Basic Trope: Making a short term deal with an enemy without ending the overall conflict.
- Straight: Alice and Bob are enemies. Bob is The Gunslinger, but has a Cool Sword and Alice is a Swordsman but has a BFG. They agree to exchange weapons before their battle.
- Exaggerated: Alice and Bob are nominally enemies, but remain allies until the last moment (when only one of them can claim the MacGuffin).
- Downplayed: Alice gives The Rival Bob some supplies when she finds him injured, hoping he'll return the favour at a later date.
- Justified: It would have been far more effort than it was worth for either Alice or Bob to simply rob the other.
- Inverted: Alice injures herself to deny Bob a Plot Coupon she had no use for herself, out of spite.
- Subverted: Bob reveals that he stole the sword from Alice's mentor specifically so she'd trade him for the gun. It was a Batman Gambit on his part.
- Double Subverted: ...or so Bob claims, to save face.
- Parodied: Alice and Bob are a Punch-Clock Hero and Punch-Clock Villain. They frequently trade advice and various items off the clock.
- Zig Zagged: Alice and Bob's deal turns out to have incredibly complicated consequences, with various twists and turns which raise questions over whether it was truly a fair deal.
- Averted: Alive and Bob always attack each other, with the winner taking what they want.
- Enforced: The writers wanted Alice to acquire the gun as part of a victory early on, but they wrote themselves into a corner trying to work out how Bob could steal it back without making Alice look incompetent. They use this trope to allow Bob to get it without risking Alice undergoing Villain Decay.
- Lampshaded: "You know, we could just make a fair deal this time..."
- Invoked: Alice collects guns and other things Bob would find useful, should she need a bargaining chip.
- Exploited: Alice hires a lawyer ahead of time, so she can have an iron clad contract drawn up to hold the heroes to the terms of the deal.
- Defied: Bob's code of honour forbids him from making deals with evildoers.
- Discussed: Alice and Bob exchange quips about making a deal over the fate of the world.
- Conversed: "I know Alice is the villain, but why don't she and Bob just swap?"
- Implied: Alice and Bob's corpses are found at the end of a dungeon which can only be accessed by two people working together, implying they put aside their differences for a while.
- Played For Laughs: Alice and Bob's deal is treated as an Anticlimax Boss sort of Mundane Solution to the matter of their equipment.
- Played For Drama: There's a great deal of distrust on either side; will the trade go through, or will something scuttle it?
Now that you've reached the end of this playing with, why not trade it for the main article?
