Basic Trope: An enemy which travels around the world map, typically more powerful than average.
- Straight: Bob the Giant wanders around the world map and attacks Alice if he sees her. Depending on how the game goes he may never turn up.
- Exaggerated: Every single enemy in the game travels around at random. It's possible to complete it without getting into a single fight if you're incredibly lucky.
- Downplayed:
- Every level has a few Pre Existing Encounters.
- Bob is one of only a select few roaming enemies, and his appearance on the world map is conditional.
- Justified: Alice's Adventure is a Wide-Open Sandbox game, with realistic NPCs, including enemy behavior and patterns.
- Inverted: The enemies wait at fixed positions, as if their only purpose was to impede Alice's progress to certain places...
- Subverted: Bob turns out to be a friendly NPC.
- Double Subverted: Bob warns Alice that there's a dragon hunting to the North; if it sees her she's in for an uphill battle.
- Parodied: The giants wonder around because they're afraid Alice will turn up at their hideout looking for loot.
- Zig Zagged: Some enemies roam, but the game still has Random Encounters.
- Averted: None of the enemies have any sort of AI or capacity to travel outside of battles.
- Enforced: The game is an MMORPG, having the monsters roam around gives the impression that the persistent world is more than a load of data on a server somewhere.
- Lampshaded: "Oh, this is one of those massively overpowered bosses that wander around and'll kill and eat me in one hit/bite if I don't avoid it?"
- Invoked: Alice flushes Bob out from his home, ensuring Bob is harder to find when he journeys out to make for a better hunt.
- Exploited: Bob realises that mooks that meet a Player Character tend to die and monsters that wander around tend to be in a more evolutionarily ideal position. Being the Social Darwinist he is, he promptly follows suit.
- Defied: The king of the land puts huge bounties on monsters that wonder around. All roaming monsters have since gone extinct centuries ago and the few passive ones that remain have been captured and listed as protected species.
- Discussed: "How do we find a Wondering Giant?" "That's the thing, we're not going to. It'll find us before we'll find it."
- Conversed: "Oh no! If those giants spot me I'm screwed!"
- Implied: The giant is not explicitly called out as wandering, but it can appear in a valley that would be incapable of generating enough food to support a giant for more than a day or two.
- Deconstructed: All the NPCs in the game or at least the area it's located (regardless if they're friendly or not) are heavily armed (some even actually clutching firearms too) since they could be attacked by a massive and very powerful predatory monster at any time and most of the cities/villages that were founded near the monster's territory are either heavily reinforced with some of the best security in the realm or are just straight up evacuated, abandoned, or destroyed by the time you find them.
- Reconstructed: This just explains why most of the roaming enemies are found far out into the wilds or in places where it's very hard for a stable civilization to be established; those that wander too close to civilization will likely die or be placed in captivity because the natives would most likely know how to defend against/tame such deadly monsters.
- Played For Laughs: The roaming giants are very self aware and speculate as to whether or not Alice is The Hero or another random villager when she's spotted.
- Played For Drama: Alice is attacked by a giant in the prologue and forced to flee, breaking her sword and other equipment in the process. The giant continues to spend the rest of the game stalking her to finish the job.
Back to Roaming Enemy
