Neverwinter Nights 2 / Tropes 0 to F

Tropes 0-F | Tropes G-L | Tropes M-R | Tropes S-Z | Mask of the Betrayer | Storm of Zehir | Mysteries of Westgate

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Neverwinter Nights 2 provides examples of the following tropes:

• Affably Evil: Mephasm, an Always Lawful Evil Devil who is soft-spoken, helpful to the player, and not even interested in making you sell your soul to him. He even responds to Ammon Jerro's slaying of his own granddaughter Shandra with seemingly genuine regret and no malice at all. On the side, he implies that he is Neeshka's devilish grandfather.
• Alien Gender Confusion: * A (probably) facetious example can occur between a male Player Character and a demon.
  Male PC: No, I'm not female.
  Baalbisan: But it looks female. How can I be certain?
  Male PC: I suppose I could show you. Stand back — I'll need a lot of room.
  Baalbisan: It offers to reveal its parts, but my vision is not what it was. I doubt I could make out something so diminutive.
  Neeshka: Well, from what I have heard, it is not that small at all.
  Elanee: What did you say?
  Neeshka: (quietly) Hey, I don't know, I'm just trying to help.
• Alignment-Based Endings: The game has the canonical good ending where the Knight-Captain and Player Party defeat the King of Shadows. The non-canon evil ending has the Knight-Captain pull a Face–Heel Turn and join the King of Shadows after killing the party. The Expansion Pack Mask of the Betrayer has several variations on its endings.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Bishop's popularity with the fans.
  • So much that a mod was created so that he could be a romance option.
    • He was originally intended to be a romance option, but it got cut before the game shipped.
• Already Done for You: The fifth statue of Illefarn, blessing claimed by Ammon Jerro.
• Always Close
• Amazon Brigade:
  • You can create a balanced all-female team pretty early using Qara, Neeshka, Elanee, and a female Knight-Captain built as a tank. Act II adds Shandra Jerro and Zhjaeve to the mix.
  • Even easier in Storm of Zehir, which lets you handcraft your own party.
• Androcles' Lion: During your investigation into the Ember massacre, you'll find a giant intelligent spider named Kistrel in a cave. If you don't kill it, it proves quite benign, and later shows up in Crossroad Keep's basement and knits you a nifty cloak.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Unlike its predecessor, the game has a quickcast hotkey button. When pressed, all of your readied spells will be here, including ones from your other classes. This free up the quickbar for items and special abilities.
  • Spells with area effects have markers to tell you how large the blast radius are. Very useful if you're playing the hardcore rules and don't want to injure your party members.
• Anti-Grinding: Enemies never respawn. There's nothing to grind.
  • Averted in the last level where resting always has a chance to spawn random enemies. (With Evil Gloating to boot!)
• Anti-Villain: The gnome sisters, Mirri and Jilla. They were infected with lycanthropy by a werewolf. They exiled themselves in a cave to avoid hurting anyone. They hunt forest animals for food or eat their insect collection when they can't find anything to eat. However, when someone enter their lair, the scent of flesh drives them crazy and they can no longer control their murderous hunger.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit:
  • The OC limits you to three party members for Act I, three party members plus Shandra for Act II, and raises it to four after she gets killed.
  • This gets even more egregious in Mask of the Betrayer. You get a maximum of four companions and a party limit of three, which means you always have to leave one behind. This is unusual since the party limit for the last half of NWN2 is four.
  • Storm of Zehir limits you to four party members, counting the party leader, and one cohort (raised to two cohorts if one of the party members takes the "Leadership" feat).
• Artificial Stupidity: Here's a few examples: tanks will charge past several mooks in order to attack a random one and will often leave a mook near-dead and attack another one instead of killing them first. Spellcasters will bombard enemies regardless of threat level and numbers and clerics or druids will buff up your party even when not necessary. You're better off playing 100% manually, but believe it or not you're also better off than you were in the first Neverwinter Nights: at least your companions won't randomly go charging off to attack enemies on the other goddamn side of the map.
  • Another fine example of Artificial Stupidity is the tendency of your own party members to attack Elanee the druid while she's transformed into her animal form, after they've run out of other enemies to attack. Resting won't stop this, since your party members are still in combat, which prevents Rest from working.
• "Ass" in Ambassador: Both Torio Claven, Luskan ambassador and Garius' underling, and her replacement, Sydney Natale, take this trope to new heights. At least Torio can be reformed by the end of the game.
• Attack of the Town Festival: Subverted. West Harbor's Harvest Festival goes off without a hitch. The githyanki attack that kicks off the plot happens after midnight that night.
• Bag of Holding: The original version. Hey, it's D&D; what did you expect?
• Bag of Sharing: Sort of.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: Neeshka resists The Dragon's mind control before the battle with him claiming that "[she] won't betray the only person who's ever been nice to [her]" if Relationship Values with her are decent at the end of the game.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Bishop and the female player character. He was supposed to be a romance option but was cut for time constraints.
• Big Bad: The King of Shadows for the first game, the Spirit-Eater Curse for the second, and Zehir for the third.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Sorry Black Garius, but you're not the main antagonist, you're his servant, and that's all you'll ever be.
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: Only the ugly word is "bribe".
• Black Comedy: You can choose "Sociopath" as a male voice. When leading, he will sometimes say: "Follow me... I have such sights to show you." It's also possible for him to start laughing hysterically when he realizes he's about to die.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: The Blessed of Waukeen feat included in the special and gold editions.
  • One of the poorer examples of the trope. The feat only allows you to purchase additional magic items from a few merchants. By the time you get access to these merchants, you should easily be able to craft much better items for virtually nothing.
• Broken Bridge: Closed access to Blacklake District.
• Bullying a Dragon:
  • Hey, Amie, don't you think it might be a bad idea to piss off a wizard that's giving your master a hard time?
  • In one notable late-game encounter, you run into a group of bandits who intend to kill you for your magic items and the Luskan bounty on your head. You can remind them that you've already left thousands of bodies behind you. If you pass your Intimidate roll, some of them run off, while the rest charge into pointy death at the Knight Captain's hands.
    • The intimidate skill can actually be used numerous times, another standout is intimidating Jalboun into ditching his mercenary orders to attack you.
• The Butcher: You get the "Butcher of Ember" background feat after Luskan frames you for said massacre.
• Cannot Spit It Out: The premise behind (failed) influence checks.
• Central Theme: The nature of heroes. Basically everybody was the Hero of Another Story, but either stalled out and failed to rise to greatness or fell to evil one way or another. Even the Big Bad wants nothing but to defend his homeland, even after they turned on him.
• Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: This is one of the breaks from the pen-and-paper rules. Changing clothes happens instantly; the only real restriction is that you can't do it during combat.
• Chekhov's Armory: The guns hang in bunches. There's the other old ruins outside of town, the fact that the Gith seem to think a shard's in town when you're around, the talk of Cormick and Lorne...
• Chekhov's Gunman: Shandra Jerro.
• Chevalier vs. Rogue: On arriving in Neverwinter, the Player Character must choose to join the Neverwinter City Watch, eventually leading to membership in the Neverwinter Nine, or the local thieves' guild, leading to membership in the Shadow Thieves.
• Clear My Name: The trial arc has Neverwinter's longtime rival Luskan accusing you (at the behest of Black Garius) of massacring an entire village. Nobody in Neverwinter actually believes them, but the law must be upheld so you're charged with murder and put on trial.
• Cliffhanger
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Neeshka will act like one if the player character is male.
  • That's because her romance plot got cut. She gets less clingy further into the game as a result.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander:
  • Aldanon.
  • Grobnar, too.
• Color-Coded Elements: Fire, electricity, cold, acid, sonic, magic, divine, negative energy, positive energy (white colored).
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • Character’s health status goes like this: Green = uninjured, Yellow = barely injured, Orange = injured, Red = near dead.
  • Challenge Rating is also color coded: White = effortless, Green = easy, Blue = moderate, Yellow = challenging, Orange = very difficult, Red = overpowering, Purple = impossible.
• Comic-Book Time: The last Shadow War happened when the future Knight Commander was an infant. So depending on race that can mean eighteen years ago or a century. They get around this by the only witnesses you talk to being elves and very old humans, and at one point there's confusion how many generations removed a participant was from a modern character. This involves some very careful wording at the beginning to avoid establishing if any of the village's human residents have personal memories of it or not.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The game frequently references that Neverwinter is still recovering from the plague and the war with Luskan that the city suffered from in the previous game. Also, Deekin, the most memorable companion from the two expansion packs Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark, appears as a shopkeeper and references events from both expansions — albeit in a way that only those familiar with them will have any idea what he's talking about.
  • Also, a reference outside the plot but within their universe: at one point, Zhjaeve actually talks about Dak'kon, who apparently is an almost legendary figure.
  • Storm of Zehir features glimpses at events that should be very familiar to those who know what happened in the Realms between 3.5 and 4th edition D&D rules. You see a scrying vision of another plane, where a beautiful woman lies dead while a hawk-headed man stands over her. You also get to meet an illithid who apparently read the mind of a seer and saw the murder of Mystra. He is Driven Mad by the Revelation.
• Cool Sword: Make that Cool Swords, plural (and you can even design your own). This is Dungeons & Dragons, so the trope is to be expected, but the Silver Sword of Gith takes the cake. See the Trope Page.
  • The Sword of Gith also qualifies for Oddly Shaped Sword.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot:
  • Ammon Jerro — even lampshaded in a dialog choice.
  • The Player Character can also say the standard trope identification phrase to the githyanki high commander.
• Creepy Child: Marcus.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Discussed. The reason Lord Nasher knights you in Act II is abuse a loophole in his treaty with Luskan so that your trial will take place in Neverwinter and your death if convicted will be quick and clean. Sand notes if you're convicted under Low Justice as a commoner and extradited, it won't just be a single swing of a headman's axe. (This doubles as a Continuity Nod to part four of The Legend of Drizzt: In Luskan, horrific public executions like having your limbs tied to horses and torn off are entertainment.)
• Cute Monster Girl: Neeshka.
• Cutting Off the Branches:
  • Canonically, Qara dies no matter what she ends up doing in the ending (obviously, you kill her if she betrays you; if not, she gets her head crushed by a rock) while Sand is implied to survive if he's on your side.
  • This will also happen to Casavir and/or Elanee, regardless or whether you romanced them or not.
  • Mask of the Betrayer assumes (not unreasonably) that the Knight-Captain defeated the King of Shadows. Storm of Zehir is muddier—One of Many's appearance in a random encounter would indicate that the Knight-Captain turned evil in the Unapproachable East, if Khelgar didn't also talk about them returning to Crossroad Keep (which only happens if good). Possibly they failed to stop themselves from devouring Okku, created One of Many without knowing the consequences, and then banished it after, or it may have been created by someone else.
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • Sand in particular, but most characters, including non-party members, have a moment or two.
  • One memorable incident at the inn is a three-way insult contest between Khelgar, Neeshka, and Qara.
• Death Is Cheap:
  • Averted in the original campaign and Mask of the Betrayer. Party members who lose all their hitpoints suffer a Non-Lethal K.O. and recover at the end of the fight. Three friendly characters suffer Plotline Death and can't be resurrected.
  • Played straight in Storm of Zehir. Downed party members will bleed out and die if left unattended, but reviving them is as easy as casting a spell, going to a Temple of Waukeen to have it done for you, or using a Coin of Life (a consumable item that casts resurrection).
• Destroyable Items: Destroying a chest has a chance to destroy its contents too.
• Determinator: Ammon Jerro. It takes some serious will to do everything he does, while refusing to excuse any step of it as being even a sliver righteous. He's a monster, he knows it, and to stop the threat that would unmake the world, he has damned himself for eternity without a moment's regret... Well, until he realizes he's gone too far being The Determinator, and his granddaughter dies because of it.
• Determined Homesteader: A famed trait among the citizens of West Harbor. No matter how many times their village gets utterly destroyed, they will return and rebuild.
  • It's also stated that the smarter bandit and lizard clans in the area know not to mess with the village - They fight back.
• Did You See That Too?
  Khelgar Ironfist: Just to make sure my eyes aren’t lying to me –- a huge suit of armor did smash through here, attack the githyanki –- and us –- then we drove it back to the portal? Because if my drinking is catching up to me, then I'm stopping right now.
• Did Not Think This Through: The Lizardmen around Highcliff want to drive the villagers off their land. Their main tactic in doing this is to harass them by blocking off the road and sabotaging any ship trying to leave.
• Diabolus ex Machina: See Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies.
• Doomed Hometown: West Harbor, although this is played with. An attack on the town starts the story as per tradition, but the town and most of its inhabitants actually survives (your initial goal is actually to bait the attackers away) and can be visited later. Then it really is destroyed by a completely different enemy at the end of Act 2.
  • You can visit the village again during the 2nd expansion, Storm of Zehir. Guess what? It is now under siege by dragons. West Harbor is the Butt-Monkey of the Sword Coast, seriously.
• Door to Before (Straight and averted)
• The Dragon: Garius.
• Dragon Hoard: If you manage to kill the red dragon Tholapsyx you get to loot her hoard.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him, (i.e. Dropped a Temple on Them, see Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies)
  • Mask of the Betrayer thankfully rectifies this by revealing that over half the party managed to survive.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: For the majority of Act I, the player will feel like all of Neverwinter's personal errand boy (or girl).
• Dysfunction Junction: All of the party members have some sort of severe mental baggage or messed-up past (if not both), all of the party members regularly bicker and annoy one another, and all of the romances are dark, strained, and doomed. This can mostly be laid at the feet of Chris Avellone, who has a severe aversion to straight-played romances.
• Early Game Hell: Not that the game is particularly hard, but the early levels can be somewhat frustrating (especially for Squishy Wizard characters) because of low health, large numbers of enemies, lack of useful class abilities at low levels, and the high amount of randomness in the combat system.
  • Of particular note is the Graveyard, which is crawling with undead that inflict diseases and drain your stats — and those debuffs are not removed by resting. Unless you're playing a cleric or druid, or go to Highcliff first to add Elanee to your party, you better stock up on potions of Lesser Restoration and Remove Disease.
  • The game goes some way towards relieving the worst of it by skipping you ahead to third level before any real combat.
• Earn Your Title: You gain various history feats as you advance through the story. One of the best examples of this trope is "Master Orator", earned by completing your trial for the Ember massacre with such a thorough acquittal that the Luskans are completely trounced.
  Feat text: Your considerable skill in the courtroom is the talk of Neverwinter's legal community. Local barristers will be studying the transcripts of your trial for years to come and comparing their performance against yours.
• Easter Egg: Keep randomly generating names during character creation and eventually the random name generator will give you "lol".
• Edge Gravity
• Either "World Domination", or Something About Bananas: Grobnar Gnomehands' attempt to translate "kalach-cha" toys with this.
  Grobnar: "Kalach-cha". "Kalach-cha". Well, it's not Gnomish, Elvish, Dwarvish, Orcish, Goblin, or Draconic — well, unless the 'k' is silent, but that would make it "gizzard stone" or the equivalent.
• Elves Versus Dwarves: Downplayed. Khelgar is obviously bigoted against Elanee, but even then it's secondary to his constant rudeness and intense distrust of Neeshka. The end of his Story Arc revolves around admitting that Elves aren't so bad. The whole time, he never has anything much to say about Sand, implying that it's only Wood Elves he has a problem with and not Elves in general.
  • Completely averted by Illefarn, the ancient civilization responsible for the King of Shadows. The nation is frequently described as an alliance of Elves and Dwarves. In the Illefarn ruins, you find a symbol of this union: a tree made of stone. The fact that you have to speak to six spirits - three elves and three dwarves - highlights their equal standing and respect in Illefarn's society; you meet both low and upper class members of both races.
• Enemy Mine: Casavir and/or a paladin Knight-Captain would probably (depending on the DM) not be allowed to work alongside evil teammates Bishop and Ammon Jerro in a pen-and-paper game. It could easily count as a violation of the paladin code of conduct and they'd lose their powers over it. Thankfully NWN2 paladins don't have that class feature or the game would be Unintentionally Unwinnable.
• Escaped from Hell: Ammon Jerro fought his way free of the Nine Hells and back to the Prime Material Plane after being transported there by breaking the Sword of Gith fighting the Big Bad.
• Escort Mission: Sometimes NPCs being escorted can be told to wait or survive at 1 HP no matter what hits them, but when they aren't, it's fun.
• Everything Fades
• Evil Is Not a Toy: How's that plan to steal the King of Shadows' power working out for you, Garius?
• Evil Is Petty: True in the original campaign, which has the problem common in Karma Meter RPGs of mostly being written for a good or neutral character and therefore encouraging lots of actions that are more jerkassery than evil. Completely averted in Mask of the Betrayer, which has opportunities for an evil character to commit any number of truly horrific acts.
• Evil Versus Evil: The King of Shadows is in a three-way conflict with the Githyanki and the forces of Ammon Jerro.
• Fairy Battle
• Face–Heel Turn: Bishop, as well as some of your other non-Good party members, depending your influence over them.
  • Special mention goes to Sand and/or Qara, as it is literally impossible to keep one without the other turning. No matter how well you have treated her, how much you've agreed with her, or how much she likes you, if Qara's influence score is equal to or less than Sand's she will complain about being tired of being treated like a dangerous psychopath by people without any real power and decide to betray you and help destroy the world. If Sand's score is a single point below hers, the otherwise quite reasonable and intelligent wizard will suddenly conclude that the sorceress he's been working alongside for weeks is a bigger threat than the abomination that is literally in the process of exterminating all life on the planet, and join the bad guys simply because it means opposing her.
• Fake Difficulty: How much easier would this game be if combat was coded competently, or even if your party members had half competent AI?
  • Not much. With fan made add-ons, the AI gets smarter... and so do the enemies. As buggy as the combat is, it's somewhat in your favor, given that you're generally outnumbered. And can always control your party manually if necessary.
  • The most effective tactic in D&D 3.5 is to buff your party to the point they are almost untouchable and just beating everything down with your damage augmented weapons. The AI is almost completely irrelevant for this tactic since it is smart enough to attack the closest enemy.
• Fallen Hero:
  • The King of Shadows.
  • Also Ammon Jerro. As the game points out, there's a reason that he and the King of Shadows get mistaken for each other.
• Fantastic Legal Weirdness: A defense option in your murder trial in Act II is to use a boy with True Sight to cast doubt on eyewitness testimony that you led the massacre of a village (it was really Luskan soldiers under a magical illusion, which he saw through). Your opponent, Luskan ambassador Torio Claven, tries to counter by disputing the boy's ability, but he proves it by telling her about the medallion she has in her pocket.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Neeshka seems to be a regular victim of this to the point that the PC is labeled as the only person who has ever been nice to her at endgame if you have stable Relationship Values.
  • Deekin, as well, complains about how often he has to tell people he's not dangerous and means them no harm.
    • Also, kobolds hate gnomes. This leads to a funny moment when Deekin sings a song about butchering gnomes and Grobnar misses the point completely.
  • Khelgar starts out not liking Elanee and Neeshka because they're an elf and a tiefling respectively. Part of his Character Development allows you to prove to him that he's wrong.
  • The Knight-Captain can also go through this at different points through the game depending on what his or her race is. One example being in the arc where the Knight-Captain is accused of slaughtering the village of Ember, which has a guard in port llast who is willing to attack you brings up your race if you're part of one that has a dubious reputation (like the Drow) after you deny slaughtering Ember. Bevil notes that a tiefling Knight-Captain probably reminds people of the demons who tried to destroy West Harbor years ago. And a half-orc will be insulted by orc leader Logram Eyegouger, who claims their human blood makes them weak.
• Fiery Redhead: Qara. In Mask of the Betrayer, the PC can describe her as "an impulsive red-headed mage girl with an anger management problem". She's also a sorcerer specialising in fire, so is a rather more literal example of the trope than most.
• Figure It Out Yourself
• Fire Keeps It Dead:
  • Carried over from the Baldur's Gate series, reducing a troll to 0 HP just makes it fall over. You have to hit it again with either acid or fire to get it to stop regenerating and die.
    • This in turn originates from the Dungeons and Dragons source material.
  • Subverted once in Mask of the Betrayer, in the crematorium of Myrkul's temple in Shadow Mulsantir. Probably because burning was used equally as a form of execution and torture as it was for getting rid of corpses (Myrkul was not a nice death god), the furnace room is infested with incorporeal undead. Luckily you can potentially learn a useful anti-undead power in that incident (or possibly turn them into the party member One of Many), so it's not all bad.
• Flavor Text: Any equipment has his little story to tell.
• Foregone Victory: Performance in the initial Ember trial is irrelevant, as you will still have to face Lorne in trial by combat.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Several drops and occurrences of "betrayal" appear in the Official Campaign, which leads to the expansion pack. There's also a seemingly non-sequitur lore entry on the Wall of the Faithless on one of the generic loading screens.
  • One of the first conversations in the tutorial has an optional long, apparently irrelevant, story about a fight between Cormak and Lorne. Not only do both feature heavily in the plot, but the story tells you how to win in your fight with Lorne at the midpoint of the game.
• Freudian Excuse:
  • It's heavily implied that the reason Lorne betrayed Neverwinter and joined Garius was that he never got over his humiliating defeat to Cormick in a previous Harvest Cup, as well as his cowardice during the war in the first game, so he joined Garius in a bid to become stronger than ever.
  • Subverted with Bishop. He's got the perfect setup for one, but he's just responsible enough not to believe it.

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