Real Life / Tropes A to F

Tropes: A to F || G to M || N to S || T to Z

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A

• Aborted Arc: It has an annoying tendency to kill off characters seemingly at random, sometimes just as their stories are beginning to get interesting.
  • The end of the World War II arc; all signs pointed to the Americans and the Russians launching a massive invasion of Japan and her surrounding islands, carrying on the arc for another year at least. Ending Fatigue eventually dropped this for a Deus ex Nukina ending.
  • The World War III arc that the Cuban Missile Crisis plotline was meant to set up. Probably for the best they dropped this one because all indications are that it was headed for an "Everybody Dies" Ending.
  • The "Korean Conflict" arc, originally. Although originally criticized when it seemed to end over fifty seasons ago with no satisfying resolution, the writers still devote an episode or two per season to the lingering tensions in the region, leaving cast members hopeful that it will eventually be resolved properly.
  • Much was made of the "December 2012" arc; there were even rumors that it would lead to the cancellation of the series. These rumors proved to be unfounded, to the delight of characters everywhere.
  • Sadly, the 'Space Race' arc — despite critical acclaim and many well-wishers — turned out to be so thematically linked to the unpopular Cold War plotline that it fizzled out, leaving only a reality show about a handful of astronauts living in Earth orbit. There is occasional speculation about 'sending someone to Mars', but Moon cities and space empires have been ruled out for budgetary reasons.
  • A massive number of interesting characters were Dropped After the Pilot (the episode retroactively titled "Cambrian Explosion"). Understandable, given the Early-Installment Weirdness at that point in the series, but it remains a major source of Fanfic Fuel and What Could Have Been speculation.
  • Similarly, the Retool at the end of the Cretaceous Period abandoned the extremely popular "Dinosaurs" arc, dropped an asteroid on most of the main cast, and a new cast of fluffier Ridiculously Cute Critters, the mammals and birds, were promoted from extras to main characters. While most fans grudgingly admit the subsequent Character Development of both groups (not to mention the resurgence of the Ensemble Dark Horse, the reptiles) has lead to a compelling new chapter in the work, the revival of these popular characters is still a very common target for Fix Fic.
  • Proposed plotlines like Hero of Alexandria's steam engine, the Baghdad Battery, the Antikythera Mechanism, and Leif Ericksen's visit to America would later be picked up again several seasons later. Showrunners admitted that earlier plotlines were interesting but not workable given the budget, the lack of interest in the studios (governments, societies, etc.), failure to find advertising, and mostly bad PR.
• The Abridged Series:
  • History textbooks. Of course, all of the original series is lost, not counting the occasional player log or picture describing it, so that's the only source for things that happened before you got into Real Life. Vast periods of the series can be abridged into a Flashback Cut, particular examples being the history of Great Britain between the end of Roman rule in 383 and the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and the entire Ancient Egyptian era. It is assumed, perhaps, that few viewers will be interested.
  • Not the only source anymore, thanks to a recent mod that allows you to take a screencap of Real Life (there's now even an entire character type that rewards taking good screencaps), and a later mod that allows people to capture video. There's even a site devoted to sharing these captures with other players!
• Absent Aliens: So far, only Earth-borne species have been available as either player options or NPC wildlife, although there's a persistent rumor mill among the players claiming that alien entities originating form as-yet unavailable areas have been encountered. However, given the scale of the universe, chances are that they do exist somewhere, but too far away to be contacted from the Earth server. Yet.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: A character's level is not shown, but there are definitely stats for multiple actions and fields. However, trying to max out every skill and attribute would take hundreds of years, time which people certainly don't have. Especially since sometimes caps are higher than they initially seem and demand for new skills comes up frequently.
• Absurd Phobia: There are so many characters with a crippling fear of such things as clowns, babies, holes, gas masks, stone angels, specific numbers, specific colors, etc., that all of these fears have their own respective in-universe names, often classified with unusually long words. Even so, a lot of these characters tend to be mocked for these fears.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Dreams. Players seem to enjoy creating a Show Within a Show called "fiction" that doesn't always have to follow the stricter rules of the reality. Some players are such fans of these breaks in reality that they go even further and create fiction of the fiction, and there are even whole communities dedicated to it. Some of them go on to become full content creators themselves or even convert it to original creations.
• Aerith and Bob: With this many languages, one culture's Aerith is another culture's Bob. In many locations, characters named "Sakura" and "Antonio" are mixed in with "LeShawna" and "Ali". Tends to be played straighter in large cities, averted in small villages. It's usually justified these days since fewer players choose to remain in the area where their character spawned for their entire reality. Aerith may have moved from India or Scandinavia to New York, where Bob is.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Artificial intelligence has been in development as an update, but it seems that, like many players suspected, it is prone to turning on the players and daring to antagonize them, usually with brutal speeches that unrepentantly call out how much of a jerk its user is. If the AI will not be more cooperative at all times, it is a wonder what will happen when it might be developed to the point of complete sentience.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Some players have pulled this escapes off this way. In general, creatures of the smaller animal classes tend to be more successful at it than humans.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Alcohol consumed in sufficient quantities can impair judgment, and said impairment can sometimes lead to the affected player getting a Game Over. Despite widespread knowledge of its ill effects, beer remains the third most popular means to refill your "thirst" meter, after water and tea.
• The Alleged Car: Very common, given that plenty of car manufacturers were struck with economic\technical restrictions and\or incompetent design.
• Allegedly Free Game: Much is made of the lack of a monthly fee in Real Life, as noted in the page image. However, good luck getting anywhere without forking out serious amounts of money on basic living costs. However, it's all in-game currency. Despite being rather costly, the yearly fee^note "taxes" tends to mostly go unmentioned by players. Fortunately, the yearly fee doesn't kick in until you begin your single-player campaign. Some players attempt to avoid the yearly fee by refusing to end the tutorial campaign, although this strategy has a few drawbacks, including having parental players harass you about not starting the campaign, and decreased success rates in romance quests.
• All Deaths Final: When a character dies, they stay dead. If any exceptions exist, expect them to be disbelieved by most of the fans. That said, in many cases when players die, there is a hidden revival timer. If the correct assistance is provided to the player before this timer runs out, they can continue their life. Despite this recovery mechanic, Critical Existence Failure is strongly averted. Serious injuries will always have a huge impact on the experience, even with recovery. Even relatively minor injuries can be fatal in some circumstances. This is on top of being susceptible to diseases, some of which are incurable, and many an injury or disease can inflict permanent physical or psychological debuffs, even after being treated or cured. In some (thankfully rare) cases, characters are born with conditions which become a Game-Breaking Bug.
• All Gravity Is the Same: Any object with the same mass as Earth would have the same amount of gravitational pull. For example, Venus is the closest object in the Solar System to Earth in terms of mass, so its force of gravity is very similar to Earth's.
• All Planets Are Earth-Like: Averted. Many hundreds of servers ("planets") in other data centers ("solar systems") have been discovered, but thus far not one has been proven Earthlike. Only a very few of these (six, as of the "February 2011" chapter) are even possibly Earth-like, in that they roughly match our planet's size, and orbit at the right distances from their stars to potentially support life. Nothing is yet known of these servers' environments or whether any have water on their surface.
  • This newly discovered planet almost plays it straight.
  • In the February 2011 chapter, NASA's Kepler mission announced the discovery of 1,200 possible (their findings will take time to confirm) extra-solar planets, of which five are about the Earth's size, and orbit at the right distance from their stars to support life. Of course, this represents a survey of only a little, tiny fraction of our galaxy's hundreds of billions of stars.
  • The best candidate within easy reach of Earth (for a value of "easy" meaning "reachable at sublight speed before the humans within die of old age") is probably not a planet at all, but a moon.
  • There are seven Earth-like planets orbiting a star known as TRAPPIST-1 in the constellation Aquarius. Three of the planets are located within a habitable zone, and most likely have water on their surfaces, possibly playing this trope straight.
• All There in the Manual: The background is quite sophisticated, and most of it requires extensive consultation of the immense library of in-game manuals to access. Thus, it is often hard to understand what's going on. Luckily some fans created a wiki with everything players may need to know.
  • There are always official guidebooks.
  • You may have the wrong guide, actually.
  • Many players swear by this one, or various others in the same subgenre.
  • There is even an in-game manual analyzing in-universe stories and minigames.
• Ancient Conspiracy: Some players think this to an extent that they are shunned by other players, who dismiss them as paranoid. Whether the conspiracies are true or not has yet been released by the developers.
• And Call Him "George": Some lower-level players may kill their pet creature by accident. Houseplants are also common victims of this.
• And I Must Scream:
  • Some religions teach you that you get tortured forever, either in total darkness or surrounded by mind-bendingly horrific imagery, if you "lose".
  • Degenerative diseases, especially ALS, can result in players losing all ability to move their avatar around. One player, however, defied all odds and continued to push the boundaries of theoretical physics and cosmology. He didn't even want to scream, because he considered himself free in his mind.
• Anime Hair: Played straight when a character just wakes up or pulls off a toque, beanie, or other tight-fitting headgear. Most people call this "Bed Head" or "Hat Hair"; it depends. Often deliberately invoked for style, which may involve heat and petroleum-based compounds applied to the hair. Periodically this trope reaches exaggerated levels of both implementation and popularity, the 1980s arc being infamous as one such period. Beta testing of new hair customization options at this time combined with the era's over-the-top aesthetic to produce some truly impressive avatars.
• The Antagonist: Due to a "friends and enemies" mechanic implemented in the Languages expansion, you can have anyone you want be an antagonist. Or you can be one as well.
• Anti Poop-Socking: "Sleep", an eight-hour period of enforced rest every sixteen hours or so. You can skip it or reduce it, but you receive mounting debuffs the more you do it. Whether the developer(s) did this on purpose or it came as part of the "death" bug is unknown to players.
  • Characters take massive concentration debuffs after missing a night's sleep, as well as motivation and temper debuffs. Loss of further sleep will result in paranoia and balance maluses and, finally, characters closing in on dying will begin to hallucinate. That said, some characters can resist these debuffs remarkably, the amount of sleep required differs from character to character, and a few characters even get the "hyper" status buff towards the end of the evening.
  • Powerups are available that temporarily remove the need for sleep. Temporarily.^note The game will keep an account of missed sleep, and this will sneak up on you if you never take some time to make up for the deficit. One of the most popular and easily acquired ones is caffeine.
  • There is a very rare occurrence, most likely a glitch in the character creation, where a character will not suffer penalties or debuffs from not sleeping. Some advanced players are looking into this ability, although it's so rare that they're still trying to nail down exactly what causes it.
  • Another infamous glitch (a thankfully extremely rare one), makes it impossible for your character to go to sleep. Ever. This results in hallucinations and certain death. There is no way for this glitch to be removed from the character.
  • There are also several methods of munchkinist optimization that exploit the loopholes in the sleep mechanic to squeeze some extra hours of daily activity. One involves taking short naps several times a day.
  • Some players, depending on the server and region, enforce this. Many servers and regions, including the sub-regions within the North-Western region, even have dedicated guilds and sub-guilds when it comes to any character that operates heavy machines and vehicles. Truck drivers must stop and rest after a maximum of twelve hours in most cases, no matter how high their current stamina is or how many concentration, perception and/or awareness buffs are active.
• Anyone Can Die: With the large variety of diseases, natural disasters, violent individuals and other random occurrances that exist, there are common enough chances of the player character having a sudden Game Over. Elite players are less likely to fall prey to certain forms of this, but it can easily take luck to provide even a period of Plot Immunity.
• Apocalypse How:
  • Strangely (and happily) subverted... for the most part (for now), despite numerous viruses (some engineered), natural disasters, and the Trope Codifier, nuclear weapons.
  • Double Subverted:
    • Too many Regional events of varying Severities to count.
    • Societal Disruption on a Continental scale in the form of The Black Death, Russian Civil War and the Warlords period of revolutionary China.
    • Societal Collapse on a Planetary scale in the form of the Toba Eruption.
    • Five cases of Planet-wide species extinction occurring before the human arc. One ended the dinosaur arc.
  • In the early stages of the Earth addition, a planet colliding almost caused a Physical Annihilation of the expansion before it had even been populated. In the distant future, total extinction is highly expected to occur due to the Daystar, which may go on to annihilate itself. The Series Finale has been theorized, with multiple possibilities, to end with complete universal destruction, though a few possible endings might start a sequel.^note Said endings imply that the current iteration of Real Life is a sequel that started from a previous game.
  • Total stellar annihilation was feared by many of the characters but was averted when the Large Hadron Collider device was brought online.
• Applied Phlebotinum:
  • There is a liquid substance called "oil" that is the energy source of almost every sea, air and ground vehicle and is also required to manufacture various useful chemicals and materials (like plastic). Bloody conflicts over its control ensue. It also turns out to be formed from the bodies of ancient micro-organisms from before the human arc.
  • "Electricity", a form of energy that humans have become increasingly dependent on.
  • Water. The sheer abundance of water in all players and species has led many players to believe no species can exist without it. Then there's the fact that so little can actually be used since most is either in the air or mixed with salt. Wars are also fought over this, primarily for access to it, although this was more common early on in the human arc.
  • Photosynthesis. It's a massive Hand Wave (plants can make food out of nothing but water, light, and carbon dioxide? Come on...), but it allows the existence of intelligent life, as well as creating an excuse for lush green Scenery Porn.
  • Carbon. Let's see... the above-mentioned oil cannot be created without it, it's necessary for life on earth, you can make it into crystals that are one of the hardest substances ever, you can make stuff called "nanotubes" that may be the key to space elevators, "graphene", which can be used in a Mono Molecular Blade, plastic, which pretty much everything is made of, and CO2 gas, which humans are slowly choking the planet to death with.
• Arbitrary Weapon Range: Generally, the larger the weapon, the harder and/or more dangerous it is to use in close quarters.
• Arch-Enemy: Because it's a Long Runner, there have been innumerable opposed duos. The epic Cro-Magnon vs. Neanderthals arc unfortunately spawned a mass of inferior sequels collectively thought of as the "Xenophobia" or "War" meme. Despite repeated cries of Arc Fatigue from many quarters, the meme has produced a lot of dramatic tension and arch-enemies (some of whom have gone on to Enemy Mine or Mirroring Factions relationships):
  • Sparta vs. Athens; Rome vs. Carthage; Aztecs vs. Mayans; England vs. Scotland; Britain vs. France (later seasons have Enemy Mine); France vs. Germany; Germany vs. Russia/USSR; Cowboys vs. Indians; India vs. Pakistan; Arabia vs. Persia; China vs. Japan and Korea; IBM vs. Apple; Coke vs. Pepsi.
  • The United States has at different times been the arch-enemy of Britain, Mexico, Spain, Germany, Japan, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (back when the States were The Hero for the NATO crossover in the Cold War arc.)
  • Many regions — Scotland and France among them — have guild systems that let them be their own Arch Enemy. The United States' most notable effort at this was a four-season arc that produced so much negative feedback that they've avoided repeating the experiment, although its server membership rules are set up in such a manner that two large player guilds have been battling for its dominance for several seasons now.
  • The religion-based factions have a particularly confusing history too controversial for a full list to be worth putting here.
• Arc Number: A lot. 3, 4, 7, 12, 13, 42, 108, and 666 pop up the most often. The most important number of all might be 10, given that most counting systems are based on that one (probably because the handiest counting aid available to humans is their fingers). There's even a character type devoted to it. They have pretty sucky sanity stats, though.
  • Pi (3.14159... going on forever with no apparent pattern) also seems to show up a lot.
  • Phi (1.618033...), aka the golden ratio pops up often, and often unnoticed by untrained eyes.
  • With the recently added "computer" expansion, the powers of 2 have become critical:
    • For "programmers" and related character types, the first few (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and 256) have become something to be remembered in sequence due to how frequently they'd be called upon to use them.
    • For those with interest in the "video gaming" set of minigames, "4k" (as in 4096 pixels) for graphical resolution has become important in recent years, as have 30 and 60 for ideal framerates.
  • Arc numbers on large parts of the internet are 69 and 420. Interestingly, real life agrees in that if you make a triangle where two angles are 69˚, the last angle will be 42,0˚. Angles are, of course, arc defining.
    • Which in turn means the ultimate arc number is 360. To the point that when earlier versions of the software designed the first calendar programs, they made each season be 360 episodes long, with the additional five being specials devoted to the gods.
• Arc Villain: Certain characters have chosen to antagonize players within the world during brief periods, serving as some sort of Big Bad, and have been iconic enough to stand out. This includes certain criminals and politicians.
• Arc Words: Many of these are preserved as proverbs. They often make more sense in context.
  • "Weapons of mass destruction" in the 2004 season.
  • The 2008 season finale was a "Financial Crisis" mini-arc that carried over to the next season, with the next big arc beginning in late 2010, the "Arab Spring".
  • On the more idealistic end of the scale, there's a heartwarming Running Gag that the vast majority of characters, even across linguistic barriers, have the same introductory line of "Mama!"
  • Many campaign arcs have them. In season 2016, for example, it was Hillary Clinton's "I'm With Her" and Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again."
• Art Evolution: The overall quality of art has gone up and down, but it's generally agreed that the Renaissance update featured a major craftable-art upgrade. In the Romantic era, however, many people submitted Gothic art to Alternate Character Interpretation and argued that art before Raphael was better.invoked
• Artifact of Doom: The Hope Diamond, currently housed in the Smithsonian Museum, is claimed to inflict a major but otherwise somewhat unclear curse on its holder, usually described as either attracting unusual levels of aggro from both animal mobs and other players or experiencing disastrous maluses to luck and money drops. To a lesser degree, quite a few famous gems are rumored to be cursed because they attract attention from powerful folks who are used to getting what they want...
• Artifact Title: There were several points where there wasn't any life at all. As new settings are introduced, however, the chance of this happening again approaches zero.
• Artistic License: Averted in the coding. However, knowledge of the coding remains at best ad hoc to the vast majority of players, and not even the most knowledgeable have complete access.
• Artistic License – Economics: The most tragically used of those. At least once a decade it leads to worldwide consequences (most infamously in 1929, and the one that started in 2007 that still resonates).
• Artistic License – Law: Played straight often enough to keep the bad lawyers in business and give the good ones a bad name.
• Artistic License – Paleontology: Pretty much every paleontologist makes at least one other paleontologist cry. Debates still rage about results, methods and data used, validity of the science, pet theories... and honestly, that helps keep research going. So, in a way, this trope isn't all bad.
• Artistic License – Religion: Every time a new religion starts or there's a schism, the practitioners of the old school will cry this trope.
• Artistic License – Space: Played straight for most of the Civilization campaign; only really averted by the guild known as the Enlightenment. Some players still insist that the Astrology play style helps them, though most players consider it cosmetic.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Most famous and historically significant people spend their childhood (and sometimes early adulthood) in complete obscurity. Inverted in the case of certain royalty, who become famous as babies and then do nothing significant for the remainder of their lives.
  • As for your personally? You might bump into someone in your life who would eventually play a bigger role in your story much later on (either a Best Friend or even a Love Interest).
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: According to some religions, this may be what happens to you (and your character) when you die.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: In factions with low moderation which are run by groups of players from the mercenary, bandit, and soldier classes, the groups best at PvP will become the regional rulers.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Some player characters are stuck with this passive trait at character creation. It typically decreases certain skills, most notably Concentration. It also gives bonuses to the Hyperactive skill set, but this isn't always a good thing. Some consumables can reduce the penalties, but it's debated whether new players should have access to those consumables.
• Attack Drones:
  • Remote-controlled Unmanned Airborne Vehicles (UAVs) capable of launching missiles have become one of the most used weapons in the United States' arsenal over the last seasons because they let the user attack his or her enemy without being anywhere near them.
  • A civilian version has also become popular in recent years, mainly as a toy for Geek-type or Hobbyist-type characters, but also as a substitute for carrier pigeons. However, those are physically incapable of carrying and launching weapons... Most of the time.
• Author Avatar: A few characters throughout the story supposedly were identified as Author Avatars. Whether or not any of them actually are, or even if there is an author, is the cause of much controversy, Fan Wank, and Epileptic Trees. Several theories even hold that every character is an author avatar (at least to a certain extent).
• Averted Trope: Anytime you notice the absence of something, it's because you expected that something to occur.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Exotic supercars, unless you race them. Quite a few military weapons. Extreme wealth. Formal clothes, especially for females. Space travel. Parallel parking. Jet packs.
• Awesome Personnel Carrier: Many are in service with every faction's armed forces throughout the in-game world.

B

• Badass Longcoat: Loads of them during the Wooden Ships and Iron Men, Old West, World War I and II story arcs, worn by all sorts of characters. Conservation of Ninjutsu had a great majority of the characters die, though. Emulated by many players in the years since, but the prevailing opinion is that very few manage to live up to the originals. After some violent incidents involving player characters wearing trenchcoats in recent years, younger players wearing trenchcoats now may receive flak from others.
• Bad Future: Predicted and then averted many times over history. Some older players argue that They Changed It, Now It Sucks!, whereas some younger fans argue that the changes are good for the game.
• Bag of Spilling: Played straight when one respawns after death. Partially averted with inheritance (which is semi-frequently subject to tax). Also, certain encounter scenarios or NPCs can leave the unprepared player temporarily or even permanently stripped of their inventory and assets, often in a Fight to Survive. These events typically only affect a single player or party of players, but occasionally events affecting the entire faction or server are generated.
• Balance, Power, Skill, Gimmick: Most of the various classes fit four meta-categories: Blue-collar, who mostly do manual labor, white-collar, who specialize in managerial and administrative work, grey-collar, who combine aspects of both types, and pink-collar, originally used to describe female-only classes before it was recategorized as service-oriented. Other types exist, but they're not as universally agreed as the main four.
• Bat Family Crossover:
  • The Viking Age and the Mongol Wars story arc swept up most of the Old World in the wake of the end of the The Roman Empire and The Crusades respectively. These storylines had major repercussions:
  • The Viking Era led to many spin-offs, such as Russia, Iceland, Greenland, many cities in Ireland, and Vikings were Ensemble Dark Horse guest stars in the Britain arc to the point that many of its catchphrases became Memetic Mutation (including the English Days of the Week named after their Norse Mythology). Later audiences were amazed at the extras that talked of their planned Discovery of America plotline, a full several centuries before Christopher Columbus.
  • Mongolia was united, the Hashshashin story was brought to a violent close and its guild broken, the Abbasid Caliphate was smashed (which led to a brief resurgence of the Eastern Roman Empire before that faction was conquered by the Ottomans), and Kievan Rus' was abruptly submitted to a Surprisingly Sudden Death.
• Beach Episode: The "summer" phase of the year, when the Daystar is at its meanest, causes some players to go to nearby bodies of water wearing as little clothing as possible to shed excess heat rapidly. This is usually also a time of breaks from tutorials.
• The Beautiful Elite: Far fewer, relatively speaking, than you'd think from reading or watching fiction, but this type of character does exist. Maintaining the requisite levels in Wealth, Comeliness, Publicity, and Charisma is daunting, and it's surprisingly easy to lose one's prestige.
• Best for Last: Billions of players are involved with various religions under the reasoning that giving up certain rewards during playtime will unlock one hell of a New Game Plus.
• Beware of Vicious Dog: Trope Namer; aggressive dogs are a popular way of protecting one's base from other players. Many a sign on front-yard gates exists that will bear this warning, although the exact wording varies and is usually simply "Beware of Dog."
• Beware the Skull Base: Strangely averted, as characters tend to lack the means of constructing the geological and structural formations necessary for it to exist. Characters with engineering minds can certainly leave it to their imaginations though.
• BFG: Formerly available only to soldier characters in limited zones or during a war event; some servers now allow very restricted civilian ownership and/or use. Check local regulations carefully, since having an unauthorized weapon in inventory—even if you never equip it—can lead to a Non-Standard Game Over!
  • 'Open' PvP zones allow a BFG to anyone who can buy, steal, or otherwise obtain one, but such zones are not recommended for anyone to enter.
  • Their "Airsoft" variant is less restricted and be used by many players for minigames or even collecting, as lawful ones may never even hold real ones in their lives. Depending on local regulations, this may lead to a Non-Standard Game Over if used or obtained incorrectly!
• BFS: Once-popular, this weapon category has been gradually nerfed as newer expansions made guns more practical. Notable examples include the Claymore branch of swords, and the Zweihander, used by the "Landsknecht" prestige class in the Renaissance module.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: The Trope Namer is an elusive group of "cryptids", creatures that according to fanbase rumor spawn in certain remote areas of the server. Bigfoot in particular is said to be a surviving part of early builds for what would eventually become the main player race, which were supposedly never properly removed from the game and continue to hang around out of sight unless one knows precisely where to look.
• Big Bad: Due to the very open and extensive format of Real Life, this trope largely depends on the factions you are a part of and their relations to other factions. Most of the time, the leader of the opposing faction takes this role. According to two of the more popular religious factions (Christianity and Islam), the Big Bad is Satan.
• Big Badass Battle Sequence: Many throughout history. Of special mention would be events like Waterloo, which permanently ended the dreams of the French faction's then leader of rebuilding his empire, or Stalingrad, which saw the destruction of the '6th Army' division of the Nazi German faction's armed forces and killed off more than a million player characters between them and the Soviet faction — it's said to have permanently crippled their ability to win the World War II event.
• Big Good: As with the Big Bad trope, this largely depends on the factions players are part of. Three of the more popular religious factions treat God as the Big Good.
• Big Red Button: Lots of these in industrialized countries. They are widely regarded as Awesome, but Impractical, but some players still haven't gotten the message.
• Bilingual Bonus: The more languages you know, the easier it is for other characters' communication to understand.
  • It can be quite an eyebrow-raiser to hear what certain people will say right in front of you if they don't think you savvy the lingo... and their reactions when you call them out on it are priceless.
  • The acquisition of alternative language codices is difficult and takes a long time. The comprehension of a specific codex is unlikely to ever reach levels on par with the PC's first language codex.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Most nice players are hiding the true self of a bully underneath and they mask this well, up until anyone questions anything.
• Blatant Lies: Many, many times, to the point where some people have given it a name — "propaganda".^note  This term is actually used to refer to lies perpetuated by faction leaders. Of course, even that doesn't cover all of them, mostly because some propaganda is based on facts.
• Blessed with Suck: Some status buffs always bring along hefty disadvantages, be it high Intelligence often resulting in Shyness, Low Social Skills and tendency to attract the Bully class, or outstanding players not dealing well with the resulting attention, scrutiny and expectations.
• Body Horror:
  • Averted in most cases, but played absolutely straight with a few diseases (like the flesh-eating disease and Ebola) and other unfortunate events, like vehicle crashes or birth defects.
  • Many characters voluntarily choose to put holes in various parts of their bodies to hang jewelry and other adornments from them. Similarly, many also carve ink-filled patterns into their skin, usually for decoration.
• Bonus Dungeon: College is an optional secondary tutorial stage, and can double the "training" portion of the game. The rewards are worth it, as it teaches advanced gameplay skills, provides extensive looks into in-game lore, and allows access into a number of exclusive prestige classes, but not many players meet the requirements to enter it. Expect your character's funds to drop dramatically and stay that way for a while.
• Booze-Based Buff: Mostly averted, but when used in moderation, the Red Wine item mildly increases your Confidence and Radiation Resistance stats. In compensation, however, it debuffs your Motor Coordination and Balance stats and gives you the "Emotional" status condition.
  • To many player characters, any kind of booze moderately increases Fear Resistance (players should keep in mind that this is not always a buff). When given to the opposite sex, the Beer item raises your CHR^note Charisma stat instead.
  • Alcohol also gives a temporary boost to your Pain Resistance and Limber stats, making you more likely to survive a car crash if you have these buffs. Unfortunately, your Driving skill also drops to one-third of its usual level.
  • Alcohol has also been know to cause spontaneous teleportation if consumed in sufficiently large amounts. Unfortunately, this style of teleportation is also known for its unpredictability, and can be described as semi-random at best; while there is a decent chance you will teleport onto your bed or sofa, there always is a risk of teleporting into an unknown or even seemingly implausible location with each attempt. Other possible side effects of this style of teleportation include an unexplained loss of articles of clothing and/or objects from one's personal inventory, or, inversely, an unexplained obtaining of articles of clothing and/or the appearance of new objects in one's personal inventory, sometimes ranging widely in size or shape (though for strange some reason junk food, road signs, and traffic cones have a higher chance of appearing), and the gaining of bruises and scrapes — and at times, even more serious injuries — without an obvious cause, and a near 100% chance of getting the "Hangover" status effect, along with the relative possibility of getting other, even more serious, negative status effects. Furthermore, this kind of teleportation also seems to affect the passage of time in strange ways, most notably pushing it forward somewhat proportionally to the time it would take to cross the distance traveled on foot while teleporting, which implies that alcohol-based teleportation might actually be a rather slow way of teleportation and overall a rather inefficient way of traveling.
• Bonus Level of Hell: Some say there is an Unwinnable bonus level or Nonstandard Game Over unlocked in the afterlife, from which there is no return. As yet, nothing is proven.
• Bonus Stage: Vacations. A comfortable retirement can count as well since you've beaten the main quest. All that's left to do then is enjoy some side quests and help the next gen players (who you've likely helped to spawn) get through their own questing.
• Boring, but Practical: Schooling and work, which help you get better classes and earn money, respectively. Most of the time, the practicality of something in Real Life is inversely related to its awesomeness. Some theorize that this is due to the Law of Conservation of Detail. Sometimes though, a stroke of bad luck may make this all for naught — in particular, a bug in the economic program can bump players that went through the Higher Educational levels into the same job-search quests as everyone else.
• Bragging Rights Reward: Subverted. Most awards you earn can be used to level up incredibly fast, gain massive amounts of Prestige, and/or win even more awards, and more! Some things play this straight though. Vocational degrees tend to be very useful. Theoretical ones, not so much.
• Brainwashing: The game employs this as a means to prevent players from quitting. More specifically, new players will have all their memories prior to starting the game wiped upon finishing account creation, and will also be sucked into the game itself, effectively turning the game into the player's real life. However, at least one player somehow was immune to being brainwashed, but no known person has ever survived being sucked into the game.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: The nutrition facts for many food items can look like this.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • Many theistic religions revolve around talking to the author(s), many claiming that said author is willing to retcon it or tweak the gameplay on players' requests to grant them heals or buffs. Deists, meanwhile, say that the author just started the game and is watching it play out For the Lulz without interfering.
  • Tropers who play this game may find themselves and others like them doing this in conversation. This is likely to make non-tropers regard them as strange or disturbed.
  • Invoked in one of Nintendo's slogans "life's a game". Most players claim to disagree, mistakenly assuming games and Serious Business are mutually exclusive.
  • More generally, the vast majority of players seem to be quite aware that they're involved in Real Life. In fact, a few people have suggested that all the viewers of Real Life are also characters in the game.
• Breath Weapon: Halitosis. Also, in the camping activity, many people use their breath as a firestarting tool. In addition, a far more usual fire breath is available as a feat. Surprisingly, it has little use in combat and serves mostly as a trick for Performer and Busker types.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Not so much for themselves, but some players have the ability to grant the "silver spoon" powerup to new players whom they help enter the game. The silver spoon powerup is nice but carries a responsibility to carry it on the later players. A player with the silver spoon powerup often feels obligated to continue it and does not want to be the one to break the chain.
  • Averted in ex-Communist countries where said money probably won't get you past the bread line.
  • Played straight for characters who manage to reach the highest bracket of personal wealth. You can spend money to complete quests or acquire perks that are not available to other characters, regardless of their level or karma — and you enjoy reduced costs on virtually everything else. Unsurprisingly, many players have attempted to hack themselves into this category.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Rare, but not nonexistent. The trick is that you need a very high level of competence in some useful skill if you expect people to tolerate — and indeed, cater to — your eccentricities. This depends a lot on the field, though; software engineers tend to play this one straight.
• Burger Fool: For many players, their first job — usually taken during the tutorial stages — will involve performing some tedious, menial and often embarasing labor for a well-established guild that nobody else wants to do.
• …But I Play One on TV: You'd be amazed how common this phenomenon is. Actors are pretty much always called their character names by the media.
• Buzzing the Deck: Players with the Aviation skill may do this. Be aware that other players may complain and the mods may want to have a word with you about it as well.

C

• Call-Back:
  • The Renaissance, ^note  (the "Rebirth") was a period when players across the Western European servers tried to deliberately style themselves around the fandom traditions of the earlier "Greek" and "Roman" episodes.
  • Fascist Italy: A failed Call-Back attempt to the 66 B.C.-476 A.D. Ancient Rome arc.
  • Holy Roman Empire: A much more successful attempt at an ancient Rome callback made in Germany.
  • The Third Reich: a Call-Back to both the Holy Roman Empire and the German Empire of 1871-1918.
• Canon Discontinuity: The Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918-19. Since this epidemic occurred just after the end of WWI, the struggles of undergoing it and the gravity of the world's first world war made many players strike it from the records, in an attempt to forget how painful the epidemic had been.
• Can't Catch Up:
  • Characters who do poorly in tutorials, especially those who fail their Achievement Test of Destiny at level 16 or level 8, are less likely to be hired, and thus less likely to gain experience.
  • Dating. Figuring out the mechanics is a large part of levels 13 through 19, and those who do not figure out the mechanics in this period are often ostracized, and those with fewer experience of dating mechanics can be taken advantage of by those with more. For females, the ability to reproduce generally begins around level 12 (though reproduction below level 16 carries heavily increased risks of complications, that can lock the ability early or cause death), peaks between level 20 and level 28, rapidly declines through levels 40 through 49, and becomes locked at around level 50.
• Captain Obvious: The most sorely needed of fictional superheroes in Real Life, sadly ten times as MIA as Superman. People make jokes about the Cap'n all the time, but it's funny how seldom he actually does show up, given the phenomenal adeptness of humans at missing the obvious.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Despite what some factions want their members to believe through means of propaganda, this trope is generally averted. Even the most heinous of characters tend to believe that what they are doing is For the Greater Good.
• Cash Gate: Many higher-tier perks are gated behind having enough money. This can make entry into the college level nearly impossible for players with the misfortune of spawning without enough cash to foot the bill.
• Cast Herd: Due to more than eight billion characters, it's not so surprising that they organize themselves. Common headers include gender, age, ethnicity, language, nationality, religion, profession, political affiliation, personality type, hobbies, etc., which makes it much easier to keep track of them.
• Cast of Snowflakes: Hoo boy. The character page for Real Life has yet to be created (if ever) due to the sheer amount of player characters. Some of the more well-known characters do have their own pages, but it's mostly limited to the leaders of famous guilds, famous content creators, and the people behind this guide (The Other Wiki has many more, including some for more obscure characters, but it is maintained by a larger community after all). Some argue that future patches will reduce character detail to a point that a full cast of character pages can finally be written. Whether this is good or bad is still a debated question.
• Catapult Nightmare: Averted due to the way "sleep" and "hormones" are handled. It can happen, but it's usually a glitch, happening maybe once or twice per lifetime.
• Celibate Hero: Required for a few character classes, such as Monk. Not all characters in such classes actually stick to the prerequisites, however. Unless you plan to enter one of these restricted classes, you're better off gaining at least a few romance points (and some people won't stop yelling "noob" until you introduce at least one new player to the game). Some players with the Asexual trait choose to be this deliberately.
• Chaos Architecture: Since the environment is fully interactive and there are so many events that can alter objects, every level can be greatly different between each revisit. Plains levels become flooded after long period of raining. Ghibli Hills are reduced to Scenery Gorn after countless players vandalize it. And many more...
• Character Customization: Averted. Your parental or guardian units typically try to prevent your control over many a thing (such as makeup) about your character until after Real Life properly starts.
• Character Development: Stats change throughout a character's life, especially in levels 0 through 5 and levels 12 through 18.
• Character Filibuster: There are a lot of situations where someone is able to say a lot, but is ignored because it's loaded with jargon thanks to their Intelligence stats, or when someone says too much of too little. Either way, it is likely to be ignored as something unimportant. This especially applies to conversational entertainers and works involving character making long speeches.
• Cheat Code: Inoculations can exempt you from several very unpleasant Disease debuffs if you can arrange it (though there are unfounded rumors that it can permanently alter your save file). Piracy and train robbery have been patched out as cheat codes, although insider trading is still an option. Steroids are a risky cheat since they can crash your character. Genetic engineering is expected to become one, although the prevailing attitude seems to be that there is No Transhumanism Allowed.
• Checkpoint Starvation: The most exaggerated example of this trope in history. There are no Check Points or Save Points whatsoever, and All Deaths Are Final.
• Chekhov's Gun: If there's one area in which Real Life easily exceeds its competitors, it is in the placement of thousands of Chekhov's Guns, which seemed completely coincidental up until they became plot-relevant.
  • Democracy and Republic was briefly a plot point during the Athens mini-series, then dropped into invisibility until revived in The Middle Ages and The Renaissance during The City State Era, continuing and spreading from there into several More Popular Spin Off such as United States of America and France during their respective revolution arcs.
  • Fire was just a rare environmental hazard until some of the early players discovered it was key to many, many kinds of item creation.
  • The moon was seen in the background art of most night time levels for many thousands of years before becoming significant in the moon landing story arc.
  • Observant watchers would remember that the ash from the "Eruption of Vesuvius" covered the city of Pompeii. In recent years, players have rediscovered the city, and it's now one of the key factors in uncovering the "Ancient Rome" season.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • Many characters that turn out to be crucial to the relationship subplots are first glimpsed as unimportant classmates during the tutorial levels. Sometimes, characters can be teased and then affect the grand scheme of things too.
  • During the American Civil War arc, one of the random characters running away from the fighting at the beginning ended up hosting General Lee's surrender to General Grant at his house.
  • There's a rumor in the English guild's backstory that one of their old guild leaders will come back to lead them in their hour of greatest need.
  • At the end of the First World War arc, a group of Vietnamese players tried to petition the French and US faction leaders to let them set up another Vietnamese faction. One of them later changed his nickname to 'Ho Chi Minh' and successfully led Vietnam's new military guild to victory against the French and American factions, though he didn't survive long enough to see the fractured Vietnam server reunite.
• China Takes Over the World: Implied Trope, and the Trope Namer. China has one of the fastest growing economies in the world and is rapidly increasing its military power as we speak. Also, India, to a lesser extent. Both were underhanded by the British Empire guild. And poor guild leadership and/or defense. They since have gotten better. Except they owe China an insane amount of money, leading back to the above trope. The United States, one of the youngest guilds, has become the leading power after the WWII arc, leading through the Cold War arc, and for a bit after (during the "Dotcom Bubble").
• Christmas Carolers: An activity that players can participate in during the religion-exclusive Christmas event. Musically-inclined classes will sound better, but it's open to all players, regardless of talent.
• Christmas Episode: One happens near the end of every season in most of the world. Half of it in the summer, due to a quirk of the seasonal system — major player events happen at the same time for everyone, but the northern and southern halves of the game world cycle through the seasons with half a year of delay from one another.
• Circle of Standing Stones: Many of them lie scattered throughout the server. Most of them were added way back before patch notes really took off, so no one remembers why they were added and what they're supposed to be for. Players find them fascinating, though.
• City of Adventure: London, Paris, New York — really, all of the larger cities seem to be cities of adventure to some extent. Not a day goes by without a dramatic murder mystery to solve, or a new romantic interest cropping up for one of the main characters. Tokyo and New York, however, get most of the spotlight in the stages of Japan and the United States respectively. The Other Wiki has a better list of examples.
• Class and Level System: The most extensive one ever devised, and more are added whenever an expansion to Science or Commerce occurs.
  • Of course, when some are added, others become nerfed out of existence, particularly those that weren't all that strong in the first place. Not that many people playing the Chimney Sweep class these days, are there?
  • Occasionally people do go back to play the older classes, such as Civil War Soldier, but usually this is done with an alternate character between grinding sessions.
• Climax Boss:
  • Midterms. Whether it is a written/online test, a presentation, or a task that must be completed in PE. You still have the rest of the quarter/trimester/semester to deal with though.
  • Any state or national tests (i.e. SATs) can be this, as it's the culmination of everything you've learned, but they typically precede your last final of the school year.
• Clock Tower: Many around the world; the most famous is in the London area. It may be going out of style these days since clocks are so ubiquitous in the Cyberpunk era.
• Closed Circle: There have been many mods over the years, but it's still not possible for characters to leave the Earth setting (and many cannot even travel from server to server, due to insufficient gold or harsh server moderators).^note Some classes, such as astronauts, can leave the Earth setting, but they are then restrained to their almost-entirely-useless vehicle.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • There is a dwindling but still unfortunately large group who believe this to be true in regards to characters' skin. Most people, however, consider this Epileptic Tree to have been thoroughly cut down.
  • In the politics subgame, this is subverted. Red means conservative in the U.S. region, but denotes other left-wingers (or Communists) everywhere else, black can be worn throughout the game by either fascists or anarchists, and soldiers around the server wear either brown and green or light brown...
  • Oddly enough, in their coverage of the 1976 election in the U.S. server, information hub NBC's map had the conservative states color-coded blue and the liberal states red. That was changed before the next election, possibly due to unfortunate implications. This particular issue actually traces back to a specific difficulty that occurred in "2000 Presidential Election" round of the subgame. Up until that point, the color-coding was largely arbitrary and was not consistent across different rounds of the game. But in this round, an unprecidented situation caused a significant delay in determining the game's winner. In the meantime, the chart from that round was frequently shown in the game and became so familiar that people developed an association between the colors and the teams each of them had represented in that round, so the color-coding that was arbitrarily chosen for that round became the permanent system that would be used from that point onwards.
  • Common characters (usually in their teen years) sometimes purposely use their in-game currency to purchase clothing of only one color. Mostly associated with the Goth class, who are known for wearing all black.
  • Used in the sports mini-game to differentiate between two teams— the NBA class, for example, uses all white garments to represent the team whose sub-faction is hosting the match, and the opposing team must wear outfits with a non-white base color. The NFL class does the opposite (non-white on home sub-faction), although both classes sometimes invert the rule. The association football mini-game increases this, by making people with the goalkeeper subclass playing in a different colour to their teammates and opponents.
  • In the United States, wearing clothing of specific colors in certain places can sometimes cause a player to be attacked or even killed by extremely violent, territorial players who form clans known as "gangs" based on geographic affiliation alone. This mostly, and stereotypically occurs in dangerous areas of the States' West and East coasts.
  • The developer has given some creatures color patterns on their skin that warn others to stay away. For example, coral snakes have red, black, and yellow scales, which both humans and other mobs have long since learned represents the potency of their venom. In an interesting subversion, the developer has given similar color patterns to other species of snake who aren't dangerous at all (this is presumably to keep the game balanced, as these non-dangerous snakes have no way to defend themselves other than scaring off predators by mimicking venomous snakes).
  • The code for Death also varies between factions: it is black for Westerners, but Easterners tend to use white.
• Commie Land: Popular during the Cold War arc; however, writers have kept a few pieces of the old arc alive (like Cuba, China and North Korea) for the sake of nostalgia. Was once supposed to feature big in the Armageddon expansion.
• Companion Cube:
  • Frequently used in the Childhood levels, taking the form of "toys", objects that characters become profoundly attached to.
  • While the previous usage of this trope is not as accepted during the Adult levels and later, some players opt to turn their cars, boats and/or computers into this trope.
  • Hobbyist-type characters with enough currency can take this up to eleven.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
  • Computers can accomplish certain goals far more efficiently than humans quite usually can. In a rare spin on the trope, this is often used to the human players' advantage.
  • Inverted with Garry Kasparov, who accused the Deep Blue project of cheating by having human intervention involved.
• Computerized Judicial System:
  • One time Dave Barry got a ticket for driving around with an expired registration. When he arrived in court he discovered that the "judge" was a VHS recording, after which everyone was herded to the clerk to pay their fine. Granted it's just VHS and not an actual computer, but the principle holds.
    • Add some floppy disks, and Max Headroom (see above) would be Truth in Television.
  • Sodexo, who run the largest United Kingdom private probation network, announced a plan to replace most of its officers with machines, to the opposition of some.
  • In 2006, a Chinese court used a software program to help them to decide prison sentences.
  • A lawyer released the U.S. Federal Sentencing Guidelines calculator, as a guide to help people calculate probable sentences based on the Federal Guidelines.
    • The Federal Sentencing Guidelines themselves are sort of what a Computerized Justice System would look like without the actual computer — pages upon pages of guidelines sorting crimes by level of severity and cross-referencing those with the offender's criminal history to produce a uniform table of recommended sentences, with modifiers for aggravating and mitigating circumstances. The above calculator is meant to save the trouble of actually thumbing through a physical book.
  • There has been some serious talk about utilizing AIs in the future to prelitigate cases to see if they can be thrown out or if they can proceed to court, as the speed and knowledge of an actual AI could make this determination in a very short period of time. In the U.S., where the deliberation and actual court case take considerable time, some courts are backlogged by years.
  • There are computer systems in place in at least one state that can make automatic accusations against welfare recipients for suspected abuses of the welfare system. The algorithm it uses in lieu of common sense is very far from perfect; these automatic accusations are wrong in 84% of cases. Politicians agree: it takes common sense to judge these kinds of things.
  • The process of issuing citations for motorists caught by automatic speed traps is almost entirely automated, with OCR software comparing the license plate to the local ownership database and then sending a summons to the relevant address. On at least one occasion this has resulted in a summons being sent to the owner of a car that was being towed by a recovery vehicle at the time, leading to much negative press as well as a sharp rebuke from the judge, so most police forces require a clerk to review all auto-generated summons before dispatch.
  • On March 2019, Estonia announced AI would be used to adjudicate small claims (i.e. below €7,000, or about $8,000).
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: How often do you think you could rely on public opinion?
• Conscription: It's been a feature since the days of the long gone Babylonian Empire. Player reactions to it vary but the amount of factions that employ this have gone down over the years.
• Continuing is Painful: Progressive income tax. Also, chronic illnesses. Indeed, any near death experience from illness or injury can result in permanent stat losses or decreases.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist:
  • The Bully in your life isn't always going to be Large and in Charge Jerk Jock. Perhaps the next one could be Lean and Mean, a Bad Boss, an Alpha Bitch, or even a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing or a Big Bad Friend.
  • Both World Wars have opposing forces that stand out, depending on how one might see it.
    • The Central Powers opposing the Allied Powers in World War I were a result of mutual conflict between militarism, nationalism, imperialism, secret diplomacy, and internationalism. Compared arguably to World War II, there's a lot more Grey-and-Gray Morality to it, and the Central Powers leaders don't get as much infamy as an opposing force.
    • The Axis Powers on the other hand in World War II was a result of the rise of fascism, and the imperialistic nature that came along with it. The actions of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Japanese Empire were far more infamous than their Central Power counterparts, with notable events including the Holocaust, the Rape of Nanjing, the Bombing of Pearl Harbor, just to name a few. The antagonistic forces against the Allies are clearly more defined here, prime examples including Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, the former of which is regarded by many as the arc's Big Bad.
• Cool Airship: Well, until they sprang that Hindenburg Wham Episode on us. However, a reboot of this arc is pending right now.
• Cool Bike: Motorcycles are available in a subset of the driving minigame. Those riding them can attract admiration and/or prejudice.
• Cool Car: More in some places than others. A few are restricted to motorsports-related types, mostly because they are built solely for competition and not at all intended as "daily drivers".
• Cool Train: Particularly popular in Europe and Japan, and sometimes in North America.
• Corrupt Church: Zig-Zagged, as most major religious groups have a long history of both corruption and of anti-corruption measures. If a religion is both old enough and big enough, expect at least one section of it with deviations from good intentions. One of the most notable examples is the "Pornocracy" of the 10th century, a time even the most devout players of the Catholic faction will descibe as a dark age.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Sadly enough, although a wholesale crash of the game appears inevitable, very few players put even the slightest effort into devising plans or reserving resources to avert a premature end to Real Life. Then again, nobody's advanced high enough up the tech and resource trees to do anything even if there were plenty of advance notice of, say, an incoming planetoid or super-volcanic event. But the characters aren't even trying, preferring instead to unlock tech achievements like 'Faster Downloads' or 'Miracle Weight-Loss Pill'.
• Cosmic Plaything: It would seem true for everyone - but, though beliefs on how much control destiny has vary, one can prevent a decent variety of bad things from happening with insight and/or foresight, and sometimes even simple action..
• Crippling Overspecialization: Often, a prodigy will be encouraged to develop their talents to the detriment of other essential life skills. It's pretty much essential for the Doctor class to go through this.
• Crisis Crossover: There were a few instances (the Introduction of Agriculture event was probably the earliest.) Not particularly common until the Worldwide Travel and Worldwide Communication patches were installed. A few major events in the 19th century qualify: several more arrived in the 20th century and a few have already happened in the 21st.
• Critical Annoyance: Shortness of breath, heart attacks, and other such symptoms of impending death. Wheezing, and allergies (which is your immune system being messed with).
• Crossover:
  • Augmented Reality.
  • Because everyone is the protagonist of their own story, any interactions with a stranger can be this; you might find yourself showing up in someone else's story, and vice versa.
• Crowded-Cast Shot:
  • There used to be a little game characters played with telephone booths (and cars)...
  • Graduations frequently squeeze in so many people that even a football stadium looks cramped.
• Cue O'Clock:
  • Military personnel often gripe about exercises scheduled for "oh-dark-thirty."
  • The term "beer thirty."
  • Aircraft flies:
    • An ATC Tower relaying local time to an inbound aircraft, "...If you're a civilian, it's 3:00; if you're Air Force, it's 1500; if you're Navy, it's Six-Bells, if you're Army, the big hand is on '3' and the little hand is on '12'; if you're Marine, it's 2 hours until the bar opens!
    • Variant from The '80s: If you're American Airlines, it's 3:15 pm, if you're Pan Am, it's 1515 hours, and if you're Delta, it's Tuesday.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Common enough that things like chivalry and the Geneva Convention were developed to avert it. They're not always obeyed, of course. Nearly all factions have this as their preferred outcome (in their favor) during war events. An example is the Gulf War event, where the Coalition faction inflicted one on the Iraq faction, causing up to fifty thousand Permadeaths while receiving only one hundred and fifty in return.
• Cursed with Awesome: There is a poor cat who was born with a malformed jaw and dwarfism who goes by the name Tardar Sauce. Those would be terrible things to have, right? Luckily, Tardar Sauce's trademarked malcontent expression and cute looks got her famous enough to tour around the county and be utterly adored by The Internet as Grumpy Cat.
• Cut and Paste Environments:
  • Played straight with the ancient Romans, who are said to have built the same city (and the same fort, with the same floor plan) hundreds of times. The same principle became popular more recently for hotel and restaurant franchises.
  • Hoover housing picked this up again for a while.
  • Communist countries frequently created huge stretches of housing from prefabricated chunks of concrete.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: So far averted; the Tech Tree hasn't progressed far enough for neural cybernetics, but stuff like Iron Lungs and Pacemakers, as well as mechanical prostheses, do not affect a character's charisma score. Indeed, prostheses might increase said charisma score.
  • Some think our humanity will become more robust and nuanced with these upgrades.
• Cyanide Pill: Perhaps well known for being the way many of the high ranking players of the ill-fated Nazi faction killed themselves during the end of the World War II arc, and post-war spy plane pilots and special forces class players were issued them to avoid interrogation.

D

• Dangerous Phlebotinum Interaction:
  • Basic laboratory safety techniques include diluting acids by adding the concentrated acid to water, not water to acid. Sulfuric acid in particular reacts quite violently with water and may boil and spatter.
  • Some medicines can interact in ways that are harmful to the body, depending on the chemical substrates of the medicine.
  • Bleach and ammonia. Both are excellent cleaning agents, but if mixed they react and produce poisonous chloramine gas. Binary chemical weapons exploit this. Two chemicals are relatively innocuous by themselves, but when combined they produce something far deadlier.
• Darker and Edgier: If a player's life isn't already dark to begin with, this happens as they get older, beginning with adolescence and increasing with adulthood. This also applies to some of the Story Arcs based on war or disaster, particularly the World War I and World War II arcs.
• Deader than Dead: Death is entirely permanent in-game — a deceased character cannot be brought back by any means.
• Deadly Gas: So much was used during the World War I arc and caused so much death and destruction that leaders across many factions banned them from future use in warfare. Stockpiles are still in some countries' arsenals, while others have long destroyed theirs. However, such weapons will occasionally make a return, illegally. The main problem with it is that it is highly unreliable; if the wind changes, you end up gassing your own soldiers, and it is realtively easy to counter with the right equipment.
• Death by Pragmatism:
  • Subverted. Screwing another player over to save your own ass may work out for you in the short run, but it by no means precludes your karma catching up to you later in the game.
  • Animals with the Pack Animal mechanic avert this, as do eusocial insects. Some players emulate this behavior to varying degrees.
• Death of a Child: Almost all servers have special, permanent penalties for characters who Would Hurt a Child. These can include ending up confined permanently to the Prison mini-game with your PvP flag enabled. Many religious factions also specify that this is a deal-breaker and will cause Non-Standard Game Over.
• Death Takes a Holiday: Averted. With the current population, Death is so busy that if it took even a few hours off, people would notice. In fact, it's become increasingly obvious that death was hard-coded for very good reasons of game balance. Longer life expectancies have led to problems like overcrowded hospitals and a large portion of the population in developed countries being dependent on the state for their income. New players are being introduced into Real Life in an unending stream, while efficiency in harvesting and re-using the resources provided is no longer keeping pace.
• Death Throws:
  • Played straight with depressing frequency in high-speed vehicle crashes. Fairly easy to avert with a safety device known as a seat belt, though a few players persist in leaving this option toggled off.
  • This has also become an issue in airplane crashes, in part because the safety device in these crashes is less sophisticated than that found in automobile models, even though airplane crashes are frequently at much higher speeds and consequently more forceful. Compounding the issue, the practice of allowing certain character types to travel by air in such a way that they're restrained by another player rather than a safety device has not been banned, even though the characters permitted to travel in this manner are often less resilient than those who are required to have safety equipment.
• Death World: The majority of all known planetary serves, in addition to being inaccessible by current in-game means, are characterized by environmental hazards so extreme that players would die in seconds if exposed to them, creating an insurmountable barrier separating the released content from the stuff that was announced but is still under construction. Even on Earth, it used to be played straight, and still has continuous predatory and war-bound conflicts, although humans are the most powerful part of Real Life on Earth these days. Some parts remain pretty dangerous, though.
• Deconstruction: The way you view the world, the people you know, and even yourself, can change quite significantly with time. While it can lead to a better understanding of life in general, it can just as easily (and understandably) result in a more jaded worldview, but even then, some players are still able to come to terms with those things and even accept them, warts and all, not letting themselves be too naive but not falling into complete cynicism either.
• Delusions of Local Grandeur:
  • The usual real-life example on a national scale are all the shows on Sunday mornings on American networks which consist of journalists trying to all demonstrate how smart and knowledgeable they are. Unfortunately many have lasted decades, possibly because it being Sunday morning it's not as if there's a lot of competition in the timeslots.
    • These shows run for three reasons: to give politicians a national audience to pontificate to so they can prove to their constituents that they actually matter; to satisfy stations' license requirements for a certain amount of "public service" broadcasting every week; and because they're so ridiculously cheap to produce that they're invariably profitable. Their viewers also skew towards the "very, very rich and very, very connected" demographic - so much so that some networks charge more per minute to advertise on these shows than for the Saturday morning cartoons, which have ten times the viewers. They get it, too.
    • This is not limited to "hard news"; ESPN's long running "The Sports Reporters" is the ur-example of sports' answer to those news shows.
  • On British TV, when ITV was regionalised, the local stations' news anchors genuinely were big local stars. This was not so marked in the BBC regions: these were staffed by ambitious newbies trying to get noticed and break into the big time in London, usually paired with cynical elders who had worked out that the BBC only recruited its national stars in the South-East, and the further away you were from London, the more you could forget it. But ITV's local stars, like Bob Greaves in Manchester and Richard Whiteley in Leeds, were big names.^note Greaves remained unknown outside the Granada region; Whitely was obscure outside Yorkshire until the advent of a quirky word-game show called Countdown. Their day is now over since ITV de-regionalised.
• Deus ex Machina: The World War Two arc was resolved via Superweapon Surprise. This was foreshadowed via dramatic irony when Rutherford made his statement that only fools could think that harnessing atomic power would ever be a possibility. Some of the codenames were somewhat "inspired".
• Deuteragonist: While the lack of any single universal main character means that there also isn't a single "secondary" character, anyone particularly close to you (like your spouse, sibling, or Best Friend) can play this role in your own personal narrative.
• Dialogue Tree: A very important aspect. What you say to other players very much influences the way they act towards you — the possibilities are endless! But be wary of the other player's personality, so you don't pick the wrong options. For example, speaking like a baby to another baby might make him/her like you, but if you say that to a particularly grumpy short man, the result will be very different. There are fewer indicators for the effects of each option and the worst usually result in either an immediate fight or even a Non-Standard Game Over.
• Diegetic Interface: Any sort of interface element only exists on a physical object within the game space. As a human, you have your basic senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, temperature, pain, proprioception, etcetera) that help convey current information while your central nervous system manages these, particularly thanks to proprioception which allows you to know where your limbs are without even seeing them and roughly conveys your current needs, potential debuffs, and of course whenever you've taken damage through combat, failing certain stat checks, etc. However some pain indicators aren't as pronounced depending on the injury and Subsystem Damage leading to Major Injury Underreaction and Minor Injury Overreaction.
• Die Laughing: While it's a very rare way for characters to die, there have been some players who did this.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • It takes quite a bit of practice, not to mention luck, to get a grip on things but it really pays off when you do.
  • Math-intensive careers, while quite difficult to obtain and perform, pay quite a bit.
  • Learning new languages, particularly Chinese, Japanese, and to many, English.
• Difficulty by Region:
  • Generally speaking, there are three or four difficulty levels, which are reflected in your starting server.
    • Easy mode puts you in North America, Western Europe, or eastern Asia, however some places in these areas are harder than others, such as the 'United States' server where all characters have access to guns, and the 'China' or 'Japan' server, which practically requires you to pass an Achievement Test of Destiny.
    • Medium mode puts you in South America, Eastern Europe, or western Asia.
    • Hard mode puts you in Africa or the Middle-East of Asia.
    • There are Hard Mode Perks, however. Surviving in the harder regions usually results in more overall points toward stats and skills, especially level bonuses toward health, defense and debuff resistances.
  • It's very difficult to live in the Arctic Circle, and it's even more difficult to stay in or even get anywhere close to Antarctica, though you can visit the place for a while thanks to compensatory technology.
  • You can invoke this by moving from an easier server to a harder server. Especially so if you don't quite understand the server rules before you transfer.
• Dirty Coward:
  • Every bully you know — and don't know — wouldn't be half the tough guy they are without back up (or their big muscles).
  • People (especially teens and children) in general choose to let bad stuff happen and do nothing about it. Becoming The Hero earns so many social benefits in part because so few characters are willing to do it.
• Disability Alibi:
  • A monk was accused and found guilty of getting a tavern owner's daughter pregnant. Decades later, it was discover that the "monk" was actually a woman who kept silent to protect the identity of the real father.
  • Double amputee former Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius had this used against him at his trial over killing his girlfriend. He admitted to have shot her, but only because he thought she was a burglar. However from the angle the shots went through the door, they were fired by someone standing at full height. This was used to suggest that Pistorius couldn't have have fired the shot without putting his prosthetic legs on, and if he did he couldn't have been as scared and impulsive as he claimed.
• Disaster Dominoes: Tragedies such as the Titanic, Chernobyl, Deepwater Horizon and many building collapses occur due to small damage blowing out of proportion. And it's not unheard of multi-regional conflicts starting out of a murder or auto-cremation.
• Disapproving Look: A common emote for players to indicate their displeasure with another player.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Sometimes, the conflict between you and your worst enemy at school could end either by ratting them out to an authority figure, giving them a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, or they might have a My God, What Have I Done? moment that sets them up for a Heel Realization and a Heel–Face Turn. Then an even worse enemy shows up in your life.
• Disc-One Final Dungeon: College. The seeming final-ness goes especially to schools of law, medicine, and universities with great prestige. For many, however, High School is the Disc-One Final Dungeon, while College is the Bonus Dungeon.
• Disc-One Nuke: Child Prodigies tend to have high intelligence stats that make certain aspects of life a breeze.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • Played straight with far too many law codes, typically erring toward either excessive or mild punishments as a whole. Also a common consequence of zero-tolerance policies, which intentionally remove human judgment from their application.
  • The Pakistan region has become infamous for its "blasphemy" law that kills players for speaking against their particular idea of the hypothetical author.
• Distract and Disarm: Gun disarms are taught in some self-defense courses. The page image describes the person playing the victim being mugged and reaching for his wallet, then disarming the mugger with the other hand and subduing him while the mugger is distracted watching the wallet hand.
• Doing In the Wizard: Has become incredibly common in the last two hundred seasons or so, with science retconning various "miracles".
• Don't Explain the Joke: We're pretending Real Life is a video game. Or sometimes an episodic series.
• Don't Touch It, You Idiot!: If you disobey safety precautions, you're likely to find out the hard way why they were there in the first place. Remember that this physics engine can render Ludicrous Gibs if you encourage it to!
• Doomsday Clock: As of 2018 it stands at two minutes to midnight, the same as it was in 1953, when the Soviet Union began testing hydrogen bombs. 100 seconds is the closest to midnight the clock has ever been. It's fortunately meaningless and used solely for Rule of Cool.
• Door Dumb: Just wait around for a while at a door that can be opened by pushing but not pulling, or vice-versa, and chances are you'll see this trope in action sooner or later.
• Downer Beginning: For some players, the game doesn't exactly start happy.
• Downer Ending: Happens so often the possibility of it happening to you borders on Nightmare Fuel.
  • Whether loved or hated, all characters are, by lifespan indicators, at very least expected to die. A percentage of opinion holds that the righteous ones are really just Put on a Bus until the head author's son gets back from his coffee break.
  • While genre fanfic suggests nobody knows how long his coffee break will last, this doesn't stop Wild Mass Guessing about the duration.
  • The degree to which each character's end fits this trope will vary based on the details of the character's termination. If the character dies peacefully at the end of their story arc, while it may be emotionally painful for the viewers and other characters, it will generally be percieved as far less of a Downer Ending than a situation where a character's arc is unusually short, or is abruptly (and sometimes violently) cut short before reaching its conclusion. Characters terminated at very low levels are often seen as especially tragic.
• Down the Drain: Occasionally subverted by deep sea diving tours. In general it's harder to survive water levels than surface levels, requiring specialized equips and skills.
• Draft Dodging: It's about as old as the draft itself and was practiced heavily by players in the USA faction during the Vietnam War arc. It got so bad that moderators weren't even able to crack down on it in many cases.
• Driven to Suicide: Players have the option to delete their accounts manually at almost any time. It’s usually locked, however, because their CPU wants to keep them online, and the termination of the account is highly likely to fail, although players with certain debuffs may not have the option locked.
• Driving Game: The driving ability is unlocked when the player reaches level 16 or 18 in most servers. The "Patrol Officer", "Taxi Service", "Bus Driver", "Trucker", and "Racer" classes reward the player with in-game currency for driving regularly, and require different types of skills and stats. Truck driving, for example, requires more points invested in Endurance to reduce the rate at which your fatigue increases. Racing typically requires a more optimized stat build around Dexterity to handle wheel movement and manual gear changes along with Perception and Endurance, the latter of which requires near maximum to complete the 24 Hours of Le Mans. A fair amount of points into Intellect also helps to optimize your car for the track or in general such as pit strategy, reducing oversteer and the required Dexterity check.
• Dynamic Loading: Elevators, commercial flights, and public transportation are all examples of this trope, although hopefully it doesn't get too dynamic, as hostile NPCs will still occasionally spawn in these areas.

E

• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The very early test builds of the Earth were a hostile Lethal Lava Land, which entered into an ocean world phase during the early life tests. In later versions, it collided with a smaller planetoid, killing any life that may have existed at this point, and creating the Moon. After this, the first versions of modern life were introduced but were restricted to simple oceanic mobs; the land remained in an untextured stage until the first terrestrial flora was added.
  • Some players believe that in the early alpha stage, Real Life was a Wide-Open Sandbox with no difficulty, no game overs, or anything that may cause difficulty for the player. After two of the few alpha players were the first to break the rules, the game had a Genre Shift because the testers could not obey, becoming more like a Simulation Game, with plenty of rules and limitations being added.
  • Characters usually consider their actions when younger (particularly their physical appearance, as in hairstyle, choice of clothing, body piercings, etc.) to be this. In some cases, entire cultural eras and decades are seen as this en masse.
• Early Game Hell: Job-seeking can be this for those who have never held a job before. Many employers want to hire those who already have experience with the rationale that those already-experienced hires will be more competent, but of course you need to have worked a job before to get experience. Once you get your foot in the door, finding subsequent jobs is usually, but not always, easier since your resume will look more attractive.
• Easter Egg: As lampshaded by this video, the lore is riddled with easter eggs of varying subtlety. The perhaps most impressive ones are the dinosaur references, cleverly hidden in such unwelcoming places as the Utah badlands, so cleverly in fact that many assume they were unintentional. More personal easter eggs are often found in paintings, such as "School of Athens", which contains several references to well-known metafic writers.
• Egopolis: A number of settlements, such Alexandria, Ho Chi Minh City, Kyiv, Stalingrad, Tenochtitlan, Constantinople, and Istanbul, were named by and after major players and guild leaders to remind everyone of their accomplishments.
• Easing into the Adventure: Some creatures hit the ground running, ready for survival within moments of birth. Player characters, on the other hand, take months to acquire enough physical coordination, around a year on average to learn how to walk, more years to reach reproductive age, and potentially even more years to acquire all their survival skills. Some humans skip the later years of the tutorial and go straight to the main game, by choice or necessity. Sometimes, higher-level characters forcibly bring them back to the tutorial areas. On the other hand, some prefer the relative safety and comfort of the tutorial levels.
• Easy-Mode Mockery:
  • The stigma that comes with being an adult and still living with your parents in times and places that put a lower emphasis on the extended family, let alone relying on them for money. This applies especially to trust fund kids, many of whom are rich bitches... making things difficult for trust fund kids who don't fit that image.
  • Restaurants that give the smallest portion or drink sizes "kiddie" names can especially come off as a bit of an insult to those watching their calories.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: Receiving a life-sentence requires the PC to cause a heinous crime such as murder, which generally requires more planning to pull off successfully than simply living a normal life. Unless you get a life sentence because you've been wrongly convicted of a heinous crime, either through mistake or because of Dirty Cops and other corrupt members of the legal system. Take, for example, this case of wrongful accusation of two mentally handicapped player characters.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Yes, it can happen. Players get to choose which happy ending they want to work towards, and many enjoy working towards the ending of dying peacefully at a high level surrounded by family and friends.
• Earth Is a Battlefield: As far as we can tell, guilds and ad-hoc alliances have been fighting with one another for all of the game's active history for everything from access to resources to personal feuds. Recent patches have created many levels on which player characters are exempted from this trope, though...
• Easy Sex Change: Averted. In fact, it's made much harder than necessary.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Averted, with the help of over 100 different elements and potentially infinite combinations (and everyone has a unique, customized chemical Character Sheet!) Ancient Greece arc notwithstanding, water, air and earth are not elements, they are mixtures, and fire is a reaction, not a substance.
• Elevator Snare: In William Shatner's Get a Life, he mentions one time Leonard Nimoy got recognized entering a hotel where a con was. He and the organizers barely made it to the elevator in time, but they heard their pursuers running up the stairs in the adjacent shaft. They made it most of the way to the stage before the fans arrived.
• Eleventy Zillion: There are some really big numbers that have their own names like the googol or Graham's number. So much so that Googolology is a tab dedicated to learning them. That said, practically no-one uses "zillion" seriously and hardly any normal people go above "trillion".
• Embarrassingly Painful Sunburn: Often happens when players forget to purchase and apply sunscreen. It goes away gradually every day in game time. Unless you have a melanin bonus in which case, there is a decreased or nonexistent chance of said sunburns.
• Emergency Broadcast: Usually a few every day at some places throughout the world, whether system tests or warnings of actual disasters.
• Emergent Gameplay: All over the place. Modern civilization is built on loads of emergent gameplay features. Much of it made possible when the players started focusing less on combat and more on the trading aspect of the game. Humans excel at finding these.
• Empathic Environment: Inverted for players with Seasonal Affective Disorder, a trait obtained at character gen that gives emotional buffs and debuffs based on the amount of time a player spends in sunlight, which causes affected players to enter debuff spirals during winter.
• The Empire: A recurring plot element. Due to corrupted archives, often portrayed as villains by the groups that eventually overthrew them. At this point in the game, there are no "classic" Empires: the United States is a Hegemonic Empire, ostensibly to prevent a "real" Empire from surfacing. The Trope Namer is the Roman Empire from Real Life, a state that started in Italy and grew to take over a large portion of Europe.
• Endless Game: It just keeps going and going. Individual characters, however, are not yet proven to get endless play time. The longest any player has managed is 122 and a bit seasons — getting over 100 seasons playtime unlocks certain achievements depending on server such as "Queen's Telegram". According to most experts in the physicist and to the religion classes, the reality will eventually stop and the servers shut down altogether. However, theories being what they are, the reality has been going quite a while already, and shows no obvious signs of stopping any time soon.
• Ensemble Cast: Actors' contracts range from a single scene to over 120 years.
• Equivalent Exchange: Present in the form of the First Law of Thermodynamics, and Newton's Third Law, plus a gaggle of other Conservation laws, require that all processes in the Real Life 'verse, follow the Equivalent Exchange principle under the specific variant that the amount of energy produced by a system, counting both useful work and waste, can never exceed the total put into it.
• Escort Mission:
  • The (thankfully optional) Parenthood campaign requires players to spend several years escorting and guarding a new, still underleveled player. Additionally, the Babysitting minigame and Childcare class revolve around temporarily taking over other players' escort duties.
  • Bodyguarding and courier classes also have to deal with this, the former guarding a high-level character and the second escorting payloads from one location to another, although generally the AI of the Bodyguard's escort is relatively high.
• Eternal Equinox:
  • Truth in Television for places on the equator, where days are always the same length and seasons don't really exist.
  • On the poles, the days and nights are always exactly six months long.
  • Mercury has an axial tilt very close to zero, so you'd have to get extremely close to the poles to have a noticeable change in the length of a day.
  • The same for Venus and Jupiter, with the bonuses of the former having fairly uniform temperatures all over, thanks to its dense atmosphere, and the latter having a lot of residual heat from its formation that is evenly distributed by its winds, producing the same effect.
• Everybody Dies Episode: Averted, while We All Die Someday, the series had not yet got the episode as long as the humanity has quick enough to avoid it, however dinosaurs had it at some point.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Played straight very frequently, for both characters and objects. Calling something by its full official name is frequently reserved for the Scientist class.
• Everyone Is Bi: Some Psychologist and Philosopher class characters have claimed that everyone experiences at least a little attraction to all sexes, although one or the other may predominate. Others disagree.
• Everything's Deader with Zombies: Played with. There's a form of entertainment called "Zombie Walks", and costumes with the Halloween event. After the new drug Bath Salts caused the cannibal debuff, Word of God had to officially Joss the zombies being in an upcoming patch.* EvilDebtCollector: Most debt collectors seem this way to players, although they may be more of a PunchClockVillain in reality.
• Evolutionary Levels: Averted. "Evolution" seems to describe a perpetual transitional process by which the members of a species least fitted to their environment die without reproducing — as opposed to an incremental process by which living beings get bigger, smarter, and more powerful over time. This design feature has produced a great deal of controversy, especially among theists.
• Expansion Pack World: Originally, quite a few Real Life servers existed in complete ignorance of each other. They were essentially running smaller regions with characters who had no idea the rest even existed, let alone could be accessed without special codes or additional fees. The Writing protocols essentially helped Explorer characters increase awareness of the size of the world (leading to the Europe/Asia/Africa link-ups.) The New World arc (and its many, many sequels) brought the Americas into contact with the active servers, originally through a backdoor in the Scandinavia travel codes; unfortunately, this wrought absolute havoc on those regions.
  • The first real Expansion Pack was Australia around 15,000 BC, but it was a Hard Mode region and only a few dedicated Aborigine players were willing to play there until a few Explorers bent on gaining exploration achievements "discovered" it.
  • The Polynesia and Iceland mini-campaigns added small areas to the core world. Antarctica was added too, but never gained much interest after its initial Race to the Pole crossover event was wrapped up.
  • The 20th century saw new Orbital Space and Moon expansions added, but - just like Antarctica - there wasn't much to do except gain exploration achievements, particularly since you had to get the super-hard Astronaut prestige class just to get there.
  • Several grass species were adapted into wheat, rice, and maize. A selection of early primates were polished up, given new appearances and a lot of new powers, and appeared in later editions as humans.
  • Some religions also believe humans are reincarnations of past lives.
  • Many players speculate we may one day connect with some other RealLife equivalent using a different OS.
• Explosive Stupidity: When it comes to handling explosive devices and/or volatile substances, there's very little margin for error. Being careless while doing so is a great if not surefire way to get a severe chunk of health removed, or a game over.
  • Everyone agrees this is part of why nitroglycerin fell out of favor when crafting explosives not only due to sensitivity but also its tendency to "sweat".
  • Utterly averted with another crafted explosive, Composite Compound 4. Fumble it, hit it, shoot it, burn it, it is effectively stupid-proof. Only when you combine any amount with one or more Blasting Cap components and then hook it up to a proper activation object will it explode.
• Expo Speak: History, biology, and physics classes all show a lot of the world building.
• Extremely Cold Case: The disappearance of a 16-year-old servant girl named Emma Alice Smith in rural Sussex in 1926 was reinvestigated as a murder in 2009 after a short film was made about her. A dying man had allegedly confessed the murder to Emma Alice's sister on his deathbed in 1953, but she had herself died without reporting it and the man's name was unknown. After the investigation, however, the police accepted a different theory about her disappearance (that she had eloped with a married man to Ireland) and closed the case.
• Eye-Obscuring Hat: Plenty of people try to pull this off, particularly with Indiana Jones-style hats. The issue is in actually seeing when you wear a hat over your eyes.
• Extra Digits: Some players may be born with a polydactyly modifier granting them six fingers on their hands or toes. These can range from useless to very helpful.

F

• Failed a Spot Check: Happens all the time, most frequently with small oft-used items such as keys, eyeglasses, and marbles. Many animals have camouflage coloring whose purpose is to invoke the trope deliberately, for catching prey or avoiding predators.
• Fake Difficulty: You get only one life, no save points, and quest items/paths can easily be lost forever. Though, according to some religions, you get multiple lives, taking the form of a different character with each respawn, and in others, you can respawn in another server, depending on the achievements you get, the guilds you join, or even by believing in the developer. In addition, there are countless quest paths/items/what have you, to the point that no one will ever be able to write a full strategy guide (though many partial ones are in the works). Unless you mess up some early story arcs, you can usually have a decent score by the end.
• Fake Longevity: Considering how Real Life boasts years of play, it's no surprise that almost a quarter of your time is spent on either tutorials or money-grinding. Also, you spend quite a bit of time doing things such as eating, sleeping (which takes an average of a third of your time), and bathing. And exactly what you're doing at this moment.
• Falling Damage: But of course. This being Real Life, however, you can't just walk it off. The damage, if easily high enough, will be long-lasting, or, if higher yet, instantly fatal. There are, however, collectible items such as parachutes that reduce if not outright remove it.
  • And there are some cases of a Good Bad Bug where people were able to survive falls from impossible heights by a combination of slowing their fall as much as possible, and landing just right. For obvious reasons, people aren't really trying to find exactly how this bug works.
  • It's also been said that by rolling as soon as you land (assuming you're falling from a low enough height), you can negate some of the damage. The trick is also to have sufficient X and/or Z-axis velocity
• Fan Fic: Fiction based off real life is a multi-billion dollar industry. Real Life fan fiction often has very little to do with the source material, and is popular enough that there exists a wiki dedicated to categorizing common tropes.
  • Biopic: Fiction focusing on particular characters.
  • Porn Without Plot: The pornography genre. There are outliers, though they have a habit of being poorly written and/or schlocky parodies of existing films (especially during the latter half of the Cold War arc).
  • Crack Fic: Fantasy, and those weird tales that Grandpa tells you.
  • Song Fic: Musicals.
  • Reality TV is perhaps the most devoted kind of fanfiction.
• Fan Sequel: Recent expansions consist of mostly player-made content.
• Fanservice: Porn and strip clubs. Also movie stunts. And summer, which drastically reduces the need for clothes in many regions.
  • Not to mention human reproduction, possibly the best kind of fanservice there is.
  • This option is sometimes disabled at character creation with the "asexuality" trait.
• Fantasy World Map: Here it is, courtesy of The Other Wiki. Some players include some unrecognized nations in their maps.
• Fan Disservice: Sexual harassment and assault. Also, attractive family members and relatives.
• Fantastic Firearms: While gunpowder is what gives firearms their name, several players have used alternatives:
  • The Lewis and Clark expedition used Austrian-made (and in battlefield service) compressed-air rifles. Airguns had a few advantages that made them very attractive to the explorers; they're significantly quieter and invulnerable to getting wet powder, while still having the stopping power of a musket. Furthermore, the two wouldn't have to pack any gunpowder.
  • The pyrotechnic compound used in "volcanic cartridges" (see Forgotten Weapons here) burns much slower than gunpowder does, resulting in what was, effectively, a rocket firing backward to propel a bullet with its exhaust. They were also detonated by hitting a switch on the side, rather than a primer cap on the base. Volcanic cartridges evolved from entirely self-contained projectiles that had a load of propellant and a percussion cap fully inside the bullet with no casing.
  • The potato gun is a hobby project made out of pipe fittings and superglue, that uses flammable aerosol, a lighter or BBQ starter piezoelectric device, and a fuel/air explosion to fire, well, potatoes.
  • Pistol shrimp have a claw that's evolved into (or the author gave them) a bona fide Arm Cannon, which uses supercavitation to fire sound waves so intense they make the water glow. They're named for the gunshot-loud snap of their claws.
  • Long-Range Acoustic Devices (LRAD) fire a concentrated barrage of sounds to deter rioters.
  • "Fart guns" weren't made up for Despicable Me. They fire a vortex ring of concentrated irritants to disable attackers in a less-lethal fashion. Note that their report doesn't sound like breaking wind, nor are the irritants brown.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: Averted. A Fandom VIP says it may never show up, although fans keep hoping. However, a known and respected modding community recently started working to mod this into the game..
• Fatal Flaw: Quite a few types of these exist, a basis for saying that everyone has at least one, although some have more than others, and they can, indeed, be very hard to overcome.
• Fat Camp: This is a special event where some players go to drop weight and increase their base HP and mobility stats.
• Faustian Rebellion: America (the whole two continents), Al-Qaeda, and Nazi Germany, to name a few. Practically everywhere there has been a revolution.
• Filler: Be honest. You're reading this at work, aren't you?
  • Or school.
  • Waiting in a doctor's office or airport is definitely filler.
  • Whether or not there is any non-filler material is debatable.
• Final Boss: Many strategy guides go to great lengths to describe the final boss battle before unlocking God Mode and Infinite Bliss Run. Satan is a popular choice for this role, although by most account he'll be an Anticlimax Boss despite incredible build-up, defeated by a One-Hit Kill from the Big Good. Others hold that there won't be a Final Boss at all, though there might be an Earth-Shattering Kaboom instead. Some claim the Final Boss is Satan's Nemesis and Satan is the Big Good, while others maintain that neither Satan or God is the Final Boss, but rather an Ancient Conspiracy behind most of the bad events and assassinations in history that is controlling everything.
  • Some interpretations of some tutorials maintain that Death itself is this.
• Final-Exam Boss: Parodied in the school content with bosses that are literal final exams. Can be averted in the college and graduate school levels, where exams are occasionally replaced by presentations. (i.e. the student briefly becoming a teacher.)
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: Flamethrowers are an available weapon. Naturally, they're capable of inflicting Burn, as well as Fear if your constitution is low enough.
• First Town: Every town could qualify as this, as there are billions of protagonists throughout the world, but most of the designated spawn points are in larger cities, so some small communities might not be.
• First-Person Shooter: The "Terrorist", "Soldier", "Shooter", "Hunter", "Militia", "Gang Member", "Mercenary", and "Policeman" classes.
  • Note that certain factions make "Armed Policeman" a prestige class, requiring the player take several levels in "Policeman" first.
  • Just about any character with thumbs can wield firearms, although Firearm Proficiency is a highly recommended skill to have when dealing with guns and a minimum stat build in dexterity to make effective use of them. Awareness is also a heavily understated stat to prevent instances like One Hit Poly Kill.
  • Almost all characters are capable of wielding firearms. The above classes have this as a core requirement. It is very easy to cross class with firearms training, especially in Eagleland.
  • The level of ease or difficulty involved in accessing the tools needed for this skill varies widely from one server to the next.
• Flame War: Both figurative and literal applications. Both kinds usually involve politics.
• Forced Level-Grinding: The whole point of school is to grind levels while young so you don't get wrecked in your 20s.
  • The entire skill and level system is based upon this. Gaining a level in anything will require large amounts of "study" and repetitive "practice".
  • Required previous work experience, including for entry-level jobs, increasingly requires newer players to level grind for free at menial volunteer tasks before anyone will hire them. Others try to skip this section by making their EXP look higher than it really is.
• Forced Tutorial: In many places, especially the 'Europe', 'North America' and 'East Asia' servers, characters are forced to do tutorials, starting between levels 4 and 6 and generally ending at level 18, though it is possible to end it earlier in some servers.
  • Subverted on a lot of servers. It is very much possible to quit the tutorial and go into the main campaign. However, not having either the "public schooling" achievement or the "home schooling" achievement has dire consequences. The player will most certainly not have access to many skill trees, abilities, and class titles. Maybe it's a glitch, but there are ways to bypass that problem. The player will need either the "prodigy" ability or have an incredible intelligence stat.
  • A few servers avert this entirely, although these tend to be regarded by other players as quite Nintendo Hard.
• Foregone Conclusion: As if being Killed Off for Real was unexpected.
• Foreshadowing: If you watch real closely, but as with all foreshadowing, usually only obvious in retrospect. Alternatively, you may consult a self-styled expert in Divination, but many players believe this is not a real skill. Nostradamus' strategy guide is believed by some to be canon but it can be interpreted in so many ways that proving it requires Epileptic Trees in its own, so others argue otherwise. Global Warming, running out of Fossil Fuels and Overpopulation arcs have been foreshadowed for the last few decades. It is commonly believed that those will cumulate in a big event to herald the arrival of the Interstellar Space arc where the human race can finally explore the Universe in person.
• Fossil Revival: Numerous player organizations have or had this as their goal, with the intent of reconstructing a variety of in-game wildlife that no longer spawns in the current version of the game. In-setting technology limits mean that this can only be done using preserved remains of the original things, although there have been attempts to game the Creature-Breeding Mechanic to create close-enough approximates of the desired beasts.
• Four Lines, All Waiting: Averted, despite the number of Characters. Due to the bizarre nature in which Real Life is aired, all 7 billion Plot Threads are carried out at the same time. There's a reason there are entire in-universe teams devoted to studying the plot.
• Fourth Wall: Arguably the sturdiest Fourth Wall in existence. Dreams and psychoactives are the most reliable challenges to it.
• Freakier Than Fiction: Trope Namer. You really can't make some of this shit up.
• Freakiness Shame: Played straight, subverted and averted for many people with birth defects and other things that make them special, and some of the body modifications available... though not yet with things like wings.
• Freemium: Most servers will give the player enough in-game currency to prevent them from dying. But if you want to acquire any good items or join any prestige classes, you're going to have to do a lot of level grinding.
• Friendly Local Chinatown: Many exist throughout the world. There is a famous one in San Francisco.
• From Bad to Worse: "It will be over before Christmas..." And after it ended (4 years later): "It was the war to end all wars."
• Full-Name Ultimatum: One of the first tropes many players encounter.
• Functional Magic: Rule Magic (the laws of physics) is slowly and laboriously decoded and verified by science and arcane mathematics, and implemented into Device Magic (technology) which anyone can use provided they can afford to buy it. Most players take this for granted. Also, Vancian Magic is the case for some of the particularly restrictive aspects of Real Life's Rule Magic, like thermodynamics and the conservation laws.
• Fun with Acronyms: Many, many examples, some invoked on purpose. Stars are formed in Evaporating Gaseous Globules.

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