Team Fortress 2 / Tropes H to P

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You can view the main article HERE!

Tropes A-G HERE!

Tropes Q-Z HERE!

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H

• Halloweentown: The Halloween event maps Mann Manor, Harvest Event, Eyeaduct, Ghost Fort, Ghost Town, Helltower, and Carnival of Carnage. Mann Manor also counts as a Haunted House, while Carnival of Carnage is a Circus of Fear.
• Ham-to-Ham Combat:

• Literally, with the addition of the Ham Shank.

• Hammerspace:
  • Mentioned by name on this fan-made page.
  • Exaggerated with the Spy. According to the Ap-Sap, he keeps his knife, revolver, and sapper in a suit pocket.
• Handshake Substitute:
  • The High Five taunt, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • The Love And War Update also added the Flippin' Awesome^* an assisted backflip, Skull Cracker^* a mutual headbutt, and Square Dance^* Exactly What It Says on the Tin taunts, which work the same way.
• Harmful Healing: Heavily implied to be happening with The Medic's healing beam. Healing is the side effect of his treatment.
  • The Medic considers healing a generally unintended side effect of satisfying his own morbid curiosity.
  • The "Meet the Medic" video goes into more detail about how the Ubercharge works (a cyborg heart implant).
    Scout (post-op): "Oh-ho-ho, man! You would not believe! ...How much this hurts."
  • This example, however, is more caused by the dove he accidentally sealed in the Scout's chest, which is why the Scout sometimes has a dove fly out when he dies
  • "All I can tell you about this next procedure is that it will be... excruciating!"
• Hats Off to the Dead: Parodied. In the promotional video "Meet the Sniper", RED Sniper is shown taking off his hat and bowing his head after stabbing BLU Spy with his machete. In the game proper, this is one of the Sniper's taunts.
• Have a Nice Death:
  • The game provides a freezecam shot of who killed you, and if gibs are on and any of your body parts are in the shot, it very helpfully points out which parts they are ("Your spleen! Your pancreas! Your torso! More bits!")
    • Especially funny if -sillygibs or Pyrovision is on; see Silliness Switch.
  • If it's a domination or revenge kill, your opponent's character may also make fun of you. And on rarer occasions, they will even if it's not.
  • Several classes have special achievements for taunting during the enemy's deathcams, sometimes more than one. The Sniper can either doff his hat at the enemy (basically, paying respect), or wave (to mock them). The Soldier has one where he taunts over at least three pieces of the enemy's remains, and the Medic has one for taunting over an enemy's ragdoll.
  • Upon defeat, the Administrator declares "YOU FAILED!" and your entire team is rendered unable to attack while the opposing team gets to crit all of you to death.
  • If you fall do your death you get this:
  Playername fell to a clumsy, painful death.
  • Changing classes or typing "kill"/"explode" in the console will result in this line:
  Playername bid farewell, cruel world!
• Headless Horseman: During the 2010 Halloween update, the Horseless Headless Horsemann appeared about every eight minutes in the new "Mann Manor" map. He's extremely powerful, and prances around the map gleefully with an axe decapitating all in his path. If a player actually manages to defeat him, they'll score an achievement and a free hat. If they go the extra mile and land a hit with a melee weapon near his dying moments, the player may get an extra rare crafting item as well. He is so powerful that he can even defeat MONOCULUS! and Merasmus (the latter of which is supposed to be able to boss him around, as shown in Carnival of Carnage).
• Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: No matter which team wins on the Helltower map, both RED and BLU go to Hell. The winning Mann brother sends his mercs to Hell so he won't have to pay them, and the losing Mann brother furiously drags his team down to Hell with him. The advantage to winning, however, is that the winning team is given a health buff that will help them survive the inevitable clash against the losing team in Hell.
• Heal Thyself:
  • Medic:
    • In the event that a Medic is low on health and there are no medkits or other Medics present, the Sniper vs. Spy update introduced a taunt to the Kritzkrieg where the Medic will take a great huff of the health gas from the barrel to restore 11 health.
    • Taunting with the Amputator will also provide some healing to you as well as any nearby team members (but not disguised Spies, oddly enough), and holding it will give a small boost to the Medic's Healing Factor.
    • The Blutsauger Syringe Gun side-grade also allows a Medic to self-heal... by leeching health from his enemies. On the other hand, it reduces his natural Healing Factor.
  • A Sniper with a Cozy Camper can regenerate up to 4 HP per second.
  • In Mann vs Machine, all players can upgrade themselves to regenerate up to 10 HP a second.
  • The Concheror bestows the Soldier with a passive HP regeneration, up to 4 HP per second depending on how recently he was hurt. The Black Box blends this with Life Drain by healing the Soldier for up to 20 HP on hit, depending on how much damage that rocket dealt.
  • Scout has an unlockable secondary called the Mad Milk that heals him and his teammates by 60% of the damage done to enemies covered in it.
  • Pyro's Powerjack heals the user by 25 HP upon killing an enemy with it.
  • The Half-Zatoichi heals the user by half their max health upon killing enemies; however, you can't put it away until you either kill an enemy or hurt yourself for 50 health points. It is equippable by both Soldier and Demoman.
  • Heavy
    • The big man has perhaps the most iconic self-healing method: eating the Sandvich. It heals you by 300 HP upon use and takes 4 seconds to eat, during which all you can do is "nom nom nom". He also has the Second Banana, that heals him for 200 HP but recharges three times as fast as the Sandvich, and the Dalokohs Bar, which heals him the least (100 HP) but can give the Heavy a 50 health overheal and also recharges in 10 seconds. The Sandvich can be thrown with Secondary Fire and acts as a medium health pack; the Banana and Dalokohs only act as small ones. All three can be recharged instantly by picking up a health pack, no matter the size, while at full health.
    • He also has the Warrior's Spirit, which deals more damage than stock and heals him for 50 health upon killing enemies, though with the extra 30% damage taken this doesn't last too long.
  • The Spy has the Conniver's Kunai, which cuts his max health to 70 HP, but lets him steal the health of his targets on a backstab, dramatically overhealing him to a max of 210 HP.
• Healing Factor: Along with examples from the before-mentioned trope, Mann vs Machine upgrades can allow this for all classes.
• He Knows Too Much: While Ms. Pauling and the Administrator don't actually try to kill Soldier and Demoman from the opposing teams, they do drive a wedge in their friendship because of this, as they would eventually talk about their work and realise that they're hired by the same person to kill each other.
• Helium Speech: Those in Pyroland will hear other players speak like this.
• Hell Is That Noise:
  • To the Engineer, "Spy's sapping my sentry" (or anything) and the beeping. Especially monstrous if you've just been killed and can't do anything about it.
  • In Mann Versus Machine Mode, the ticking of the Sentry Buster.
• Helmet-Mounted Sight: The Virtual Reality mode can use the player's headset to aim weapons.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Whoever pushes the cart during the last elevator push in PLR_Hightower. Someone must be with the cart to the very end of the elevator rise until it explodes to achieve victory. However, a clever Spy with a Dead Ringer can capture it by himself, thus saving both himself and his teammates.
  • Most payloads result in this, since the blast radius is huge. In most cases, even Dead Ringers can't save you, since the payload explosion leaves an instant-death pit in its wake.
• High-Five Left Hanging: One taunt is to offer a high five to other players. The Spy has a Dummied Out line where he's rather angry at the idea of being turned down.
  Spy: Leave me hanging, and you will regret it.
• Highly-Conspicuous Uniform: The classes' outfits are designed to be brightest around the torso, to make identifying and aiming at them easier.
• High-Pressure Blood: Gibs have particle emitters attached for the first second or two after death.
• Hilarity Ensues: Mentioned in the description for Payload Race:
  "Two teams. Two carts. Two tracks. Hilarity Ensues."
• Hero Shooter: All the classes are heavily characterized with unique personalities. This serves a practical purpose: Valve made the physical appearance of the classes very differentiated from each other in order to make it easy to eyeball who is charging at you in the thick of battle. Having the kooky personalities is just an added bonus.
• Highly Specific Counterplay: The "Direct Hit" was one of the first unlockable weapons for the Soldier. Its rockets are much faster than normal, making it a specific counter for the Pyro's newly introduced backblast ability (which allowed them to deflect projectiles like Soldier rockets). It was later patched to also do minicrit damage to targets who were airborne.
• The Hilarity of Hats: Most of the humor (that doesn't involve someone beaten to a pulp or drenched in urine) is based around the incredible status of hats. There's a reason why it's nicknamed a "war-themed hat simulator".
• Hit Points: All classes have a certain amount of set health and how much damage they can take before they die.
• Hitscan: Pistols, SMGs, shotguns, rifles, and miniguns follow this straight (though shotguns and miniguns fire in a cone and get less accurate at long range), contrasting explosive weapons, flare guns, and bows, which follow projectile motion. This most often gets brought up when discussing the Scout and the Demoman: Scouts have two hitscan weapons (to their benefit) and Demomen have none (to their detriment), which leads to Demos having a hard time dealing with good Scouts who get up close and make themselves impossible to track for the grenade launcher.
• Hitbox Dissonance: Hoo boy. Lag compensation "curving bullets" around corners so they hit you. Melee attacks playing the sound it makes when it hits an enemy but not dealing any damage. Huntsman arrows hitting when they should have missed. Enemies Spies getting a backstab on you when they are in front of you.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • An Engineer can be killed by his own sentry if he stands in front of it as it shoots, and a Demoman and Soldier can gib themselves with their own projectiles if they're too close to the blast. Scouts who can't aim with a Boston Basher/Three Rune Blade might bleed to death, and a Detonator-wielding Pyro can damage himself from the explosives.
  • Skilled airblasting Pyros can intentionally invoke this on any character using a projectile weapon (Soldiers and Demoman usually, but can also happen to Huntsman Snipers, Flare Gun Pyros, and, amusingly, even Sandman Scouts) by reflecting the projectile right back at them, or at their teammates. This is actually encouraged, since reflected projectiles gain minicrits if they're not already full crits.
    • Unskilled airblasting Pyros can do this to themselves by intentionally walking into a hail of rockets/grenades/stickies.
• Hold the Line: RED team's job on Payload and the Attack/Defend style CP maps, as well as everyone's job in Mann vs. Machine.
• Holiday Mode:
  • Birthday Mode, which was set to activate on the anniversary of the original game's release. Ludicrous Gibs turn into silly objects like unicycle wheels and springs, blood turns into helium balloons, health pickups turn into crates, ammo pickups gain ribbons similar to presents, and everyone receives a noisemaker item to use and a paper birthday hat to wear.
  • Halloween Mode, which activates in the late half of October and on a full moon. Health pickups turn into candies, items that are Halloween/Full Moon restricted become visible, and the title screen shows either the art for the current Halloween update or one of the mercs dressed in a Halloween costume. Valve servers will run special Halloween maps, and your default taunt randomly becomes the dance move from the music video of Michael Jackson's ''Thriller''. Special cosmetics are also put into the game, usually some kind of costume or something similar.
  • There's also an actual Holiday Mode, though not as major as Halloween and Birthday. During the month of December, festive lights will appear on the hanging cables commonly seen throughout the game. Valve also implements weapon reskins and new winter-themed hats to be put in the game.
• Holler Button: By default, pressing the E key makes you call out to Medics, warning them that you need assistance. The other voice commands are managed by small menus, though with some console commands any key can become a Holler Button.
• Homemade Flamethrower: Most of the Pyro's flamethrowers are clearly made up of junk repurposed to create a flamethrower.
• Homemade Inventions:
  • The Bazaar Bargain was made using an old bolt-action rifle, a long piece of metal, some bolts, one half of a binocular and a military-grade laser sight, all bought for just under three dinars.
  • Soldier's Beggar's Bazooka was made with pipes for the body, a bent clotheshanger for the sights, and a funnel for the exhaust.
  • Pyro's stock Flame Thrower is made using a small propane tank, a long metal pole, a gas pump, and zip ties to hold the thing together.
  • The Degreaser has been built with a gas pump, a car muffler, an exhaust pipe, a stove top burner, and a fire extinguisher. The Powerjack has been made out of a car battery strapped to an antique automobile jack using large rubber bands.
• Hot Bar: Each class has their own loadout for weapon types, cosmetics, and taunts.
• Humongous Mecha:
  • The giant robots in Mann vs. Machine. Sturdy, powerful, slow as balls. (Except for the giant Scout robot, naturally.)
  • The Mecha Engineer, introduced in the Mecha Update, is over one hundred feet tall! (It isn't.)
• Hyperactive Metabolism:
  • The Heavy's unlockable lunch item, the Sandvich, must be laced with Human Growth Hormone. It regenerates all of the big lug's health. Should he drop it by dying or throw it with alternate attack, it will heal half of the health of anyone who picks it up.
  • The Scout is the exception, receiving 75 points of health (3/5 of his health) for a stolen Sandvich instead. This is an allusion to Sandvich's first appearance in Meet The Scout, where the Scout physically wrested it from the Heavy.
  • Speaking of which, his drinks also take effect immediately.
• Hungry Weapon: The Eyelander thirsts for heads, and whispers repeatedly "heaadssss". By the time Gray takes over Mann. Co, the Eyelander has taken to living with a drunken, unemployed Demoman in his mansion, ranting about TV shows, and getting a taste for churros.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Like many First Person Shooters, most weapons that are not equipped do not appear. However, they still take up inventory space (the Scout and Heavy cannot carry lunchbox items and sidearms at the same time). The current exceptions are the Demoman's and Sniper's shields; the Cozy Camper; the Soldier's backpacks (but not the instruments); Ali Baba's Wee Booties and Bootlegger; and of course, the Gunslinger. The Medic also carries his backpack around all the time, supposedly holding much of the machinery that powers his medigun. Same for the Pyro's oxygen tank.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • Some of the Engineer's domination lines against the Sniper insult his tendency to camp, despite the Engie being designed for much the same purpose.
  • Similarly, the Demoman has lines about the Sniper camping, yet defensive Demos lay out carpets of stickybombs and wait for long periods of time.
  • The Sniper will also insult his headshot victims for "standin' around like a bloody idiot", despite a Sniper's own tendency to do the same thing.
  • The Engineer, the shortest of the mercenaries, has the line "Take it like a man, shorty" when killing someone with his wrench.
  • The Scout will sound disgusted when hit with Mad Milk, even if he has Mad Milk equipped. Doesn't apply to the Sniper however, who will instead sound annoyed more than disgusted when hit with Jarate.
  • Spy usually plays himself off as cool and suave, and the Sniper plays himself off as formal and dignified about killing others... except, of course, when Spy dominates someone and when Sniper... well, Sniper is just a damn liar.

I

• I Banged Your Mom:
  • The Spy's Domination lines to the Scout, derived from the plot of "Meet the Spy".
    Spy: Well, off to visit your mother!
  • The Demoman also claims to be shagging the enemy Medic's wife in domination taunts.
• I Call It "Vera":
  • With the addition of Name Tags, players can now call their weapons and hats whatever the hell they want. Even stock items.
  • And the Heavy's miniguns, Sasha and Natascha.
    • As well as Svetlana (the Tomislav), Oksana (the Brass Beast), and Sheila (the Huo Long Heater).
  • The Sniper's kukri, Sharpy.
• I Can See My House from Here: One of the Scout's lines while double jumping.
  Scout: Hey, I can see my base from here!
• Idiot Ball: Scout looks to be holding this in-game, if he's using the Force-A-Nature/Soda Popper and/or the Boston Basher. If he's using the Force-A-Nature or the Soda Popper, fires once and reloads, he'll eject and throw the unused shell away for no good reason. Apparently, it takes too long for him to simply open the darn thing and replace the spent shell only. If he's wielding the Boston Basher and swings it but doesn't hit an enemy, he doesn't make any apparent effort to stop the spiked club from beaning him in the head.
• I Fell for Hours: Ghost Fort, Helltower, Gorge Event and a few other Halloween maps have a large pit into Hell for you to fall down. Six of the nine classes have their own yell for falling into it. Scout and Spy take the time to lampshade the situation.
  Scout: "AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH- Holy crap, this goes on forever..."
  Spy: "AAAAAAAGH!... Come on, I don't have all day!"
• I Know You Know I Know: Playing Spy can lead to this kind of thinking.
• Implacable Man: The super-huge, super powerful, super unstoppable Giant Robots on harder waves of Mann Vs. Machine mode, who only take knockback from the Heavy's rage attacks and simply walk over obstacles they can't quickly destroy.
• Improbable Accessory Effect: The Demoman's Bootlegger (a peg leg replacement) somehow increases his movement speed and turn control. The Sniper's Darwin's Danger Shield (a shield on his back made from crocodile skin) reduces fire damage. (It used to increase his max HP instead.)
• Improbable Use of a Weapon: The Ullapool Caber, a hand grenade, is a melee weapon.
  In-game weapon description: A sober person would throw it...
• Improbable Weapon User: Every single class, usually with melee weapons. There's candy canes, frying pans, rakes, bottles, mittens, wrenches, busts, protest signs, icicles, neon signs, robot arms, riding crops, severed arms, war fans, rolls of wrapping paper, sledgehammers, German 'potato masher' grenades, golf clubs, car jacks, sentient and evil loaves of bread, jars of piss and milk, shovels, pickaxes, boxing gloves, baseball bats... and even a fish!
• In the Style of: The art style is based off of J.C. Leyendecker.
• Incendiary Exponent:
  • The "on fire" status effect. Exploding players with this will now result in burning gibs.
  • Invoked by Saxton Hale; all of Mann Co's product line are designed to be highly flammable, so Hale can be sure that they're turned on. This includes products with no moving parts, like shovels.
• Incoming!: It's a voice command. Also used by the Heavy in Meet the Spy before he mows down the door to the intel room.
• Increasingly Lethal Enemy: Don't let the Bomb Carrier in MVM hold the bomb for too long. If it's not a Giant Robot, it'll gain a defensive buff, then fast health regeneration, and then unlimited critical hits.
• Infinite Supplies:
  • The Engineer's dispenser provides limitless ammo to anyone standing near it. Pyros and Heavies can fire an unending stream of pain this way, even from a level one.
  • The Dispenser also gives any nearby friendly Engineers more metal to build with. Nobody's really quite sure where the metal comes from. Though teleportation technology exists...
• Informal Eulogy: Some domination lines.
  Soldier: You're dead, that's good, amen.
  Spy: Here lies Scout. He ran fast and died a virgin.
• Injured Vulnerability: Certain weapons do more damage if the player they hit has been "prepared". Example: the Flaregun does critical damage to flaming targets, as does the Axetinguisher, and the Sniper's Bushwhacka similarly deals crits against anyone covered by the damage-increasing Jarate.
• In-Series Nickname: Demoman and Engineer are often shortened to Demo and Engie. Medics and Heavies call Medics "Doktor" sometimes. The Scout will call the Engineer "Hardhat". And Soldier has a lot of nicknames for allied Medics. The namecalling in domination lines probably doesn't count as "nicknames" per se...
• Insane Troll Logic: The Soldier, on his account of being seriously mentally ill. Not only does he shout complete nonsense very often, but some of it is flat out confusing:
  Soldier: We have you surrounded, at least from this side!
• Insists on Being Suspected: In the video "Meet the Spy", the BLU Spy tells his teammates that anyone in the building might be a disguised RED Spy, stressing that "He could be you! He could be me!" This doesn't end well for him, as the BLU Soldier immediately kills him. The RED Spy is later revealed to be disguised as the BLU Scout.
• Instant Gravestone:
  • An update replaced the bonuses of certain Set Bonus loadouts with this when a player kills an enemy. The only set that doesn't get this is the Saharan Spy set, given how this trope would undermine the Spy's effectiveness.
  • Several weapons, like the Golden Wrench and the Spy-cicle, leave physics-reactive statues instead of corpses.
• Instant-Win Condition:
  • No matter how any member of the team fares individually, so long as the overall map objective is completed, victory is achieved. This is especially noticeable on Attack/Defend style CP, where a single BLU can win the game even if everyone else is getting massacred.
    • On cp_steel, capturing the final point is the only thing that matters for BLU to win. Unlike other CP maps, which only allow the closest point to be captured, this last point is always available, so it is possible to ignore the first four points and go straight for last. However, it takes a very long time to capture, the cap speed can be sped up by capturing the rest of the points, and capping the other points tweaks the map to make things harder for the RED team (opening up routes for BLU, closing down routes for RED, etc.), giving incentive to work through the map in sequence.
  • In Mann Versus Machine, all the robots marked as "support" will instantly drop dead once all the non-support bots are killed. For example, if a wave consists of 30 Soldier bots and unlimited "support" Scoutbots, killing the 30th Soldier bot causes all the Scoutbots to die instantly, no matter how much of the field they control or how far they've advanced the bomb. This also applies to Sentry Busters, which will disappear without detonating once the main robots are destroyed.
• Instructional Film: The original release maps (as well as a few later maps) are introduced with a black-and-white instructional film explaining the map's objective and, sometimes, unique elements of its topology.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: tc_hydro has a commentary node about how its conspicuous waist-high fences are Lampshade Hanging and a major theme of the game.
• Interface Screw:
  • Getting hit with the Sniper's Jarate causes the screen to go yellowish and warped until the effect wears off.
  • The Scout's Holy Mackerel causes the killfeed to broadcast whoever he's hitting with the fish until he stops or kills the target. This also applies for the Unarmed Combat and Hot Hand.
  • The Spy's Dead Ringer screws with the enemy's kill feed (it lies about the spy's death) and, in some cases, gives out completely legitimate achievements.
  • Being lit on fire adds a ring of burnination to your HUD (and a constant HP drain, of course).
  • Visiting Pyroland on maps that support it turns the textures psychedelic, everyone's voice becomes high-pitched, and death screams become laughter.
• Invisibility with Drawbacks: Spies cannot attack or Sap when cloaked. Their invisibility also flickers when they bump into enemy players or take damage, and they can still be outed if coated in Jarate, Mad Milk, or if spotted while emerging from a body of water.
• Ironic Hell:
  • Happens to Blutarch (and supposedly Redmond), as well as Miss Pauling (and potentially the Administrator). When Blutarch dies, he notes that there is nothing on the other side, directly the opposite of how his feud with Redmond has led to TF Industries' conquest and control of the entire planet. In her afterlife, Miss Pauling wakes up half-buried and surrounded by vultures, not unlike how she's often tasked with disposing of other peoples' bodies. And, when Miss Pauling takes a glimpse at what the Administrator's personal Hell might be, hers is a room not unlike the wall of screens she spends her entire day sitting behind, but instead of revealing what the mercenaries are up to, the screens face inwards and show only her face. She herself notes that it's very poetic.
  • Also, Inverted with most of the deaths of the mercs. In Sniper's version of Heaven, his deceased parents finally approve of his profession and even encourage him to return to the living world so he can keep doing it. In Scout's version of it, God is there and acts like a total fanboy of him, stoking his ego massively. Averted with the Medic, who is shown to have a more traditional Fire and Brimstone Hell, complete with the big red guy himself, who he promptly scams.
• Irony: Valve has a habit of adding in Halloween variants of popular 6v6 competitive maps, maps that are otherwise made to be viable in competitive settings, and were not designed for the unbalanced map designs other Halloween maps usually offer:
  • Sinshine (Added in Scream Fortress 2015, Halloween variant of "Sunshine", was later added proper in "Meet Your Match")
  • Cauldron (Added in Scream Fortress 2018; Halloween variant of "Bagel", currently not in-game).
  • Moldergrove (Added in Scream Fortress 2020; Halloween variant of "Undergrove", currently not in-game).
• I Shall Taunt You: Each class has a wide variety of taunts, ranging anywhere between posing for a screenshot, mocking your enemy, and doing something in-character for that class. Vocal taunts are triggered automatically as the result of kills, while taunt animations can be triggered manually at any time. Certain taunts can even kill other players if they stand right in front of the one doing it.
• Item Amplifier:
  • The Back Scratcher increases the amount of health gained from health kits by 50% for Pyros. However, other healing sources such as the Medic's mediguns, Engineer's dispenser, and the Payload cart heal the Pyro 75% slower.
  • In Mann vs Machine mode, the Medic can upgrade any of his Mediguns to share Canteen abilities with their healing target. As a bonus, the effects of the used Canteen is extended depending on how much he has upgraded this ability.
• It's a Wonderful Failure: Fail a Payload map and you get to see the bomb you failed to stop blow up.
• It's Personal: A common effect of getting Dominated by an enemy player.
• Item Crafting: Think of blueprints as recipes, but instead of making Chicken Cordon Bleu, they make guns! And hats! And Sandviches, which in retrospect would have helped our analogy better if we'd mentioned that first.

J

• Jack of All Stats:
  • The Pyro has the most balanced stats of the team. He has a fairly respectable 175 HP, above average movement speed, and only really loses out on range. Their true strength comes from the versatility of their loadout as they can do just about anything from use a shotgun, use a flare gun to crit burning players, mini rocket jump with the Detonator, put out burning players, reflect projectiles, and even destroy sappers. Other, more specialized classes most of these things better but the Pyro’s versatility and balanced stats make them an invaluable team player.
  • The Soldier, with his somewhat above-average damage and health, somewhat below-average mobility, and his rather average effective range. His only real special ability is the Rocket Jump, which trades his health in for more speed, which the Demoman can do better, but with more self-damage.
• Jar Potty: The Jarate, a jar of yellow piss. Sniper can throw this to cause mini-crits on any poor bastard that gets hit and in conjunction with the Bushwacka, Sniper gets full crits at the cost of taking 20% more damage due to the knife. The jarate can also mark spies or extinguish team mates. It's Smisstmas version has a team-color ribbon, a cork, and sticker that says "Merry Smissmas, Mate!" to rub it in.
• Jobber: The BLU team in the official videos. Since the focus is always on the RED team (except for "Meet The Spy", where it's a Mook Horror Show with the BLU team reacting to the RED Spy), whenever BLU appears, they're usually getting their asses kicked. Even in the Competitive Mode trailer, BLU team loses to a gloating RED team.
• Joke Weapon:
  • The Frying Pan. It can be equipped by several classes and functions exactly like their stock melee weapon with no changes at all in stats. It does, however, carry one very annoying feature: whenever you hit something with the pan, it makes an obscenely loud "PWANG" noise (often louder than gunfire!). This carries over into other people's games, and can drown out the noises of combat with endless PWANG PWANG PWANG PWANG PWANG-ing.
  • The Holy Mackerel and its close relative, The Unarmed Combat. They're reskins of Scout's default bat (the former is a fish wrapped in newspaper, the latter is Spy's severed arm), but with one exception: every time someone gets hit, a special message appears in the killfeed along with how many consecutive hits were dealt with the weapon. If someone gets killed by it, the killfeed message appears as normal, but with "FISH KILL!" or "ARM KILL!" added to the middle.
  • The Hot Hand. It provides Pyro with a speed boost on hit, with the trade-off of dealing less damage spread over two back-to-back hits. It's mediocre as a weapon, but that stops nobody from using it, since running around and slapping people to death is hilarious. Just like with the Holy Mackerel and Unarmed Combat above, slapping people with the Hot Hand adds a special killfeed message counting the hits, which changes to "SLAP KILL!" if you kill someone with it.
• Jump Jet Pack: The Pyro's Thermal Thruster. It can build two charges over time, and the Pyro can spend a charge to fling into any direction they're looking at.
• Just Add Water: You can take unwanted items and smelt them into scrap metal, which then gets combined into reclaimed and refined metal, which then can be made into weapons and hats. Specific recipes exist to craft specific other items and weapons without having to wait for the random drop system to give them to you. There are many recipes that make little sense (metal + wrench = wrapping paper, metal + 8 jars of piss = marble bust) among some that do (batter's helmet + 2 cans of soda = batter's helmet with 2 cans of soda attached, rifle + sword that decapitates people = rifle that decapitates people).

K

• Kaizo Trap: After a success for BLU on Payload or either team for Payload Race, don't think you're sure to get some free kills in humiliation, as the detonation can still kill you. Of course, some people enjoy throwing themselves into the explosion or the pit of death that it leaves behind.
  • The fleeing enemy team is stripped of weapons. They can still taunt however, and with this comes the ability to tauntkill their pursuers.
• Killed Off for Real: As of Blood Brothers, Redmond and Blutarch Mann.
• Kill Sat: Using the Wrangler with a sentry in a high enough place can result in something very akin to this.
• Kill Streak:
  • Attaching a Killstreak Kit to a weapon will let it record how many kills you get in a single life. For every 5 kills, a banner displays it to the entire server. There are three kinds of kits, such as basic Killstreak Kits, weapon-sheen Specialized Killstreak Kits, and sheen-and-eye glowing Professional Killstreak Kits.
  • Some achievements require this, albeit with restrictions, like using a certain weapon. Most classes also have increasingly enthusiastic responses when they kill a number of enemies within a short period of time. Also, killing the same player four times without being killed by them in between (doesn't have to be in a single life) results in a Domination.
• King Mook:
  • Team Fortress 2 has 3 King Mooks in Mann Vs. Machine: Major Bomber, a giant robot Demoman wielding a Grenade Launcher and wearing Prince Tavish's Crown, Sergeant Crits, a huge robot Soldier with a Rocket Launcher and Tyrant's Helm, and Captain Punch, a gigantic Heavy wielding the Fists of STEEL!
  • Now Valve has added three even more powerful ones — Sir Nukesalot, an upgrade to Major Bomber who uses the Loose Cannon, Colonel Barrage, who wields the Rocket Launcher, and Major Crits, who wears the Full Metal Drill Hat, wields the Rocket Launcher p, and is 1.9x larger in size than the other robots.

L

• Lantern Jaw of Justice: All of the classes (except Pyro) have one of these, further exaggerated by their underbites — yes, even Bratty Half-Pint Scout has a hatchet chin that can kill. The Soldier class epitomizes this, being a great, big, yelling, murderous chin.
• Laser Sight:
  • Sentries controlled with the Wrangler have one, which is justified since it would be difficult to aim it otherwise.
  • Sniper rifles merely have a dot that shows up on the object they're aiming at; the Machina also emits a bright beam of light when fired. Sniper bots in Mann vs. Machine, however, have highly visible thick blue lasers, to serve as an easier warning to where they are in the heat of the battle.
• Last Lousy Point:
  • The grind-based achievements, particularly Pyromancer (1 million points of fire damage as a Pyro), Tartan Spartan (1 million points of explosive damage as a Demoman), The Best Little Slaughterhouse In Texas (5,000 kills with sentry guns), Chief of Staff (1 million points of actual healing — overheal doesn't count — as a Medic), the Replay achievements (100,000 views on YouTube), and Metal Massacre (kill a million robots, which will take FOREVER).
  • Also frustrating are the achievements that require players to get a number of something (kills, points) within a life.
  • Getting the Australium Jungle Inferno Contracker involves completing every bonus objective available. This includes the "Defend the (objective)" ones which are highly dependent on the competence of both teams — you can't defend the objective if the opposing team is too incompetent to even approach the objective, or if your team is too busy getting steamrolled.
• Lazy Bum: Engineer players who have the Rancho Relaxo taunt often fall into this trope, sitting around — and refusing to stand up for anything — rather than helping their team. Sometimes veers into Laborious Laziness when players sit down in improbable, often near-unreachable places.
• Lead the Target: Required of some slower projectile-based weapons, such as the Syringe Gun and Huntsman.
• Leitmotif:
  • Heavy: Arguably the main theme (simply titled "Team Fortress 2"), as he's almost the main character of the game.
  • Soldier: "Rocket Jump Waltz", "The Art Of War", "Intruder Alert"
  • Engineer: "More Gun" (based on Wilco's "Someone Else's Song")
  • Demoman: "Drunken Pipe Bomb"
  • Scout: "Faster Than A Speeding Bullet"
  • Sniper: Not in the game for copyright reasons, but his is a pastiche of the Magnum Force theme.
  • Spy: "Right Behind You", "Petite Chou-Fleur" (although that could arguably be Scout's Mother's theme, too)
  • Medic: "A Little Heart To Heart", "MEDIC!", "Archimedes"
  • Pyro: "Dreams of Cruelty", "Do You Believe in Magic"
• Lessons in Sophistication: In the short "Expiration Date", The Scout takes lessons on how to be a proper gentleman from The Spy, in order to have a proper date with Mis Pauling before the Red team dies of teleporter induced cancer. This being TF2, Hilarity Ensues.
  Spy: Seduce me.
• Lethal Joke Weapon:
  • All the melee weapons have a much higher chance to inflict a Critical Hit (except for the knife, which works differently due to its design around Backstabs, and all weapons that register headshots), including the bottle, the shovel, and especially (from a gameplay standpoint) the boxing gloves.
  • The Sniper has an unlockable jar of a certain yellow liquid that causes anybody within the "blast radius" of where it's thrown to take 35% more damage for 10 seconds.
  • All of the kill taunts also count as Lethal Joke Weapons. They are slow to play out and often have very limited range, but they usually instantly kill on contact. The Lethal Joke is most especially funny with the Heavy, who can kill people by pretend-firing an imaginary gun with his outstretched index and middle finger and miming shooting people by pointing at them and saying POW!. Surprisingly, that taunt can kill from a damn good distance.
  • The Ullapool Caber is an unlockable melee weapon for the Demoman; all it is is a German WW2 stick grenade that explodes when it hits an enemy or a non-friendly solid object, dealing 100 damage to the Demoman and launching him high up in the air, likely to be finished off by fall damage, but it's capable of dealing upwards of 180 damage to any enemies caught in the explosion, and, if combined with the Chargin' Targe for a guaranteed melee critical... 400+ easily. Your team not able to keep the cart back? Just charge in and clear out the entire thing and buy them some time.
  • The jumping practice weapons for the Soldier and Demoman, the Rocket Jumper and Sticky Jumper, respectively, do no damage; rightfully so, considering that the weapons are intended strictly to be used to learn how to perform explosive jumps. Until you realize that you can use the enhanced maneuverability to get behind enemy lines very easily without sacrificing too much health. They can also be used in conjunction with the Market Gardener — which grants crits while rocket jumping — or the Ullapool Caber — which lets the player become an Action Bomb — for devastating damage against the enemy team. If you know what you're doing, that is.
  • Many 'useless' or 'underpowered' weapons become very powerful in Mann Vs. Machine mode. Of particular note is the Third Degree, a Fire Axe that deals damage to anyone linked by a Medic's healing beam. A single critical hit on the giant robot or ONE of its Medics will instantly kill ALL of the Medics. Also, the usually ignored Beggar's Bazooka becomes very powerful after a few rounds, as it can rapidly fire a bunch of rockets in a wide radius. The normally only-good-to-play-around-with Righteous Bison, when fully upgraded, is an absolute beast, due to its penetrating laser beams. Add in the fact that the robots travel in huge groups...
  • The Mecha Upgrade on Christmas 2012 introduced three new weapons, one of which (the Vaccinator, a new medigun for the Medic) is fairly useless in normal play against human players due to its many drawbacks, but it's obviously intended for Mv M play in the first place.
  • The Holiday Punch is one of the unlockable Melee weapons for Heavy that fits this trope to a T. It consists of a pair of mittens that have the ability to deal guaranteed critical hits to enemies from behind as well as other Heavies who are wielding the weapon, and it can also randomly crit. The catch is that critical hits dealt by this weapon do no damage; instead, they force your enemy to laugh from anywhere between 2 to 5 seconds depending on the class (in practice it forces your enemy to use the Schadenfreude taunt). What makes this particularly lethal is 1. The Holiday Punch is capable of performing a Taunt Kill, meaning if you succesfully crit an enemy they are essentially dead to rights, and 2. It can stun Übercharged players. That latter part actually got Holiday Punch banned from some forms of competitive TF2, as you could easily stuff Übers with a Holiday Punch Heavy being pocketed by a Kritzkrieg Medic. However it should be noted that the laughter mechanic will not work on players who are midair (i.e. jumping), swimming underwater, disguised or cloaked.
• Lethal Joke Character: Certain weapon builds fall under this category in skilled hands. One such build is the Trolldier (Rocket Jumper, Mantreads, Market Gardener). He has no ranged attacks whatsoever and his main weapon does no damage, making him seem harmless — but a skilled rocket jumper can use this build to become a speedy dealer of death, able to instakill any class but the Heavy and the Soldier — and the Demo, with certain weapons — with a Gardener crit, as well as stomp on weakened enemies to finish them off, leaping away to safety before his foes have a chance to react.
• Level Grinding:
  • Somewhere from a half to a third of the Achievements to unlock new weapons are based on merely doing fairly common things several times, like running or double jumping. The Pyro has one for causing a million damage. The Medic has one for healing a million damage.
  • Complaints about this brought Valve to formulate a new mechanic for weapon unlocking for the Sniper Vs. Spy Update. It backfired and introduced the easiest form of grinding ever.
    • In response to these complaints, the achievement method was reintroduced with much lower requirements, making it fairly easy to get the alternate weapons without any of the excessive achievements. Good luck with getting Hats, though.
• Life Drain: While some weapons can do this by default, Mann vs Machine upgrades can allow all weapons to do this.
• Lighter and Softer: Than most other games in the genre, and Team Fortress Classic. Sure, it's rated M, there's a ridiculous amount of gore, and it's definitely not a kid's game, but the style very much averts Real Is Brown and looks like a Pixar film, the worst swear in the game is probably "bitch" (delivered in one of Engineer's Domination lines)^* or, if you're British, "wanker", delivered by the Sniper, many elements of the game are hilarious and not meant to be taken seriously, and it appears that none of the classes really die (see Resurrective Immortality in Tropes Q to Z).
• Limit Break: After filling his ÜberCharge meter, the Medic can unleash a devastating attack where he and one teammate are invincible (or, with the Kritzkrieg, have unlimited Critical Hits) for eight seconds. The soldier's backpack-type weapons work in similar fashions: the Buff Banner fills as he does damage and gives all nearby allies guaranteed mini-crits (+35% damage); the Battalion's Backup allows him to protect nearby allies from critical hits and severe injuries (-35% to damage taken) — it used to charge by taking damage, rather than giving it, but a patch changed it so that it charges exactly the same way as the Buff Banner; the Concheror fills rage like the Banner. Upon activation, everyone affected by it receives a speed boost and 20% of the damage they deal as healing.
  • Shooting Superman: Even when the Medic's ÜberCharge is activated, many people keep firing out of desperation. It makes more sense with rockets and grenades, though — the stock medigun's ÜberCharge does not protect from being pushed back. (In fact, a properly aimed explosive or a Pyro airblast can essentially ruin an ÜberCharge rush; even if the two aren't separated, they won't get their momentum back before the charge ends.)
    • Snipers even have an achievement for getting a killing shot on an Über-Duo right as their charge wears off.
  • The Pyro's Phlogistinator has an Mmmph meter that fills as he deals fire damage, in place of an airblast. When the meter is full, taunting with the weapon will give him several seconds of guaranteed Critical Hits, allowing him to completely annihilate just about anything in front of him for those few seconds. Not only that, but as of the Tough Break update, the Pyro is completely invincible while taunting.
• Literal Metaphor: The Spy's primary attack is backstabbing his "teammates" by literally stabbing them in the back with a knife.
• Lives in a Van: The Sniper in Team Fortress 2 lives in a camper van, and the Spy and Scout sometimes taunt him about it during a domination kill.
  Scout: That was a mercy killing. You live in a camper van!
• Loads and Loads of Loading: One of the worst offenders in modern videogaming. Which isn't too surprising considering the game uses the notoriously poorly coded Source engine. Expect to wait at least two minutes to get on a server, and then have wait even longer when someone connects right before you do and fills the last player slot.
• Loading Screen: The game's loading screen on Valve-made official maps shows the map you're going to, your stats, and a random tip. On community-created maps, instead of stats, there's a list of top donors, players who bought the most stamps that represent the map.
• Locomotive Level: The custom Capture the Flag map Convoy takes place on and within two team-colored trains.
• Loot Boxes: The Trope Codifier with the Mann Co. Supply Crates. Crates themselves are given away for free but require keys in order to open.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: The Pyro's mask is there to force a kind-hearted individual to be a ruthless killing machine, by creating a virtual reality illusion in which the Pyro thinks themself to be spreading joy and laughter in a Sugar Bowl world.
• Luck-Based Mission: Getting the Running With Scissors^* Win with Scissors 3 times in a row and On The Rocks^* Lose with Rock 3 times in a row achievements require getting a particular result in the Rock–Paper–Scissors taunt 3 times in a row. The results of Rock–Paper–Scissors are completely random. Since the game will never randomly choose a tie, there's a 50/50 chance of winning/losing each game and a 1/3 chance to roll either scissors or rock - thus, a less than 0.5% chance to get the achievement. Better get playing!
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic: You'll dole out random crits more often if you're consistently dealing damage. Furthermore, melee weapons have a chance to crit twice as often as guns do.
• Ludicrous Gibs:
  • Not only will characters who die from explosions explode into their component parts (which will be identified if they're in frame when the game shows who killed the player), but the game also offers a second set of gibs (developed for markets like Germany that prohibit high amounts of violence) where you explode into things like hamburgers and rubber ducks. Ludicrous gibs, indeed.
  • The Birthday mode made them even more ludicrous, turning the gibs into presents. If only you could find hats in said presents.
  • In Mann vs. Machine, this does not happen by default if a player dies from explosions unless a Bombinomicon is equipped.
  • While most weapons able to gib are obviously given to Soldier and Demoman, some other classes have weapons that can blow enemies into bloody chunks as well: the Engineer's level 3 sentry shoots rockets that can gib, the Pyro's Detonator and Scorch Shot shoot explosive flares, the Classic reduces enemies to a cloud of red mist, and most ridiculously, the bauble launched by the Wrap Assassin deals a tiny amount of splash damage that nevertheless still counts as an explosion for gibbing rules (although said splash damage is so minimal that it's extremely unlikely to happen in an actual game). To reiterate: it's possible, if unlikely, to turn someone into chunky salsa with a Christmas tree ornament.

M

• MacGyvering: Several classes have weapons built out of random junk. The Pyro's Degreaser, the Sniper's Bazaar Bargain, the Soldier's Beggar's Bazooka, and the Medic's Quick-Fix are all built out of things any sane person probably wouldn't try to build a weapon out of.
• Macross Missile Massacre:
  • Frequent during the WAR update, when nearly everyone was playing Soldier or Demoman. The first five seconds of any game were a blistering hail of explosive ordinance from both sides. Kind of like this.
  • In Mann vs. Machine mode, the robots often target a single player. Players close enough to a wave of Soldiers or Demomen as they enter the field should expect a barrage of explosives. The Giant Rapid-Fire Soldier spams rockets like there's no tomorrow.
  • The Beggar's Bazooka can store and launch up to three rockets at the same time. In Mann vs. Machine mode, said bazooka can be upgraded to launch 11 missiles.
  • Level 3 sentries send a barrage of missiles to their target in a spiraling inward fashion.
  • The Air Strike has an expanded clip with every kill you have on it, capping at 8 rockets. When blast jumping, its fire rate increases dramatically, letting you rain death from above.
• Made of Explodium:
  • An update on June 8th, 2011 introduced doves into 21 of the maps. They explode rather violently (for no damage) when you shoot them. Or use your melee attack on them. Or just touch them.
  • The Bombinomicon introduced in the Very Scary Halloween Special, when found, can be equipped as a badge in the miscellaneous slot. When equipped, it causes the wearer to die in a glorious, flashy purple explosion no matter what their cause of death was. However, Spy players hated this, since slipping in, getting a few kills, and slipping out unnoticed is very difficult if your victims keep exploding every time you stab them.
• Made of Indestructium: The CTF briefcase and the Payload.
• Made of Plasticine: The game was originally going to take this literally, with all of the mercenaries replaced by claymation models of themselves.
• Magikarp Power:
  • A Level 1 Sentry is barely a hassle to the enemy team, with most classes being able to dispatch one with ease. A level 3 Sentry, on the other hand, can completely deny entire pushes without an Ubercharge or a Spy to disable it.
  • The Eyelander starts off with giving the user 25 less max health and a slower melee deploy. Accumulate four kills with it, and you'll have 60 more max health and move nearly as fast as a Scout.
  • The Bazaar Bargain starts off with a slower charge rate, but becomes faster with every kill.
  • The Air Strike initially has weaker rockets and a smaller explosion radius, but shoots faster while rocket jumping. It also increases in clip size with every kill, capping at four kills (8 rockets) for raining explodey death upon your opponents.
• Magnet Hands: Every class has a taunt for weapons they have, and if a taunt involves the weapon (e.g. Demoman drinking out of his bottle, Heavy cuddling with his minigun), it'll stay in their hands. Before it was fixed in a patch, if the player switched weapons via quickswitch immediately after the pressing the taunt key, the weapon the character was holding for their taunt changed, resulting in some strange moves (the Spy pulled a cigarette out of the barrel of his pistol, the Heavy ate his minigun, etc.).
• Major Injury Underreaction:
  • Two of the Spy's responses to being set on fire:
    Spy: "I appear to have burst into flames."
    Spy: "I do believe I'm on fire."
  • The Demoman will sometimes say, "Ohh, that smarts" when he's damaged, whether it's 3 hit points shaved off or most of his HP bar depleted. Or even if he gets gibbed.
• Man on Fire: Any class who falls victim to the walking inferno that is the Pyro. Pyros themselves are an exception; while they still take damage from fire directly, their heavy asbestos suits and chemical filter masks prevent them from being set ablaze.
• Man Versus Machine: The title Mann Versus Machine says it all.
• Marathon Level:
  • The final stage of Dustbowl is usually an example. RED has to Hold the Line while BLU attacks. As the final portion of Dustbowl, the point is hardest to capture, and BLU has about 15 minutes to try to cap it (the battlefield is also heavily stacked in RED's favor, so it's often this trope for BLU too).
  • "Wave 666" on Halloween!Coaltown. Nine hundred and eleven zombies^note reskinned robots and nine tanks. No checkpoints. Have fun!
• Martial Arts Headband: The game has two Hachimakis. The first of which was a tie-in with Homefront. The second one was part of the Japanese bundle, where the sales from the item were donated to help with the Japanese relief efforts.
• Maurice Chevalier Accent: Francis the Talking France, a gag character, is literally a sentient France with knowledge of cinema. Of course, he parodies Maurice Chevalier.
• Meaningful Name: The so-called Highlander mode, where There Can Be Only One... of each class available on each team.
• Mecha-Mooks:
  • The Mann Vs. Machine update, wherein you and five other friends fight to survive a horde of robot versions of regular classes, as well as Special Robots and giant, Super Robots. Also, to a lesser extent, Sentries, which are stationary guns built by Engineers. They're pretty much his Mooks, albeit immobile and (probably) non-sentient.
  • Tell that to half the entries for the 2012 Saxxy Awards. Hell, the Overall Winner was about Engie and his Sentry.
  • That being said, the Mini-Sentries placed down by Gunslinger Engineers play this much straighter, as they build more quickly and cost less metal than regular Sentries, but cannot be upgraded, allowing the Engineer to deploy a large number of them in quick succession without worrying about maintaining them.
• Mechanically Unusual Class: It could be argued that all the classes are like this, but a few stand out. Here they are in order of uniqueness from most to least:
  • The Engineer is mechanically (har har) interesting, as while he can deal a bit of damage, his primary purpose is to build gadgets which can teleport teammates across the map and replenish their ammo (as well as heal and deal damage). Other classes fight in a more direct manner.
  • Then there's the Spy, who focuses on mindgames; he can turn himself invisible, and can disguise himself as the enemy, and is one of the only classes to focus on facing and is the only class in a normal game who does most of his best damage at melee range.
  • The Medic is focused almost purely on healing and turning himself and one teammate either invulnerable, nearly invulnerable, or a source of Critical Hits.
  • The Scout is the most maneuverable class in the game, and the only class capable of a Double Jump.
  • The Pyro is pretty much the only class that can set people on fire (a rather unpleasant experience).
  • The Sniper is the only class with an accurate distance weapon that actually deals solid damage at long range, and the only class besides the Spy with a guaranteed kill method (a fully charged headshot will always kill a non-invulnerable enemy).
  • The Demoman is the only class that can reliably kill around corners.
  • The Heavy is the slowest character in the game, but also able to utterly block anybody coming in a narrow cone.
  • The Soldier is mostly mundane... unless you can Rocket Jump.
• Microtransactions: The Mann. Co store. You can earn just about everything in the game for free — weapons from random drops, craft them into other weapons, craft spare weapons into hats, or wait for even rarer random drops — or you can just stump up the cash.
• Mighty Glacier:
  • The Heavy is THE Mighty Glacier of the game. Ridiculously high damage output and the largest healthpool in the game, limited by his snail-like speed. Emphasized by the Brass Beast, a minigun which does more damage, but reduces Heavy's movement speed while firing to a painfully sluggish pace.
  • The Defense classes are described as this by the official wiki. They're slow and require set-up, yet possess the most firepower out of all classes. They also play with it a bit; Demomen are slower than normal and they'll need some time to prep their Sticky traps, but with a Sticky Jump, they become a Lightning Bruiser. Engineers are squishy and require significant time to set up their nest, but once it's up, they can be a nightmare to take out without Übercharge.
• Mini-Me: A lot of classes have miniature doll/plushie versions of certain characters. There's the Pocket Medic for the Heavy and Soldier, Pocket Pauling for the Scout, Pocket Pyro for the Engineer, Pocket Pardner (a mini-Engineer) for the Pyro, Pocket Heavy for the Medic, and Pocket versions of Saxton Hale and the Horseless Headless Horsemann for all classes. Related, the Pyro also has the Cremator's Conscience (two plush versions of themselves with a halo and devil horns) while players who bought the Spycrab Plush in real life can get a crab version of the Spy that sits on his shoulder.
• Mission Briefing: When you join a server, you get the bare bones of your mission presented to you in an old-timey black and white movie (and on Territory Control, what parts of the map have been won by which teams drawn on the blackboard).
• Mistaken for Spies: Any sufficiently competent team will treat every living thing as a Spy and act accordingly. Those that don't get sapped and backstabbed into oblivion in short order.
• Mistaken for Transformed: In the "Meet The Spy" promotional short, the Blu Soldier kills Blue Spy in the belief that he's actually the Red Spy in disguise. He was wrong; Red Spy is currently disguised as the Blue Scout, and uses the ensuing confusion to kill both Soldier and Heavy.
• Mob Debt: The 2014 Scream Fortress Halloween event was announced with the comic Blood Money, in which Merasmus the Magician has been building a carnival with Yakuza money^note referred to as "The Japanese Mafia", but needs Team Fortress's help to make it haunted fast so he can pay back his loan. The following year's Scream Fortress opened with another comic, Gargoyles and Gravel, in which Merasmus was now in debt to The Mafiya and so was bringing back all the Halloween events for the Team.
• Mob War: Arguably, the game is centered around an extremely exaggerated version of a classic 1920s gang war. Not only are there Mafia/bank robber-themed sets, all the classes can be dressed up in fancy clothing and many wear hats. The mercenaries seem more like gangs than an actual army, as they fight for the money and enjoy overkilling people in insane ways. And Redmond and Blutarch are like feuding mob bosses at times. Reliable Excavation Demolition and Builders League United are simply stated to be a respectable front for the mercenary operations, like typical gangland Syndicates, and both corporations also control thousands of shell companies. One of RED's biggest areas is trading in booze, too, which explains why RED has many beer advertisements and even distilleries on certain maps. The mercenaries also tend to mainly fight in industrial areas, and the fighting is centered over the capture of enemy turf, the capture of enemy intelligence, or blowing up an important base with a giant bomb or two. Hit-and-run tactics and ambushing, the main methods of fighting in gang wars, are done by many players, too. Finally, the mercenaries are perceived to be an outright threat to the city of Teufort — once they all get fired when Gray Mann takes over Mann. Co, the police start hunting them down.
• Mobile Shrubbery: The mod PropHunt turns one team into map objects, and they must hide in the scenery from the "hunters". This frequently happens while the props find somewhere to hide or flee from the enemies.
• Money Spider: Parodied. The Mecha-Mooks in "Mann vs. Machine" mode run on piles of money for whatever reason, and hence drop them when destroyed.
• Monster Roommate: Merasmus the Wizard. Though, given that he's roommates with the Soldier, it's hard to say which one of them's more monstrous.
• Mood Whiplash: "Meet the Pyro" runs on this. Silly and happy one moment, horrifying the next.
• Mortality Phobia: In the expanded plot, this is the primary motivation of Blutarch; initially, he had a life-extension machine built because he simply wanted to outlive his brother Redmond (who had his own built); however, he still spends brief amounts of time dead and is now absolutely terrified of The Nothing After Death.
  Every day I'm dead a little longer, Mister Conagher. I have seen the other side. There is nothing there.
• Morton's Fork: No matter which side wins in Special Delivery, the rocket crashes anyway.
• Motivation on a Stick: The Sammy Cap, which is a hat for Heavy that attaches a Sandvich on a fishing rod by the means of a belt tied around his head.
• Multinational Team: Scout, Soldier, and Engineer are American, Heavy's Russian, Medic is German, Spy is French, Sniper is raised, not born Australian and born New Zealander, Demoman is Scottish, and Pyro is... Pyro.
• Multiple Choice Form Letter: In variations from Saxton Hale.
• Multiple-Choice Past: Heavy's 2012 Halloween costume, "The Grand Duchess". It's either a failed attempt to demonstrate Real Men Wear Pink, a successful attempt to demonstrate Real Men Wear Pink, something he put on by accident while drunk, or a Serious Business historically-accurate (for an Alternate History) depiction of Princess Anastasia.
• Mutual Kill:
  • The Pyro can set enemies on fire, which does damage over time. This means that it's possible for someone to die from the burning even after they've killed the Pyro. The Pyro update includes two achievements for killing enemies this way.
  • The Huntsman fires relatively slow-moving arrows, which can kill a target even after the death of the Sniper who fired them. In one instance, two Snipers, one using the Huntsman, the other the normal sniper rifle, headshotted each other.
  • The WAR! update gave the Soldier an achievement for killing a Sniper with a rocket after he dies to one, aptly named Mutually Assured Destruction.
  • There are a few weapons that cause bleeding, also damaging the opponent over time.
  • This can happen to classes with splash damage weapons. If you're playing as Soldier or Demoman, are badly wounded, and fire on your attacker point-blank, you can expect a shower of both your and your opponent's chunks. Can also happen with Engineers if they're foolish enough to stand between an enemy and their own turret.
  • Similarly, it's quite common for an Engineer to die, only to watch their own sentries avenge them on death cam seconds later. Clumsy Spies are known to be killed by an Engineer's sentry shortly after they backstab him.
• Mutually Unequal Relationship: Everyone is terrified of the Pyro because of his/her lack of speech, lack of face, and obsession with setting people on fire. From the Pyro's point of view, his teammates and fairies are all childlike fairies he plays with, and his flamethrower dispenses rainbows.
• My God, What Have I Done?: In Helltower, when someone casts an ultimate spell, the mercs are left terror-stricken by the power of the magic spell.
  Scout: No! NO! It's too much magic! We toiled in God's domain! Oh no! I knew this would happen! I foresaw this!
  Demoman: Too much magic! It's the devil's work!
  Heavy: Heavy cannot believe eyes! Everything is insane!
  Engineer: What dumb son of a bitch cast that?
  Medic: I can't take any more of this insanity! Someone make the magic stop! Too much magic! I can't take it anymore!
  Sniper: We used too much! The magic's in my bloody hand! It's only magic, it's only magic...!
  Soldier: Son of a cussing cussword!
  Spy: What the hell is that? What have you done? God, help us!
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: In PVP maps, human players can't push the payload or carry intel while übercharged, drinking Bonk!, or otherwise rendered invulnerable. In Mann vs Machine, bomb-carrying robots can be übercharged and drink Bonk! with impunity, which is part of the spawn pattern of some waves.
• Mystery Box: Again, Mann Co. Supply Crates.
• Mythology Gag: The "Meet the Sniper" trailer features a bobblehead figurine that resembles the Civilian, a playable class in the original Team Fortress Classic who was scrapped in Team Fortress 2.
  • The Catch-Up Comic shows off the Classic mercs for a single panel. The Scout can be spotted holding the crowbar (melee weapon of choice for every class except for Engineer and Spy), and the Soldier is holding the aforementioned Civilian's umbrella.
  • If The Classic, a sniper rifle based on The Sniper's primary weapon in Team Fortress Classic, kills a player with enough charged damage, it will gib them instantly similarly to how ut would in the original game due to how damage calculation worked in that engine.

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• Named Weapons: The Heavy has some named miniguns (Sasha and Natascha), and naming one's items is possible thanks to the Name Tag.
  • The Meet Your Match comic showed what the Heavy named his other primaries, suggesting he does it with all his miniguns.
• Near Misses: A Scout under the effects of Bonk! Atomic Punch will dodge every attack until the drink wears off. Also, when an enemy shoots at you and narrowly misses, you can hear the bullet/flare/dart whiz by you.
• Necro Cam: When you die, the camera shows you a still of whoever dealt the fatal blow (or his corpse/gibs), his health, and the weapon he currently has on hand. If your ragdoll appears in the shot, it may be labeled 'You!'. If you were gibbed, your body parts are marked with humorous labels such as 'Your head!', 'A bit of you!', 'More bits!', and so on.
• Never Bareheaded: Five of the nine classes wear hats by default. Four of them can be made hatless by obtaining hat-free items equippable in the headwear slot. However:
  • The Soldier can only have his hat replaced by other hats or hair; his default army cut cannot be shown by itself.
  • The Spy and Pyro can't have their balaclavas and gas masks removed, either. The Pyro can, however, have his entire head replaced with a different mask. The Spy just wears whatever over his balaclava.
• Never Trust a Trailer:
  • The trailer for the Mann Vs. Machine update seems to suggest that the players would be divided into three RED players and three BLU players fighting against the AI-controlled robots. In the game, the players are six REDs fighting the robots who are on the BLU team, though this is less Gameplay and Story Segregation and more for the sake of easy identification.
  • The same trailer shows MvM being a Darker and Edgier arc, taking place during a stormy, snowy night, and having the robots ominously arrive like they're straight out of an alien movie. In actual gameplay, two of the MvM stages take place during broad, sunny daylight, and the robots act like a typical Tower Defense horde.
• Never Needs Sharpening: Since the weapons need to have drawbacks for Competitive Balance, the Parody Commercials try to play up the weaknesses as strengths. For example, Scout's Force-A-Nature only holds two bullets and has a slow reload, so the ad says it loads slowly so that you get to savor each shot.
• Never Was This Universe: Soldier's story about Sun Tzu may not be true, but in this universe, stairs were a nineteenth century invention. It's implied, however, that these differences may be due to the presence of magic, as well as Australium.
• Noah's Story Arc: Parodied in the "Meet The Soldier" video:
  Soldier: ...Then [Sun Tzu] used his fight money to buy two of every animal on Earth, and then he herded them onto a boat, and then he beat the crap out of every single one!
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Played straight with Charles Darling, who is an obvious evil expy of Charles Darwin. Otherwise it's inverted most of the time, as the supplemental material to the games loves killing off real-world celebrities. So far the comics have killed off Tom Jones, The Beatles, and the Queen of England. There is also a magazine ad for the Direct Hit that claims that it is the perfect weapon to kill Fred Astaire with.
• No Fair Cheating: "This server is VAC-secured. Cheating will result in a permanent ban." Cheating on VAC-secured servers can permanently ban your entire Steam account from VAC servers in any game.
• Noisy Guns: Every weapon makes a distinct noise when you select it in the Backpack, or switch to it during gameplay.
• No Name Given: Ignoring team affiliation, the Pyro's and Spy's names haven't been revealed.
• Non-Human Head: During Halloween, these come out in full force. Besides "hats" that replace merc heads with different animals, the Merasmus fight will periodically turn the heads of players on both teams into bombs.
• Non-Indicative Name:
  • A fairly funny example is the map "Gorge", whose eponymous land feature according to a blog post is not a gorge but "a large-ish hole not big enough to meet the U.S. Geological Survey’s standards for a gorge, disguised as a by-the-book, nothing-to-see-here gorge."
  • The unlockable Heavy secondary "The Buffalo Steak Sandvich" is not a "sandvich", just a steak. ("Who needs bread?")
  • What the team names are acronyms for, Reliable Excavation & Demolition and Builder's League United, are rather the opposite of what the teams tend to be when both sides don't have the same goal: RED is defense, while BLU is offense.
    • Furthermore, it's likely that neither of them do any construction or demolition; they're both intelligence agencies posing as holding companies. And the true goal of all this inteligence gathering and mercenary work is of course to acquire gravel.
  • In TF2, the sapper is responsible for clearing the enemy front lines by destroying Engineer buildings. In Real Life, a sapper is a military engineer responsible for construction and other tasks of military engineering on the front lines.
  • According to canon, the Australium Briefcase on the map Doomsday does not contain any Australium whatsoever.
• Non-Standard Character Design:
  • A minor one, but while most of the mercenaries have the same grey-blue eyes, Demoman's one good eye is brown.
  • Spy and Pyro never take off their respective face masks.
  • The girl Scout talks to in a flashback in "Expiration Date" is noticeably more cartoony than anyone else in the short, with a much larger and rounded head and odd lighting effects on her body.
• Noodle Implements:
  • Weapon crafting recipes are based more on gameplay mechanics than on appearance. Sometimes this makes sense (Sandman+Tribalman's Shiv=Boston Basher, a spiked club that inflicts bleeding), but other times...not so much. Mid-quality scrap metal^note Reclaimed Metal+two bottles of milk^note Mad Milk=a neon sign^note Neon Annhiliator? Pocket watch^note Dead Ringer+bow and arrows^note Huntsman=serrated kukri^note Tribalman's Shiv?
  • An Alternate Reality Game set up to hype the Pyromania Update added several "Mysterious Treasures" to the item drop system: a goldfish, some pocket lint, a cheese wheel, a banana peel, a barn door plank, a capacitor, and a secret diary. After the Pyromania Update was released, everything but the capacitor and diary were "incinerated" and could be used to craft a Pile of Ash, which would give the player a weapon or cosmetic crate tied to the update. The Pile of Ash item and its components were removed from the game about a month after the update, but the Barely-Melted Capacitor and Fireproof Secret Diary are still available as cosmetic items (although the Capacitor doesn't appear on the character's model or do anything).
  • The Spectral Halloween Special introduced the eerily similar Pile of Curses, which gives the player a Voodoo-Cursed Soul cosmetic item that turns the equipped character into a zombie. Crafting a Pile of Curses requires seven Voodoo-Cursed Items: an old boot, a skeleton, a bag of quicklime, a robot arm, a novelty bass, a sticky bomb, and a nail.
• No Ontological Inertia:
  • Killing a Demoman will cause all the explosive traps he's laid to disappear. There's even an achievement for the Heavy for removing a certain amount of traps by killing the Demomen that set them.
  • Similarly, killing an Engineer during Sudden Death and Arena mode will make all his buildings explode. Note that this does not happen in any other game mode, where the Engineer can then respawn and go back to his hopefully still-standing buildings. If the Engineer switches to another class, all of his buildings will disappear. If he switches melee weapons (but not classes), his buildings will be destroyed, presumably because of the differences between build time of the Jag and different sentries for the Gunslinger.
• No Range Like Point-Blank Range: Because of the damage fall-off mechanic, weapons will do significantly more damage if you're up close and personal in someone's face. This is to reward players for putting themselves in danger by closing the distance, as being farther away from the enemy in a fight gives you more options to either continue the fight or flee, and gives you more time to plan out your next move.
• Nose Art: It seems that the Heavy (and on the Hoodoo level, also the Scout) likes to graffiti the Payload carts.
• Nostalgia Level: 2Fort, Badlands, Dustbowl, and Well, though they've been redesigned somewhat.
• Not-Actually-Cosmetic Award: When Team Fortress 2 first released alternative weapons, the only way to get them was to complete various achievements for the class in question. The achievements system is still in place, but the items can now drop, and you can trade, craft, or just buy them.
• Not the Intended Use:
  • One of the Spy's Taunts, the Box Trot is a taunt that makes the Spy imitate Metal Gear's infamous box creeping. Problem is the Spy's impersonation is too good, as this box easily blends in with the box props on most maps and reduces his hitbox, allowing Spies to block capture points undetected.
  • The Dead Ringer was conceived as a tool for Spy to fool his enemies by temporarily faking his death so he can go in for the killing blow when they least expect it. However Spies became notorious for using it to become the closest thing to a playable Damage-Sponge Boss, with them frequently and repeatedly feigning death to be an obnoxious unkillable distraction. This became hated by so much of the fanbase that the Dead Ringer went through a series of nerfs over the years before finally being brought to an acceptable level in 2017's Jungle Inferno update.
  • The Ubersaw allows the Medic to gain 25% uber when hitting enemies that come too close, at the cost of slower firing speed. However, it didn't take long for players to realize it can still work while you are being Übered by another medic, allowing for Über-chaining. One Medic übers another to allow him to attack the enemy with the Ubersaw while invulnerable, build an Über, and swap places. With good timing and a little luck, this can allow the two to remain perpetually invulnerable. More competent teams, however, will likely use Pyros or Sentry knockback to separate them or keep them at bay until their über runs out, and their actual damage output isn't spectacular.
  • At a full charge, the Machina's shots overpenetrate targets. However, they never said it had to be enemies that the bullet passes through — this has the unintended benefit of making it easier to fire through crowded areas without risking a teammate bodyblocking the shot. And yes, bullets that pass through teammates and kill enemies count as penetrations for the sake of that obnoxiously loud fanfare.
  • The Scout's Boston Basher was made to be an enormously high-risk, moderate-reward melee weapon that will inflict bleed damage on hit, but will damage Scout himself if it gets nothing. The downside to the Basher is so great, however, that it's almost never used as an actual offensive tool, especially since like many of Scout's melee weapons, his trademark Scattergun makes them redundant. Despite this, the Boston Basher is extremely common in competitive circles as the self-damage allows friendly Medics to charge up Uber faster, as well as create a mini-Recoil Boost as an extra half-jump to reach unexpected places.
  • The Engineer's Eureka Effect was made to allow Engineers to quickly teleport to their spawn room or a teleporter exit in the case of an emergency, without needing to use the teleporter entrance. However, since the exit doesn't have to be active in order for Engies to use the Eureka Effect, it's often used as a stealth tool that players use to secretly appear in places and surprise enemies without the sounds of teleportation giving away their location. Users of this strategy are often nicknamed "Ninjaneers" by the fandom.
  • The Ullapool Caber is this lore-wise. It's a "potato masher" grenade that the Demoman uses it as he'd use any other melee weapon. As the flavor text says:
    A sober person would throw it...
  • The Rocket Jumper and Sticky Jumper are variants of the Soldier and Demoman's stock explosive weapons that deal no damage but (to their user only) full knockback. Their intended purpose was to practice Rocket Jumping. However, a few players managed to exploit the increased mobility available when explosive jumping no longer costs HP for surprise intelligence captures. Additionally, since they originally looked just like the stock versions, it was hard to tell whether any given enemy was actually trying something like this or not. The weapons were eventually nerfed to substantially increase damage taken from enemy fire (later reversed) and block capturing intelligence or similar objective-related items, as well as to be visually and audibly distinct from the stock versions.
  • Taunts are usually meant for mocking your enemies or for making a quick friend if it's a Taunt that can be interacted with, but they can also be used to peek your 3rd person camera around corners to check for threats without having to expose yourself.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: As of the Mann Vs Machine update, Redmond and Blutarch have been Killed Off for Real, Gray Mann sits ready to conquer the world with an army of killer robots, and the 9 classes are no longer working for RED and BLU.
• Nothing Can Stop Us Now!: Except for the other team, and their guns!
• Notice This: Everything about the game's art direction is designed so you can figure out what's going on at a glance...
  • Each class has a unique silhouette, uniform, and character quirk. Valve wanted the characters to be immediately distinguishable by their physical build and their way of running.
  • The uniforms are the most brightly colored around the head and chest, to aid in the identification of the weapon each player is carrying.
  • The bases are uniquely themed with both color and architectural design, and you get color-coded arrows pointing you to the map objective.
  • The cart on Payload/Payload Race and the Intelligence on Capture The Flag have glowing outlines that can be seen through any obstacle. (Valve added this feature after something similar was successfully implemented in their Left 4 Dead series.)
  • Characters that are dominating or dueling you have a large icon over their heads.
  • The Gun Mettle update added the ability to pick up dropped weapons. Any weapon that your class can pick up is outlined in yellow.
  • Similar yellow outlines appear around players whenever you're using the Supernova power in Mannpower to show you what players you're targetting.
• Not Enough to Bury: Whenever a player is gibbed. The Demoman provides the page quote, natch.
• No Hero Discount: In Mann Vs. Machine mode, Mann Co. charges you for all of your upgrades, even though you're the only thing keeping their facilities from being destroyed. This is lampshaded numerous times in supplemental materials, as it turns out they're not even being paid for their services and the blurb for the canteen acts as if Mann Co was being super-generous by giving them a small plastic container "filled to the damn brim with life-giving air".
• No OSHA Compliance:
  • Two out-of-control sawblades on the aptly-named 'Sawmill' map stand between the competing teams and the Control Point.
  • A few maps are also home to numerous Bottomless Pits that can be the death of many players, especially if the control point sits over one.
  • Parodied with faux-safety warnings put in the levels. RED's building on the ctf_2fort map, for example, has "building condemned" notices plastered on the front.
  • Even the actual spy bases using the area as a disguise, no matter how obvious it looks according to workers who would watch mercenaries fight on their lunch breaks, lack safety, where you would think RED and BLU would show some mild concern. The best example is cp_Steel◊, where rockets can fire with little warning to anyone standing under the exhaust, hand rails hardly exist anywhere a dangerous fall might happen, and there seems to be little protection against the blast of the rocket if and when it takes off. The safest thing in that picture is the glass immune to gunfire and explosions.
• No One Could Survive That!:
  • With the introduction of the Dead Ringer cloaking watch, your opponents will probably be thinking this quite often. Watch as a Spy takes a direct hit from a critical rocket (something only two fully overhealed classes can survive), bursting into gooey bits... only to appear behind the Soldier who fired it.
  • Incidentally, the same item inverts the trope. Given that the Dead Ringer can activate when you suffer any damage, no matter how minuscule, be sure that enemies will be suspicious when you die from a single pistol shot.
• No Recycling: Averted, as the Engineer can earn back most of a destroyed construction's metal by running over the scraps.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Several classes that are usually meant to stay behind the lines/not get directly involved are actually devastating if they catch you by surprise thanks to their melee weapon's high crit rates.
• Not the Fall That Kills You…: The Scout can fall/jump from high places and double jump before a landing to negate any fall damage. The Soldier has a pair of tanker boots that also negates fall damage, but only if he's landing on an enemy from the jump. Other classes will take damage from a long fall, and at low health, can die from it. The kill feed will notify everyone of the player's clumsy, painful death. There's an achievement for the Medic for healing a player in the air that would've been killed from such a fall.
• Number of the Beast: For the Halloween event of 2012, Coaltown has a wave of 666, and you fight zombies instead of robots.
• Numbered Sequel: The original game wasn't even a standalone game until Team Fortress Classic, which came out much closer to the original mod than the sequel.

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• Obvious Rule Patch: There are quite a few specific rules surrounding objectives. No capping objectives while invulnerable^note preventing teams of Uber Medics or Bonk! Scouts from capturing everything without resistance and the Intel/Australium Briefcase cannot be taken through a teleporter or by players with the jumper weapons^note preventing sneaky Engineers or rocket-jumping Soldiers or Demomen from completing CTF maps within seconds.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • In-Universe, whenever the Tank spawns in Mann vs. Machine, one or more of the characters can be heard exclaiming "TAAAAAAANK!" in this sort of tone.
  • The various "[Class] is dead!" exclamations in Mann vs. Machine are also surprisingly emotional, considering that in the regular game Respawn is taken for granted.
• Oktoberfest: The Medic is German, and of course has the stereotypical accent. "Oktoberfest" is one of his taunts. Thankfully, he doesn't wear lederhosen, though he can put on a hat. A Mann vs. Machine map brings the team to his hometown of Rottenburg, which looks to have situated itself as this for tourists.
• Older Than They Look:
  • According to supplementary materials, The Heavy helped his family escape the gulag which they were imprisoned in after the Heavy's father was executed for counterrevolutionary activities; The Medic is a stereotypical heartless and amoral German who is strongly implied to have grown up in Nazi Germany, despite supplementary materials claiming that he isn't a Nazi; and The Soldier was old enough to be rejected from serving in World War II because of mental issues and yet he still travelled by himself to the frontline, only stopping fighting in 1949 when someone tracked him down in Poland to tell him the war was over.
  • However, this can all be handwaved by Australium, which can super-extend the human lifespan, as well as the fact that the game takes place in the '60s/'70s.
• One Bullet at a Time: The Stickybomb Launcher can only place 8 bombs at once. If you shoot any more, the first ones start detonating in sequence. The second launcher available, The Scottish Resistance, can have 14 bombs out at once, but will only detonate the ones you are actually aiming at when pulling the trigger. Other projectiles in the game (such as rockets, arrows, flares, and syringes) are only limited by their fire and reload rates.
• One Bullet Clips: Played straight or averted, depending on the weapon. Some weapons, like the pistol and syringe gun, replace the entire magazine. Others, like the shotgun and rocket launcher, reload one shot/rocket at a time. Miniguns and flamethrowers don't have a reload function; they just need an ammo supply to keep them loaded. Some weapons have literal One Bullet Clips, such as all of the Sniper's primary weapons and the Crusader's Crossbow. The only weapon that doesn't reload like the others is the double-barreled Force-A-Nature and Soda Popper; if you have one round in the barrel and reload, that unused round is lost.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • Headshots, backstabs, and killtaunts. While those attacks deal more damage than even a overhealed Heavy can take, they are survivable under some conditions, usually a Dead Ringer. Tele Frags, however, always kill.
  • A plugin called "Roll the Dice" has Instant Kill as one of the possible results. Predictably, this is best used with the Heavy, which can spray 1-hit kill bullets everywhere.
• One-Hit Polykill: While the Righteous Bison and Machina (when fully charged) can do this by default, upgrades in Mann vs Machine can allow some weapons to do this.
• One-Handed Shotgun Pump: Done by The Engineer with 2 shotguns in the "Mann vs Machine" Trailer.
• One Nation Under Copyright: Reliable Excavation & Demolition controls one half of the world. Builder's League United controls the other half. The woman officiating the war between the two companies is the CEO of both of them.
• One-Steve Limit:
  • The Heavy's Huo-Long Heater used to be called the Huo-Long Heatmaker, but the name was changed to avoid confusion with the Sniper's Hitman's Heatmaker.
  • Averted, however, with the SMG reskin, the Woodsy Widowmaker, sharing its name with the Engineer's Widowmaker shotgun, and the Stickybomb Launcher reskin, the Rooftop Wrangler, sharing it's name with the Wrangler.
    • Also, the Frontier Justice, a Shotgun for the Engineer and the Frontier Djustice, a hat for the Demoman. Bonus points as both are pronounced exactly the same.
• One-Wheeled Wonder: Robot Medics are the only robots in the game to not use legs, instead opting for a single wheel.
• One-Woman Wail: In the "ROBOTS!" soundtrack, a single woman hits the high notes of the melody near the end.
• Only Sane Man: Averted — you'd have thought that out of nine Mercenaries, there would be at least one guy among them who's stable enough to take charge, but this wasn't a career path chosen by the mentally well-adjusted.
  • The Spy and the Heavy are the closest straightforward examples. The Spy is The Stoic of the Mercs and frequently plays this role in the promotional materials, while the Heavy, despite appearances, is a very calm and well-educated man off the battlefield. However, when fighting, both characters' psychotic sides start to show.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Again in the Mann vs Machine Trailer. When the BLU Soldier and Demoman are found playing cards and smoking by the RED Heavy, Scout, and Engineer, they expect to be slaughtered (you can see the Oh, Crap! in the Soldier's face). So when the RED Heavy instead tosses them a shotgun to arm themselves, they immediately know serious stuff is going down.
• Organization with Unlimited Funding:
  • TF Industries controls the world, utilizes armies of paper-pushers to solve problems, and has enough money to finance death rays, doomsday devices, bombs, and rockets, and outfit their mercenaries with state-of-the-art weapons and designer headwear — in particular, they can resurrect the dead and build ammunition and health dispensers that defy the laws of thermodynamics, on a whim. In the sixties.
  • Handwaved with the addition of Australium, a goldlike metal that boosts people's brainpower immeasurably, allowing a nation like Australia (in-universe, a nation of idiots) to build teleportation and cloaking devices and master "the entire spectrum of the moustache sciences."
• Ornamental Weapon:
  • The Demoman's vest has extra pipes, the Pyro's bandolier has napalm grenades, and the Soldier carries a couple of frag grenades on his bandolier. The Soldier only uses a grenade in a kill taunt.
  • The Sydney Sleeper has extra darts attached to the butt and in the Sniper's pocket, and the Huntsman puts arrows in the Sniper's quiver.
• Our Slogan Is Terrible: The slogan for Mann Co. Ready-to-Use Corpse-Grade Quicklime is "Just Add Body!" And underneath on the bag, the bullet points read, "Minimal Residue", "Hose Down", and "Flowery Scent".
• Out-of-Character Alert: One of the easier ways to spot a disguised Spy is to look for weird behavior a non-spy wouldn't do. Examples include "medics" not healing someone 24/7, "scouts" moving far slower than they would normally, and "teammates" making straight beelines towards the backs of other teammates as well as Engineer Sentry nests.
• Overdrawn At The Bloodbank: The mercenaries lose a lot of blood when shot, especially if the weapon has a bleed effect. Coupled with the healing provided by a Medic, one can lose a lot of blood in a life.
• Overly Narrow Superlative:
  • Valve has jokingly described this game as "America's #1 war-themed hat simulator". How many other war-themed hat simulators could there be?
  • The Sun-On-A-Stick. With a 25% damage reduction penalty, and crits only coming if the Scout strikes an on-fire enemy, its usefulness is very situational.
• Oxygen Meter: While there isn't a visible oxygen meter, staying underwater long enough will cause the player to flinch and make drowning-type noises and take damage. Health lost from drowning is restored by coming up for air. Medics and Dispensers can heal players faster than drowning can kill them.

P

• Pacifist Run:
  • The Medic class achievement "First Do No Harm" entails reaching the top of the scoreboard in a game of six or more players on a team without killing anyone, instead relying on assist kills while healing others.
  • The Scout has a similar achievement called "No Hitter", where you take the intel and bring it back without firing a shot (the icon is even a dove holding an olive branch above an intel case). That being said, there's nothing stopping the Scout from beating people to death with a bat and still getting the achievement.
• Padded Sumo Gameplay: Certain maps have a tendency to stall pretty badly. Capture the Flag, Control Points, and a good chunk of early maps are all notorious for this.
• Painting the Medium: In the Mann Co. store, you can click on the item and get a preview on what it looks like, both alone and on the character. Except for the Spy. This was probably a Good Bad Bug, and was fixed in short order.
• Papa Wolf: The Sentries are often thought of as the Engineers' children. If the Engineer's Sentry is killed, and they are using the special Frontier Justice shotgun, which gives an automatic two critical hits for every time that the dead sentry got a kill, then you'd better "Start prayin', boy", 'cause if you're not Übercharged, you're one or two shots away from the respawn room. It's also clear from listening to his "<X> down!" lines that he sounds more distressed about Sentries being destroyed than any other building^note although this may also be due to the fact that Sentries are usually watching important points; a Dispenser or Teleporter going down is a minor inconvenience, but a downed Sentry would likely mean the enemy is breaking through.
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • To their teammates (or supposed teammates, if a Spy disguises as the enemy Spy), Disguised Spies use this trope literally, wearing a paper mask with the face of the class they are impersonating. This even shows up on this holiday card.◊
  • Inexperienced spies can also result in this in-game. The easiest way to catch a Spy is to find one that isn't using their weapon. Medic and Pyro disguises pretty much give themselves away. The other, more combat-oriented classes make better disguises.
  • Several maps are military bases set up like legitimate businesses, not helping by the fact that both sides are fighting in plain view. 2Fort for example are RED and BLU bases disguised as farms (including plywood cows with prerecorded mooing), but the residents of Teufort like to "watch the mercs fight over that spy base" when they're bored. The "Mann Vs. Machine" map "Decoy" takes the cake, which is a very hastily-made fake Mann Co. facility set up in a ghost town by the Soldier, complete with a small room with his building contract and several failed signs. The kicker is that it works.
• Parrot Pet Position: There are many "animal companion" cosmetics that can ride on the class's shoulders. Every character has at least one pet that's unique.
  • The Medic was the first who has his pet dove Archimedes, for those who bought the Archimedes plush. He is also covered in blood in his RED variant.
  • Chucklenuts (a squirrel) and the Catcher's Companion (a cardinal or blue jay, depending on the team) for the Scout.
  • Compatriot (an eagle) for the Soldier.
  • The Carrion Companion (a Halloween-restricted skeleton bird) and the Fiery Phoenix for the Pyro.
  • The Bird-Man of Aberdeen (a parrot) for the Demoman.
  • Red Army Robin (a tiny robin) for the Heavy.
  • Ein (a canary with goggles) for the Engineer.
  • The Cobber Chameleon, the Steel Songbird, and Sir Hootsalot (an owl) for the Sniper.
  • The Spycrab (a crab plush) and Aristotle (a crow wearing an Archimedes mask) for the Spy. Arguably the Backstabber's Boomslang (a snake which coils around his arm and rests on his shoulder) as well.
• Percussive Maintenance:
  • Everything an Engineer can do to improve their buildings is performed by hitting it with either a wrench or a robot hand.
  • Hilariously and heavily lampshaded in the Sentry Operating Manual, where heavily detailed instructions are given for sentry maintenance and upgrading, with said instructions always followed by a rephrase of "hit it with your wrench".
• Perfectly Cromulent Word: "Uppengraden" (spoken by the Medic in Mann vs Machine).
• Permadeath: Sudden Death, where you go from unlimited respawns to no respawns. Also Arena mode, which never has respawning anyway.
• Personal Raincloud: One of the particle effects available for an Unusual hat.
• Pimp Duds: The Hustler's Hallmark, an unlockable team-colored pimp hat for the Demoman. For bonus points, the Demoman can "pimpwalk" by looking up and crouching while moving straight forward.
• Pinned to the Wall: The Sniper's Huntsman can pin enemies to the wall. There is even an achievement called "William Tell Overkill" for pinning a Heavy's head to the wall.
• Planet of Hats: Implied for at least some parts of the world as the Demoman is apparently part of a tradition of "Highland Demolition Men," so this may simply be specific to certain communities.
• Player Archetypes: Not on the Five Gamers list, but this seems to fit:
  • Real Men favor Soldier or Heavy.
  • Thespians favor Spy or Scout.
  • Brains favor Engineer or Medic.
  • Loonies favor Pyro.
  • Munchkins favor Sniper or Demoman.
• Player Elimination: In Arena Mode, normal respawning is disabled and players are forced to sit out after dying until the round finishes.
• Player-Generated Economy: Valve added the Steam Community Market, an entire, organized trading system for Team Fortress 2 items with money. The community has taken it even further, using Refined Metal, crate keys, and (formerly) in-game earbud headphones as currency, and trade/deathmatch servers as informal marketplaces. A savvy trader can get even the rarest cosmetics without spending a dime on Microtransactions.
• Plot-Based Photograph Obfuscation:
  • Someone is obscured from the photograph of Zepheniah Mann and company, and his section of Zepheniah's will is similarly obscured. His will shows that he left the entirety of his something to somebody, and swore them to utmost secrecy in its keeping. In Loose Canon, the third recipient of a life-extender machine is out of the panel.
  • It was revealed that he left his entire stash of "miracle gravel" (implied to be Australium) to Elizabeth in order to keep it from Gray, who had previously tried to blackmail him for it, and it's implied that Gray is the third person who received a life extender machine.
• The Points Mean Nothing: It doesn't matter how many points you get as long as your objective is done, though it's an indicator of how well you're helping your team and how balanced the teams are.
• Poirot Speak: The Medic, Heavy, and Spy do this.
• Power-Up Food: In addition to the Heavy and Scout's "lunchbox" items, all classes are equipped with a canteen in Mann vs Machine mode that can give a wide variety of power-ups.
• Practical Currency: In Mann vs Machine, credits heal and overheal the Scout if he collects them, to help offset his otherwise limited usefulness on defense.

• Prank Injuries:
  • There's a hat that appears to be a butcher knife (actually a meat cleaver) stuck in the mercenary's head. It's unclear whether this is a real knife or not.
  • The cleaver looks exactly like one of the Scout's secondary slot ranged weapons, the Flying Guillotine.
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner:
  • The Engineer has a few whenever he receives Revenge Crits on his Frontier Justice.^note A crit from that weapon tops at 180 damage, enough to instantly kill all but two classes without overheal.
    Engineer: Start prayin', boy!
  • And from Meet The Medic:
    Medic: Now? (creepy chuckle) Let's go practice medicine.
• Premature Encapsulation: The first update to two simultaneous classes was named the "Sniper Vs. Spy Update". The next update, where kills between the two classes actually determined the results of the update, was known as the "WAR!" update.
• Preorder Bonus:
  • Not for TF2 itself, but items have been given out as pre-order bonuses for other games, including non-Valve ones. To date, they've given out Bill's Hat for pre-ordering Left 4 Dead 2, Max's Severed Head and replicas of Sam's and Max's guns for Sam and Max: The Devil's Playhouse, a Worms-style hat for the Soldier, complete with nonfunctional Holy Hand Grenades, for pre-ordering Worms Reloaded, and a poker visor for the Heavy for pre-ordering Poker Night at the Inventory.
  • The post on the blog announcing the Rift tie-in items mentions that the Scout sent his back, unopened, because he didn't have any room in his apartment for any more tie-in crap before he discovered how awesome it was. (Some fans have become disgruntled with all the tie-in items.)
• Press X to Die: Pressing the taunt key as a Soldier with the Equalizer on hand will make him perform a taunt kill that blows him to gibs^note unless he has the Rocket Jumper equipped, which nullifies all self-inflicted blast damage, or has maximum blast resistance in Mann vs Machine. However, it'll also gib anyone within 6 feet. Also, typing "kill" or "explode" into the console will result in just that. It can even be bound to a key, for convenience, like X for example.
• Pretty Little Headshots: Exaggerated with most weapons, as headshots deal no extra damage at all. Played straight with the Spy's Ambassador and most of the Sniper's primaries, with the exception of the Hitman's Heatmaker (which decapitates the target upon a fully-charged headshot) and the Classic (which makes the target explode into Ludicrous Gibs).
• Prochronic Product:
  • Exaggerated in supplemental media. The WAR! Update stated that Abraham Lincoln invented the staircase and that he died attempting to Rocket Jump up them at Ford's Theater, implying that the invention of the rocket launcher predated the invention of the staircase.
  • Australium greatly enhances the technological level of the entire country of Australia, to the point where teleportation and flying cars are commonplace in the 1960s, with the side effect being that everyone in Australia, even the women, have full mustaches and incredibly buff bodies. And the supply of Australium starts drying up...
• Product Placement: The Preorder Bonus cosmetics above tend to become this for the game in question. Such cosmetics, with some such as Strong Bad's Dangeresque shades being specifically singled out by the game's creators, also have the negative tendency of destroying the game's art style, since futuristic monocles from the 21st century tend to clash badly when placed in a 1960s world.
• Propeller Hat of Whimsy: The Pyro's Beanie is a cosmetic item in the form of a propeller beanie for, well, The Pyro, who is a Psychopathic Manchild.
• Properly Paranoid: While it pays for everybody to cognizant of threats (Spies in particular), priority targets such as Engineer and Medic tend to be more paranoid by necessity, and if a Pyro isn't bathing everything and everyone around them in a near-constant baptism of fire, then they're highly suspect.
• Proxy War: At first, the game's Excuse Plot consisted of mercenary teams hired by two brothers who hate each other, and are trying to achieve superiority over the other via complete ownership of a gravel pit. Later events changed the status quo as The 'Verse was further developed.
• Pumpkin Person: The Horseless Headless Horsemann, a skeleton with a Jack-O' Lantern for a head.
  • The mercenaries can also achieve this trope with the Horseless Headless Horsemann's Head, won by beating the HHH.
• Pun: Many of the achievement names, some of which would not be out of place on this wiki. ("Tartan Spartan", anyone?)
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!:
  • The Soldier, firing/swing his weapon while standing on a control point will yell, "Stand! On! The! Point! Maggots!", and when ignited, might shout, "I am on fire!"
  • Parodying There Will Be Blood, the Scout has, "I. Eat. Your. Sandviches! I eat 'em up!" He also has a bunch of other punctuated phrases along the lines of "You! Suck!" and "You! Are! Terrible!"
  • The Sniper will sometimes do this if he gets a Revenge Kill directed at an enemy Sniper:
  Sniper: You. Are. A. Bloody. Disgrace.
• Punny Name:
  • Bots with certain names will tend to favor certain classes - for example, CreditToTeam usually spawns as an Engineer (the Heavy, upon being teleported, will declare: "Engineer is credit to team!").
  • It also affects their behavior slightly. A bot that takes the name of Weighted Companion Cube tends to just stand in spawn unless attacked.
  • A few weapons also follow this pattern. The Gunslinger lets you essentially sling guns and your enemies, the Quick-Fix quickly fixes your allies' wounds, etc.
• Pursued Protagonist: The moment Grey fires the Team, the entire New Mexican police force immediately start hunting them down (starting with Scout and Spy), because they're sociopathic murderers who have been terrorizing them for years, and now don't have Mann Co to protect them. Subverted when it turns out that Mann Co.'s dubious health and safety protocols (and toxic water supply) already turned the town of Teufort insane. They're accusing the mercs for crazy stuff that they did themselves, which the mercs don't remember doing at all.
• Putting the "Medic" in Comedic: The Medic often invokes this trope. For example, in the Meet the Medic video, he tells Heavy a story about how he made a patient lose their skeleton. While Heavy is fully conscious during a heart transplant.

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