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I swear I found this once. My cousin described a D&D group that went to a town to root out a cult. They had a known low level member of the cult in their hands. Instead of finding the leaders of the cult, what they achieved was an Epic Fail.
All they had to do was beat the name
of that members cult contact of of them and move on up the chain.
A form of Gotta Kill Them All. Moves more into Sorting Algorithm of Evil and The Pawns Go First when it's not something the hero does intentionally, but can overlap when they have to work through the list by necessity (say, each one you defeat somehow gives you access to the next one, so they start at the most vulnerable and work their way in). There's usually at least a little Your Princess Is in Another Castle! mixed into any combination of these, too.
For the D&D example: if you mean they worked their way up the chain, that's more a combo of Cutting the Knot, Take a Third Option, and Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique than an epic fail. (The cult allowing the lower level members to know the identities of the higher members would be an epic fail, though.)
Is there a trope describing the process of starting with a street level criminal Mooks and following leads all the way to the top of the organization?
In Payback, Porter wants his money back. He starts with the small fry and obtains the name of each successive link up the ladder to the top. The Big Bad who can give him his cash.
In Deadpool, Wade follows a similar process to find and take revenge on the man who tortured him into mutant anti-hero status.
Much of the action of the film involves the ways the main character goes about beating or tricking the information out of each successive rung in the ladder.
Definitely part of Man on Fire, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. I think it must be a staple of investigation plots where the target is either name or location unknown.
Serial Shakedown?
Edited by trooper8