Basic Trope: A character has an ability or power that cannot be nullified or mitigated by the setting's standard defensive measures.
- Straight: Emperor Evulz throws a dark orb which passes through the holy wards on Bob.
- Exaggerated: The orb shatters every defence on Bob's person, including the wards along with his physical armour and psychic blocks - and that's just the energy surrounding it. The orb hits absolutely unimpeded.
- Downplayed: The orb can still be parried by Bob's enchanted shield, but passive means of protection like wards are useless.
- Justified: The wards are designed under the reasonable assumption that they will be pitted against sorcerors below Evulz' tier of power.
- Inverted:
- The spell needs to make contact to do harm. Though it is a high level spell that deals ludicrous damage, a simple cheaply-produced shield or ward completely stops it.
- Bob doesn't need any kind of defence but his own durability, which is enough to completely absorb the attack with no harm done.
- Subverted: One of Bob's wards activates and stops the orb.
- Double Subverted: The orb rapidly absorbs energy from the ward and uses it to continue toward Bob and hit him.
- Parodied: Evulz throws a sharp pencil at Bob. It over-penetrates and ends up ripping a hole through the entire evil fortress, since even Evulz' sturdy construction can't block it.
- Zig Zagged: Every season, Bob develops a new way to defend against Evulz' attack. The next season, the orb returns to being an unstoppable threat. Rinse and repeat.
- Averted: All attacks are created in such a way that there exists at least one defence that will always protect against them.
- Enforced:
- Bob needed the protection earlier in the plot to get past the Mooks, but if it worked during the final battle, the battle would be boring and get poor reception, so No Saving Throw it is.
- This battle with Evulz is meant to be a Hopeless Boss Fight, and the developers want to be absolutely certain the player couldn't avoid his lethal attacks.
- This event is taking place in a Tabletop RPG session that the Game Master wants to end, so he has Evulz issue a Total Party Kill that can't be avoided at all.
- Lampshaded: "That's alright. All I have to do is take the hit and keep going."
- Invoked: Evulz spent a long time studying miracles and sorceries to understand exactly how they work. With this knowledge, his signature move could be built from the ground up to avoid standard countermeasures.
- Exploited:
- Bob focuses on building up his natural toughness and evasive skills so that he is specifically geared to make the main advantage of the dark orb irrelevant to their fight.
- Evulz devotes as much attention to amping up the power of the orb as possible so that it is instantly lethal for all intents and purposes.
- Defied: The entity that enables magic refuses to give someone an always-useful attack to prevent them from becoming complacent and refusing to do any further research.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: All other offensive and defensive spells are made irrelevant along with the strategies that depend on them.
- Reconstructed: Spells only remain invincible for so long before enterprising wizards develop a new form of magic that can defend against them. Having an unstoppable spell is therefore an indicator that a mage has put extreme effort into constructing it and has remained vigilant enough to stay ahead of the curve.
Back to No Saving Throw.
