Needs Help: Cardboard Obstacle

Cardboard Obstacle seems to be two fundamentally different tropes combined into one, with the central thesis just being a complain-y "obstacles that are not fun."

Out of the three versions of the trope it lists, the first and last are "obstacles that are dropped in front of the player which they are already clearly able to pass; obstacles that are, in other words, just busywork." Those are fine and describe subtle variations on the same trope.

The problem is the middle one, which is "you get an item to pass an obstacle, and only use it once, and never use it again." It's a completely different trope from the other two (in fact, it's essentially an inversion of them.)

Fusing these tropes together also creates a Tropes Are Not Bad problem; taken individually, both of these tropes can be used in good ways. But they've been fused under the thesis of "obstacles that are bad", which seems unnecessary.

After taking about 15 minutes of research, I have deduced that both of the Tropes on this page are actually detailing various types of "locks" in a Lock and Key Puzzle other than an actual Locked Door; in fact, a Locked Door could be considered a Cardboard Obstacle depending on what would be required to unlock it.

And, yes, it could also be considered an Insurmountable Waist-High Fence that can be "climbed".

It suffers from not just complaining and an implied merge, but also obscurity: 9 examples, 25 related wicks, and no section for similar Tropes.

Type 2 seems like either a species of Scrappy Mechanic or, in seemingly better cases, They Wasted A Perfectly Good Mechanic.

Type 1 is written as the videogame version of Chekhov's Boomerang. Type 3 is "Type 1 but overdone."

I say that the description needs to be rewritten as a description of the various "locks" of a Lock and Key Puzzle and include examples that are not actually doors. (Locked Door then becomes a Subtrope of this.)

edited 21st Jun '15 8:51:33 AM by DonaldthePotholer

The first paragraph describes an obstacle which can be removed or bypassed only by a specific item or ability. This is Ability Required to Proceed.

The rest of the page is complaining about how the above is done "wrong" in some way or another.

edited 21st Jun '15 2:22:39 PM by DiamondWeapon

Okay, looked at the page, and wow. There's a lot of complainy tones.

Should we just...cut this? Anything tropable seems covered elsewhere.

edited 9th Nov '15 3:53:18 PM by Berrenta

Throwing in my hat for cutting it.

I will agree that this trope page seems based on complaining about badly used tropes. Cut.

Slice and dice, the trope is at most just a subset and at least an example that could be cited under another trope.

Btw, is there a legitimate place for complaining on this site?

Not really. This site isn't for complaining. It's for describing.

Incidentally, this is complaining for reasons mentioned somewhere above. Cut.

It has 216 inbounds. Is there a reason not to redirect it to Ability Required to Proceed (the non-complainy version) rather than cutting it?

edited 6th Jan '16 1:04:06 AM by troacctid

If there is a non-complainy version, maybe we can use that. No use having two tropes with one having a negative tone.

Personally, it won't matter too much whether to cut or redirect. If there are a sizable number of inbounds, definitely redirect.

edited 1st Jan '16 3:34:48 PM by Berrenta

I say to axe this one. Like has been said already, it's mainly complaining about tropes, and those tropes have basically been covered elsewhere as well. So either give it the axe, or if someone can think of a better trope, possibly make this a redirect. But, yeah just give this one the boot and cut it.

squash it

Going ahead with removing wicks, since either way we want this gone.

Whether we will be able to cut it entirely is the question. Are the wicks worth keeping?

Wicks are done. Asked the other mods about the inbounds, and they didn't seem to mind having this cut entirely. So I'll go ahead and handle the cut and close this.