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    N 
  • Nameless Narrative: Everything is nameless when introduced, but will receive a name if it sticks around players for long.
  • Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
    • Players in the Criminal class can have these.
    • Some players and groups in the Musician class, especially those specializing in Heavy Metal, might have names that appear to be these, but barring the occasional exception they are generally Non-Indicative Names.
    • A number of animal mobs have names of this sort — that's what happens when you let the player base name creatures.
      • Wolf-trap seadevil.
      • Assassin spider.
      • With prehistoric creatures, we have Tyrannosaurus rex (tyrant lizard king), Daspletosaurus (frightening lizard), Tarbosaurus (alarming lizard), Torvosaurus (savage lizard), Megalodon (big tooth), Lythronax (king of gore), Carcharodontosaurus (shark-toothed lizard), Sarcosuchus (meat crocodile), Carnotaurus (meat bull), Deinosuchus (terrible crocodile), Deinonychus (terrible claw), and the winner: TERATOPHONEUS (MONSTROUS MURDERER).
      • The tarantula hawk wasp. Yes, that is one animal, whose name is three different animals you would never mess with combined.
      • Vampyroteuthis infernalis, whose name means "the vampire squid from hell", is pretty harmless.
      • On the other hand, Cnidoscolus stimulosus, whose name translates to "feels like you've been hurt with a whip", isn't harmless at all.
      • The Asian murder hornet, which appeared in the West in 2020 and was then silently dropped.
  • Nerf: Guns, typically, unless one belongs to the Soldier, Mercenary, or Armed Policeman class. There are some exceptions; the United States server allows any player to obtain almost any gun in the game provided they don't violate a few basic rules but this means Player Versus Player is potentially much more deadly on this server. Additionally, on many servers, it's possible to obtain a full-strength gun, but this is considered cheating and carries severe penalties if discovered. Note that the effectiveness of the weapon does not change, but the wielder's effectiveness with the weapon is the only thing that differs.
  • Nervous Wreck: Fears are autoassigned at birth, but some fears are more common than others. Common fears include snakes, spiders, the dark (for children), heights, fire and death. In addition, life experiences can add or remove fears. This means that some characters are more easily afraid than others. Other characters will remain calm in many situations, including their own death.
  • New Game Plus: According to religions that believe in reincarnation, if your Karma Meter is high at death, you're more likely to start with access to perks or exclusive features at rebirth. If your Karma Meter is low, you consequently more likely to start with a large handicap at rebirth. You don't get to keep your skills, items, or even the aforementioned Karma Meter from a previous game and you have to start from 0. An exception is made for characters who get the "Enlightenment" upgrade, who are rumored to get access to a secret Golden Ending, although this takes an insane amount of Level Grinding.
  • Nintendo Hard:
    • Many, many examples, from high-level school and college courses to job-hunting during economic recessions, to (for some people) figuring out how the dating mechanics work, to simply trying to survive in war-torn countries. In short, life isn't fair. Nevertheless, some players have been known to play for over 100 years on one continue.
    • The rules for connecting to other servers can get complicated. At the very least, the "passport" inventory item is required. To switch servers permanently, players are often required to have high wealth and skills stats. Some players manage to sneak onto servers, but the mods usually kickban the offending players when they're discovered.
  • No Bisexuals: Zigzagged. While there is bisexual erasure to the point where some players are quoted as saying things such as "you're either gay, straight, or lying," it's more commonly accepted that some characters are bisexual.
  • Nobody Poops: Massively averted. Although some players try to deny it, it's normal that everyone poops, pees, burps, farts, sneezes, coughs, and so on - but not every body acts out these functions the same way. This trope may be played straight, nonetheless, for characters that develop medical conditions, such as digestive complications like constipation.
  • No Continue Run: Mandatory. However, if you have friends with enough points in the CPR and resuscitation skill tree, it's possible to get a single extra continue. (Some players, through a combination of very good and very bad luck, have managed to get more than one this way.) Continuing is Painful however, as your lifespan gauge won't be refilled, and you'll likely suffer penalties to several stats plus a permanent decrease in max hitpoints. If the Game Master (should one exist) takes a shine to you, and you have a lot of luck points, it's possible to get a continue, or rarely two.
  • No Fame, No Wealth, No Service: In particularly snobby places, players may be refused service or even entry unless their Status stat is sufficiently high or they're able to pay significant in-game fees.
  • No-Holds-Barred Beatdown:
  • No Indoor Voice: Many examples, including cicadas, howler monkeys, parrots, and humpback whales (yes, those "songs" are deafening up close, what did you expect from a creature bigger than a bus?)
  • Non-Indicative Name:
    • Greenland, while sporting some coastal vegetation, is almost entirely covered in glaciers.
    • Iceland, while containing the odd glacier, is almost entirely covered in vegetation.
    • Fireland, which is an archipelago (a collection of islands) near the Antarctic, a server which is covered in even more glacier than the aforementioned Greenland server.
    • The Canary Islands are named for the Latin "canus" as in dog.
    • And since the factory ceased production, Sugarland, Texas.
      • While on the topic of Texas town names, Old Dimebox is surely worth a mention. And Marble Falls doesn't have anything resembling its name since they built the dam.
    • "Canada" means "Village." It's the second-largest country in the world (geographically-speaking).
    • Any of several People's Republics of Tyranny.
  • Nonstandard Game Over:
    • The death penalty.
    • Getting a life sentence in prison. Well, you are still technically playing, but you're not going to be doing much for a long time. Unless you escape.
    • And when you get to do something the only option is "Die".
    • Locked-In Syndrome. Consciousness is maintained, and you can blink, but that's about it. Likewise, Persistent Vegetative State.
    • Coma can also be this for some, as many players who fall into one never wake up. In recent years, however, this has become notably less common.
  • No OSHA Compliance: Trope Namer. While usually averted, it is played straight occasionally. A great example of this is the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory episode between the second half of the Industrial Revolution arc and the World War I arc.
  • "Not So Different" Remark: It has becomes so common in the past several seasons to do this to characters who criticize other characters that it's basically a Memetic Mutation.
  • Not-So-Harmless Villain: Many characters, although prominent examples include Adolf Hitler, an out of work ex-soldier wannabe artist turned fascist dictator, and Osama Bin Laden, a quiet, religious boy from a moderate, prosperous family turned mass-murdering terrorist mastermind. The recent revelation that Kim Jong Il's faction has obtained nuclear weapons was a major plot twist that, thankfully, so far has gone nowhere.
  • No Title: At least, not that we know of. "Real Life" is just a colloquial name for it.
  • Novelization: Biographies, textbooks, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
  • NPC: Robots. Most of them won't even try to have a conversation with you, and the ones that do always give very scripted answers.
  • Nuclear Torch Rocket: Not quite yet, but the Tech Tree items currently being Researched:
    • A common idea, called a "Nuclear Thermal Rocket," is to use the heat of a conventional nuclear reactor to heat hydrogen gas (any other fuel isn't worth it; hydrogen gives the best returns for its weight but is a nightmare to store and carry around) as with N.E.R.V. and Project: Timberwind. Some theoretical designs have a reactor added to a conventional rocket, to be turned on for interplanetary travel, which is called a "Bimodal nuclear thermal rocket." This has proved problematic for both political (most players and servers mess their drawers at the word "nuclear") and practical (the darn thing needs a few tons of shielding to keep from frying the astronauts, the fuel is constantly trying to escape, etc) reasons. A few were tested, but never used on anything. The USSR claimed to have solved the shielding problem, and China states they have one capable of reaching Mars inside of a week, but how much this was/is commie propaganda remains to be seen.
    • Theoretical designs purport to use fusion reactors with a hole in the Containment Field leading to a rocket nozzle made of superconducting wire, which works to stretch the field so that the plasma doesn't actually touch any of the physical components. The fusion reaction can be squeezed very tightly (something called a "Zeta Pinch"), and then allowed to flow through the hole and into the nozzle. This method would be capable of flying a spaceship at about 2G's of acceleration and would have the power to obliterate Rhode Island if it got caught in the exhaust plume.
      Another method merely uses the fusion reactor as a combustion chamber, similar to the nuclear thermal rocket concept.
    • One nuclear reactor-free method currently within the grasp of modern science involves uranium salt dissolved in water. This salt would reach critical mass as the water is squirted out of the rocket nozzle, causing a sustained series of nuclear explosions at the ship's tailpipe. They would need special fuel tanks honeycombed with neutron-absorbing materials to keep the fuel from exploding early, and rocket nozzles protected from their exhaust's heat somehow. It has the unfortunate downside of vaporizing the ship if the fuel tanks are punctured.
  • Nude Nature Dance: Special ability for those who have taken the "Gardnerian Wiccan" prestige class that allows them to perform many ceremonies "skyclad" (nude), complete with dancing.
  • Numbered Sequels: Numerous conflicts, such as World War II.
    • And the Second Battle of Bull Run/Second Manassas.
    • Oddly enough, some disenchanted fans were already calling the first world war "World War One". The foreshadowing for that series wasn't particularly subtly written.
    • The Third Reich, although thankfully that map didn't last long until it was deleted and a new one was coded to replace it.

    O 
  • Obfuscated Interface: Many Real Life computers (other than Windows) display a couple of screens full of text too fast to be actually read when booted.
    • Linux installations typically show much more. In the old days, starting was so slow that the text could be read and technically oriented users often actually understood it. Watching someone use VI or Emacs can also be quite confusing, and using the text console can often lead to a screen full of confusing text.
    • Mac OSX does that too, if asked politely. The point is that in case the machine hangs, the last few lines can give some clue about the problem.
    • Also, the user base for these computers tends to consist of people who specifically dislike having information hidden from them, and who at least like the idea that they can customize things. Since the text is being generated anyway (for log files), echoing it to the screen is the most direct and modifiable form of display.
    • It's also helpful when the computer stops for no apparent reason. By showing the last thing the computer did, and the more knowledgeable will know the next thing it was going to do, one can determine the area where the problem occurred.
  • Obituary Montage:
    • The US Sunday morning news programs, like This Week, have montages of notable deaths during the past seven days.
    • The major news magazines, Time, People and so forth, have weekly sections under such headings as "Milestones" or some similar name, and one of the listings will include brief biographies of notable people who passed away during the week covered, with major figures getting their own stories.
    • At the end of the year, the magazines will devote an entire section to people who died during the past year. Some, like People, will publish special issues, offering feature-length stories of the most notable people and full-page tributes to those not quite as prominent. People also takes it a step further, including not just pop culture personalities but servicemen and women who died in the line of duty (usually, the Middle East) from the end of December of the previous year to the week of deadline for the year-end issue (usually, the middle of the current December).
  • Obvious Rule Patch: Whatever happened to the dinosaurs was probably a result of this. Other than that, pretty much averted. When a new rule is discovered (generally as a result of poking an old rule until it breaks) it's also discovered that the new rule applied even before it was discovered.
  • Official Couple: A system has been devised to cement a couple as being, in their own opinion, the author's One True Pairing. A lot of these are eventually disproved, but many others remain plausible for the duration of the characters' tenure.
  • Official Presidential Transport: One of the perks for players who reach the National Leader class. Most servers have one for their top player.
  • Old Media Playing Catch-Up:
  • Bitcoin: Its assimilation as truly legal, Government-regulated currency is a slowly-going process because of the lack of proper technology and channels. The users' anonymity is particularly hard to track and even harder to enact accountability over.
  • NBC: Olympic broadcasts are a textbook example. They are often Live but Delayed by many, many hours (around 16 hours for the Beijing opening ceremonies) until the American prime time when the most advertising dollars are. NBC recently persuaded the International Olympic Committee to schedule more popular events live at times more acceptable to Americans to avoid spoilers, but even then the east-west time zone delay means that half the country is spoiled thanks to the news. Finding other methods to watch the Olympics is becoming increasingly common among fans, such as watching the Olympics from other countries or from sponsored websites.
  • Trash Taste: Usually brought up when conversing the evolution of the Japanese popular culture industry. Episode 13's discussion on anime/manga media piracy suggests this is what is really at play; that traditional business metrics of a show/series' success (i.e., DVD sales and merchandising) are slowly becoming less accurate. Hence, pirate streaming might indeed cause the spread and awareness of a show, but it may not automatically translate to sales (which is what matters). However, such a divide causes a massive wedge between anime production companies, legal streamers (like paywalled Netflix and Crunchyroll), and international anime communities. In turn, it is precisely companies who try to provide accessible yet legal alternatives online (such as Kadokawa through Bookwalker—for manga at least) who are managing to bridge this gap.
  • Once an Episode: In general, every episode contains at least one sunrise and one sunset. Subverted in the Arctic regions. On the poles this is Once a Season.
  • Once a Season:
    • For hundreds of seasons now, every season has featured many of the same celebrations as the previous ones. Traditionally, every season ends with a big celebration, though different servers disagree on when exactly a season ends and the next one begins.
    • Every season features every character's birthday, and consequently, the accompanying celebrations.
  • One-Hit-Point Wonder: Some would have you believe a given member of the human race is extremely fragile when a decent variety of single attacks,some worse than others, are bound to kill them in one strike. Also subverted because humans are tougher than they look — enough decades of time, though, eats up HP something fierce. Also, modern weaponry has made humans one-hit kills, and it would take a much longer time to bring one down with just the hands. Good old-fashioned luck plus modern medicine (particularly the advancement in Trauma medicine) plus some curious biology means this trope is Justified, Played Straight, Averted, Zigzagged, Invoked, Enforced, Subverted, and even Parodied. Occasionally with the same person, and rarely, all in one incident. Warfare is a particularly fickle mod that allows for all of these to happen at the same time.
  • One-Way Visor: Spacesuit helmets, welding goggles, Hazmat suits, and mirrored, wraparound shades.
  • Only Known by Their Nickname: Welcome to the Internet. Many famous characters, like Snoop Dogg, Elton John, and David Bowie, are subject to this trope.
  • Only Sane Man: Most players think they are the Only Sane Man, but if they're all sane, why is everyone surrounded by crazy people? This leads to an inversion as some people think they are the only insane person surrounded by sane people.
  • Only Smart People May Pass: You're repeatedly tested on your knowledge in the "School" phase as well as the optional "College/University" phase. Depending on the character class you choose, you'll also have to do this kind of thing frequently during your job.
  • Only Useful as Toilet Paper:
    • The transience of news is recognised in the proverb: "Today's headline is tomorrow's fish&chip wrapper."
    • Subverted by Marvel Comics, who actually printed a short Spider-Man/The Incredible Hulk story on novelty toilet paper in 1979. Many years later, for April Fools' Day 2023, they republished it as a Webcomic.
    • Rudolph Louis (music critic for the Muchner Neuste Nachrichten) wrote an uncomplimentary review of one of composer Max Reger's works. Reger wrote to Louis:
      I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me.
    • Count Dmitry Khvostov self-published his poetry because publishing houses refused to. There's a Russian story claiming Ivan Krylov was once in dire need of something for wiping purposes while outside, and was "saved" when the count drove past with some copies of his latest book.
    • During WWI in Tanzania, the isolated German colonial army used obsolete documents (maps, letters, etc.) as toilet paper. An eccentric British intelligence officer dug up their latrines to retrieve a wide variety of useful, if outdated, information.
    • Supposedly, J. R. R. Tolkien was once given a gift by a fan of a cup with the writing on the One Ring inscribed on it. He didn't understand why anyone would give him something based on such an evil artifact, so he decided to just use it as an ashtray.
    • Following the infamous "Pine Tar" incident involving George Brett using too much of the stuff on a bat, and Major League Baseball saying the "spirit" of the rule was not broken, then New York Yankees manager Billy Martin quipped "The Major League Baseball rulebook is only useful if you go out deer hunting and run out of toilet paper!"
  • Ontological Mystery: Characters enter the world naked and crying with no idea whatsoever of their purpose for existence. Might all be a giant "Shaggy Dog" Story.
  • Opening the Sandbox: When your Player Character reaches the age of majority (18 in most servers), the game cuts you loose to do pretty much whatever you want. Of course, this also means you lose the safety nets being a minor provides, so tread carefully.
  • Origin Story: An uber-example as every player has their own unique story. Some gamemasters have attempted to write all-encompassing origin stories, to varying degrees of acceptance.
  • Our Trolls Are Different: Internet-based cruel pranksters.
  • Our Demons Are Different: In Name Only slang for computer subroutines.
  • Our Dragons Are Different:
    • Large, flightless lizards native to a handful of tropical islands. No Breath Weapon, but they have a mouth so filthy a bite almost always results in infection. A smaller type of lizard, called the flying dragon, is much smaller and weaker but possess a set of wings formed from its own hyper-extended ribs; these are only found in certain jungle maps. Another small lizard type, the bearded dragon found in the desert and scrubland maps of the Australia server, shares none of these traits but is popular among sections of the player base as pets.
    • In the setting's backstory, there was the Yi qi, a small dinosaur with bat-like wings, and Dracorex hogwartsia, a bipedal, armored-headed reptile named as a shout-out to another work.
  • Our Presidents Are Different: "President" is a common title among leaders of the larger player guilds and alliances, and has become particularly widespread in recent patches.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: Parasitic insects (mosquitoes, blackflies, etc) and worms (leeches), mostly. And certain bats, eels, and birds.
  • Our Zombies Are Different: Hacked computers, displaced fossils, viri, and people who haven't had their coffee yet.
  • Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Zig-zagged with extreme confusion.
    • Played straight in that many ancient religions have become mythology since almost no one believes them anymore.
    • While atheism as a whole seems to be gaining popularity, this was a fairly recent 21st-century explosion, and there are still billions of people who adhere to a religion. Those that hold such beliefs are usually treated civilly by those that don't. Church attendance has dropped below 50% in the US server for the first time in history.
  • Out of Focus:
    • Happened big-time to Mongolia after the death of Kublai Khan.
    • More recently, Australia gets much, much less attention than Canada or Britain.
    • For a long time, formerly great civilizations like Arabia, India and China were more or less ignored. Now they seem to be making a comeback. Recently, France and Russia seem to feel this is occurring for them.
  • Overly Long Gag:
    • This page.
    • These words.
    • End of the world predictions.
    • Life itself.

    P 
  • Pacifist Run: This is the default option, and you can often suffer massive penalties for straying from this path (ranging from being temporarily banned from the server to immediate player character death). That said, certain character classes, such as Soldier and Police, are allowed to use lethal force without serious penalties in particular situations. At the same time, however, many players disagree on what exactly those situations should be, with some even arguing that it should never be allowed or that such character classes should be banned.
  • Path of Most Resistance: Claimed to be the best way to succeed. Played straight if you needed to get into a highly technical position or rely heavily on ability, but subverted by those who manage to bluff or use other means to gain status.
  • People's Republic of Tyranny: The more a country's name sounds like the personification of an ideal, the more likely it is to be the opposite. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the People's Republic of China, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are all good examples.
  • Permadeath: You die, that's it for your character. What happens afterward is unknown, but there are three basic campsnote :
    • If you were good, you go to the New Game Plus in Fluffy Cloud Heaven, but if you were bad you go to Fire and Brimstone Hell. Where the dividing line is believed to be varies — some believe that only really evil people go to hell, others believe that only characters with Incorruptible Pure Pureness get heaven. Still other schools of thought hold that whether or not you go to Heaven or Hell is inherently out of your control, so your actions mean nothing. Many ancient religions also had a third level in-between the other two. In another variation, one major belief system teaches that there is a Fluffy Cloud Heaven but no Fire and Brimstone Hell. In this belief system, the player is required to play and pass one last level to reach Heaven. If they do not pass the level, they must continue playing that level indefinetely until they achieve a satisfactory score.
    • You start over with a new character. Details vary, but generally depend on your Karma Meter in the life you just finished. Some believe that, eventually, you play a different game entirely.
    • Nothing. You're just dead.
  • Permanently Missable Content: Too many to count. You do not get a warning, but it is still possible to progress without missed items.
  • Piecemeal Funds Transfer: One man was actually caught because his program worked too fast. He hadn't thought about how much money he would actually acquire, and when his account grew beyond reasonable levels, someone wondered where all the money was coming from.
  • Pilot Episode: A matter of much debate. It's generally considered to have taken place in Africa, but nobody is exactly sure when except that it was a long time ago.
  • Pinball Scoring: Some currencies' values are so low that one USD is equal to thousands of that currency. And then there's hyperinflation; post-World War I Germany, for instance, had banknotes with values as high as 100,000,000,000,000 marks. Zimbabwe is an example, with everyday bank notes hitting the trillions and maybe beyond. This was recently patched and as a result, the currency in question no longer exists for practical purposes.
  • Planet of Hats: Averted six billion ways to Sunday, although this doesn't stop a lot of authors from trying to play it straight. Declining in popularity these days.
  • Platform Hell: If you want to see other people experience it, Ninja Warrior. If you want to experience it yourself, go for a tough hike or try to climb a mountain. Be careful, though; this minigame gives you only one life, and no one continues unless you're lucky enough for a Mountain Rescue player to be in the area. However, if you have a distress beacon item, you get a generally high chance (depending on local conditions) of getting an additional continue, but you have to restart the entire minigame.
  • Platinum Makes Everything Shinier:
    • In credit card plans, platinum cards offer more exclusive and elite privileges and reward programs to their holders than gold cards do, and require a higher income and/or credit score to obtain, too.
    • Among the awards that the Recording Industry Association of America offers to singers whose songs or albums have been successful, platinum awards for 1,000,000 units sold are the second-highest tier, above gold awards (500,000 units) and below only diamond (10,000,000 units).
    • A couple whose marriage has endured for fifty years celebrates their golden anniversary. If they reach their seventieth anniversary still together, then that is referred to as their platinum anniversary.
  • Playable Epilogue: Retirement. You've finished all of the main quests, and all that's left to do is enjoy minigames at your leisure while waiting for the credits to roll.
  • Player Versus Player: Between the "Law/Crime", "Wimps/Bullies", and opposing "Military" class tree players. Technically any player can engage, but it's not a very good idea.
    • Special rules for Player Versus Player contests exist in minigames known as Boxing, Wrestling, and Ultimate Fighting. The advantage of these is that there's no penalty for engaging in them, and they do not cause death (most of the time). Not to mention that unlike other examples of this trope, the aggression is confined to these mini-games and no animosity or hatred would continue to affect the characters outside of the contest area.
    • The entire world is one big Player Versus Environment zone unless you are either doing one of the above or in a designated PvP zones such as Somalia or Iraq. Penalties for attacking players outside of those zones can range from your character getting banned and deleted from the server to being restricted to special penalty zones where you can get ganked by trolls and twinks.
    • The 'Lawsuit' minigame is a good choice for players who want nonviolent PvP action... but expect to spend a lot of in-game currency even if you win. 'Office Politics' is also another choice, but the rules aren't nearly as consistent.
    • And of course there's other forms of nonviolent PvP, known as "games".
  • Pocket Rocket Launcher:
    • The Gyrojet invented jointly by Robert Mainhardt and Art Biehl (thus the name of the company being MBA: it stands for "Mainhardt, Biehl, Associates") in 1965 is a rocket-firing pistol. It got to a carbine-sized long arm before the company folded. It was too inaccurate for combat, since a manufacturing defect only caught years later caused its spin-stabilization rockets to actually decrease the accuracy (remember what we said about rockets being finnicky?). Until this defect was found, the projectile's weight was blamed; the thought was that they didn't have the weight to resist being blown about by the wind. They also had a minimum range, where the rocket-bullet was going too slow to reliably kill (better propellant would have fixed that, however, the most potent safely-burning, non-toxic rocket fuel they could find was used), and a maximum range where the rocket tore itself appart through centrifugal force. There is an Urban Legend that it was originally intended for use in space stations, where recoil would be a big problem and weather a complete non-issue. However, it seems that their inventors just really liked the idea of a rocket-propelled bullet, and the accepted story is that it was noticed that rockets are more powerful the further away from the gun they get, as they pick up speed as they travel, whereas conventional guns have most penetrating power up-close ("point blank"). In any case, the US military was barely interested, and the gun-buying public didn't want to buy "bullets" that were not only expensive (a whole dollar for one round, and this is back in the 60s where a dollar went a lot further), but also of consistently low quality (lots of duds and the aforementioned manufacturing defects).
    • A Spiritual Successor to the gyrojet, called the "pogojet" was invented in 2015. The rocket first forcibly extends a telescoping piston (the "pogo") that cold-launches the rocket, and creates enough drag to keep it from killing anyone-it's a deterrent, rather than a legitemate weapon.
    • The USA's National Firearms Act declares a rocket over four ounces, or carrying explosives of any size (including incendiary or chemical warheads), to be a Destructive Device with "no sporting purpose," and it's illegal for a private citizen to own one.
    • For those with more balls than brains, firework fights. Yes, some people shoot fireworks at each other for fun, and a lot of them are hurt or killed.
    • The ancient Chinese utilized a small, musket-sized launcher that fired a quiver's worth of rocket-propelled arrows in a shotgun-like spread.
    • The Danes, as early as 1848, issued some soldiers with small rocket-propelled incendiary grenades that fit into their guns, called Voss rockets, instead of traditional rifle grenades. They were used in a couple of conflicts (namely, the two Danish-Prussian wars), but didn't see much use. While effective due to the use of the standard load of black powder used as a kick-charge, they became illegal by 1869 due to the signing of an international treaty banning explosive weaponry weighing in at under 400 grams.
    • Those Wacky Nazis tested with a 9mm rocket-propelled bullet of varying lengths that they called the "S-Munition" as part of an experiment. The idea was to create a constant pressure wave behind the projectile to increase its velocity (and thereby its range and damage profile). While their records state that they would be fired from a smoothbore gun similar to the MP-4 Sturmgerwer, no such device was ever found. Lots of rounds though. They also tried creating an Anti-Air rocket launcher that rivalled a regular shoulder-carry one, but had several (the working protoype had 4 and the improved iteration had 9) 20mm barrels strapped together. They called it the "Fleigerfaust," which means "plane-fist."
    • One that was just a hoax: In 1934, one Clyde Farrell claimed to have invented a rocket-launching, belt-fed SMG that weighed about three pounds. He never submitted the plans for patent, nor did he demonstrate it to the military (despite his claims to the magazine "Modern Mechanix").
    • One of the closest examples in Real Life thus far is the Raytheon Pike, a small guided missile that can be fired from a 40mm grenade launcher (currently the M320 or the FN EGLM).
    • A similar weapon, the AeroVironment Switchblade, is a guided missile (a "loitering munition," which does exactly what it says it does) that can be launched from a soldier's backpack, just like a certain bounty hunter from a certain Space Opera.
  • Poison Mushroom: There's a reason why many wilderness survival guides warn novices to think twice about eating wild plants and fungi. The best-case scenario is a horrible stomach illness and/or diarrhea. Worst case scenario, unwittingly ingesting a deadly poison.
  • Plothole: There are many, as lampshaded in this video. While many do turn out to be Blatant Lies uttered by Unreliable Narrators, quite a few seem legit. Players who study these refer to them as "paradoxes", but only when they can phrase them in a way that invokes irony.
  • Plot Armor: Averted. The plot follows character development, rather than the other way around.
  • Polar Penguins: There are many penguins in Antarctica, which is in the southern hemisphere of the main game world. Their game function seems to be uncertain.
  • Polluted Wasteland: Many industrial areas and several cities count, particularly during the Industrial Revolution. Occasionally averted, often reverted.
  • Poor Communication Kills: This trope has been grossly overused throughout the series run. According to the Tower of Babel archive, this was a deliberate choice from God.
  • Posthumous Character: Influential characters from early seasons can have a surprising influence on later plotlines even after they die. The Doomed Moral Victor from the Rise of Rome storyline is now (arguably) the posthumous main character. The Chessmaster from the Arabia arc and the Jerk with a Heart of Gold from the Bo Tree arc has been almost as influential, and even the Crazy is Cool Mad Scientist from the Restoration Arc (and his later counterparts in the World War I and World War II storylines) is still considered important.
    • Some players believe they have an unlimited number of lives, and thus after dying they start over again with a new life, though all stat points are reset to zero and the game begins again under a new set of dice-roll conditions. Occasionally, however, some players claim to experience bleed-through from a previous life/game attempt.
  • P.O.V. Cam: Standard for all players. Due to hardware limitations, an alternate setup is not accessible at this time. (See, however, Psychic Powers and Near-Death Clairvoyance)
    • Some items, such as Skype or Security Camera, do allow a limited form of third-person view.
    • Certain items found lower on the Tech tree, such as mirrors, can also be used to look at your character from different perspectives.
    • In the most recent updates, an item known as a "Drone" has become available to the public. With these drones, players can look at anything from different angles, in some cases even things that are kilometers away! However, restrictions on their use depend on the server.
  • Poverty Porn:
    • The critic Diana George says many organizations have such a hard time convincing people living in first-world Western civilizations (particularly in America) that real poverty is actually out there that they resort to this in order to gain favor.
    • Joãosinho Trinta noted this as a reason for why he chose to create lavish costumes and floats for Carnival, creating a trend: "Only intellectuals like poverty, the poor people like luxury."
  • Powder Gag: As anyone who has gotten careless while baking can testify, this trope is very much possible, even if the results are usually milder and the ensuing cloud smaller. In fact, this applies to more powders than just flour —dust from spring cleaning or construction sites and finely-coarse ash also produce similar effects.
  • Power Gives You Wings: Inverted — wings give you power! Just ask any member of the "Air Force" class tree. Inverted differently by the dinosaurs, who got wings at the expense of a substantial decrease in power.
    • And Red Bull.
    • The dinosaurs may be a Double Subversion: wings may have come at a substantial decrease to their overall stats, but through Min-Maxing the winged descendants of the dinosaurs that developed that way became the only ones to survive the mass extinction event which ended their story arc, though their racial descriptor changed from 'dinosaur' to 'bird' in the process.
  • The Power of Friendship: Players will never get far into the game without making some kind of connection with other players of the same species, which opens unlimited paths, some that were previously not considered! With any luck, those connections will pay off.
  • The Power of Rock: Played straight. Usually used by the "Angsty Teen" class to get back at their parents. Rock music was also played to get Manuel Noriega to surrender during Operation Just Cause.
    • Sometimes happens when players think the game is too hard and try to Game Over, but the lyrics helped them get back on their feet.
  • Power Perversion Potential: My, my, my. Where do we begin? This trope was the founder of one of Real Life's first job classes.
    • At some point, humans must have realized they didn't need a partner to orgasm and could literally take matters into their own hands. Things have never been the same since.
  • Present Day, Present Time: Always.
  • Press Start to Game Over: Tragically it’s entirely possible to get a Game Over before completing the first level of the tutorial, sometimes without any visible reason if the Random Number God decides to screw you over. In extreme cases, you can get a Game Over before you even start the game.
  • Press X to Die:
    • Suicide is arguably a subversion, as you have to be deliberate about it. The vagus nerve reflex would be a straight interpretation.
    • This can also happen unintentionally when a player inadvertently takes an action that turns out to lead to termination. If clear warnings of the danger are present but the player ignores or fails to recognize them, the result is sometimes referred to as a Darwin Awards.
  • Press X to Not Die: No on-screen indicators, and it doesn't always show up. All you've got is your instincts.
  • Pressure-Sensitive Interface:
  • Notes played on the piano are louder when the keys are pressed hard, and quieter when they are pressed more lightly. This is a great improvement over earlier instruments such as the harpsichord. This sensitivity is also built into modern electric keyboards.
  • It's a common way of expressing frustration. Say you're in a hurry and you're trying to cross the street, and you pushed the button to cross, but the crosswalk light isn't changing. It's not uncommon in this circumstance to futilely press the button over and over. Similarly, if you click/double-click something on a computer and nothing happens, you'll be sorely tempted to do it again, even though this may just slow the action down further. People playing fighting games start mashing the buttons harder as they get more desperate, even when it's just an ordinary digital button and they're only destroying the controller.
  • Sometimes, buttons that have become worn or dirty do need a second attempt with a bit more force in order to close the contact, which is why elevator controls and the like usually light up and/or sound a tone to signal the fact that they've been activated.
  • All British pedestrian crossings have an indicator that lights when the button is pressed (on older versions, it's an illuminated WAIT sign, and on newer versions a red light). People still press the button repeatedly.
    • Irish crossings have the light too. But sometimes no light means "no signal" and light means "signal received"; sometimes it's dim light: no signal, bright light: signal received; and sometimes it's permanently a dim light. So people press it over anyway.
  • Some crosswalks at intersections that have been converted back to pure timer operation have their buttons disconnected, and pressing does nothing. People are already used to waiting, so nobody notices any difference.
  • On at least one computer system, pressing buttons repeatedly will make it realize that you're impatient, and it will speed up. The system was designed to give programs that interacted with the user a higher priority than background processes that didn't. Pressing random keys during a long calculation would make it treat the task as interactive, so the calculation finished sooner.
    • A lot of PC GUI applications scroll this way. If you drag to select text or pixels, and your pointer leaves the scrollable part of the window, the will slowly start to scroll. Some apps scroll faster if the user moves the mouse because they scroll one unit per "event", and the mouse sends an event every time it has moved one or more pixels since the display was last updated.
    • Some poorly written applications on old cooperative multi-tasked computers would do their processing only in response to OS messages. Meaning, the processing would go faster if you wiggled the mouse, slammed on the keyboard, or otherwise did something to make the OS send more messages than usual. This could happen in Mac Classic applications and 16-bit Windows applications.
  • Some car remotes do react to multiple presses, for instance, 3 presses of "lock" will start the engine.
  • "Close door" lift buttons are a special case.
    • If the lift is not in operator mode, the button has no effect. The lift doors don't close any quicker, but you feel as if you're in control.
    • If the lift is in operator mode (which requires a key), the buttons give you total control. The doors remain open until you select a floor or close them. You can even override the doors and leave them open as you travel.
  • This is actually a function in many graphics programs (like Photoshop) when using a tablet: The stylus is pressure sensitive, and the mark you create is either bigger or more opaque —or both— depending on how hard you press down (and the "brush" you're using). You can even adjust your pressure on the fly, so you can make a thick-to-thin line or a transparent-to-opaque brush stroke.
  • Electro-Magnetic Resonance technology for touch screens:
    • An electromagnetic field is used to communicate and get positional information from a specialized pen whose nib sensor is also pressure-sensitive for controlling brush width, opacity, tilt, and rotation. This is used by all sorts of tactile devices, including gamepads like the Sega Pico.
    • The 6th through 7th generations of iPhones have 3D Touch, in which lightly holding or firmly pressing on the touchscreen can access alternate functions. Later iPhones would ditch this in favor of going back to simple binary touch.
  • The Keystone keyboard is an effort at this, featuring customizable analog keys. For example, one can configure the keyboard to send lower-case letters when tapping lightly and upper-case letters when pressing firmly.
  • In firearms, "progressive" or "staged" triggers allow different rates of fire depending on how hard the trigger is pulled. A light pull fires a single shot, while a heavier pull fires full-auto.
  • Prestige Class: "Doctor", "Lawyer", "President". "Rocket Scientist" and "Brain Surgeon" are commonly considered this as well.
  • Prequel: "Real Life Prehistoric".
  • Product Delivery Ordeal:
    • A common sidequest in Real Life consists of transporting or trading products across great distances, which requires an extensive preparation and coordination. Even those who simply want to bring a present to someone or move furniture between houses can relate to this kind of pain.
    • There's a classic riddle that is sometimes proposed in schools and friend circles to see who can solve it first: A farmer wants to transport a tiger, a sheep, and a bundle of hay to a rural village (variations of the riddle replace the sheep with a goat, and/or the hay with grass). But at one point, the farmer meets a river, and while there's a canoe that can be used to transport people and their packages, it's only big enough to hold two entities (one of which, logically, will be a person). The farmer wishes to reach the other side with all three things he's traveling with, but he'll have sail across the river back and forth as he can only carry one thing at a time; if he tries to transport the hay first, the tiger will eat the sheep when they're left alone; and if he tries to take the tiger first, then the sheep will eat the hay. What should the farmer do? Take the sheep first, because the tiger won't do anything with the hay. When the sheep is put into the other side, the farmer can go back to get either the tiger or the hay next. When the second item is placed to the other side, take the sheep back so it's left to where the remaining item is. This makes it so, in the final step, the tiger and the hay are now on the desired side; all the farmer has to do then is to sail back one more time to grab the sheep and take it to the other side and have all three items crossed to continue the travel.
  • The Prom Plot: Those in the "teenager" class can partake in the Prom minigame. Can be used to increase your Relationship Values if done well, but those with the "Social Anxiety" trait may want to skip it.
  • The Promised Land: Users on third-world country servers view first-world servers as such, and try to do anything to switch over. For some, switching over brings them better gameplay, but for others, life doesn't improve that much. In the late 19th century edition of Real Life, many players tried to switch over to the United States server. How well it worked out for them varied from player to player.
  • The Protagonist: You are the main character whose life the events of your story revolve around.
  • Psychic Powers: Nothing so far, despite a surprising amount of grass-roots support for an expansion. They seem to clash with the physics engine.
  • Puberty Superpower: After roughly a decade and a half of playing, your character will receive various stat boosts. The most obvious is the ability to reproduce, allowing you to create further characters with a member of the opposite gender. You will receive an increase in height and strength, boosts which are usually more pronounced in males. If you are a guy, you get the option to grow beards and mustaches. As for a girl, you receive the Most Common Superpower, useful for extortion, and feeding your young. Although it is possible to begin the Love Life quest at around age seven, it is not possible to unlock the Sex Life quest until you reach puberty. There is also a bug which makes it impossible to unlock the Sex Life quest at all.
  • The Public Domain Channel: Some TV channels will air public domain movies or shows, because the Rights Negotiation minigame can be kind of a pain and results in a big loss of money.
  • Punk Punk: Constantly averted. Every time it looks like a Punk genre is going to take over, fate pulls a fast one and stops work on that tech tree. Steampunk / Clock Punk never got going, though they're good fun for lobbying. The only part of the world that took Ocean Punk seriously was the Caribbean area, Diesel Punk was going great at the start of the 1900s but kinda ran out of gas (although the Internal Combustion Engine was such a popular element it was adopted by other genres), and Atom Punk was considered but dropped after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters, and Fukushima was the final nail in its coffin. The newest Punk genres slated for Tech Tree expansion are Bio Punk and Cyberpunk, but we'll have to wait and see.
  • Puppy Love: While the love buffs are much more common when puberty kicks in, prepubescent characters also receive love buffs. Generally (but not always) they are not very strong and fade away on their own, however some characters (albeit rarely) end up in a lifelong relationship with their childhood love.
  • Purely Aesthetic Gender: Averted in the extreme. For instance, male characters have a weak point while female characters suffer a nasty debuff once a month (though once they are roughly halfway through the game they lose this debuff; some, though, experience a more random set of debuffs for a while afterward; male characters, however, retain their weak point for life). Female characters also tend to have lower starting STR scores, and on some servers, penalties (sometimes massive penalties) to Respect ratings. Some players claim these disadvantages are offset by increased WIS and CHA scores, but there is still controversy on this point.
    • Perhaps also subverted in the form of transgender people in that they lack most of the above characteristics but often face severe penalties for having a Purely Aesthetic Gender.
    • The lists of Disease debuffs that favor one gender or the other are long enough to choke a horse, and worse, many of those diseases are picked up at character creation. Lupus, for example, is found in women almost ten times as often as in men.
      • One that can affect the literal aesthetics of the game world is color blindness and is found much more commonly in men than in women.
    • Childbearing, one of the most monumental events in the game for most players, is restricted to one gender. It usually involves both, but the male need not even be present while the female is committed. Some mod attempts have been made to allow males to conceive, but this is not as successful as yet.
    • In many species, sexual dimorphism is even more pronounced than it is in the H. sapiens type used by every character reading this page. Birds can be so radically different that they can appear as entirely different species, while the eusocial insects live an Amazon Brigade existence with males only sticking around to impregnate a queen.
    • Recent game upgrades allow individuals to physically change gender if they so wish, though this is optional.
  • Push Polling:
    • PiQ's (replacement for Newtype USA): An article regarding fans' opinions on their new format. The fact that it was called the "Cheese and Whine Party" pretty much guaranteed that anyone who didn't like it wasn't exactly going to get much sympathy.
    • Happens all the time on Wikipedia. Many people seem to think they can change the (nebulous) rules and force all other editors to do what they say, simply by holding a small biased poll on the matter. One of the more famous ones was a policy proposal to outlaw sarcasm.
    • Google Docs offers a surprisingly long survey, and the bulk of the questions are asking whether the user is aware of such-and-such feature. It seems it's at least as much about making the surveyed users aware of those features than it's about gauging how many people are using them, which could presumably be accomplished without a survey since Google Docs runs on Google's own servers.
    • Any Twitter poll that says "RT for yes, fave/like for no". Since only one of those options is a signal boost, and people generally follow people whose opinions they share to some extent, you can bet more potential "yes" voters are going to see this than "no" voters.
    • There was a famous Real Life example to show how people will sign any petition if it's worded the right way. People were asked to sign a petition to ban the substance dihydrogen monoxide — used in industry with almost no regulations, used by various kinds of criminals, capable of killing humans and other animals, able to corrode iron... Of course, anyone with a basic knowledge of chemistry should know what molecule has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. note 
    • One infamous push poll was created by Karl Rove while working to get George W. Bush nominated for president over John McCain. "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?"note  Other polls implied that he was homosexual and that he was mentally deranged because of his captivity in Vietnam. Theoretically this is a moot point, because he didn't — but the poll put the idea in people's heads, without technically making a provably false accusation.
    • Moral philosophers do this on purpose, and it is amazing how they can completely change someone's answer to the most fundamental questions of life by changing only the way exactly the same question is phrased. Which is why education is important in the first place.
    • When Kay Hagan was running against Elizabeth Dole for a North Carolina U.S. Senate seat, potential voters received calls from a company that was taking a poll. One of the questions is, "Would it affect your vote to know that Kay Hagan is associating with and taking money from atheists?" This question and some others like it soon made it clear that the "polling company" was not legitimate, but was only asking questions to raise doubts about Hagan. Dole's campaign also ran a TV ad implying that Hagan, who was a former Sunday school teacher, was an atheist. By the way, Dole lost the election.
  • Backfired for Republican Minnesota state representative Eric Lucero, who created an online poll in 2020 reading "It was recently reported Gov. Walz is considering a unilateral edict with a stroke of his pen to mandate masks upon everybody across Minnesota. Do you support Gov. Walz continuing to usurp the Legislative Branch, violate the Constitution, and create his own laws as an unchecked king?" Despite the incredibly biased wording, 69% of respondents on Facebook and 91.7% on Twitter voted "Yes, I do."
    • A rumored Real Life example that led to the break-up of the Soviet Union. The politicians interested in splitting the Union polled the general public with the question "Do you want to be independent?" Obviously, nobody is going to answer "no".
    • In the Netherlands, right-wing politician Geert Wilders was put on trial for using this trope to incite hate speech during one of his campaign rallies. During the rally, he asked his followers if they wanted "More or less Moroccans" in the Netherlands, to which most chanted "Less!". Wilders then stated "We'll take care of that, then.", which caused thousands of people to press charges against him for discriminatory statements. The public proscecutor decided to take the case and Wilders was eventually charged with "hate speech and inciting discrimination" at the court case. He, nevertheless, did not get punished by the court and later walked back on his words, stating he only meant the "criminal" fraction of Moroccans during his rally speech.
  • Put on a Bus: Lots of people lose track of friends and relatives. Many find themselves put on a bus, too. Commonly invoked with bus tickets.

    Q 
  • Quicksand Box: invoked In some cases, it's easy — you simply need to survive by collecting food. In some cases, it's hard because of the expansive nature and you can't guarantee that a certain path will result in food. In extreme cases, you have to plan ten years with little guidance on what should be done.

    R 
  • Ragdoll Physics: The Ur-Example and, so far, the best-coded in history.
  • Rage Quit: A sadly high number of players exit the game before finishing it for reasons ranging from frustration about their lack of wins, to despair from being hurt by other players, to bugs making their experience unenjoyable. Very few of these quitters are ever given a chance to continue playing, but those that do usually will, making a subversion.
  • Rain Aura: Go somewhere that's at once miserably hot and horridly humid. Stir in one (1) cloudburst. Observe the steam rising from the pavement. Repeat as necessary.
  • Random Encounters: Too many to count. Cockroaches (can be found everywhere), stray dogs, and Mugger players in street levels and great white sharks in aquatic levels are just some examples.
    • Also spiders, some of which can kill with a single, poisonous bite.
    • Snakes.
    • Running into someone you don't want to see or talk to.
    • This is a staple of the "Retail" level. At any time, someone can walk into the store and need your assistance.
  • Random Events Plot: Some days go like this for people.
  • Randomly Drops: The Archaeologist, Beggar, Garbage Picker, and Thief classes are almost entirely dependent on these turning up something good. The Police prestige class Drug Enforcement is too, to a degree. The Street Vendor class depends on being seen as a unique enough provider of these compared to others in his or her class. Also happens, obviously, to players searching thrift shops, junk shops, street vends, and low-price shops.
  • Random Number God:
    • Character Customization is especially weird, because it requires two players, each from a distinct half of the player base, to generate a new one. Stats are based on the stats of several related characters, not just the two that instigated the generation of a new character. The random number generator used in character generation is mediocre at best, clearly favoring some values over others. Some other, smaller, completely random changes are also made to the base stats, giving unique new values for those stats, but these changes often have no effect on gameplay or hinder the new character's later progress.
    • A good number of new characters are also deleted before gameplay begins due to a poor stat roll or problems during the later stages of character generation. All in all, Real Life character generation is really fun at first but becomes highly inconvenient later on, and downright painful at the end.
    • The character changes after generation and can change based on interactions within the game, as well as self-modification which occurs semi-randomly. Whew... it's complicated.
  • "Rashomon"-Style: In life, much like fiction, players can experience the same thing, yet interpret it very differently. What's true, false, denial, or just missing proper context is usually anyone's guess.
  • Rasputinian Death: Although the Trope Namer's death was greatly exaggerated, there have been a few rare cases.
  • Read the Fine Print: It's usually a good idea to carefully read and reread ANYTHING given to you to sign before you put pen to paper. Consulting with someone with some levels in contract law before signing would also be helpful in some situations.
  • Real Is Brown: It is. It's also many, many other colors, to the delight of species with color vision.
  • Reality Has No Subtitles: Players who have different language sets will have serious difficulty coordinating anything.
  • Reality Is Unrealistic: Trope Namer, Trope Maker, and Trope Codifier. Example: When Mt Everest was first reliably measured, the result was 29,000 feet. Since that figure *sounds* unreliable, they announced 29,002 instead.
  • Real Life Writes the Plot: Well, it is the plot, but discoveries and wars are almost entirely based upon players' actions.
  • Reasonable Authority Figure: You will encounter them often enough that the Corrupt Politician or Obstructive Bureaucrat stereotype isn't always true. NPCs such as Parents or Teachers may qualify.
  • Reassigned to Antarctica: The Trope Namer itself offers an aversion. Like the aquatic levels, survival in and exploration of the polar regions requires a great deal of special training and equipment, and relatively few players (aside from the locals in the northern region) even attempt to do so.
  • Recycled In Space: Rumored for an upcoming expansion.
  • Recycled Premise: Happens so reliably that even a character with no science ranks catches on pretty quick: water flows downhill, summer follows spring, and every year there's a World Cup somewhere.
  • Red Baron: The Trope Namer.
  • Redemption Equals Death: Since it gets to the point in some situations that Anyone Can Die, this trope comes in straight, subverted, averted, and every other possible combination. The straight version often spawns religions.
  • Redemption Equals Sex: Reportedly played straight in many ancient religions, averted in most cases today. Still played straight in Tantric yoga and a few New Age cults.
    • Also frequently played straight in everyday life. Make-up sex is often an example.
  • Reed Richards Is Useless: Most of the greatest add-ons that redefined the whole game, such as the internet or computers, were designed for military purposes, and then released to the civilian public.
  • Reference Overdosed: Any work you can think of is somehow encountered here.
  • Refuge in Audacity: Oh, so many, many examples...
  • Regenerating Health: Played with. Characters do have a healing factor, but it can take days to years to restore them to full health, and they may permanently lose several abilities. However, certain items can drastically increase the rate of regeneration, and many players devote their time in-game to healing others. Despite this, taking major damage is a very, very bad thing in real life.
  • Retcon:
    • Amnesia and the blocking out of memories (usually of traumatic experiences), though it's handled quite differently here than in most other series.
    • Common during totalitarian regimes when "purging" a character to the extent that they simply never existed according to the players ruling at that time.
    • "The jury will disregard that and the statement will be stricken from the record."
    • "History is Written by the Winners."
    • Criminal records. Some legal systems act as if any crime a player committed as a minor never happened once they become an adult. Additionally, a crime on an adult's record of which they are later revealed to be innocent is retconned from their record; from a legal point of view, it never happened. Should the actual perpetrator's identity ever be known, their record is retconned accordingly.
      • In some regions, a crime that you're found guilty of will be wiped from your criminal record after a set time, depending on the severity of the crime. The less serious the crime is, the sooner it is wiped from the record.
  • The Reveal:
  • The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified: A good number of countries, especially most of the ones in the Americas, owe their existence to a resistance against the empire they had once belonged to (Britain for the United States, the United States for Cuba, France for Haiti, Portugal for Brazil, and Spain for most of the others). For such countries, their revolution was a glorious epic, and nobody dares to say that it was "wrong", or that it would have been better to stay being part of the Empire.
    • One story arc of the current season is Britain's secession from the EU.
  • Retraux:
    • Consumer-level video editing programs such as iMovie and Windows Movie Maker have their share of effects that make things look brown ("Sepia"), old (old reel marks), or even very old (choppy action and faded borders). Of course, these are abused by amateur video makers.
      • Effects like those are even built into some camcorders; Sony's Digital-8 decks are a good example, as are some flash and DVD-based cameras. Needless to say, people who do serious video work tend to recommend not using them under any circumstances and doing all that sort of thing in postproduction.
      • Ditto for digital cameras, which very often include options to take pictures in sepia and/or in black-and-white.
      • Digital filtering programs such as Instagram achieve similar effects with still photography.
    • "Vintage" T-shirts for sale at retail stores. Brand-new shirts deliberately faded and cracked to look like they're 30 years old. Pre-ripped jeans also count.
    • Certain slot machines (mainly those manufactured by IGT) are still being made with mechanical reels and levers to pull, even though they're all run by computers now and these are no longer required. Many people prefer these for a more authentic experience. Even in Minnesota, where mechanical reels are not allowed, the video versions of these same games are still built with levers. Sadly, machines that dispense payout in coins/tokens (instead of tickets) are much rarer, if not extinct.
    • Computers and laptops built with false-wooden frames, buttons, and similar accessories are fairly popular among various groups, particularly steampunk.
      • Along those lines is a remake of the Commodore 64. It has the same shell but with modern hardware and operating system. But it also includes a Commodore 64 emulator for the full experience.
    • Various architectural styles like Neoclassicism or Gothic Revival. Amusingly, the latter was a reaction to the former: Neoclassicism was seen as "Enlightenment" and "liberal" (in the old sense), so Romantics and (old-sense) conservatives invented their own revival to counter it, drawing Romanticism Versus Enlightenment into the field of architecture in the ugliest (except for the buildings, all of which were beautiful) possible way. The debate didn't end until the Bauhaus-educated German Modernists, driven from Nazi Germany for being "degenerate" (or worse, Jewish) came out of nowhere to destroy them both. (The Soviet Vkhutemas was doing much the same thing, but since they were Dirty Communists they were ignored in the West).
    • Many alleys of Budapest's Inner City were redesigned to look 19th century, complete with lamp posts that look like gas lanterns.
    • The goal of the Margaret Bridge's reconstruction was explicitly to restore the bridge to its 1936 design.
    • Reliced musical instruments. Fender is particularly guilty of releasing guitars and basses that are purposely beaten and aged in the factory that look like they have 50 years worth of abuse on them. This is also the entire business model of Nash guitars, which are really beat up Fender copies for about twice the price of new Fenders. Needless to say there is quite a bit of contention amongst guitarists as to whether this is an affordable alternative to vintage instruments that can run up to $70,000 a piece or if they are bought by posers who want their guitars to look worn without actually putting the work into having a guitar get that beat up through touring and playing constantly.
      • There's also another aspect to this. From the 50s to the 70s all instruments used nitrocellulose lacquer, but as it was rather hazardous, polyurethane is the standard finish today. Nitro is very "fragile" and easily comes off and ages very nicely (fading, yellowing and so on). This is why real vintage guitars have a special sort of relic to them. Polyester on the other hand is very hard and thick, has no real aging and hardly ever comes off, which makes getting a played in feeling with many modern guitars is close to impossible. It's thick and goopy and dampens the sound, but protects the instrument and offers a wider selection of colors. Polyurethane is somewhere between nitro and polyester — only a little bit thicker than nitro so it doesn't kill your harmonics, but with durability and color choices comparable to polyester. It still doesn't age quite the same, and opinions vary as to whether that's good or bad. Still, it's generally considered an acceptable compromise.
      • On the subject of musical instruments, there's also been a movement in classical music called "historical performance practice" which is exactly what it sounds like - to use certain styles of instruments and vocal techniques to perform early music works as they would have sounded at the time of their premieres. When instrumentalists aren't playing on actual older instruments (like those of the various Cremona violin makers in the 17th century), they build new ones with the style and sound of older ones.
    • Doritos re-released three chip flavors (Taco, Sour Cream & Onion, and Salsa Rio) that they discontinued in the 1970s or 80s in 2012, and put them in bags made to look like the bag design from that era as well. In Canada, they reissued the discontinued Ketchup flavor for a while in early 2015.
    • Part of Harley-Davidson's appeal is in motorcycles that resemble those from the old days, particularly those from the Forties and Fifties, but with modern conveniences added such as the Softail rear suspension made to look like the rigid frames of yore. Add to the fact that the engines used on Big Twins aren't really that far removed from the original Knucklehead of 1936; the Twin Cam is an all-new design, but it's still conceptually similar.
    • Enthusiasts either install or fabricate accessories to make their bikes more vintage looking, e.g. a FLD Dyna Switchbacknote  customised to more closely resemble a late 50s to 60s FL, or build a reproduction bike that is practically identical to the original vintage models, save for more modern materials and production methods.
    • Though more subtle than most, there has traditionally been a lot of demand for "film look" coming from digital video cameras, to the point of making things like 24p frame rates standard even on relatively low-end camcorders. The adoption of DSLR cameras like the Canon 5DmkII specifically aimed to duplicate the Depth of Field effects film cameras traditionally give by using standard interchangeable lenses and large image sensors; the jury is still out as to whether "film look" has been truly achieved for The Rest of Us, or if its proponents have created a new, unique DSLR look.
    • Pepsi and Mountain Dew Throwback use cane sugar instead of the high-fructose corn syrup found in modern soft drinks (in countries where the latter has replaced sugar). They also feature vintage brand logos on the packaging.
    • The Seattle Space Needle celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2012. As part of the celebration, the whole thing was painted the "only in the 60's" shade of "Galaxy Gold" paint that it was during the 1962 World's Fair.
    • In the 1990s, McDonald's built several locations in the style of their earliest restaurants. Many of these had only walk-up service, just like the earliest ones.
    • A few years ago a bunch of breakfast cereals, such as Frosted Flakes and Lucky Charms, went retro by selling them in their much older box designs.
    • The art of Randy Regier consists of authentically crafted vintage/Atomic Age toys, complete with the occasional aging, packaging, printed media and shopfront setups, that range from high quality (i.e. "The ToyGantic" and "Go Fast Daddy-0"), to intentionally shoddy (i.e. the John Manshaft line and "Electric Man Waiting for a Train Set") and absurd (i.e. the "Blazing Sun Model" and "Tardy the Manpony").
    • It's fairly common in Indonesian to intentionally write using the spelling pre-EYD to give an old, Dutch-occupation era feel (even though the EYD was released in 1972, more than 20 years after the Dutch surrendered). For example, the Dutch restaurant specializing in Indonesian cuisine called "Tempo Doeloe" (roughly translated to "past" or "the good old days") — the proper spelling is actually "Tempo Dulu".
    • There seem to be literally dozens of applications for adding a rotary phone dial to a smartphone.
    • 8mm is a app that simulates Super 8 8mm analog home movie effects for use on iPhone camera videos. Celebrities such as Hilary Duff and Selena Gomez have (according to Word of God) used it for effect on Instagram videos.
    • Many airlines have at least one plane in their fleet painted in a retro livery. Either one from the airline, or from an airline that has been amalgamated into the current brand that the airline owns the rights to. American Airlines for example has several planes in their 1960s livery, US Air has liveries from Pacific Southwest Air (PSA), Allegheny and Piedmont (all defunct), and British Airways has painted one plane in 1970s livery with plain "British" logo on the fuselage.
    • Also a common practice with railroads:
      • Union Pacific led the way, ordering a number of heritage engines representing railroads they acquired, complementing the authentically historical locomotives and railway cars UP also maintains. note 
      • The Norfolk Southern Railroad went all out, ordering twenty heritage units painted in the liveries of predecessor railroads, such as the Central of Georgia, Erie, Norfolk and Western, Penn Central, and Wabash.
      • Amtrak also introduced liveries in 2011 for its 40th anniversary that resembled its 1970s and 1980s paint schemes.
      • Canadian Pacific joined in in 2019, ordering freight diesels in its 1950s-era tuscan and grey paint scheme.
      • In October 2020, Canadian National introduced heritage liveries of their own, with a rebuilt freight locomotive displaying their pre-1960 livery, and newer locomotives painted in the liveries of railroads that were acquired by Canadian National; including Grand Trunk Western, BC Rail, and Illinois Central.note 
    • This review of The Wizard of Oz on the CED format, written in 2013 from the point of view of a 1981 reviewer who took on the then-new CED release from MGM/CBS Home Video.
    • A number of toy and model kit manufacturers over the years have released older items in current packaging, designed to remind one of the old packaging. Hot Wheels Redliners are still available in some places, Matchbox once released a series of diecasts in modern blister packaging but with a little box similar to their oldest form of packaging included, and Round 2 Models, who own a few of the older brand names of model kits known to older Americans, often use the original box art for kits first released in the 1960s, unless there are legal issues to work around (such as losing the licence for The Munsters while still being allowed to sell the kits of the cars). One problem with that is that the kits haven't been re-tooled since they first came out, such that the tooling is as old as the hills. Another example is the reproduction lithographed tinplate toys currently being released solely for the collector's market.
    • You can still have a house built in older styles from the 19th century onwards; Queenslanders, for example, are still being built, albeit with current materials and techniques, and are available in many styles echoing the older styles, including Victorian, Federation, Edwardian, and Ashgrovian (a 20th-century style adapted from American California bungalows.)
    • Gentrification or renovation of large urban areas can lead to large-scale renewal of some of the oldest parts of a city, as the place is done up to attract people with fresh paint, unbroken windows, and verandahs and awnings overhanging the footpath that no longer look like they're going to collapse on top of you when you walk under them, and to celebrate the history of the area. Some of these can go a bit far in their presentation, as they are given extra atmosphere by means some might consider an excessive amount of faux-historical packaging, such as Flinders Street East (second picture sepiatoned in GiMP) in Townsville, Queensland; the road is designed to make horse-like clopping sounds when cars are driven along the street.
    • The British electronics store Maplin is selling a reproduction ZXSpectrum, with in-built bluetooth 3.0 and HDMI television compatibility. It looks exactly the same as the original 48K version.
    • Many old towns in Europe were either entirely leveled or significantly damaged by bombings in World War II. While some were redesigned in the then modern "car friendly" style (now widely decried as an abomination against urbanism), some were then or have been since rebuilt in the original style, more or less faithfully. One of the best known is probably the Frauenkirche in Dresden that was rebuilt faithfully except for the weird placement of the original stones (distinguished by their blackened appearance which is neither due to fire or pollution, but owed to age) — in 2005. However, infill development in those neighborhoods is also often also built "in the original style" which may or may not work, but is often vastly preferred to some "hyper modern" glass palace in the midst of buildings centuries old.
    • Several boutique car companies, such as Excalibur from the 1960s to the 1990s built small numbers of "neo-classic" cars, mimicking designs from the 1920s and 1930s.
    • The Morgan Motor Company in the UK, which never stopped making cars that way. One such model, the 4/4, was first released in 1936 and ceased production in 2019.
    • The whole Keep Calm And... meme, with the memetic introduction set underneath a generic crown, is based on a typeface font Gill MS, first devised in the early part of the 20th century as an official font for public signage provided by the London Underground. This was widely adopted by British government institutions and the stark, spare, lines of Gill MS are now absolutely, iconically, linked to British government publications in The '40s and the "stiff upper lip" ethos of WW2.
    • It is fairly common for well-known food and drink brands to offer some kind of product that is heavily inspired by its classic recipe and presentation.
      • Pepsi in the United States and Canada has 'Pepsi-Cola Made with Real Sugar', which as the name suggests is made with cane and beet sugar instead of the high-fructose corn syrup that became ubiquitous in American sodas in the 1980's.
      • Walkers crisps in the UK have a 'Salt and Shake' flavor, which are completely plain crisps that come with a separate sachet of salt that you are intended to use by pouring it into the bag and shaking it, which is how packets of crisps were sold before 'Ready Salted' packets became popular.
    • Some affiliates of MeTV will - in keeping with the network's classic television theme - use variations of older station logos such as Dayton, OH's WHIO and Norfolk, VA's WVEC.
    • American "barcade" businesses often go with an aesthetic that captures the look and feel of 1980s arcades, featuring refurbished arcade cabinets from the 20th century and newer arcade games designed to capture the look and feel of them.
  • Revolving Door Casting: Can happen for a variety of reasons; you move to a new place, you graduate school/college, get a new job, etc. Sometimes you lose touch with old friends and gain new ones.
  • Revolving Door Revolution: France went through fourteen governments from the 1700s to 1958, though the Third Republic managed to last from 1870 until it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1940.
  • Right Behind Me: The downfall of any player who makes a habit of badmouthing others behind their backs.
  • The Rival: There's always someone in a person's life making it harder (or to put it in a positive context, much more interesting).
  • Rodents of Unusual Size: Capybaras, porcupines, and beavers.
  • Rogues' Gallery Transplant: Sometimes happens when defending another character from a bully; that character's bully might become your bully.
  • Rule of Cool: The rather limited and strict physics engine eliminates a lot of cool possibilities, but if you know where to look, Real Life is full of cool things: indoor plumbing, Jupiter, and chocolate, to name just three. Some claim that the engine limitations make it even cooler when somebody manages to do something badass anyway.
    • Occasionally invoked in-universe as a reason to do something: for instance, two prominent servers once competed for ten years and spent a lot of resources to see who would be the first to unlock the Moon expansion, just for the bragging rights.
  • Rule of Cute: Did not feature much in the early seasons, but began with the introduction of Amphibian characters and became increasingly common once mammals appeared on the scene. In a few cases, such as the Asian giant panda or the Australian numbat, Cuteness Overload has been employed to induce characters to help save the species.
  • Rule of Fun: Generally subverted. Learning to play guitar takes months of lessons and practice, shooting people is neither fun nor temporary, fighter jets have very complex controls and usually aren't even within sight of their target, making whole lines of blocks doesn't make them vanish, and sports take lots of practice, require you to be in great athletic shape, and can cause injuries far more severe than sore thumbs.
    • On the other hand, this is the only reason we engage in leisure activities that don't benefit us in any concrete way.
  • Rule of Funny: Played straight once you accept that most Real Life humor is Black Comedy. People find Epic Fail ways to end their games so often that 'the Darwin Awards' have become an established fixture: hypocrites and Jerkass characters occasionally receive a hilarious comeuppance: and, of course, certain features of Real Life are almost certain to provoke mirth.
    • It's also purposely invoked by the Comedian and Cartoonist classes, among others.
  • Rules Lawyer: The "lawyer" prestige class is half of the Trope Namer for this. They, along with legislators and various other characters, have this as their class specialty. Some other characters just take up this ability as a hobby. This ability invokes YMMV among quite a few players; the player consensus seems to suggest that it's an annoying but necessary part of the game.
  • Rule 34: To the point where Real Life porn is a major industry. It's possibly the one universally accepted Fetish, though doubtless, some people disagree.
  • Running the Blockade: When there's a blockage somewhere, occasionally there's someone foolhardy enough to try and charge right through it.

    S 
  • Sacred Scripture: Many biographies on the head developer have surfaced in-game, most appearing shortly after the game release. Many players consider these factual, or even as rules to play by, but other players strongly disagree. This often leads to flame wars on in-game chat. Additionally, members of a given religious faction frequently disagree on interpretation - splits into bitter rival guilds tend to result.
  • Sanity Meter: A truly elusive game mechanic that's difficult to completely understand for even the highest leveled of players in the appropriate specialist sections of the Doctor class, and the effects of the meter are notoriously difficult to downright impossible to relieve. Sometimes players are afflicted with moderate to debilitating penalties right as soon as they start the game, sometimes they gain the immediate effects from traumatizing incidents note , and sometimes the effects are gradually built up through a whole game's worth of playing. Resistance to how quickly the meter fills will vary between players, where two players can experience the same horror and only one of them will feel the mental aftereffects while the other will remain mostly unfazed. The effects of the sudden debuff vary wildly too depending on which version one is afflicted with, which include but are not limited to vivid nightmares while resting, and a massive penalty to the characters' Fear Resistance and/or losing most of the control over the characters' actions when placed in similar situations, and in extreme cases, the player may feel a compulsion to manually delete their save file. This happens often enough that there are multiple player classes dedicated to relieving the issues caused, to varying degrees of success.
  • Save Scumming: Averted; there appears to be no way to save the game at all. Unless this theory is correct and we all have unlimited save games.
  • Scaling the Summit: A major achievement for athletic player classes, although it tends to tie them up in an in-depth questline that allows for the advancement of few, if any, other quests and can last for months.
  • Scars are Forever: Played straight for humans, at least. Many kinds of cells cannot be regenerated in vivo without becoming malignant neoplasias. Even if the cells could regenerate, there's a good chance the cells can't self-organize after a wound to regenerate correctly. The body resorts to healing, where it lays down fibrous tissues to hold itself together as best it can. Barring surgery, that's permanent.
  • Scenery Gorn: Any Ghost Town, abandoned theme park, abandoned building, bombed-out region, or heavily polluted area.
  • Scenery Porn: Sets the standard for all other scenery, and most media can't hope to measure up. 126 million light receptors per eye make for some really good graphics, and the resolution cannot be beaten. Full 3D, pan, dynamic light and shadows, adjustable focus, and (with the proper upgrade equipment) zoom. And a visible spectrum of several million colors. Also has changing times of day, living landscapes, near-infinite fractals, and weather effects that are never the same twice. A specific location of Scenery Porn is the Crystal Cave.
    • Here is a screenshot gallery to give you the general idea.
    • The Scottish Highlands. In England, the Lake District and the Peak District.
    • It's all over the place. It's called nature. Also, some cities are like this.
  • Schematized Prop: Many, most notably the digestive system. The reproductive system also deserves mention.
  • Schizo Tech: Because of a lack of product placement, the new equipment has to be bought, resulting in people with the latest game console, a 5-year old cell phone, a 13-year-old car, and a fridge that's older than its owner. Increasingly averted for characters that buy from companies that practice planned obsolescence. With a little careful purchasing though, one can still play this straight.
  • Science Is Bad: Although generally averted (learning how to safely employ fire and how to kill germs were particular fan favorites), Real Life does flip-flop the trope, particularly when the current plotline emphasizes Who Watches the Watchmen? or creates a conflict of interest with politics or religion. In general, each generation has factions For Science! and protesters claiming that this particular achievement goes too far. As science has unlocked greater and greater tech tree achievements, it has become increasingly clear that the protesters may only have to be right once for human character generation to be blocked for good.
  • Scoring Points:
    • Many classes in schools and colleges use points to determine your grades. Also, credit scores.
    • Some militaries use a points system for officers to determine who is eligible for the promotion. Of course, the threshold can change instantly...
  • Screeching Stop: This is true on certain surfaces with certain types of brake shoes.
  • Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: Non-profit organizations.
  • Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Some major corporations exhibit this trope. Players of the Politician and Celebrity classes often attempt this, and just as often fail. This has led to it being classified informally as a psychological disorder, called "affluenza."
  • Screw the Rules, I Have Plot!: Usually averted since no one can figure out what the plot is. Though some events make you wonder...
  • Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: Common enough to be represented by an entire job class — they're called Dictators. Politicians besides dictators may attempt this. The US Congress exempts itself from several laws, for example. US Presidents have been known to exempt themselves and their staff from laws.
    Richard Nixon: Well, when the President does it that means that it is not illegal.
  • Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!:
    • Used occasionally, but frequently subverted when the character who attempts this is punished for their actions.
    • Non-violent protesters believe this and are something of a Trope Codifier here.
  • Sea Monster: Many different examples.
    • Whales, despite their Gentle Giant status.
    • And including extinct animals, we have plesiosaurs and similar creatures like the ichthyosaur and mosasaur, and megalodon, a prehistoric shark the size of a whale. Its modern counterpart may be the Whale Shark, which is thankfully nonaggressive and feeds on plankton.
      • Indeed, so many different creatures like this existed in the past that one can argue that plesiosaurs can't have survived to the present because the mosasaurs would've eaten them, long before the K-T extinction took down subsequent forms of reptilian Sea Monster.
    • The modern equivalent of Carcharocles megalodon might be the Whale Shark from a size perspective, but in every other respect, it's a Great White that is... bigger.
    • Check out the miniseries Sea Monsters (from the creators of Walking with Dinosaurs) for some of the nastiest aquatic predators ever.
    • Predator X. Its teeth are each a foot long.
    • The Oarfish: an eel-like fish that can exceed fifty feet long. Harmless, but quite impressive.
    • The African country of Burundi is home to Gustave, a man-eating crocodile. Gustave weighs in at approximately one ton, is approximately twenty feet in length, and has been known to eat adult hippopotami. Given the number and variety of bullet-shaped scars that cover his body, he may be Immune to Bullets.
    • Saltwater crocodiles can be even larger than Gustave. Large adult male saltwater crocodiles can be more than six meters long and weigh more than 2,600 lbs.
    • The Bloop, or rather, whatever made the Bloop, an ultra-low frequency underwater sound that matched the profile of a living creature, but not any specific living creature we know. If it did come from a living creature, scientists agree that it would have to be several times larger than the Blue Whale, the largest known animal on earth.
    • Tullimonstrum, a bizarre fossil lamprey from the Carboniferous Period, bears a striking external resemblance to the Loch Ness Monster, except it's barely a foot long and found in North America.
    • The Coelacanth. Now, fair enough — as fish go, they're rather harmless. But the fact the coelacanth has been swimming around virtually unchanged for millions and millions of years; it can grow to the size of a healthy human adult, makes a lot of supposed sea-monster sightings just a little bit creepier.
    • The whole point of fishing shows like River Monsters, Hooked, and Monster Fish. Their catches range from the modest (Taimen) to the bizarre (catfishes of the Amazon), to the truly gargantuan in scale (marlins, giant catfishes, and the Mekong Giant Stingray).
    • The Kraken, once thought to be a mythological monster, is known today as the Giant Squid.
    • THIS exists. The horrors...
  • Sealed Orders:
    • The Knights Templar went down so fast partly because Philip IV of France's orders to arrest the Templars were issued sealed, so nobody (not even the omnipresent Templars) knows what is inside them until they were all opened simultaneously on Friday, 13 October 1307.
    • The captains of the Royal Navy's four Vanguard class ballistic missile submarines are each given a sealed handwritten letter by the Prime Minister when he or she enters office before they leave port detailing what they should do in the event of a nuclear attack on the UK which neutralizes the normal chain of command. These letters are destroyed unopened when the PM steps down.
    • Surprise travel companies allow particularly adventurous travelers to go on arranged tours without even knowing where they're going until they're at the airport itself on the day of departure. The more elaborate ones will send something like sealed-wax envelopes containing their tickets and a customized journal for their curated trip, with instructions not to open the envelope until arrival at the airport so as to preserve the surprise until then.
    • British nuclear strategy has their orders for a "the Government has been wiped" situation in sealed envelopes that can only be opened if Royal Navy boomers can't detect signs of life from the country. They are called the Letters of Last Resort and can vary from a full retaliatory strike to taking orders from Australia, depending on what the current Prime Minister decided when he or she wrote them. The letters are destroyed unread when the PM changes.
  • Selective Stupidity:
    • Google once did a survey of passersby in Times Square to see how many knew what a browser was. Very few did. It was so amusing that they posted it on YouTube where it proved popular.
    • Child reporters on Germany's public broadcasting channel ARD once asked members of parliament and other politicians about the internet. Among the most infamous responses was the minister of justice's reply to what browser she uses: "Brauser? Remind me again, what's a Brauser?".
  • Sequel: The Afterlife (maybe).
  • Sequence Breaking: Some players have managed to cross the broken bridge into the higher-level jobs without activating the necessary Event Flags in the school and/or college stages first.
    • This is particularly common among players with the "Child Prodigy" or "Genius" feats.
  • Serial Killer: A few characters seem to be this. It's the job of the Police class (an in-game moderator of sorts) to track down and imprison (perma-ban) them.
  • Series Fauxnale: Many of the participants seem intent on believing that the finale is approaching. This may be due to a craving for some kind of resolution of the incomprehensible plot.
    • The Great War arc (later known as World War I) was advertised as "the war to end all wars". Ninety seasons later, and war episodes are as common as ever.
    • Some of the "Crazy Street Person" class advertise it rather more frequently.
    • The Y2K storyline also served up some red herrings.
    • The date 6/6/06. Some people bet on whether we would survive. Others suggested that people listen to Slayer. Does anyone else wonder how the believers were supposed to collect their money?
    • The 2012 season seemed destined to fit into here, although it wasn't.
    • When episode 12/20 aired, we weren't sure if 12/21 would air or if the show would just end. It aired, so this does fit here.
  • Serious Business: And how. In fact, you are expected to treat it as the most important thing ever, or you'll possibly be considered a freak or something.
  • Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: This is practically required to get a university degree (a prestige-class Knowledge achievement that can only be unlocked through several years of level grinding). Also, some people with Asperger's syndrome may speak like this all the time, as well as in Spock Speak.
  • Sex Montage: It's happening right now, though probably not for you if you're reading this. Unless you can multitask.
  • Shifting Sand Land: North Africa, Arabia, Central Asia, Western USA, most of Australia, and a part of South America.
  • Ship Sinking: Allllll the time. Occasionally cause for a Heroic BSoD.
  • Ship Tease: Spreading rumors about characters dating each other. Prevalent in many characters' high school arcs and certain magazines that provide constant coverage of Celebrity characters.
  • Short-Lived, Big Impact: Something many people doing speed runs aspire to In-Universe.
  • Shout-Out: After the release of the original Star Wars, a President character proposed an unnecessary orbital defense against nonexistent weapons, code-named 'Star Wars'.
  • Show Within a Show: A truly massive number of them, of literally every genre. With such a large cast of characters, it's not surprising that every major group has a large number of fictional and nonfictional novels and books. Heck, there's even a Database Within The Show that analyzes both the show and the shows within it.
  • Single-Biome Planet: Averted for the most part. It is difficult to get a large sphere to truly have a single biome across its entire surface. Major exceptions would be planets not near a star (called rogue planets) or planets with extremely thick atmospheres, such as Venus, the only large body known to play this trope entirely straight (the temperature at the poles is the same as that at the equator at high noon or midnight). Most people might assume that say, icy bodies like Pluto or rocky, airless bodies like Mercury would be single-biome planets, but the different exposure to sunlight would still result in different circumstances in different places. It might all look icy to you, but for a native of Pluto, equatorial ice would probably seem very different from polar ice.
  • The Singularity: Rumors suggest the next major expansion pack will be this, but many of the players are worried that it'll crash the server and ruin everyone's game instead, turning the solar system into cheese.
  • Sir Swears-a-Lot: Unfortunately enforced for people with certain types of Tourette's Syndrome.
  • Slice of Life: The entire world plays straight on this trope.
  • Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Tends to slide back and forth between arcs and also on a day-to-day basis. All characters have their own opinions on it and frequently argue, and some watchers make fanfics or mods that usually tip on one side of the scale.
  • Slippy-Slidey Ice World:
    • Antarctica, Siberia, the local ski resort... all there. Greenland, but not Iceland. Ironic, no? In general, these areas lack the classic slippery ice — it's usually fairly rough unless recently melted and refrozen — but inflict severe environmental damage on any player not equipped with significant protective gear and items.
    • Many areas can become a Slippy-Slidey Ice World after a "Freezing Rain" event.
  • Slobs Versus Snobs: Some servers, particularly the United Kingdom server, have a sharply defined class system.
  • The Slow Path: Expect loads and loads of grinding to attain your character's preferred class. Even if the class has shortened requirements, your character may have to complete other, unrelated sidequests, or take even more grinding to get the class. The artist class (and various sub-classes) have it the worst, as many grinds, but will never get player recognition.
  • The Smart Guy: Many, some of whom have managed to induce system-wide improvements or change the nature of the interface. The unknown inventor of thread qualifies, as does Archimedes, DaVinci, Sun Tzu, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Leibniz, Linnaeus, Tesla, Einstein, Von Braun, and Hawking. Despite millions of characters who desperately sought fame through politics or conquest, The Smart Guy can achieve such fame that Last Name Only is adequate for recognition, even after hundreds of seasons!
  • So Beautiful, It's a Curse: Yes, it is. Being attractive may cause others to envy you, bully you, or even stalk you. Not to mention sexual harassment or actual rape. Also, most human societies at any time have a history of attractive girls being kidnapped/sold in sexual slavery.
  • The Sociopath: There are a whole bunch of them around, and is very difficult to pinpoint them no matter how normal they seem to be. Lack of Empathy is obvious enough as it is. They have no conscience, they're utterly self-centered, and are good at manipulating people.
  • Sociopathic Hero: Most of the players who are sociopathic are supposed to be on the side of good, but also have no qualms with mistreating other people and making them feel worthless for their own amusement.
  • Somewhere, a Herpetologist Is Crying: There is an urban legend wherein a woman keeps waking up to discover her husband's pet python is stretching itself out alongside her in bed. She calls a herpetologist to ask about the behavior, and he tells her "Get out of the house now!" (is that a Stock Phrase?): The python, he tells her, was measuring her up in preparation to eat her.
    • Sadly, most wildlife-rehabilitation facilities have had to treat turtles with cracked shells, whom some idiot tried to remove from their "little house" in ignorance of the fact that the shell is part of the animal's skeleton. A case of Television Is Trying To Kill Turtles in action.
    • Horned lizards are often called "horned toad," "horny toad", "horned frog" etc etc etc due to their similarity to the given amphibians but they are lizards. To make things more confusing, their scientific name, Phrynosoma, evidently means "toad-bodied" so...
    • One Not Always Right tidbit had a man in a petshop try to have a staring contest with one of the pythons for ten minutes before the owner had to remind him that snakes can't blink.
    • The idea that snakes somehow possess a hypnotic gaze probably stems from a few things. The first is that snakes lack eyelids, so their unblinking stares can be kind of creepy to humans. The second comes from stories of people who witness small animals sitting very still when snakes are nearby. This is standard prey behavior with just about any possible threat, freezing up so that predators who aren't already aware of them might not notice (if that doesn't work, run). This sort of behavior may be partly responsible for the myth of the Gorgon Medusa. And while we're on the subject, snake charmers don't charm snakes with music (since snakes don't hear things the same way we do), the snake is just following the motion of the charmer's flute and hands.
  • Somewhere, an Entomologist Is Crying: Insects, arachnids, crustaceans, and myriapods all do not have jaws that open and close like vertebrates, and they do not have teeth or tongues as we do.
    • A mosquito's proboscis is not syringe-shaped and certainly not its nose.
    • An arachnid's limbs are attached to the first of their two body segments (the prosoma) and the insect's the second of their three (the thorax). They are not proportioned or configured like anything remotely resembling a human or a dog.
    • Basically, every depiction that isn't attempting to go for scientific accuracy is abysmally, embarrassingly, very obviously wrong.
    • What most people refer to as a "wild" beehive is a mix between an antique bee skep and a hornet's nest. Actual wild beehives look like this or this, or are simply made inside an existing knothole.
    • Being arachnids, scorpions have eight legs (the pincers are pedipalps, which are closer to mouthparts than anything), but good luck finding one in TVland with the right number of legs. Made all the more grating because a simple Google search would clear up this misunderstanding immediately.
  • Somewhere, an Ornithologist Is Crying: Most people think hollow bones like those of birds are fragile. In reality, thanks to a complex honeycomb structure, bird bones are no more fragile than those of mammals. In the case of the now-extinct dinosaurs and pterosaurs, both having pneumatic skeletons, fragility would mean death, and they had quite strong yet light bones.
  • Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: Over the past 10 000 years, we've gone from rocks and obsidian blades to ... laser-guided cluster bombs? Remotely-piloted Attack Drones? The nuclear option? Luckily very, very few players ever get to unlock these.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: There can be times where bad things happen while cheery music is playing. For example a shootout at a party. Also, the "Ear Worm" debuff can cause this if it's in effect at the wrong time.
  • Sparse List of Rules: Most characters only know the sections of legal codes that directly affect them.
  • Spectacular Spinning: The wheel seems to be the example here. Though its introduction occurs in a Lost Episode, believed to be several thousand seasons ago, nearly every episode features one or more of the myriad variations on the basic concept. Not for living characters, though, rapid rotation around the Z-axis inflicts a nasty Interface Screw and debuffs to appetite, stability, and dexterity.
  • Spikes of Doom: Averted in everyday life, though they have been used as booby traps in wars, and several plants have thick thorns on them. There's also a creature called the Porcupine which took this and ran with it — rather literally.
  • Spinoff:
    • In-universe, Second Life. Widely considered to suffer from severe Adaptation Decay, although its fans will argue that it's merely a Pragmatic Adaptation.
    • The Science Class invokes this with their theories about alternate dimensions, and for that matter the projection that there is another, pretty identical Earth somewhere in the potentially infinite universe.
  • Spock Speak:
    • A required skill for the Scientist, Engineer, and Economist classes.
    • These pages, whenever gaming tropes are used.
    • Players with certain flavours of the Autism trait tend to do this without realising it.
  • Spoiler: Played With. There are characters who claim to be capable of knowing the plot in advance from pretty much all levels, and some play it straighter than others. Often a subverted trope, and generally Played for Drama. Characters are not usually mad about these spoilers.
  • Spotlight-Stealing Squad:
    • What other reason could there be for the number of tropes here pertaining specifically to humans?
    • People with levels in the Celebrity class.
  • Sprint Meter: Two distinct ones for characters:
    • Stamina (or Energy) is a more general measure of activities and hours you can stay awake and the only hard regeneration for it is sleeping, any consumable marked "stimulant" can grant a small amount, slow down the rate at which it drains or even grants a very slow amount of regeneration but the buffs start losing effectiveness the longer you've been awake. Your stamina cap, endurance, and drain reduction can be improved by having a nearly depleted meter when you go to sleep within a certain degree.
    • Fatigue (sometimes called Exhaustion) is tracked in parts around your body and actually has both a positive and negative extreme. Fatigue occurs when the muscles of that part reach around roughly 75% exertion through activities which leads to the expected debuffs that persist for about a day afterward. Lack of use also has its own problems as the stat goes into the negative "atrophy" range.
  • Status Buff: these do occur as well though. Hyper leads to increased energy and drive, though this comes at an increasing cost of concentration, and can be bestowed through energy drinks, caffeine, and other stimuli, or it can occur naturally. Some characters also get it temporarily when nearing the end of the day. Euphoria increases the morale, concentration, and motivation stats and the condition occurs after a big success. "Afterglow" increases relationships and skilled PCs will use this to chain together big chains of successes and level up quickly.
    • Though those with the "ADD" and/or "ADHD" character trait garner severe penalties to Concentration checks, there is a chance to cause the opposite effect, "Hyperfocus", on themselves, allowing them to shut out all other influences in favor of one goal. ADD, by its very scatter-brained nature, also grants the ability of "Brainstorming", allowing the caster to come up with as many ideas as a small group of people, though many of them may be just as scatter-brained.
    • Also there is the infamous Strength Buff. It is considered illegal in many countries and has some really bad side effects. There are some other buffs for your base physical stats, and they are equally damaging. Buffs for mental stats exist only in theory.
    • "Adrenaline Rush" is a naturally triggered buff upon sighting of any potential hostile with at least twice as many overall stat points as you, a considerable environmental hazard, or anticipating, dodging, and especially taking heavy damage. This can also be triggered by an accident through an abrupt event to any of your five senses. The buff grants a significant boost to your attack strength and movement speed. However, it only lasts until you are no longer in danger, give-or-take, and you're immediately saddled with an "Adrenaline Crash" debuff, resulting in a loss to those stats below the original values and this effect is amplified depending on how long the initial buff lasted.
  • Status Effects: Humans are rather vulnerable to poison, paralysis, stun, sloth, sleep, blindness, freeze, burn, berserk, confusion, lust, charm, fear, deafness, and instant death status effects. Some would say cursing can happen as well. Petrification is rare but known; see Pompeii. The silence status is almost unheard of (though speech impediments are common). Fatigue sets in after exercise and saps strength, agility, and motivation, and this status can advance to Exhaustion, which almost destroys the stats. Tiredness occurs after going without sleep and advances. Tiredness 1 occurs normally after going on the past evening and reduces concentration and motivation. (Note: It's possible to be stuck with Tiredness 1 if a character is addicted to caffeine.) Tiredness 2 occurs upon completely missing a night's sleep, and results in further stat hits and temper also taking a hit. Sleep Deprivation, however, is when things get nasty. SD 1 inflicts Paranoia, and SD 2 finally causes hallucinations. Any further progression results in Instant Death. Depression is caused by various factors, both natural and due to outside stimuli (it's also one of the nastier debuffs caused by substance abuse), and causes huge penalties to motivation. Temper can also be affected, and PCs who get too depressed may end up suicidal.
  • Status Quo Is God: Many players feel this way, and many resources are devoted to keeping things mostly the same way as it's always been.
  • Story Within a Story: Too many to list. Not that we didn't try. The list is made potentially infinite by the fact that literally, any character can create such a story.
  • Strictly Formula: Zig-Zagged. There is a great deal of variation, but many, many episodes are similar to the point of interchangeability.
  • Stripperiffic: Also known as varying degrees of "indecent exposure." The line for how little clothing can be worn without being considered "indecent" has been shifting in some countries, allowing for this trope to increase in prominence. Some countries have legalized public nudity.
  • Stuff Blowing Up: Even things such as whales can blow up. Although terrorism, war, and the debris caused by explosions show, it usually isn't fun (except for fireworks). This is thought to be how Real Life was first created.
  • Subsystem Damage: Almost every entity, player or not, has this to a varying level and the only way to get a rough estimate of damage is by inspecting the object or person in question or through your nervous system in many instances. Many of the medical classes and sub-classes are all about fixing individual subsystems on human and animal characters. Mechanical engineering classes, their sub-classes, and entire skill trees are all about being able to determine and repair subsystems on vehicles, implements, machinery, etc. It's important to maintain subsystems on your character as, outside of certain cases, they are gone for good once they are destroyed or lost through other means such as excessive debuffs.
  • Super-Speed Reading:
    • A childhood condition called hyperlexia causes this effect.
    • Certain players have been known or rumored to retain or even acquire this ability as adults, among them Magliabechi, John Stuart Mill, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and JFK, and Guiness book record holder Howard Berg.
  • Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: This can happen to players who work menial office jobs or are constantly busy at work until suddenly one day — usually the last week of a month — they have their workloads suddenly decreased greatly, and are allowed to simply slack off at work. Unfortunately, this likely means the player(s) in question would very likely be demoted in-game or, even worse, start a new game in another company.
  • Sweet Polly Oliver: Joan of Arc, most famously, but over the game's history it's been fairly common for female players to disguise themselves as males in order to enter guild leadership roles or engage in pvp. This has become much less common in recent seasons, as most player guilds have abandoned their gender restrictions to player careers.


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