Boring But Practical / Literature

Boring, but Practical in Literature

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• In the 1632 series, the uptimers spend over a year and a huge amount of resources building ironclad naval vessels, with propulsion, armor and weaponry far in advance of anything in existence at the time. When they launch an attack on Copenhagen, the Danes simply Zerg Rush the ships with a fleet of longboats armed with spar torpedoes. The casualty rate among the Danes is appalling, but their boats and bombs are easy and cheap to produce in large numbers. They don't win the battle, but they manage to mission kill one ironclad, and pose a genuine threat to the rest.
  • Earlier, after a discussion of just how far they should uplift their downtime allies, the Uptimers decide to share Civil War technology for this reason. Grantville is a small mining town that lacks the precision tools needed to make 20th century firearms, but 19th century guns are basically the same tech the 17th century Downtimers are using but slightly improved for power and accuracy (which also means their allies don't have to adjust their training regimens to compensate for unfamiliar weapons). Ammunition is easy to come by as it's the same as the older guns, and restocking after a battle isn't too much of an issue as the victors can loot their foe's supplies. Finally, in the inevitability that some of the guns fall into the hands of Grantville's geopolitical enemies like the French or Spanish and get reverse-engineered, the resulting leap won't tip the balance of power too far against them (as they still have a decent cache of modern weapons, and the know-how to make more ammo for them).
• Animorphs: For most of the series, the Animorphs used bird-of-prey morphs to travel, despite the fact that they had to fly with at least a mile in between each of them (because different kinds of raptors don't get along) and the fact that they could only fly so far (raptors prefer to save all their energy for the hunt). In book #51, Marco, Tobias, and Ax acquire duck morphs, which fly in flocks and can fly for hundreds of miles without stopping, and Marco wonders why they never did this before.
• Beesong Chronicles: There are a number of non-combat abilities, such as Salvaging, that adventurers prize highly. Salvaging is one of the only ways to collect valuable body parts from monsters, and even then it's not very efficient (Minor Salvaging has a ten percent success rate, and even Advanced Salvaging only has a fifty percent success rate). Furthermore, most of the time the only way to get the really good abilities is to have the appropriate Job. Non-combat abilities only come with a non-combat job, which is not suited for adventuring, and if you stop training the non-combat job you lose access to the abilities — so you can't take a couple levels of the Farmer Job for the perks and then dive into a dungeon as a Mage. The series starts with the introduction of the apis demihuman race, who have Advanced Harvesting as an innate racial ability. Not only is Harvesting better than Salvaging, since it's racial it is not dependent on Job. The apis immediately become very valuable party members, since all those 20 Bear Asses quests are much, much easier with one of them on your side.
• In the Belisarius Series, both the Romans and the Malwa have advisers from the future, but while the Malwa adviser Link tends to think in terms of flashy, futuristic weaponry, the Roman adviser Aide tends towards this trope. While Aide does help the Romans make gunpowder weapons, he also gives them boring but practical advances with things like stirrups: easy to make, simple to use, and instantly makes your cavalry far more effective.
• Book of the Dead (2021): Dove informs Tyron that there are endless ways to customise a sword's balance and shape and curvature and tip, sometimes costing immense amounts of money to get the "perfect" blade for a particular Slayer. Magnin Steelarm, on the other hand, possibly the best swordsman in the world, just has one requirement: not breaking when he swings it. He favours a simple longsword design, easily forged if you can find suitable materials, and easily replaced.
  Magnin: When you get to my Level, that's a tall order, most swords shatter. Keep the fancy enchanting rubbish away from me, it just gets in the way.
• Chrysalis (RinoZ):
  • In his first few evolutions, Anthony skips over the options to upgrade his stomach, focusing on more interesting options like beefing up his muscles, getting access to magic, adding extra sub-brains, and even contemplating growing wings. Who cares about something boring like digestion? Eventually, however, as he watches what monsters like Crinis can do, he realises that a more efficient stomach — one that can hold more of a large haul, or extract more biomass points from weak enemies — is an important asset for gaining strength quickly. He eventually makes it a standard requirement for all new hatchlings, when they evolve the first time, to make their stomachs mutable.
  • Of all the possible materials for a golgari's "true skin", granite is neither impressive nor particularly strong. But because it's cheap and plentiful, it's very easy to repair, and Granin doesn't mind being underestimated.
• Ciaphas Cain (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!!!) is given multiple opportunities throughout his series to upgrade from his fairly dinky laspistol to the much heftier, menacing, and powerful bolt pistol (or Hellpistol on one occasion). He opts for the laspistol every time, reasoning that he's become so used to the weapon, learning the intricacies of such a different one might throw him off at a critical moment. That, and Cain considers the soft factors of a laspistol - low weight, lots of ammo - to be a worthy tradeoff compared to the other two options.
  • "Used to it" is a bit of an understatement, even for Cain. As Amberley herself has witnessed and commented on, Cain is capable of performing headshots with that laspistol at ranges well outside what should otherwise be the weapon's optimal performance level. And much more, he's used it to make One Shot Kills on virtually every race within the Warhammer verse, from Orks (up to and including a friggin' Warboss) and Tyranids to Chaos cultists, Dark Eldar and Daemons. Basically, Cain has (arguably) killed more with that "dinky" laspistol than most Space Marines have with bolters and plasma pistols.
• The Cosmere:
  • Discussed and Subverted in The Bands of Mourning. The titular treasure is hidden in a Temple of Doom deep in the mountains, which Wax thinks is a terrible way to hide something; if Wax were to hide an Artifact of Doom, he'd put it in a nondescript cave. He later realizes that while a cave would hide the Bands from the builder's enemies, it would also make it difficult for the builder to find them as well. The enormous temple ensures that should the builder return, he could always find them. In fact, the Bands are hidden as part of the seemingly decorative statue in front of the trapped temple. The temple is full of multiple layers of tricks to make it look like someone else looted the place first, but it's all just a distraction. The original bearer could retrieve the Bands in half a minute.
  • The Shattered Plains in The Stormlight Archive is the home of the giant chasmfiends, enormous shelled beasts whose gemhearts are valuable as a Practical Currency (gems can be used for Soulcasting, or magical transmutation). The entire Alethi court is stationed there after a war for vengeance brought them there, but now they're mostly just seeking wealth by killing these beasts. While the other Highprinces are off fighting Parshmen and each other to kill the Chasmfiends and take their Gemharts, Highprince Sebarial took one look at the chasmfiends and knew they were going to be here for the long haul. Even after the war that brought them there ends, the opportunity to keep hunting the Chasmfiends and literally make money is too valuable to pass up. He largely ignores hunting them, instead focusing on setting up a permanent economy in what is currently the de facto Alethi court and will inevitably become a permanent part of the kingdom. As he tells Shallan, no matter who harvests the gemhearts, they end spending it in his camps.
• Cradle Series:
  • Lindon has a few of these. One of his key advantages throughout the series is that he has pure madra — the same kind children have — which has some Anti-Magic properties and some benefit to soulsmithing. When he eventually invents an Enforcement technique for his pure madra, all it does is improve his physical abilities a bit. It's not much, but compared to the explosive bursts of power from his other Enforcer technique, it's often more useful.
  • In a world where everyone has custom-made magical weapons, Eithan has ordinary janitor tools like brooms and shears. He reforges them in soulfire (which makes them Nigh-Invulnerable) and then uses them to kill people who can survive having mountains thrown at them.
  • Likewise, Eithan's solution to most problems is "throw madra at it." He has deep madra reserves due to his advanced cycling technique (which he teaches to Lindon), so he basically always has more power to use. As he says, there are other cycling techniques that improve recovery time and so on, but why worry about all that when you have so much power that you'll never run out? Underlords such as Eithan can also turn madra into soulfire (though there are more efficient methods of creating soulfire), so he also has deep soulfire reserves. Most underlords are miserly with their soulfire, but Eithan burns it casually because he is confident he can always make more.
• In The Day of the Jackal, the tactics used by Lebel and the French police to find the titular master assassin are pretty much brute-force and absurd thoroughness (Lebel's bugging of all the phones of the French government high-ups in his search of The Mole, the obtaining of all the guest records of all the hotels in France and looking through all of the birth and death certificates for The Jackal's aliases). In an era where all the records were paper and had to be looked through by hand, these searches were very slow — yet nevertheless the police are able to find proof of the Jackal's activities and force him to keep moving and changing identities. The way with which he finds the Jackal's sniping spot at the end is also very much this: instead of a complicated criminal profiling mind-game, he just asks every guard on the perimeter of the event if they saw someone that looked like the Jackal, until he finds one that did.
• In Death's End, we are introduced to the photoid: the simplest way to kill a solar system. It takes a lot of energy, but other than that, it's very straightforward: it's just a large projectile converted into a relativistic kill vehicle and shot at really high speed into a star. It's basically a bullet that can destroy a sun.
• Discworld:
  • Guards! Guards! uses this trope to lampshade the trope where MacGuffins which are swords are most often shiny and cool looking (as described: shiny that lights up with a ting!). At the end of the book in which Carrot joins the Watch, Fred Colon thinks that perhaps the sword of the last king of Ankh-Morpork isn't shiny and lights up with a "ting!" Perhaps the sword of the king is a boring old sword that was simply very, very, very sharp. Carrot has such a sword. The sword in question may even be something of an Inverted Trope. It is so remarkably unmagical it doesn't even have the trace of background magic almost everything on the Disc is saturated with, thus making it slightly more real than everything else it encounters.
  • In the same vein, Cohen and the Silver Horde (a group of octogenarian barbarian heroes) carry notably notched and beat-up swords that are STILL sharp enough to cut a die in half in mid-air. At one point, Cohen internally reflects that a simple, plain non-magical sword in the hands of a truly brave man will cut through a magical sword like suet. He's reflecting on this fact while looking at Carrot's sword, which has been previously described as one of the most non-magical objects on the Disc.
  • Discworld witches in general tend to be this, especially compared to wizards. Witchcraft is more about using psychology and common sense to make things do what they're supposed to, and even the "real magic" tends to be subtle. When the Lancre Witches face off against Lady Felmet, Granny tries to defeat her by reaching into her mind and breaking down the mental barriers that keep her from seeing her true self, revealing to her what a sadistic monster she is. When this doesn't work, Nanny Ogg just hits her on the head with a cauldron.
  • In A Hat Full of Sky, the Witch Trials are special events (not competitions) where witches gather to show off. Among impressive entries like the Pig Trick (with a sausage) and two-person juggling tricks with one person, one witch presents a better way to stop people from choking. The narration points out that while it isn't magical, something that turns almost-dead people into living people is worth more than a dozen spells that just look pretty.
  • Though wizards can be practical when the need arises. As Mustrum Ridcully has pointed out, if the magic stored in a wizard's staff doesn't work, "a good poke in any available soft bits" with a six-foot stick-with-a-knob-on-the-end can still be a very effective deterrent.
  • Discworld dwarfs have a virtually religious attachment to their axes, usually owning or carrying a few different types. However, the traditional "Dwarf axe" shape is an utterly practical one. It has a pickaxe on one side, for digging up interesting minerals, and a regular axeblade on the other, for dealing with unreasonable people who want to take your interesting minerals. A dwarf with a proper dwarf axe can both dig interesting minerals and cut firewood. A dwarf with minerals and fire can make a forge and tools, and a dwarf with a forge and tools can make anything.
  • Although Moist von Lipwig is a theatrical conman with a flair for the dramatic, when he's put in charge of revitalizing Ankh-Morpork's decrepit postal system, his main selling point amounts to this. The post may not be as modern, flashy, and fast as the recently invented "Clacks" semaphore system, but it's also more reliable, less expensive, and sending a whole book isn't much harder than sending a letter.
  • Sandra Battye in Night Watch (Discworld) came to Ankh-Morpork looking for a job as a seamstress, only to learn that 'seamstress' is a euphemism for The Oldest Profession. She still ends up making more money than her traditional seamstress coworkers (though they generally call her a 'needlewoman' for clarity), because a lot of men who need their clothes fixed (since men aren't taught how to sew) make the same mistake as she did.
• The Dresden Files:
  • The "Eebs" work like this. When trying to kill an extremely powerful wizard they shoot at him with a silenced pistol from inside a car. When it fails they just drive away. They hire a local killer to attack him. They chuck a firebomb into his building while he sleeps. All things that don't take a scrap of supernatural power to achieve, and when Harry does confront them, they run away screaming. They are also the Red Court's two most successful assassins, because while individual attacks are easy to deal with, they still have the same potential to be lethal as magical fireballs, and they don't require much effort or risk, so all the Eebs have to do is keep up the pressure until one or another attempt gets lucky.
  • Grevane makes zombies. Not a particularly spectacular power, compared to insanely powerful and insanely versatile sorcerer Cowl or body-surfer Corpsetaker, but it is hard to argue with a man who can raise and control undead in high three-digit numbers. It helps that Dresdenverse zombies are more like meaty T-800s than the usual shamblers.
  • Similar to Grevane is Binder. Binder is a one-trick pony, and his trick is summoning up to a few dozen servitors known as the Grey Men. Compared to proper Wizards it's not terrible impressive, but the Grey Men are fast, strong, intelligent enough to use simple machines (like guns) and operate somewhat independently. Being able to provide a small disposable army on relatively short notice has allowed him to make a solid career as a mercenary.
  • Harry's .44 Magnum revolver. It's not as sophisticated as the FN P-90 that Murphy favors during combat, nor does it have any badass enchantments like the swords of the Knights Of The Cross (or Harry's other magical apparel), but what it is is a highly reliable Hand Cannon that has saved Harry often both because of its stopping power and because it is highly intimidating. For that matter, when an enemy does get to close range, Harry's been known to just bonk them over the head with his staff (which, after all, is a six-foot length of solid oak) or punch them in the face.
• The Gamebook Duel of the Masters both you and the book's Big Bad are monks skilled in the martial arts. In at least one ending you realize he's used to fighting less skilled opponents and using flashy, impressive moves to cement his reputation as someone not to be messed with. Once you realize this you quickly start fighting back with moves that don't look cool, but, well, you win.
• Fire & Blood: Seems to have been Aegon III's method of ruling. No big fancy displays of the kingdom and crown's wealth and power, just keep the smallfolk warm, fed, and content. Nothing really impressive happened during his reign, but after the civil war that his mom and uncle fought, most people were just grateful for a king who was good enough and not too Royally Screwed Up- itself no mean feat considering the Trauma Conga Line poor Aegon III was exposed to as a child.
• The Four Horsemen Universe: Mark 8 CASPers are the current state of the art, but Mark 7s are still in common use and are perfectly serviceable for mercenary companies that can't afford Mark 8s (as is the case for the protagonist companies in the first two books). They're also less cramped inside than the Mark 8, though this means they're bigger on the outside.
• Fred, The Vampire Accountant: Fred is considered immensely valuable in the supernatural community. Not because vampires are powerful (though they are) or because he has a legion of powerful friends (though he does), but because he's an accountant. Due to the Masquerade laws, supernaturals aren't allowed to talk about supernatural affairs with normals — including accountants. Meaning that if they have a magical business, or even a normal business that occasionally makes use of magical assistance, they have to do all the paperwork themselves. Fred, as someone in on the Masquerade who is both willing and able to do accounting, quickly finds his business booming.
• Harry Potter:
  • Expelliarmus, the Disarming Charm. Simple, plain, does no damage. Easy to cast. But since most wizards are useless in combat without their wands, very useful. (And there's the added bonus that an expelliarmus-ed wand will sometimes change allegiance to the wizard responsible.) It knocks whatever someone's holding out of their grip, too, not just wands. In Deathly Hallows, Lupin warns Harry not to make it his signature move, despite how useful it is. In practice, it turns out to be incredibly useful: Draco effectively defeats Dumbledore with it, and Harry uses it twice to counter Voldemort's Avada Kedavra, killing Voldemort for good.
  • While we're at it, Stupefy. It is a spell that knocks someone out. That is all. But unless you want a person dead (and there are plenty of situations where you wouldn't, even if you have no qualms about killing, and even if your goal was to kill you could use Stupefy and deliver the killing blow muggle style, while the Killing Curse is one of the most difficult spells to cast), it's just as effective at putting an opponent out of a fight (it also helps that using Stupefy won't earn its user a life sentence in Azkaban, like the Killing Curse will). There's also the simple fact that Stupefy is both simpler and faster to say — you could have it cast by the time your opponent is halfway through Avada Kedavra. Assuming of course you can't use silent casting, something that works for Stupefy and not for the Killing Curse (unless the wizard is very, very powerful). Of course, if Stupefy is overpowered or multiple wizards cast it at one person, you risk harming or killing your target (McGonagall was hospitalized after being struck by four simultaneous Stunners in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, as an example of the latter.)
  • Furthermore, the Confundus Charm, as used by Snape in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, amongst others. It's not as powerful of a mind-control spell as the Imperius Curse, but a clever user can still cause havoc by giving the Confunded person the right instructions, with the added bonus that it's not illegal like the Imperius or Killing Curses. (Un)fortunately, however, most wizards operate on very little logic, something that is lampshaded by Hermione.
  • By a certain definition of "boring", Harry's Invisibility Cloak is this in regards to the three Deathly Hallows. The other two artifacts are the most powerful wand in the world and a stone that can make the user immortal (and quite possibly command an army of Inferi, among a range of other effects). Hiding from your enemies and walking past problems doesn't sound quite as impressive, but it's incredibly effective in a wide range of places, and it does wonders for Harry and his friends. This is actually further illustrated in the in-story fable "The Tale of the Three Brothers", in which the brother with the Cloak is the only one to live a full life, eluding Death all the way until voluntarily revealing himself when he's ready to die.
  • This trope is a big reason the Killing Curse is so reviled in-story. Lots of spells will kill the target, or even a lot of people at once, often in very flashy ways. The Killing Curse kills one person, very deliberately, with no ceremony, fancy effects, or hope of recovery. It's murder, pure and simple.
  • And when magic spells fail to take out an opponent, just whack it with a club. Right, troll in the dungeon?
  • Or punch someone in the face, as Sirius does to Lucius in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, causing him to drop the prophecy orb (which promptly shatters, ruining Voldemort's entire plan).
  • The Ministry of Magic stopped using Dementors to guard Azkaban after they joined Voldemort, and simply switched to using human guards. Although they no longer had the bonus of driving their prisoners too insane to be a threat, replacing blind Made of Evil monsters with skilled, loyal wizards meant no more Loophole Abuse to facilitate escapes.
• This comes up with several characters in the Honor Harrington series, like Admiral Khumalo and to a lesser extent Admiral Caparelli. While they lack the sheer genius of many other characters in the series, they make up for it by being hard-working, determined and good at delegation and are in fact acknowledged to be better at their assigned tasks (commanding officer of the Talbott Sector and senior uniformed officer of the entire Royal Manticoran Navy, respectively) than their more inspired and "flashy" colleagues would have been.
• Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John D Clark. The chapter "What Ivan Was Doing" ends with this observation:
  In short, the Russians tend to be squares in their choices of propellants. […] When he wants more thrust, Ivan doesn't look for a fancy propellant with a higher specific impulse. He just builds himself a bigger rocket. Maybe he's got something there.
• In Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, the first of the titular magicians is sent to the Duke of Wellington so as apply his magical abilities in service of the war against Napoleon. His initial, flashy efforts, however, are usually dismissed as worse than useless, leading to a lot of skepticism and tension. It's only when he starts getting to know the common soldiers and finding out what they really want that he begins to fit in, as is reflected by his magic getting a lot less flashy but a lot more useful. Tellingly, the first spell that convinces Wellington that this guy might actually be useful is when he conjures up magical roads for the armies to march on.
• The Known Space series has the ships produced by the Puppetteers: 4 models (3 available to civilians) which are customizable only in the paint job you want on them, but account for 95% of starship sales in Known Space because they are completely indestructible and impervious to radiation and weaponry. But not antimatter or tides, as several characters learn the hard way.
• The Last Horizon: One of Varic's most common tricks is just basic telekinesis. Apparently, most of the time telekinesis isn't actually all that useful, but his jaw-dropping skill lets him, for example, catch bullets.
  The blue shells whined in the air, where he was holding them.
  With crude telekinesis.
  It would only have been a little harder to catch the shots with his bare hands.
• A similar short story by Isaac Asimov, "The Machine That Won The War", showcases the "garbage in, garbage out" problem by mentioning that every single person in the chain of providing tactical information to the titular supercomputer, from the front-line generals down to the keyboard operator, all embellished the information for the sake of looking good or because the other information looked too good. So the person who took a look at the predictions of the super-computer and made the plans for the military used the actual titular machine to assist him... he flipped a coin.
• In The Magicians magicians and gods have access to an immense range of weird abilities. The most powerful beings however, have a tendency to just physically attack with Super-Strength and shrug off any complicated magic thrown at them.
• The French novel Malevil features the eponymous castle. Built by the invading English during The Hundred Years War it was built solely for function and has little aesthetic value unlike its opposing neighbor, the French castle Les Rouzies.
• In Steven Pressfield's (Gates of Fire) novel A Man at Arms, the narrator reflects that Rome conquered an empire with its armies, but it keeps that empire by introducing its subjects to the wonders of modern civilization: aqueducts that deliver clean water, paved roads that allow faster travel and transport than ever known before, and the most wondrous, revolutionary achievement of all... reliable mail service.
• In Nevermoor, various people have "knacks," phenomenal and sometimes supernatural talents, which can include things like being a master thief, having a Compelling Voice, being able to see the future, and so on. Henry Mildmay stands out because his knack is an ability to make insanely accurate and detailed maps. He's all too aware that it's not very exciting, and is just a touch bitter about being constantly compared to people with flashier knacks, but it's dead useful.
• In one of the Night Watch books, Anton travels to Taiwan and is staying in a nice hotel. He walks to into the bathroom and sees a small TV there. He's jealous since he has considered buying one for himself but changed his mind after finding out how much a waterproof TV costs. Then he looks at the back of the TV and is shocked to see that it's not waterproofed in any way. He muses that the moisture will kill the TV in a few years, so they will have to buy another. Then he realizes that this is the point. Why waste tons of money on a waterproof TV, when they can simply buy another at a fraction of the price every 4 years or so, especially since technology will have changed by then, so the new TV will be better? He admits it makes sense. It's just that the post-Soviet people have not yet learned to be as wasteful as other capitalist countries.
• The Reluctant King: In the third book, Jorian tries to use sorcery (first a flying, demon-manned giant bathtub, then a demonic envoy) to reach his beloved Estrildis in the palace. He's successful when he's advised to simply bribe someone from the palace to take her out to him.
• Renegades: the hero Insomnia has only one power, and that's being The Sleepless. Nowhere near as flashy as Elemental Powers, Super-Strength, or any other highly effective abilities of her teammates, but invaluable when conducting detective work such as trailing or stakeouts.
• Saintess Summons Skeletons: Faced with a choice between three ritual schematics to learn, Sofia is tempted by the one that generates a defensive wall, and the one that creates a field to turn flesh to stone, but ultimately she chooses the one that sacrifices gold to temporarily boost mana recovery rate. She then finds that it's constantly useful, speeding up every task she does that requires magic. It's even better when she gets a quest reward that makes it free to use.
  Cannot go wrong with more mana.
• In The Salamanders adventurers (called climbers) actually wear practical armor and learn to use different kinds of weapons for different situations.
• Sandokan novel The King of the Sea reveals that most of Sandokan's immense fortune is kept safe in one or more banking accounts in neutral countries (what he has at Mompracem is just petty cash), and that he gave Yanez the cheque book in case the 'petty cash' he had with him (a small fortune) wasn't enough to buy whatever Yanez considered necessary, like food, gunpowder, or an ironclad warship.
• The Screwtape Letters: The demon Screwtape frowns on trying to tempt humans into mass murder or other egregious crimes, and instead prefers to separate them from God gradually through minor, subtle sins throughout their lives. This means that he doesn't get to revel in the suffering of Earthlings as much as he might like, and even when his patients get to Hell, their souls taste bland and flavourless. However, it's a lot easier for the demons, since egregious sins often require some sort of virtue which the demons can't create on their own — Screwtape gives as an example how Attila the Hun would never have been able to terrorize as many people as he did if Heaven hadn't given him such incredible courage. It's also safer for them, as the subtler the effects of demonic temptation are, the less effort people put into resisting them.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, Bronn is forced to fight Vardis Egen, the champion of House Arryn, in a trial by combat. Vardis wears customized armor and an elaborate sword. Bronn wears just his own armor and uses his own sword. While Vardis' gear looks cool, it soon becomes clear that he hasn't had a lot of experience wearing it and he's way too cautious about wielding his sword because it's on loan from House Arryn. Bronn easily kills him.
  • The opposite happens when Ser Barristan Selmy goes to imprison Hizdahr zo Loraq and has to fight his bodyguard Khrazz. Selmy lets Khrazz attack him knowing every strike will just harmlessly bounce off his armor. He only bothers to protect his head and easily dispatches a legendary pit fighter.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe and Legends:
  • "Slugthrower" weaponry — these are firearms, guns that fire bullets. This is a 'verse where blasters are fairly easy to come by. But Luke Skywalker trained with slugthrowers as a kid on Tatooine, and a character in Shatterpoint has this to say about them.
    Tenk: Slugthrowers. I hate 'em. But they're easy to maintain. Day or two in the jungle and your blaster'll never fire again. A good slug rifle, keep 'em wiped and oiled, they last forever. The guerrillas have pretty good luck with them, even though they take a lot of practice — slugs are ballistic, y'know? You have to plot the trajectory in your head.
  • That and they're the perfect Jedi-killing weapon: a blaster bolt can be easily deflected back with a lightsaber, but if a Jedi intercepts a slugthrower round it will only melt it without deflecting or slowing it, resulting in the defending Jedi getting hit with a less lethal but much more painful slug. And making him defenseless due to the pain, if the bullet didn't kill him outright. Even if the lightsaber does deflect the slug, the Jedi can't reflect it back at an opponent the way they could a blaster bolt. The Force is effective against them, but it takes a skilled Jedi to catch a bullet with it.
    • There is one noted weakness: Stormtrooper armor actually works against them. Which is why most guerrillas that use them against Stormtroopers have to do stuff like filling the rounds with explosives. Even then, it's also mentioned that one advantage slugthrowers have over blasters is that you can silence slugthrowers.
  • The YT-1300 Corellian Light Freighter when compared to an X-Wing or Star Destroyer is one of the most boring ships in the universe. It is, however, one of the most popular. Reliable, durable, easy to modify and repair in an emergency; the YT-1300 is a favorite of smugglers throughout the galaxy. The most famous example, of course, is the Millennium Falcon as it is the best example of what a resourceful spacer can do with the design.
  • The X-Wing also falls into this in the Expanded Universe, where, before the production of the XJ and StealthX series, it was outmatched entirely by next generation fighters like its distant cousin the E-Wing and the Empire's pure hotrod of a starship, the TIE Defender. Yet even all the way to the Yuuzhan Vong War, the X-Wing remained perhaps the most effective fighter in the Rebel Alliance/New Republic/Galactic Alliance's arsenal, thanks to its near perfectly balanced performance and capabilities, as well as the ease at which pilots (namely Rogue Squadron) can use them. Sure, a few good pilots in TIE Defenders are a considerable threat, but an X-Wing with Luke Skywalker, Wedge Antilles, Tycho Celchu or Corran Horn at the controls is guaranteed to be the superior force (no pun intended). Part of that for the X-wing is that the cockpit and controls are intentionally designed to resemble those of cheap, popular civilian aircraft. This makes them seem mundane ("boring") but also makes it much easier and faster for civilian pilots to transition to X-wings ("practical").
  • The lightsaber style Form III Soresu. It's the most widespread and defensive form of Jedi combat, and it's nowhere near as flashy as other styles like Ataru or Vaapad. It's also why Obi-Wan Kenobi was able to beat General Grievous, despite the latter wielding four lightsabers, as it made for an impregnable defense. He managed to defeat Darth Vader and in Star Wars Rebels Darth Maul, by using this very style. Darth Bane notes in his part of Book of the Sith that Soresu and Form V (Shien/Djem So, the attacking style), are the best useful fighting styles for the Sith, and in Darth Bane: Rule of Two, he teaches his own apprentice Darth Zannah to use Soresu because her smaller size makes more offensively oriented styles^note Such as Bane's own hyper-aggressive Djem So variant, which even he can only use because the orbalisk parasites infesting his body make him virtually lightsaber-proof. impractical for her.
  • Regarding the otherwise Awesome, but Impractical Death Star — in the Novelization of Rogue One, Governor Tarkin sends Director Krennic a message warning him not to get so carried away with making the Death Star a technological marvel that he loses sight of its true purpose as a weapon to silence dissent against The Empire. In short, a "crude but functional" Death Star is acceptable. Krennic, however, begs to differ. We all know how that turns out.
  • The main competing plan, which the Death Star steals all the funding from for purely political reasons, is Grand Admiral Thrawn's plan of "replace our current generation of utterly useless fighters with some that can actually win a fight against the Clone Wars surplus and civilian models the Rebels are using".
  • While no lightsaber could be considered "boring", there are plenty of variations, like the saberstaff, the long-handled saber, the even-longer-handled saberpike, the lightwhip, the lightclub, the shoto, etc. etc. etc. Despite this, nearly everyone uses the simple one-handed saber with a single blade. While it may not be very flashy, the simple lightsaber can be held easily with one or two hands, most styles of combat are designed for its use, it's excellent for both offense and defense, and it can be easily carried around unnoticed. Also, unlike saberstaffs or pikes, it can be constructed from ordinary materials without risking it be hit by an opponent's attack and being destroyed, unless that opponent is extraordinarily skillfull.
  • Most lightsabers are noted to be very difficult for non-Force users to handle properly. The weightless blade takes a lot of getting used to, and that's a problem when one mistake can lose you an arm. Therefore, whenever non-Force users are given lightsabers, they are typically given saberpikes. It's a staff with a laser on the end, perfectly easy for an ordinary person to use. In fact, this is the reason why in real life spears and other polearms were the standard infantry weapon, rather than swords. It takes much less training to teach a common soldier how to hold a spear and stab than how to fight with a sword.
• Robert Sheckley's book "The Status Civilization" has the main character running an antidote shop on a lawless planet. He is amazed at how, despite all the scientific advancement, most poisoners prefer the plain old arsenic and strychnine. The main problem in his job, in fact, turned out to be convincing his clients that their wives would use something so primitive.
• There's a short story by Arthur C. Clarke called Superiority about a space empire that keeps inventing one incredible super weapon after another, with the most cutting-edge science. They end up getting overrun by their enemies who directed their resources towards making huge numbers of basic ships with 'generic' weapons while the other side was busy updating their ships, and by exploiting the flaws and weaknesses of waves of new technology being field-tested for the first time.
• We Are Legion (We Are Bob):
  • Traditional wisdom was to clone a replicant from an unimaginative mind so that it wouldn't go insane from isolation and repetitive tasks. Bob is a new idea, an engineer and a programmer who is able to automate most tasks for maximum efficiency.
  • Space stations are initially dismissed when trying to find a way to save the survivors on Earth, but Homer eventually realizes that space farms are much more practical, due to a wider margin of error and fewer needs. They fill a few with kudzu and extend the life of the planet by decades.
  • Major Ernesto Medeiros, the Brazilian probe, is not an engineer or a programmer, but he is an excellent tactician and a ruthless soldier. He is able to set several ambushes for Bobs using unexpected tactics, including secret Brazilian projects he was keeping in reserve.
• In Welcome to the Impregnable Demon King Castle, one of the major issues protagonist Remme faces is that in a world where tackling dungeons is a media entertainment, the debuffing abilities of a black mage are not visible and therefore not very flashy. It's acknowledged that back when the world was at war, these abilities were very useful against the enemy, and protagonist Remme's skill with it gained the acknowledgement of number one hero Aerial. In fact, when Remme left his party, they found themselves barely surviving by the skin of their teeth. As it turns out, it's harder to fight the strong enemy when they aren't being debuffed.
• This is basically the Forsaken Mesaana's whole shtick in The Wheel of Time. She may not be as smart as Ishamael, as powerful as Lanfear, as great a warrior as Demandred, or as feared as Semirhage, but she's a solidly intelligent, methodical planner who is driven primarily by a pathological need to prove her own competence. She also lacks many of the extreme mental issues that her comrades exhibit and is neither a Dirty Coward nor Hot-Blooded enough to throw herself into fights willy-nilly. Her careful, goal-oriented approach lets her through careful action paralyze the most powerful institution on the planet for most of the series, and she manages to survive all the way to the penultimate book. She is, however, fully aware that she falls under the boring side of things and has a chip on her shoulder about it (again, her Freudian Excuse is basically feeling that no one ever recognized or appreciated her true talents) so Egwene is able to exploit it to draw her into a direct confrontation and destroy her mind in a battle of wills.
• In The Witcher, Signs pale in comparison to the power of real magics cast by mages and sorceresses, but they are practical little magical effects that can be cast quickly and more importantly, with one hand. This makes them a handy tool for Witchers in the middle of combat. Of these Signs, perhaps the most useful is Axii — a simple charm spell that can calm down people or animals and manipulate their minds, not just useful in fights but for avoiding them entirely.
• "Wizard Bait": Ace manages to undo the Shaman by essentially offering his badgermen a job at Ogre Company, claiming that they have a much better employment plan than whatever the Shaman promised them.
• In World War Z, once the nations of the world decide to go on the offensive after the Zombie Apocalypse, they get rid of their flashy tanks, jet fighters, machine guns, and indeed most modern tactics. Instead, the average infantryman carries a highly accurate, semi-automatic rifle that is designed for pulling off headshots quickly and consistently, they form up in lines and open fire. These old-school tactics kill zombies better than anything. Do Not ask how realistic this is.
  • Equally important at this point is having dedicated supply runners whose sole purpose is to provide the soldiers with ammo and snacks, as any zombie engaged can potentially call a nigh-limitless horde to their location, turning a skirmish into a days-long siege.
  • Additionally, the melee weapon of choice in later chapters is the Lobotomizer, "Lobo" for short. It's described in-book as a cross between a shovel and a medieval battle axe. Dig a trench, bury a fallen comrade, decapitate a zombie.
  • One of the interviewed heroes is a member of the ISS crew who were stranded when the Zombie Apocalypse broke out. They spent their prolonged stay keeping the satellite communications network operating so the rest of humanity could coordinate the eventual counterattack.
  • In general the entire counterattack in America relied on this, retooling the entire economy for pure efficiency. For instance, the main point of those rifles was that they were incredibly cheap to make in massive numbers, and so was their ammunition.
  • One of their best tactics for clearing multilevel buildings was to just stand on a neighboring roof and make a lot of noise so the zombies will walk off the roof trying to get to you; about as boring as it gets, but effective (incidentally, the technique was invented by a dog).
• Worm may be superhero fiction but still has a healthy respect for ordinary weapons like guns or knives, and indeed a number of major characters lacking Super-Toughness get seriously wounded or even killed by them.
  • Not to mention all the superpowers themselves that qualify as this. Special mention goes to Fletchette whose power essentially boils down to this setting's version of a magic missile: a relatively weak attack that can harm almost anything and is nearly impossible to reliably defend against. Coupled with her secondary power of enhanced understanding of angles, trajectory, and sense of timing, and she becomes a nightmare. Little wonder how she manages to kill Gray Boy.
• The Zombie Survival Guide (which is occasionally referenced in World War Z In-Universe) offers a few recommendations for equipment and tactics based on this golden principle.
  • The best long-arm to use for zombie hunting is a typical bolt-action rifle (preferably one that has a bayonet on it for CQC). The reason being that any store that sells hunting weapons will probably have at least one available (or you could purchase one with ease), ammunition is plenty, and More Dakka is useless against zombies if the only way to kill them is Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain (simply said, accuracy is a must), plus the action is much more reliable in long-term use than a full-auto or semi-auto gun. Coming a close second due to less accessibility is a semi-automatic rifle fitted with a suppressor.
  • As far as melee weapons are concerned, the book highly recommends survivors pass up exotic blades in favour of the humble crowbar, for its reach, balance, and utility: can you pry open a door or tear down a barricade with that fancy katana?
  • Heavy cruiser/touring motorcycles may not be the coolest option depending on your view, but their advantages over cars are considerable: they're far easier to repair, much more maneuverable, can carry a few hundred pounds of supplies (plus more if you have a sidecar), and have reasonable performance on dirt roads or damaged urban roads. Plus they can be easily pushed somewhere safe to be repaired, while cars leave you out in the open. Bicycles are also an excellent choice, being even easier to keep working as well as quiet and versatile.
  • Armor Is Useless, being either too cumbersome to wear for more than a few hours or something that will seal in your sweat. The book recommends you settle for tight (but comfortable) clothing with a few pockets, running shoes, and short-length hair. This won't tire you out and still prevent zombies from grabbing you easily as there's nothing to really grip.
  • In the book, one attack at a dockyard was foiled by the crane operators using the cargo containers as barricades and simply dropping them on the zombies to crush them.

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