are even worse, while they do have guns they just stare dumb founded as Xingke fights them off with a sword since the only Chinese soldiers to fight are the ones with spears, and then they watch as Lelouch gives a speech before finally Lelouch has the sense to take his gun and hold Tianzi hostage with it.
In that case, the Chinese soldiers actually were about to shoot Xingke with assault rifles the moment he broke in, but the eunuchs ordered them to hold fire for fear of hitting a Britannian guest in the crossfire. Thus, the spears came out.
If a crazy guy in a mask comes up to you and starts babbling weird stuff, you'd pause in confusion, too. Especially if he's not supposed to be there in the first place. How would you radio it in, for one?
In Mazinkaiser, Baron Ashura's mooks are this trope, as exemplified in a scene during the beach episode that so utterly ridiculous that you wouldn't believe it unless you see it.
In Naruto, the nameless ninja mooks are usually dumb brutes, masked and, in a world filled with powerful techniques, normally attack with kunai rather than, you know, throw a massive fireball or do any other flashy attack to blow the opponent to dust! Worse is that even the RedShirts can be defeated by a single attacker and barely fight using any jutsu. It seems like that only the main characters, villain or hero, are trained in anything other than holding a kunai against the opponent who can pick one technique of his ARSENAL and shoot fire hotter than the sun, create tornadoes, open the ground beneath them and bury them, or throw rocks the size of buildings at them...etc. Yeah. That's the guy you want to try and take prisoner with your dinky little knife.
Windaria The key to Lunara's floodgates are guarded by an old man that sleeps most of the day in a guardhouse without a door. At the start of the film, a spy walks in there, takes the keys, and no one realizes anything until he opens the flood gates. Considering this could have flooded the entire city it merges with Too Dumb to Live.
Comics
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.
A not so old issue of Ultimate Fantastic Four uses the same idea, only it was evil zombie versions of the entire team in one cell together, and the Reed Richards counterparts prepared the trick by claiming he had built a teleporter from a ballpoint pen and a string of hair. Zombie Susan even lampshades how amazed she is that the guards were tricked by the Invisible Woman.. turning invisible. This one is especially pathetic, given that even if the teleporter claim had been true, there would still have been no earthly reason to open the doors.
In Astérix the Gladiator, Asterix and Obelix find a guard who works at the prison where they are holding Cacophonix prisoner. Asterix tells Obelix that they have 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 (overly tired) guard replies in detail adding "but it's a secret" while Asterix sits there befuddled.
The guards at the Batman-verse Arkham Asylum. Whether it's letting the Joker substitute all their real guns for popguns, allowing him access to janitorial chemicals that let him mix together some Joker Venom, or constructing a hot air balloon that allows him to fly over the walls, the increasingly ridiculous, contrived and unbelievable ways that the Joker and the other Bat-villains escape from Arkham would be construed as painfully bad in any other franchise. For the Batman comics, on the other hand, it's par for the course.
Fan Works
Parodied in Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series when Tristan is sneaking up on a guard in a suit of armor. "CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK." "Must be the wind." "CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK." "Yeah, that's definitely the sound that wind makes."
When Feliciano rescues Ludwig from the American base in the Axis Powers Hetalia fanfiction, "Auf Wiedersen, Sweetheart." The plan involved getting all but two American guards to leave by telling them that their counterparts had gotten into a Bar Brawl in town and then convincing the remaining guards to drink the drugged flask of bourbon.
Films — Animation
The ultimate and truly memorable subversion in Titan A.E.: 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 [Korso] 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." (Korso is a former Earth Space Marine.) "Akrennians [like Preed] always threaten before asking a favor, it's tradition." (Which Preed apparently completely forgot.) "And your [Stith] robes are made out of bedspreads!" Preed then asks if they have a Plan B. Stith promptly reverts to her Plan A by kicking the crap out of the guard.
Preed: An intelligent guard! Didn't see that one coming.
The commentary reveals this is one of the very few complete relics of Joss Whedon's pass at the script.
Double subversion in Monsters vs. Aliens. The heroes (who consist of an amorphous blob, a fish-man and a human/cockroach hybrid) adopt Paper Thin Disguises to bluff their way past an alien clone. He recognises the fake clone as "defective beyond repair"... and immediately orders the other two to dispose of him. And gives them a key card. And a gun.
The Guards in Tangled. They cannot find an old lady who has kidnapped the baby princess for almost two decades, when she happened to be in a tower within riding distance. Then said princess' crown get's stolen right under thier noses. Then one of the thieves comes back to Corona later with a girl with 70 feet long of hair and they don't notice it, even though he is dancing around. The only competent member is Maximus, and he's the only one to make crime virtually dissapear.
Not to mention that the same thief was able to walk up to the palace and meet the King and Queen face to face.
The guards in The Incredibles fall prey to a few of these. They're decent enough at their jobs when they're in action, but it's the boring surveillance part of the day that always slips them up. At one point in the movie, they all leave their posts to check on a colleague who's just collapsed. Later, they don't notice Helen when she's right behind them. She even talks. Later still, nobody is paying attention to the security cameras and are all partying in the background. Only Mirage notices the escapees that don't even bother to avoid the security cameras. Most notably, though, is later in the same scene where it gets absurd enough that Bob lampshades it. They enter a large room with no one in it and he absently wonders, "Where are all the guards?"
Films — Live-Action
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.
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. Ben uses a Jedi Mind Trick version of this after turning the tractor beam off. This is actually an inversion of It's 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 novel Death Star turns this on its head. One of the normal human Stormtrooper commanders was sensitive to the Force and really hated his bosses. He mislead his own troops and thus allowed Han and the others an easier path to freedom.
Additionally inverted in that a rather large number of competent major and minor characters all at some point had Imperial guard training or at least Imperial pilot training (which does include some guard training) as the explanation.
"Now, you're not supposed to enter the roo— ARRGH!"
Justified in THX 1138, in that, though the guards are glaringly incompetent, the general population (with the sole exceptions of the hero and his girlfriend) are too stupid/strung out to notice. For example, the guards routinely leave the doors to a high security prison unlocked, but none of the prisoners had ever bothered to check.
Race for the Yankee Zephyr (1981). A mook standing on the edge of a cliff catches the hero sneaking up, intent on braining him with a lump of wood. Instead of grabbing his rifle the mook begins waving his arms about and howling in a highly exaggerated martial arts style. The hero gapes in astonishment then, as the mook turns to deliver a spinning kick, boots him down the mountainside.
In Charlotte Gray, which takes place in Nazi-occupied France, the eponymous heroine and a member of the French resistance are being held in a house by Nazis, and manage to distract the guard who's supposed to be watching them by making out, then jump him and run for it when he comes over to separate them.
Idiocracy "Hey, uh... I'm actually supposed to be getting out of jail, not going back in..."
Goldfinger. Played straight with the foolish guard who enters the cell alone while James Bond is performing a Ceiling Cling and subverted by later multiple guards who's more watchful such as staying in the same cell with one having a pistol trained on Bond at all times.
In Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, Larry's escapades in the various branches of the Smithsonian along the National Mall go completely unnoticed, as if the entire area is devoid of any human presence save Larry himself. Ironically, Larry is a guard.
Of course, would YOU stick around once the dinosaur skeletons and such started moving?
In Star Trek VI, the Enterprise manages to fly deep into Klingon territory to rescue Kirk and Mc Coy despite a listening post picking them up and demanding to know their identity and destination. They manage to fool the completely incompetant guards despite having to resort to using an English-Klingon dictionary to look up their answers and making several grammatical errors during the conversation.
Gamebooks
Lone Wolf: Although even smart guards would have a hard time against a psychic hero specialized in infiltration and camouflage, some over the series display the typical incompetence associated with this trope.
For example, in Shadow on the Sand, two Vassagonian gaolers believe their prisoner has escaped when they can't see him through the peephole, just because Lone Wolf is sitting against the door. And he isn't even doing it on purpose, but still gets the opportunity to ambush them when they open the cell.
In Dawn of the Dragons, the Eldenorian guards capturing Lone Wolf and bringing him before Prince Lutha take his gold, backpack and weapons... but not the weapon-like special items. Including the Sommerswerd!
In The Last Hero, Evil Harry Dread (the archetypical Evil Overlord) hires his henchmen on the above criteria. "Butcher" is the archetype of the trope.
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)."
Seemingly averted in The Last Continent, where the guards at Bugrup Prison are wise to every escape trope, but haven't worked out how Tinhead Ned (and later Rincewind) did escape (the jail door can be lifted off its hinges). Possibly because they reckon it makes a better ballad if the prisoner escapes and then gets killed in a last stand at the Post Office.
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 Hitchhiker's 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.
Actually it's just that the guard really enjoys his job. Including the whole throw people out of the airlock part.
Both fiercely subverted and then played straight in An Oblique Approach, the first book of the Belisarius series by David Drake and Eric Flint. The Kushans guarding Princess Shakuntala were so highly disciplined, effective, and intelligently led that Raghunath Rao, greatest assassin in India, knew he could never rescue her from them. So Belisarius tricked Venandakatra into replacing the Kushans with "guards" so inept that Rao had no problem wiping them out — except for two killed by the princess herself.
The guards at the "best guarded keep of the stoutest castle" in The Wind in the Willows apparently can't tell the difference between a washerwoman they see every day and is the sister or sister-in-law of the chief warden, and their main prisoner, who is an anthropomorphic toad.
John Carter of Mars. Dear GOD, if a strange man climbs up to the roof you're guarding, tells you what a difficult and dangerous climb he had, and invites you to take a look at how precariously his rope is dangling off the edge, DON'T DO IT!
Subverted in the novel Where Eagles Dare. The German soldiers searching for the commandos don't check the ladies toilet where they're hiding. When one commando mentions how stupid that is, his superior points out the soldiers were eager to think up excuses to avoid searching places where desperate men might empty a submachine gun into them.
In Syren, the fifth book of the Septimus Heap series, Septimus gets past a guard in the Trading Post by claiming that he is someone important.
Played for laughs in William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, making this trope Older Than Steam. Dogberry: You are to bid any man stand, in the Prince's name. Verges: How if a' will not stand? Dogberry: Why, take no note of him, but let him go.
Live-Action TV
The Chasers War on Everything proved this was Truth in Television at the APEC summit, getting to George W. Bush's hotel, past two security checkpoints in a fake motorcade, with "insecurity passes" that stated they were NOT official delegates. And a guy dressed as Osama bin Laden in the back seat. See it here.
The motorcade had runners with handheld cameras. Even the Chaser boys themselves started to get scared at how easy it was for them to get in — they'd been expecting to be stopped at the very first checkpoint! The were finally nabbed when their motorcade began turning around, and "Osama" decided to exit his vehicle and began asking guards why he hadn't been invited. As one commentor pointed out, it appears that day the world's leaders were mainly under the protection of the honour system.
Played with in the Doctor Who episode "Dragonfire", when the Doctor distracts a guard by engaging him in a philosophical discussion on the nature of existence, a subject about which the guard is particularly enthusiastic.
Doctor Who: Both averted and played straight in "State of Decay" — one of the guards recognises that the man claiming to be a guard is, in fact, a known deserter. But the other doesn't... and falls for "the old prisoner trick".
Lampshaded in the Doctor Who epsiode "Deadly Assassin" by Security Chief Spandrell's criticisms of Commander Hilred for allowing the Doctor to escape:
Spandrell: Well done, Hilred. An antiquated capsule, for which you get adequate early warning, transducts on the very steps of the Capital. You are warned that the occupant is a known criminal, therefore you allow him to escape and conceal himself in a building a mere 53 stories high. A clever stratagem, Hildred. You're trying to confuse him, I take it?
The A-Team. Many a villain has been laid low by not paying attention to machine sounds after Locking MacGyver in the Store Cupboard. There was 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.
Hogan's Heroes is pretty much entirely built around this trope.
In the Original Series, one particularly ridiculous scene has a guard of an enemy installation watch calmly and without taking action as Spock walks up to him and informs of an imaginary "multi-legged creature" on his shoulder.
Also seen in the episode "Space Seed" in which Khan, a man described as being strong enough to lift two men with one hand, has but a single guard keeping him prisoner. Suffice to say the guard doesn't last long. To their credit, when Khan is defeated and tried, he has multiple baliffs on him holding him at phaser point.
In "The Killing Game," two guards find Harry Kim suspicious and stop him to for questioning. He convinces them to let him go with this line: "All right! You'd better call the bridge. Tell your superior I'm going to be late, that I'm working under your orders now, not his. Go ahead, make the call. I don't want to take the blame for this."
Standard procedure for security personnel on Voyager is to stand in the formal "at-ease" position, looking straight ahead (not at the person they're guarding) so they can be knocked unconscious at a suitably plot-related moment.
"...to say nothing of the guards' color codes, which include Red Standby Alert (apparently meaning stand around and do nothing), Red Mobilisation (wander around outside the house), and Blue Mobilisation (allow the President and his daughter to escape in a vintage car accompanied by two terrorists)."
In season 3 of Lost, Sawyer tries the whole "prisoners making out" thing to get the guards to come over when he kisses Kate, then overpowers them and takes their gun. It doesn't work, though.
Subverted in Battlestar Galactica in that when someone escapes from a cell it's either (Bulldog, and later Ellen Tigh escaping from the Cylon basestar) or because the guards are in on things (Laura Roslin in Season 2, and Tom Zarek during The Mutiny). Probably the least plausible occasion is when Gina escapes from the Pegasus brig, makes her way to Admiral Cain's quarters and shoots her, and then slips off the battlestar unnoticed. Although she had the help of Baltar, a uniform and things were chaotic in the aftermath of a major attack, it still stretched the bounds of credibility.
And played straight when you consider that with all the little accidents happening there, no one comes up with the bright idea of placing a guard at the airlocks. This is justifiable in the beginning when Galactica is massively understaffed, but not so much in the later seasons.
In the Babylon 5 episode "Between the Darkness and the Light", Garibaldi plays on his recent media fame in capturing Sheridan to break him out again. This gets him past the outer guard, but the cell guards aren't so impressed.
Guard: I don't watch TV. It's a cultural wasteland filled with inappropriate metaphors and an unrealistic portrayal of life created by the liberal media elite.
Of course, he's also working for a regime that's anything but liberal and, by that point, all media in the Earth Alliance is government-controlled (except for the Voice of the Resistance).
Subverted in the Knight Rider episode, "Indecent Little Town," when the corrupt police arrest Michael Knight and impound KITT. Specifically, when the Mooks try to secure the robot car, he resists by backing up each time they try. Although obviously surprised at this, the head Mook calmly advises one of his minions to simply provoke KITT into backing continually until the robot car inadvertently rolls onto a car garage elevator platform and they elevate it, trapping KITT.
The team on Leverage regularly talk their way past security but they usually have fake I Ds and the guards are standard office building rent-a-cops. However, in one episode Hardison talks his way past security to get into an airport's control tower. He has an employee ID but it is for a female employee so he makes a big deal of how he is in the middle of a sex change and the guards are too embarrassed to pursue this further. The danger of their negligence becomes apparent when Hardison almost causes a plane to crash. There is a reason why security at airports is supposed to be very tight.
Also, the man in charge of the tower, apparently, doesn't know who's supposed to be working for him.
Played straight in episode 6.21 of Supernatural. The mooks who guarded Lisa and Ben heard fighting noises outside the room, and went there one by one.
Tabletop Games
Most classes that would traditionally be used as guards in Dungeons & Dragons don't have Spot, Listen or Sense Motive as class skills. This essentially makes them partially blind, hearing impaired, and incredibly gullible.
Depends on the DM. Most play the trope straight because guards tend not to be treated as more than minor enemies. Those skills are mainly intended to counteract Hide, Move Silently, and Bluff. In addition, those skills are not infallible unless the DM hands NPCs the Idiot Ball. For example, no matter what your Hide skill is, if you walk in front of a guard without some form of cover, he sees you, no matter what.
Scouts used as guards can avert this trope hard. They possess Spot, Listen and Sense Motive as class skills. They get 8 base skill points per level. Hide and Move Silently are class skills. In addition, they have Hide and Move Silently as class skills, so they can stand guard without being readily visible. Their Skirmish feat also gives them a significant advantage in straight combat against most stealthy classes if there is some room to move around.
In Xiangqi, the checkmated General/King's own Advisors/Guards are often part of the reason it's checkmate; there would be escape if they weren't there, and sometimes the one the enemy Cannon is using as a gun mount cannot move because it's in a corner of the Palace and the other Advisor/Guard is in its way.
Video Games
Very heavily averted by the guards in 1998's Robin Hood game by Red Ant. The guards were extremely clever. They even noticed if one of their partners was missing. Basically, the way it worked was that the guards would walk in a predetermined path, and if they did not meet up with their partner after a few laps, then they got frustrated and would go looking for their friends. If they did not find them, then they would curse loudly, and tell their immediate superior. If the Lieutenant got at least three "My mate's vanished!" reports, then a man would be sent to ring the alarm bell. On top of that, If a group of guards spotted you, some would stay while one or two ran off to set off the alarm. On top of that, these guards would often surround you and your men, and while one held you, the other would stab into you repeatedly, often resulting in death. They fought dirty, they played dirty, and if you were spotted just once, patrols would be sent out to find you. Pretty amazing for a game made in 1998, huh?
Shinobido's guards are not really clever, but they're smart enough for some nasty (for you) actions, including:
Going on "Alert" mode if they spot a dead fellow.
Ring the alarm bells if they spot you.
Try to attack you in large numbers whenever is possible.
Chase you around even on rooves and inside buildings.
Call for help if they're alone.
Another aversion comes with the Guard Dogs in King's Quest VI. Alex has to get creative, either by magic or by using his small build and what amounts to a burqa to get past. Even then, he'd better not get busted. Saladin, true to his namesake, is not an idiot.
Another aversion from Sierra: most of the Space Quest games. In the third, the Scumsoft guards have their eyes locked on Roger, waiting for a screw-up. If Roger passes a wastebasket without cleaning it, the gig's up. The Puckoids in the fifth are trigger-happy and extremely nasty, and only screw up by leaving their engineering section under light guard - but justified as the they totally were not expecting anyone to break in through the hull. The Sequel Police in the fourth (or 10th and 12th) vary wildly between straight and aversion, as they leave a time pod unguarded at one point, but are very dogged in hunting Roger down, and shoot on sight, leaving Roger to get creative in dodging them. Another line-straddler is the opening scene of the first game. Roger needs to go a lot of dodging to get past the Sariens that have brutally massacred everyone else on the Arcada. Still, they do forget to check obvious hiding places.
Then you have the two thugs who capture Roger in Space Quest 6. Roger is able to quickly remove his handcuffs and neutralize the one who wasn't even watching him. Then you walk out into the other room, where the other thug is unconcerned with you roaming free, simply telling you not to bother him. Partly (with a stretch) justified in that the exit is blocked by a forcefield that can only be shut off by a remote on the second thug's belt.
Also, attempting to knock out one of the guards to the SCS DeepShip 86 shuttlebay results in the other one (a bigger one) punching Roger out and throwing him into the brig (which is also ridiculously easy to escape by building a likeness of Roger out of food and hiding under a food cart). No one also bats an eyelash at Roger stealing medical supplies at sickbay.
Played completely straight in Metal Gear Solid, where you can take out guards one by one trigger alarms as often as you want, but after 90 seconds everything is back to normal, with dead guards not being replaced.
Starting with Metal Gear Solid 2, however, it gets averted very hard. When guards notice something odd, they will call in immediately before going to investigate. If they don't report back in time, more guards will be dispatched to look for them. And even when everything is clear, guards are required to report in every few minutes, or a search team is dispatched to investiagte. And when full alarm is sounded, it takes just a few seconds for reinforcements to arrive with riot shields, shotguns, and grenades. Unless there's an opportunity for an Air Vent Passageway escape nearby, you can prepare to load an old save by that point.
And yet, throughout the entire series, all guards have tunnel-vision and are practically near-sighted and half-deaf, so even walking slowly from a little bit to the side will let you go unnoticed. It was even worse in the original Metal Gear on the MSX, where the guards' line of sight is literally just a straight line. They'll also never suspect something's up when they find their squadmates dozing off with a tranquilizer dart on their forehead, or reading Playboy magazines they found on the ground.
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. And even then, in some of the titles, all you have to do is hide out for a while, and they'll conclude that "The murderer must be long gone by now" and resume their patrol, without even calling for assistance.
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.
Occasionally the game goes to the opposite direction with the guards, as they recognize the main character as a thief even when he's walking in public areas (such as city streets) and doing nothing suspicious.
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 egregious example is a guard who admits he would be completely unable to stop the party, then orders them to go kill a guard dog to cover him, or he wouldn't let them pass. Wait a minute, couldn't we just kick you?
The guards in Assassin's 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.
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.
Or maybe they do realize it and don't want to fight the guy who killed a dozen guards singlehandedly.
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!
Heck, the ones on the guard towers spot you no matter what you're doing.
On the other hand, actions that are considered "high profile" will get you caught by the guards, even in situations where they wouldn't make you stand out. Example, if you run away after killing someone, the guards will spot you, even if everyone around you is also running away and screaming. Somehow, being the only person in the area walking away calmly and slowly from a murder scene makes you unnoticeable.
The second game manages to avoid some of things. Among others, some guards will look in the normal hiding places (the bench, the haystack and the rooftop...shower or whatever) if Ezio seems to disappear when they are hot on his heels. On the other hand, they also take it to new levels. You don't have the crazy guy or beggars running into you now. No, you have minstrels who run up and, in front of the guards, start singing about what a bad man you are, wiping out guards, fighting against the authorities...
Not that it does the guards much good to check behind the curtains or in the suspiciously rustling haystack... Doing so is almost always an invitation for a large, armed, armoured man (Ezio) to suddenly lunge up out of the cover, grab the surprised guard, ram an 8 inch blade straight through him in a mist of gore, and drag the corpse back inside with him. And their partner, standing 2 feet away, DOESN'T NOTICE A THING!... Until Ezio subsequently jumps out of the haystack, as a mandatory part of the attack, that is.
Some of this could be a Justified Trope depending on how the Animus functions. The actual guards may have been completely competent, with the incompetent elements being results of errors from the Animus. Most of the game (notably the parts where you control Altair and Ezio) are simulations constructed from genetic memories in Desmond. There are also gameplay mechanics that represent Desmond not remembering what is happening correctly. The actual actions taken by Altair, Ezio and the Templar, including appearance, do not necessarily reflect what actually happened. Altair and Ezio may very well have made extensive use of disguises, but only the really important ones are committed to memory.
It should also be pointed out that a competent guard would probably opt for a line of work with a mortality rate below 90%.
Special award may go for Sforza's guards which after battle they participated in keep asking "Who have done it? Have anyone seen it?".
There is an implicit explanation as to why the guards can't seem to find the protagonist skulking in the dark; Altair and his descendants have fantastic eyesight, as represented in the form of "Eagle Vision". This also means that areas most might see as dark are perfectly navigable for him. In Revelations, a Templar even orders torches be bought into an area because he's "tired of stumbling around in the dark", and Ezio can see pretty fine even before then.
Probably one of the worst offenses of the guards, though, is that they only attack one at a time, and wait about 10 seconds between each attack.
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 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.
That said, kill someone out of the way with no witnesses outside of sneak mode, and every guard for miles around will rapidly converge on you with cries of "STOP RIGHT THERE CRIMINAL SCUM!"
Even better is when two NPCs are talking, and you shoot one while sneaking. The other one turns and walks away, mid-conversation.
The guards in Morrowind are never sure what to do with a naked (wo)man with a large pile of stolen goods at his feet except fine him a few septims and leave him to his business.
In Skyrim, some of the same problems that were in Oblivion return. If you attack an enemy while sneaking, they will look for their attacker for a few seconds, then stop looking and go back to whatever it was they were doing. This may include sitting down to return to dinner...with an arrow in their head...that was poisoned...and on fire...
Skyrim lets you do crazy things with high skills and the right perks. It's quite possible to find two people talking, walk (not sneak) over to one, behead him/her with a battleaxe, and have the other just stare at you.
There's also a quirk in the programming which that means sometimes the character can see you even though the AI cannot. Successfully sneaking past a person while their head slowly swivels to follow your every move is... weird, to say the least.
In City of Heroes, mobs of enemies will usually ignore fights going on in plain sight halfway across the room with automatic weapons.
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.
This is lampshaded by a boss in the aforesaid Shattered Halls dungeon, who will actually comment as you individually kill his henchmen. "Go ahead. I was going to kill him anyway." In fact if you don't attack them he will kill them, one by one, then attack you.
There is one CoH mission where you are given a temporary power that is basically a guard suit. You can walk past any guard and get the objectives of the mission completed without anyone being the wiser. This wouldn't be bad if it didn't work on any enemy NPC in the game. Including a faction that actively hates the faction you are dressing up as.
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.
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.
Even if their suicidal lack of curiosity didn't earn them a Darwin Award, their general behaviour would. They spend most of their guarding time walking or turning in slow circles or standing in one place facing a wall. And their commanders aren't any more intelligent. One happily reports to his superior that all intruders in the area have been captured... while one stands in the middle of an empty room in his direct line of view.
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.
Speaking of Zelda, the guards in Ocarina of Time don't react unless you're several feet in front of them.
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 crap out of most anyone. Certainly a twelve-year-old like Link).
It's pretty much ethablished that also the guards of Hyrule castle are, well... dumb, without exception. No matter what time period the game in question plays in (not that we would know)), the guards never seem to notice anyone walking by, if he's not right before their eyes. Even Princess Zelda has been mentioned to sneak out of the castle with no problems frequently. The only time the guards actually keep something from going in- or outside is in Majora's Mask. And this almost ensured the Termian apocalypse.
One of the most blatant examples is the Gerudo Fortress section in Ocarina of Time. For some reason, even after the 20th time you escape, they still can't be bothered to take away your hookshot...
Or care to act when Link shoots one of the guards in the open. They just ignore the fallen body. Their pirate counterparts in Majora's Mask do the same plus will completely ignore Link if he's wearing a certain mask despite following him with their eyes, partially justified in that said mask's ability is to make Link as uninteresting as a stone.
Speaking of Majora's Mask, the guards are very diligent about keeping children from wandering out of town to the 'dangerous' wilds, to the point that they will do nothing to stop a little old lady from getting robbed in plain sight, by a thief who makes no attempt to conceal his identity. Even assuming there was some pressing issue preventing them from stopping the robbery, there's no reason they wouldn't recognize him when he walks back into town the very next day to sell the stolen goods to the curio shop next door.
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.
Pokémon 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 Pokémon universe ever has any sort of weapon or armament except for a team of Pokémon. 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 Pokémon 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.
Justified - your Pokemon are knocked out, this invading punk still has at least one ready to go. Self-preservation dictates you not tick him off further, as he may be quicker on the draw than you are.
Not only that, but the random guards usually have completely awful Pokémon. 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 Pokémon are after being beaten and before letting you continue.
Don't forget the totally idiotic guard who goes, "Who has the lift-key?! I'm not telling you who!" and battles you, and after the battle he goes, "Oh NO! I dropped it!" and he... lets the player pick up the lift-key... WTF?
Because he doesn't want to get mauled by your dragon/wolf/devil dog/tame metal SCP-682.
Wes and Michael have brassier balls than the other protagonists by far as a result of the methods Cipher includes in its peon training. They are trained with good Pokemon regularly, a larger variety is made available, some are armed with Shadow Pokemon, they ignore the tripwire mentality, Ceiling Peon is watching you infiltrate, they disguise themselves as civvies on occasion, they come in groups... need I go on?
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.
Most hilariously is the animal whistle. Throw an exploding shuriken at any enemy. They grunt in pain as it hits them. Then they explode. Then you blow the animal whistle. "Oh, it was just a chicken."
The animal whistle also works to pacify a guard who has discovered a dead comrade. "Who killed Joey? Oh, just a dog." And on enemies who have already found you and are actively chasing you.
Furthermore, in the original game the animal whistle makes a different sound on each mission, some of which are wildly inappropriate. On some levels enemies are put at ease by the sound of a growling bear, a howling wolf, or a screaming woman. The final level takes place in a lava-filled cavernous maze beneath a castle, and the enemies can be fooled into thinking you are an elephant.
Don't forget the poisoned balls of rice. If you leave one on the floor eventually a guard will stumble past, pick it up and chow down, didn't their mothers ever tell them not to eat food off the floor?
It doesn't have to be on the floor when they find it. In the original game especially, rice balls could be thrown from rooftops at such a trajectory that they would bounce when they hit the ground. The guards would not even wait for it to come to a complete stop before they began to approach it, their heads locking onto the ball and following it up and down as it sailed through the air.
Try to throw a rice ball at a guard performing his yawn animation. Upon collision, it will immediately pop into the guard's hand, giving the illusion that he randomly, accidentally caught a rice ball while yawning, then decide to eat it.
A particularly noteworthy scene in the original game involves a sleeping guard with three or four dogs patrolling around him. One of the simpler ways to take care of him is to go up a nearby hill and throw a shuriken at one of his dogs. The dog will die, causing the other dogs to bark in alarm and the guard to wake up. Simply roll backwards, however, and none of them will see you. After a short while, the guard will go back to sleep. Even as his dogs are picked off, one by one, he still decides that this is a perfectly good time and place to take a nap.
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.
Also in the later games, any alarm raised on a level will cause all of the guards in the level to be more alert, jumpy, and trigger-happy. They'll also whip out the bullet-proof vests (who knows why they weren't wearing them in the first place?).
Because bullet-proof vests are heavy, and most of the time you won't need them. It's only when it turns out that today is one of the rare days that you expect you might be taking a bullet that most folks will go get a vest.
In Conviction the guards are better and worse in a sense. When they know Fisher is in the area they'll scout the area, but other times they'll wait in the same position facing the same direction. Usually this is when they have a chokepoint, but other times if you've been killing them they'll wait you out rather than run into close quarters. A smart move if they didn't leave their flanks unprotected.
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.
Guards in GoldenEye 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.
You can also shoot their hats off their heads without getting a response.
Likewise, you can unload on the helmeted ones and they won't notice all the metallic clanking noises happening right at their head, nor feel the force of the gunshots.
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".
The worst part in all of this is that the Majestic 12 armored troops will notice said colleagues' bodies... so it's not an engine limitation. Other guards are just * that* stupid.
The AI has improved significantly in the third game. The game still plays with the trope though with some guards being programmed to be incompetent. For example, there are a number of guards that are easy to sneak up on because they are talking, watching TV, smoking, or engaging in some other activity that is distracting them.
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.
Even funnier, if you shoot a guard who is not aware of you, they will occasionally say in a curious tone "Was that a bullet?"
In Mother 3, at one point Lucas and his dog attempt to get into a nightclub, only to be informed by the bouncers that "No Dogs Allowed". The two slink away and seconds later, Lucas and his Dog (now wearing human clothes and walking upright) walk up and try to enter. The guards aren't fooled, and even mention that Lucas was just here with his dog, and now walks up with a dude who looks suspiciously like a dog. They only get in due to one of the staff members vouching for them, and even then the guards seem suspicious. But after that they do admit that even if Lucas did just get lucky pulling a fast one on them, the dog is freaking awesome.
The Krimzon Guard in Jak II:Renegade will forget about the Guard-slaughtering Phlebotinum Rebel the city's supreme ruler considers Public Enemy Number One if you enter a safehouse for two seconds. You can also walk down the street with gun raised, distinctive haircut and Team Pet sitting on your shoulder (almost impossible to fake, not that anyone wants to try), and they won't give a piece of crap. Rule of Fun applies, because being gunned down by KG every time you step out of a safe house would produce an even more frustrating game.
It's implied that many of the actual guards (as opposed to their commanders) are lazy and corrupt, so they probably just didn't care (and didn't want to get killed).
In Ōkami, the Imp guards outside the main part of the Moon Cave dismiss Amaterasu as a normal wolf (perfectly reasonable though, in that only a few can see her markings), but when she comes back wearing a piece of paper over her face, they immediately let Ammy through, telling her to "Get back to [her] post!"
The military in Prototype takes this to ridiculous extremes. Random Marine jumping off a skyscraper, flying into the base, landing hard enough to make an impact crater, and proceeding to run up the walls? When it's well-known that your highest-priority target is a Voluntary Shapeshifter? Perfectly normal, apparently.
One assumes that the individual soldiers on patrol do realise that it's you, but really, what would you do in this situation: an insanely powerful shapeshifter (who is perfectly capable of soloing whole platoons of tanks and helicopter gunships, not to mention the not-unusual 10,000+ onomnom count on the random infantry shmucks exactly like you) runs past, not stopping to eat or eviscerate you. Him not stopping makes you the luckiest man alive at that moment in time. If you try and stop him by yourself, what chance exactly do you have against someone who tanks missiles to the face, and can jump off a helicopter he tore apart mid-flight, land on a tank, pick up said tank and throw it into another helicopter? If you call in backup, you only draw attention to yourself and/or place yourself in the middle of what will turn into a bloody warzone with artillery strikes, carpet bombing and airstrikes all over the place, not to mention one suddenly-pissed-off One-Man Army. The solo guards who don't call in the insanely overpowered, flying, super mutant are simply showing an advanced sense of self-preservation.
Need to get rid of a soldier, but he and a buddy have covering fields of vision so you can't stealth kill either of them? If you disguise yourself as a soldier and bump into one enough, he'll turn toward you and shove you away, then remain facing that direction. Even if there's just a wall right in front of his face.
You can also use a combination of the "Patsy" power and the "stealth consume" to stealth-kill an entire combat base full of Marines and Blackwatch personnel. This causes much humor when you realize that an entire base full of heavily armed guards is slowly disappearing and nobody notices. Even if it's just you and another guard left. But whatever you do, don't try Patsy on him. Because only then will he think something is wrong.
Evil Genius plays this absolutely straight and quite deliberately. Your Evil Minions will outright ignore any agent of the forces of justice unless they've been tagged for execution or capture. These include squads of heavily-armed soldiers, thieves in brightly-colored Spy Catsuits, Highly Visible Ninja, and musclebound supersoldiers Dual Wielding machineguns.
The infiltrating agents showcase an unusual variant of this. Locked doors are understandably much more interesting to them than an unlocked door. However, the end result is that if you lower the security level on the door an agent is trying to break through, they will usually lose interest immediately and wander off.
Super Mario Bros..: Why Princess Peach still pays her guards is a source of continual mystification to videogame fans. She'd have better luck with a "Do not kidnap the Princess" sign than her usual group of Toads.
Also, the kings in Super Mario Bros.. 3. They have, in the entirety of the royal castles, one guard for each king in each country, and being as that guard is a Toad, said guard gets instantly knocked out by a Koopaling just charging at it.
On the other side of the conflict, the Koopa guards in Paper Mario are also pretty pathetic. If they catch Peach sneaking around the castle, they'll usually just escort her back to her room and go back to whatever they were doing beforehand without ever questioning how she keeps getting out. At one point, they decide not to take her back, because they're about to hold a quiz show and still need one more contestant.
In Black Sigil, there's an instance where your party "acquires" some Empire soldiers' outfits to sneak onto an airship. As you're doing so, the guards stop Aurora and ask her a couple questions. They then have this following exchange after you've boarded the airship:
Guard A: That slim guy sure had a girlish build... Guard B: And a girlish voice... Guard A: And a girlish face... Guard B: You thinking what I'm thinking? Guard A: The military will toughen him up. Guard B: Yeah...
The guards on The Bouncer always follow their job so loyally, in fact even if the place is gonna sink they'll stop at nothing to stop our heroes.
Guardia Prison security in Chrono Trigger. They throw you into the dungeon... while letting you keep your sword. That doesn't turn out well for them.
You can thank Yakra XIII for that oversight. He didn't think taking over as the modern Chancellor all the way through.
When your party is captured later in the game due to extreme Cutscene Incompetence on their part, the villain takes your weapons, inventory and money. At least he is a bit smarter about how to handle prisoners. It really helps if you have Ayla in your party at this point.
Even then, the guards on the Blackbird aren't much better. For one thing, they fall for the fake-being-sick-so-the-guards-come-into-the-cells-and-you-punch-them-out ploy, which is pretty much the oldest trick in the book. When you escape your cell, you can also run around the ship right past many of the guards, and they won't notice unless you get within sneezing distance of them. It's arguably Justified later on by one of the guards you can talk to in the commons after you defeat Dalton, the guards' boss. The guard tells you that Dalton treated his employees badly and didn't pay them well, which means they probably weren't inclined to work very hard in the first place.
Many guards in Sly Cooper carry flashlights. If you stand just outside their circle of light, they can not see you at all. There are similar guards with good hearing, which Sly automatically tries to sneak up on/past. Occasionally you run into both.
In the fourth chapter of Tales of Monkey Island, Guybrush must escape from jail while awaiting trial by asking to speak to his lawyer (he's representing himself). When Guybrush is ready to stop conversing with his "client", the guard will let him out.
In Final Fantasy VII, one has to wonder why the hell none of the guards on the Cargo Ship bothered to continue the search for the intruder (Sephiroth) after Cloud & co. defeated Jenova. There's no way they could have known that he was gone at that point, so why bother calling off the search? "Yeah, just ignore all the dead bodies and the undiscovered intruder. Just dock as planned!"
Heidegger was in charge of ship security at the time, so he's just as much at fault as the rest of the incompetent guard. Rufus comments on the failings of command when the ship docks.
Rufus: So Sephiroth was on board... Heidegger: Yes. Rufus: And it seems Cloud and his gang were on board, too. Heidegger: ...Yes. Rufus: They slipped through... you messed up big this time, Heidegger.
In Final Fantasy VI, you can literally stand in the way or in front of the guard in the imperial base, and he won't notice you unless you talk to him.
At one point in Cave Story, Cutscene Incompetence results in you getting curbstomped and thrown into a jail cell. The guards don't bother to take anything away from you, so you still have all your weapons when you wake up in the cell.
Subverted in Sanity: Aiken's Artifact. The main guard blocks you pretty well, until you read the guard's mind to find out the employee password.
In Runescape, This is acknowledged during a cut-scene in the "Garden of Tranquillity" Quest, where a "veteran" guard explains to a new recruit that the life expectancy for a Falador guard is about 30 seconds, which upon saying that a high-levelled "player" comes and slaughters both of them.
In Dragon Quest IX, Your character is imprisoned some time into the game. At first glance, you would think this was averted. However, press Y and open your equipment menu... This results in a few funny instances, such as guards bossing someone in full plate armor and carrying a sword that shoots fire.
The Fable series has quite a bit of this. In Fable I, should you break a window, someone nearby will tell the guards, which they will charge after you and proceed to hack you into little bits should you decide not to pay them. Same thing if you just committed total genocide on a village, but should you apologize to the guards, they immediately forgive you and continue on their merry way.
In Fable II, should you accidentally or on purpose, murder ONE villager, the guards will then constantly say, "I won't let you murder anyone else!"
Spire guards will too proceed to be dumb as wood, never mind the fact that this guy (or girl) broke out of an unbreakable collar, probably killed about 50 of your mates with powerful spells, just hacked them to pieces or shot their balls off. Charge to certain death! Doubly so after the most powerful will user on the planet gets his powers back.
Near the end of Dragon Age, the Warden and Alistair can be captured and thrown in prison. A persuasive Warden (of either sex) can ask the guard for company, and the guard will immediately lock himself in the cell with two prisoners accused of regicide. Then you can jump him and steal his keys.
Dragon Age II's Mark of the Assassin DLC includes a Stealth-Based Mission in which Hawke must sneak past the guards of the Orlesian Chateau Haine. Fortunately, the guards are easily convinced by whatever ridiculous story Hawke can come up with, are highly susceptible to distraction by thrown pebbles, apparently have very poor night vision, and are remarkably unconcerned about waking up on the floor in the middle of their patrol after being tapped on the back of the head: "Damned blackouts..."
At one point in the 1989 computer RPG Dragon Wars, the party gets captured and thrown into a jail cell (for the second time) and this trope comes into play, as the guards seemingly forget to lock your cell door! It turns out to be a subversion when you enter the next room, where the guards happen to be waiting for you. It seems these guards got into a lot of trouble for beating prisoners in their cells. But if the prisoners were trying to escape...
Marines in the 2010 Alien vs. Predator are remarkably blasé about having all their mates disappear one-by-one only to show up again as scattered corpses lacking in skulls/spines, or with a rather telling hole in their head. They also decide to check out on strange distorted verbal taunts originating from nearby isolated corners alone, without bringing backup, and will stand around with their backs turned mumbling "I'm sure it came from over here..." for a good few minutes. Even if said isolated corner already contains three to four corpses of previously mentioned dead marines with their skulls missing.
The Hitman series has what can only be described as highly jittery bunch of guards, often resorting to gunfire at the slightly infraction or social gaff. While the series has steadily improved with each release (giving warnings, pushing you out when entering a restricted zone), it is still often the case that being seen entering the wrong room without the right outfit, playing with a light switch or running will cause all the guards to immedietly open fire on your shiny-bald self. Clearly, social niceties are Serious Business in the Hitman universe.
The Hitman guards are odd overall and tend to have an all crimes are equal attitude to everything, i.e. they shoot on sight even if the room is full of screaming civilians. And, in one mission, if you alert the police (say by trying to enter a nightclub wearing the wrong costume) then they will proceed to gun you down as you flee through a crowded street during a parade (the civilians make nice bullet shields). But just to Hitman, case point being the last mission in Blood Money; sneak a gun in a briefcase yourself? The guards shoot you full of holes. Sneak the gun in in someone else's case? Said civilian is escorted for questioning and said case is conveniently left for your retrieval.
Oh and the general stupidity. Step one, flick the lights off. Step two, strangle the guard as he comes to switch them back on. Step three, wait for guard to find body. Repeat.
Also, in Blood Money they are fairly *ahem* unceremonious with the bodies of their dead buddies. The standard treatment is bag and tag in a black body bag and then *drag* said body bag across the floor, up stairs, through water, past civilians, sometimes leaving a blood trail on the carpet, and no one seems to care or be the slightest bit concerned.
Anyone also notice that, except for a few rare occasions, they never do something like, say, call for backup? Dial 999 even? Granted the leader of the Triads living in his remote mountain castle is hardly going to put a call into the police (even if they were in his pocket) but when the guards find 6 bodies littering the lobby at the casino? Nope...
And they down upon contact with water. Even if they were just swimming in it earlier.
In Dark Messiah lots of guards fall under this trope, they stand around near obvious hazards such as a wall about to collapse, when fighting the hero they stand close to spikes, pits, fires which they can easily be kicked into and they don't bother checking for traps infront of them when they spot the player, leading to a line of guards getting killed by the same trap.
Possibly invoked by the party in Knights Of The Old Republic, when captured on the Leviathan. Several of the schemes floated to break your crew out of the ship's prison involve making the guards crazy, including Jolee's (which uses a Jedi Mind Trick on them) and Mission's (which involves good old-fashioned headgames). On the other hand, three of these plans involve the "it's probably nothing" ploy: you can convince the Sith to take a "dead" body, "disabled" droid, or perfectly functional but "harmless" astromech into their ship. Juhani's plan is the only one that doesn't count, because Jedi ninja catgirl response drills are probably few and far between.
Web Comics
This is a running gag in Exiern, starting from here and getting worse, with the various guardsmen falling for almost every single trick listed above at some point throughout the strip.
Tiffany: And that is why you are not allowed to keep the key.
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.
Guineas is not very motivated. It's hard to like your "boss" when he is the guy who enslaved you, killed your creators in front of you to instill fear, and beats you regularly. He's fairly intelligent but mostly pretends to be dumb to lower expectations and shirk the work.
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. Similarly, Doorbot is supposed to insure that only robots enter one entrance. Annie convinces him to let her pass by wearing antennae and repeatedly pointing out that she's obviously a robot.
Averted in Goblinshere: 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.
In the prequel book On the Origin of PCs, Haley breaks in to a building to steal a large diamond. She accidentally wakes the guard up, but he buys her story that she is just a rather Freudian dream.
Guard: You look hot in leather, Mom...
Hilariously spoofed in the Empire of Blood arc. Haley and Elan attempt to bluff their way past guards working for a Dangerously Genre Savvy villain. The plan they're trying is specifically listed in their training manual, since Tarquin knows the sort of people usually hired as guards in his Evil Empire. That's why he gave them detailed instructions. Followed by a Double Subversion when Haley returns to the same guards after having consumed a Potion of Glibness and proceeds to Bluff their pants off.
Guards at the castle in Girl Genius show a deplorable underreaction when someone claiming he's that son and heir of their boss who stopped a little armored army single-handedly on the whole city's eyes right before these guys' shift "asked nice" to enter. That he leads a crowd, brandishes an unknown device and maniacally grins didn't spur their brains to work faster either. To be fair the guards weren't really listening. In fact, if you follow that elegant and finely-crafted link above, you'll notice that about one panel later he says, "Wait, you're who?"
Later, Gilgamesh discovers that all but one of his father's guards consider the fact that he's wearing an extremely impressive hat with his name written on it (misspelled) to constitute definitive proof of his identity. He promises the one who didn't a promotion.
In The Garden, guards fail to notice even the most obvious noises. In this page, Bathrobe Guy confronts his guards about why they let his prisoners escape. In response, they respond in all seriousness with "They said you let them go."
In Get Medieval, Torquel Hane pulled free of his chains (by dislocating his thumbs); when a guard came to investigate his cry of pain, Torquel distracted him by pointing his obviously unchained hand and saying another prisoner had escaped. The guard turned to look, and CLUNK!
The LifesBlood Labs goons in LG15: the resistance are pretty incompetent. The "Mace in Yo Face!" and "Done Dirt Cheap" incidents are particularly shameful.
Although the "Mace in Yo Face" incident is justified because those weren't real LBL henchmen.
The Evil Overlord List has all sorts of tips on how to turn the guards from this sort of behaviour and turn them into a ruthless fighting force prepared to guard anything anytime.
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 DuckTales 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.
The Trope was played with in Stroker and Hoop, when Stroker has to knock a guard out to get deeper into a complex. After dressing as the guard, he gets into the next room where the guard is seemingly fooled by Stroker holding a clipboard over his face and using a bad falsetto... until he starts to continue, at which point the guard asks him if he thinks he's an idiot, and that he was on the monitor. To which Stroker asks if he's even supposed to be watching the monitors.
In the Earthworm Jim episode "Conqueror Worm", Jim, Peter, and Snot have to get Jim's supersuit back from the labs where it was put after Jim was arrested, (It Makes Sense in Context) but first have to get past the security guards!... Which they stroll right past. The sight of a giant worm, talking dog, and living booger spurs only one reaction from the guards.
Guard:(on phone) Hello, DNA lab? Whatever you guys are doing in there— Cut it out!
Adventures Of The Galaxy Rangers had several examples of Queenie's Mooks being either thoroughly incompetent... or very competent, Depending on the Writer. With the first examples, Doc could hijack their communicator signals and pull lines of BS on them ("New Frontier," "Badge of Power"), sending them on a wild goose chase... or right into Goose's blasters. The more competent ones, like in "Tortuna", could be bribed or needed to be fought.
The guards of the "high security" prison in the Avatar The Last Airbender episodes "The Boiling Rock". Sokka and Zuko somehow obtain uniforms and pass themselves off as newbies. The Alone With Prisoner Ploy occurs in the first of the two episodes. Strangely enough, Zuko slips up and is caught - but Sokka, who was the one alone with Suki, isn't suspected at all. Later on, Sokka pulls up his mask and goes to the side to talk to two prisoners. They're obviously not hiding particularly well because they are caught...by another prisoner. The second episode is rife with its own examples of The Guards Must Be Crazy as well.
There's a bit of Fridge Horror regarding how Sokka was able to get alone time with Suki. She almost seems like she was expecting a random guard to come in and try kissing her. Maybe the male guards don't date the female ones because they can get satisfaction somewhere else...
Parodied in Family Guy, where one of Peter's Manatee Gags has him claiming it is easier to escape from Canada's Alcatraz. Cue the scene where an inmate simply walks up to a guard and asks if he can leave through this door. The guard simply says sure, just be back before bedtime, and letting the inmate leave.
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.
The Guards were also relying on San Francisco bay's freezing water doing the hard work for them. Which may have happened.
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 McDonald's fax machine, resulting in a convict walking out scot-free, without anyone thinking about double-checking even the clearly visible fax-number.
During the Cold War a couple of East Germans made their own uniforms mimicking those of the East German Guards and simply saluted the guards on duty, then walked through the checkpoint to West Berlin.
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.
To be even more fair, what's a guard supposed to do when they hear a sound? Go off and investigate the opposite direction in case someone was throwing an object to make a distraction? Or just stand there wondering what that sound was?
During World War 2, there were plenty of stories of people hiding in basements from the Nazis and not being captured. As my Dad put it, "Maybe they didn't want to check the basement."
Other theories: who wants to invade a fortified bunker? Or the guards were secretly sick of so much killing.
Nazi troops invading other countries were ordered to kill any jews they saw but many didn't because it wasted bullets and took too much time.
More likely it was because they were just human.
Recently in Germany, an inmate managed to get out of prison by climbing into a cardboard box and getting shipped out. Apparently no-one checked to see all the prisoners working that detail came back or why the package was unusually heavy.
In 1982, an unhinged man climbed the wall of Buckingham palace. Someone saw him and reported it, but by the time guards came to look, he was gone and they decided he must have left already; they raised no alarm. When he went through a window, the security system alerted a policeman on duty, who assumed it was a malfunction and silenced the alarm twice in a row. Wandering through the halls, he passed a housekeeper, who greeted him. He eventually made it to the Queen's chamber, where she was sleeping unguarded, woke her up, and chatted to her as she tried to get help by two different methods (a button and the phone); nobody came for ten minutes. As Hollywood writer William Goldman said it, if you would put this in a movie, people probably would throw rotten eggs at the screen for breaking their Suspension of Disbelief.
Even better, they only crime he was charged with was stealing a bottle of cheap wine, because, at the time, trespassing was a civil offense rather than a criminal one. The charge was dropped when he was committed to a mental hospital.
Gilber Galvan escaped an American prison by waiting in a rec area until the guards left for coffee, then using a pool cue to open the drawer of their desk and fish out the keys. He later went on to be known as Canada's "Phantom Bandit".
So far, the Obama White House has been crashed three times by uninvited guests. The first and third cases took advantage of a Bavarian Fire Drill, while the second gatecrash was a result of some misguided tour organizers sending the tourists to a White House luncheon instead of on the tour.
Mas Selamat bin Kastari, one of the most influential terrorists in Southeast Asia escaped Singapore's most well-guarded prison by going to the toilet, changing quickly, and climbing out the window. When he was recaptured more than a year later, it was revealed that he climbed into the storm drains, went 20+ kilometers north in 3 days, created improvised flotation devices from trash, and swam across from Singapore to Malaysia and met up with other operatives. Apparently, it was so unexpected, that theories ranged from his escape a cover for the fact that he had died in detention, he used black magic to get out, or he was allowed to escape so that he could lead authorities to other terrorists.
As noted above, the Obama administration has already had three unauthorized entries to the White House. It's already crazy security didn't get tighter after the first incident, let alone the fourth.
