This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Meocross: Nanoha has practically made this trope her own. talk about super-duper-ubarpowered to the point off clear insanity
dkellis: Removed the following from the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS Quattro entry:
- **Also qualifies as famous last words.
Ununnilium: Okay, I am cutting every single one of the "My dungeon party did this once" examples, and replacing them with a general example. Single-person anecdotes don't really belong in the wiki, except on certain pages (like It Just Bugs Me!).
Thus:
- This actually happened in a Tabletop RPG. It was a superhero campaign, in which the Gamemaster had prepared a Death Course maze for the PCs to traverse to reach the villain's inner sanctum. Instead, one of them used all his power at once to blast through the walls so they could cut straight to the villain.
- In another editor's Dungeons And Dragons campaign, a huge complex built into a cliff was neatly bypassed by players who came up with a means to drill straight down into the villain's lair at its end.
- The same players avoided getting involved in a battle by using several monster summonses, polymorphs and elemental transforms to drop the side of a mountain onto a large fraction of the enemy army.
- Another tactic this group likes is to buy the land on which the dungeon resides, and then go in and evict its residents.
- In this editor's Dungeons And Dragons campaign, the players seem to find a way to do this in every single dungeon, no matter how hard I try to prevent it.
- Anecdotal evidence suggests that this kind of thing happens frequently in dungeon crawl type adventures. In a game I was in, the GM tried to reverse the scenario by making us fight our way up a stone tower rather than down into a cavern. One of the other players cast Rock to Mud on the bottom level thus collapsing the tower. He then claimed experience for all the monsters he had killed. In retrospect, had I been the GM, I would have invoked the "No Risk, No Reward" style of gameplay. I would have told him "OK, you killed all the monsters but you get no XP for it. Now dig through the rubble for the item you were supposed to retrieve." Just a (significantly off-topic) suggestion.
- In this troper's games he gave them this trope freely. The Villain's lair, a sprawling citadel of doom. Classic dungeon stuff. Upon entering, they walked into a foyer, up some stairs into a room where the villain sat waiting for them, working at his desk. he invited them in, and offered to answer any questions hey had. Of course, this was quickly subverted. Once they figured out he was lying through his teeth, he sent them through a Trap Door into the real dungeon. They actually expressed immense relief at the status quo being restored, oddly.
- It is quite easy for PCs to end up rewarded for this, most strong doors are made up of an expensive material, so simply using "disable device" or other methods to take it of its hinges winds up quite profitable.
- This editor had an amusing aversion of this in a Top Secret game. Terrorists hijacked a boat containing some sort of biological warfare juice, and the agents had to parachute in and retrieve it. The agents split up to hit different targets. This editor's character hit the elevator, went down deep into the boat, and accidentally walked right into the room where the stuff was stored, bypassing the entire 'search the ship' maze. He then spent the rest of the mission with all the doors locked and covered, waiting for the rest of the team to make it to him. The normally scripted 'final standoff' with the bad guy in an easily defendable room, threatening to use the juice failed to happen because he couldn't get into the room without getting shot, and all his mooks were busy with the team.
- A feared (by DMs) Dungeons And Dragons tactic is the "scry and fry" in which the player characters use divination spells to locate the Big Bad, then cast a teleport spell to ambush him wherever he happens to be, bypassing any and all elaborately prepared defenses he has set up.
- Of course, one Mind Blank spell, and it takes a caster with deity-level power to scry the subject.
- This troper once played a Marvel Superheroes module with an amusing subversion. The tank tried to punch through a wall, only to find they were stronger than adamantium, the strongest material on earth, leading this troper to suggest the walls were made of Plot. A Crowning Moment Of Awesome in a session where the Human Torch, the (according to his backstory) most powerful being on the planet got knocked around by a Nazi guard by a string of criticals and bad defense rolls. Later used straight by punching out the Red Skull with a powered-up attack.
- This troper would like to point out that many RPGs have so many ways of doing this that it may be futile to try to list them all. There appear to be two main reasons for this: first, many games include countless different spells whose implications are often poorly thought out (though some of this is intentional: there's actually a Dn D spell called "passwall," which creates a temporary hole in a wall of your choice). The second reason is many games try to write rules for every conceivable situation, including tunneling through a wall with a battle axe. This troper has actually had players try the second one, and realized that according to the rules, all they needed was enough time.
J Bridge: Yes they do, dammit! There Is No Such Thing As Notability. Thus, I put 'em back. I liked those examples. They're funny.
Ununnilium: Notability is not the point. Anyway, I started a discussion about this on Ask The Tropers, so...
Masami Phoenix: I don't know how, but can't we create a tropertales page?
