Basic Trope: You need to unlock the ability to do something basic that you should already be able to do.
- Straight: You need to spend skill points to learn how to perform an uppercut.
- Exaggerated:
- You need to spend skill points to learn how to walk.
- You need to spend skill points to have your heart start beating.
- Downplayed:
- You need to spend skill points to be able to read and write, but the setting is The Dung Ages.
- You Shouldn't Know This Already
- You can technically do any task without any skillpoints, but would be very incompetent. Using a gun without a single skill point results in visibly bad handling and carries a small risk of friendly fire with every animation. The only confirmation that a safety exists on the gun is when he fails to fire at an actual target because he left it on, and may miss even at point blank range. Even unloading while not in combat there is no guarantee that it will actually be properly unloaded.
- Justified:
- The character is a robot that can only use skills that it was programmed to use.
- You have total amnesia, and are re-learning your basic combat skills.
- Your character starts the game in some sort of therapy that is designed to optimize bodily functions.
- The higher-ups run a cost/benefit analysis and decide that the best way to fight is with outdated tactics that were dropped from standard training for some reason.
- A normal guy might be able to fistfight fine, but not everyone can be a champion boxer. If you don't know how to punch right, you could break your arm, no Cthulhu nescessary. Half of training is un-learning the wrong ways people picked up in schoolyard fistfights or TV.
- Inverted:
- You start off with a skill that should require extensive training to use despite lacking a plausible reason for it. (for example: A civilian starting out with the ability to fire complex guns and fly military helicopters)
- It is possible to gain bonus points by starting out unable to do something taken for granted such as ability to read, or to be able to operate a space suit in a setting where staying on a planet your whole life would be very unusual.
- Subverted:
- You spend skill points to learn an uppercut, but it turns out the uppercut is actually covered in fire and you needed to spend the skill points to learn the fire uppercut.
- The skill name is more involved than typical. For instance any bird can fly. The training is to be able to carry a human sized passenger. The sheer Charles Atlas Superpower involved certainly would justify research!
- Your new skill tracker is catching up to you.
- Double Subverted:
- ...but you already had the power of fire, so you normally could've been able to do a regular uppercut while activating fire, so there's really no reason to have needed to spend skill points for it.
- … It's only showing pop-ups for the skills that haven't been logged by your old one.
- Parodied: The last skill on the skill tree is blacked out and selecting it says that it's a secret skill unlocked after getting every other skill. When you meet the conditions you obtain the ultimate special move... a normal punch. That does about as much damage as any other low level attack.
- Zig Zagged: You learn how to uppercut, but you should've already known how...except it turns out the uppercut is actually a series of lightning-fast uppercuts that you couldn't do before. Only it turns out they're not fast, the scene is speeding up for the few seconds you use the move...because you learned how to manipulate time with your uppercuts! Even though you already knew how.
- Averted: All unlockable skills are complex maneuvers that would require training to use.
- Enforced:
- The skill is Boring, but Practical and would be a Game-Breaker if anyone could use it as soon as they start the game.
- During development the skill tracker occasionally took the skill name from the wrong name table and the developers liked one of the resulting cases so much that they simply Threw It In.
- Lampshaded: "I should be able to do this already!"
- Implied: General Bob is having a conversation about some military technology and is utterly exasperated that the source of the delays was something (unmentioned) that he considered trivial.
- Invoked: A character sets up a fighting tournament where the combatants may only use certain moves after they've already defeated a number of other fighters, e.g. punch out 2 people normally to be allowed uppercuts.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: In defiance of the genre norms of a 4X the early game has a broad selection of everything that would be available at the starting time period.
- Discussed: "You learned how to uppercut!" "Shouldn't I have already known how?"
- Conversed: "Why can't I uppercut enemies from the start of the game?"
- Played For Laughs: Hiro is regularly taught basic skills by increasingly exasperated NPCs. The first one has to teach him how to wear pants.
- Played For Drama: Bob is so very brain damaged that even the simplest tasks of are Herculean efforts, the stakes for him are the possibility of an ordinary independent life taken for granted by many.
- Plotted A Good Waste: That a special forces commando like Hiro needs to spend skill points to do things like attach a silencer to his gun is foreshadowing that he is not who he thinks he is.
Congratulations! You learned how to go back to You Have Researched Breathing!
