Basic Trope: Items of equipment have requirements that must be met in order to use them.
- Straight: The Sword of Troperism requires the user to be at least level 42.
- Exaggerated: ...and also requires high Stamina, high Strength, high-ranked Weapon Focus: Sword, and a light-side alignment.
- Downplayed: Characters lower than level 42 can use the sword, but they take penalties when using it which may or may not outweigh the bonuses it provides.
- Justified:
- The Sword is an Empathic Weapon that refuses to be wielded by a wimp.
- The Sword is so big and heavy that only a mighty hero can even lift it.
- Equipment explicitly draws from its user's aura as a power source. Using a weapon that is too strong for you would result in a painful death as your weapon drains you dry.
- Inverted:
- Far from having strength requirements, the Sword actually strengthens the wielder, and may even be an Upgrade Artifact.
- The Sword can only be used by the lowest-level characters.
- Subverted: To obtain the sword, you need to do a quest, which requires level 42. However, you can also just buy it from another player, and you can wield it at any level.
- Double Subverted: You still need level 42 to use the sword's transformation power, which is the sword's one and only worthwhile aspect.
- Parodied: The item appears in an RPG Mechanics 'Verse, and the characters actually talk about needing to level up to use it.
- Zig Zagged: Some items have requirements, some don't, some only have them on certain days of the week, and you can never find out any of this.
- Averted: The Sword has no requirements for use.
- Enforced: The dev team wanted to make sure that a player couldn't somehow acquire the Sword at level 6 for an instant Disc-One Nuke.
- Lampshaded: "So with 291 strength I can't even lift it, but if I had 300 strength I could wield it like a master? What's with this thing?!"
- Invoked: Emperor Evulz forged the Sword and designed it to require an impossibly high-level wielder, knowing that the Hero will one day discover it but find it useless against him.
- Exploited:
- Evulz makes this unusable sword to be his contractually-required Achilles' Heel, effectively making himself invincible.
- Evulz, when required to supply the hero with a weapon for a duel, hands the level 10 hero a sword that requires level 42 to equip. He's a cheating jackhole like that.
- Defied: The Sword is made specifically to be usable by weak characters.
- Discussed: "Oh great, now my character has a sword that he's two levels too weak to use."
- Conversed: "Oh great, now I have a sword that I'm two levels too weak to use."
- Deconstructed: There is nobody mighty enough to wield the Sword of Troperism, and eventually it goes to rust.
- Reconstructed: The Chosen One who can wield it takes it to the Ultimate Blacksmith and gets it repaired.
- Plotted A Good Waste: "Becoming powerful enough to use the Sword" forms an entire plotline or story arc.
- Played For Laughs: The character finds out that after all that questing, he can't actually use the Sword he got from all this and has a comical Heroic BSoD.
- Played For Drama: Something horrible happens to a low-level character because he wasn't strong enough to wield the Sword when he needed to.
Back to Level-Locked Loot, if you're mighty enough to wield the Mouse of Link-Clicking...
