By the nature of the series, all spoilers except those relating to the series' backstory in the "Eyes and Ears" continuity are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
Each season of the Life SMP has a different name, and comes with a different twist, but the concept is always the same. Each server member has a set number of lives, indicated by the color of their name, and once they run out of lives, they are out of the series. Players on their final lives gain a red name, and their goal changes from just surviving, to killing as many people as they can.
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3rd Life
In its first season, 3rd Life, each member of the server begins with three lives, losing one every time they die. When someone is on their last life, their goal shifts from surviving peacefully to taking out as many other players as possible. The world itself is very limited — only 700 by 700 blocks — so resources are finite and players must share, cooperate, or steal if they are to survive. The series uses the Voice Proximity mod, so random encounters with others are commonplace.
Last Life
The second season, Last Life, begins with three new members, a new name, and new rules. Unlike in Season 1 where everyone has 3 lives, each member of the server is randomly assigned between 2 and 6 lives, and the ability to transfer lives between players was introduced. In addition, each episode starts with the server randomly assigning a "Boogeyman", who needs to kill a player with more than one life left before the end of the day, or lose all but one of their lives. After Day 2, the Boogeyman has been given a protective buff after being cured so they would have an easier time escaping from their victim's teammates.
Double Life
The third season, Double Life, shakes things up again. Each member of the group is once again granted 3 lives, but this time, they have to share their life counter and their health bar with their soulmate, another player. If their soulmate takes damage, they will as well, and if their soulmate dies, so will they.
Limited Life
The fourth season, Limited Life, changes things drastically. Instead of having a limited number of lives, players had 24 hours to live. Killing another player adds half an hour, while dying subtracts an hour. Additionally, Reds are no longer the only ones allowed to initiate PvP, as the rules are changed to allow Yellows to attack Greens.note The Boogeyman mechanic is also returned to the server, where the penalty for not killing by the end of the day is dropping a colour level in hearts (i.e. losing up to 8 hours of their life); anyone who gets killed by them will lose two hours of life as opposed to the standard one, and the Boogeyman will gain one extra hour of time as opposed to 30 minutes.note And for the first time in the series, keepInventory is enabled.
Secret Life
The fifth season, Secret Life, alters the formula once more, starting with the return of two once-absent members and one new member. While everyone is back down to three lives this season, players had 30 hearts (i.e. triple the health) per life but no natural regeneration. To regain hearts, they had to complete a secret task given to them at the start of the session and visit the Secret Keeper, and be rewarded with 10 hearts if they succeed and receive nothing if they fail; while the health nominally caps at 30 hearts, the Secret Keeper can alternatively reward players with over 30 hearts with material gifts usually unobtainable in the series. Players can also reroll their assigned task for a harder one in order to gain 20 hearts, but will lose 10 hearts if they fail the rerolled task. In addition, similar to the life-giving mechanism of Season 2, players are allowed to gift one heart to another player per session, but without losing a heart of their own; this is one method by which players can go over 30 hearts. The other method is, similarly to Season 4, by killing people, which grants 10 hearts even when that would make the player go over 30. Much like the previous season, keepInventory is enabled.
Real Life
A one-off special, Real Life, follows much of the same rules as 3rd Life: each member of the server begins with three lives, losing one every time they die, and their goal shifts from surviving peacefully to taking out as many other players as possible when they're on their last life. The alteration for this series? Everyone is playing on Minecraft VR.
The Life SMP is taped in three-hour recording sessions early in a given week, and each person's perspective is uploaded to YouTube somewhere around the follow Friday.
3rd Life began on April 20th, 2021, and ended on June 8th. A second season — later dubbed Last Life — was announced in Grian's final episode, officially starting on September 21st, 2021 and ending on November 16th. The third season, Double Life, began on June 17th, 2022 and ended on July 22nd, with a fourth, Limited Life, starting on March 3rd, 2023 and ending on April 21st, and a fifth, Secret Life, starting on October 20th, 2023 and ending on December 15th.
A one-off special, Real Life, premiered on April 1st, 2024.
Despite its name and creator overlap between the series, the New Life SMP is not a season of the Life SMP, due to its drastically different premise and modded nature.
Note: Unless otherwise specified, all tropes pertain to the characters, not the content creators that play them.
List of seasons of the Life SMP:
Canon seasons:- 3rd Life (2021)
- Last Life (2021)
- Double Life (2022)
- Limited Life (2023)
- Secret Life (2023)
Specials:
- Real Life (2024)
The Life SMP in general provides examples of:
- Aerith and Bob: Some members of the server go by their real-life first names, while others go by their internet nicknames, resulting in a sharp contrast between names like Scott, Jimmy and Joel, and names like Grian, Scar and Tango.
- Anyone Can Die: A given due to the fact that it's a non-scripted Hardcore series. Whether you died in a heroic battle, or by accidentally falling off a cliff, lose all your lives and you're out of the game.
- Apologetic Attacker: Happens (most of the time) when a Boogeyman kills one of their allies, or even a non-ally server-member whom they have no beef with.
- Big "NO!": A very common set of last words for any death in the series.
- Characters Dropping Like Flies: By the Deadly Game nature of the series, as well as everyone being a POV character (depending on which perspectives the viewers watch), this is a given.
- Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Player names are displayed in different colours depending on how many lives they have, and some also choose to change their skins to reflect their life count. Green indicates three lives, yellow is two, and red is one. In Last Life, players have the possibility of obtaining four or more lives, which is indicated by dark green. In Limited Life, the colours indicate the time range a player has left.
- Construction Is Awesome: With a good portion of the players being good builders, it's unsurprising to see beautiful buildings in the server, even with its constricting border.
- Cutting the Knot:
- On Day 3 of 3rd Life, Bdubs and Martyn (among others) decide to play Tango's minigame, Dare to Flare. After carefully reading the rules and seeing that they prohibit all fire resistance potions, Bdubs uses a golden apple to minimise damage from the lava and Marytn uses Ender pearls to jump straight to the reward chest and back out again. Tango lets both keep the prize but bans consumables and Ender pearls from that point forward.
- On Day 6 of Last Life, Grian and Impulse resolve to gather the three Wither skeleton skulls scattered across the server. After two successful heists at the Shadow Fort and the Snow Fort, they are unable to find the one at the Scottage and eventually conclude that it's inside their Ender chest, meaning that they could never retrieve it. Rather than throw in the towel, Impulse heads to the Nether fortress and grinds Wither skeletons until he finally gets a new skull, which he presents to Grian at the end of the day.
- Deadly Game: Essentially. While the series tends to start off calm, with alliances and the bare bones of a society being formed, it's only a matter of time before someone turns Red, either through the Boogeyman, a mistake, or just plain bad luck... and that's when all hell breaks loose. Inevitably, the fragile faction system that always emerges on the server collapses as more and more people turn Red or die, and in the end, only one survivor remains.
- Dramatic Thunder: Starting from Limited Life and onward, whenever a player is Killed Off for Real, thunder can be heard in the background as lightning strikes the site of their death. Lizzie's final death in Secret Life plays with this, as thunder can be heard but no lightning strikes, as she dies from falling in the Void in the End dimension.
- The Dreaded:
- In general, the Reds. While they're not the only ones on the server with the capability to kill, they are the only ones allowed to initiate PVP, and have killing everyone else as their explicit goal. On Limited Life, Yellows also fill this role given that they can kill Greens as well.
- In Last Life and Limited Life, the Boogeyman also fills this role. At least one player is assigned this role each session, and they have until the end of the day to kill another non-Red player, or face a severe penalty affecting their survival — having all but one of their lives taken away, leaving them on Red (Last Life), or dropping a colour grade and having up to a third of their life-time taken away (Limited Life). It's basically the concept of the Reds but with an extra layer of Paranoia Fuel, as the Boogeyman can be literally anyone, and you won't know who until they cave someone's head in.
- Early-Installment Weirdness:
- 3rd Life is a modified hardcore SMP, so a few players at the beginning treated it like a traditional hardcore SMP. They focused on mining and gathered resources instead of socializing and telling a story. Notably, BigB once spent an entire episode in the mines without interacting with anyone. By the time 3rd Life concluded, players realized that alliances and interactions are what makes the series shine, and that seasons are too short and unpredictable for any long-term resource gathering and base-planning to be worthwhile. Future seasons also allow players to mine and farm (and other boring things that would usually be cut out of a video) shortly before a session begins.
- BigB, Martyn, Cleo, Ren, and Impulse used to split single 3rd Life sessions into multiple episodes, but by Last Life, nearly every member equates one session to one episode and usually uploads them on the same day. BigB is the only exception to this, continuing to split his Last Life sessions but titling them "Episode # (Part 1)" and "Episode # (Part 2)"; he would also upload Part 1 at the same time as everyone else, but then only upload Part 2 a few days later. He stopped doing this from Double Life onward.
- Escort Distraction:
- On Day 3 of Last Life, Jimmy invites Scott and Pearl to tour the Southlands in order to get them away from their base so Impulse can steal their sugar cane.
- On Day 2 of Double Life, Cleo sends Jimmy and Tango on a wild goose chase to see whatever Scar's doing, allowing Scott to steal their goats while they're gone.
- "Everybody Dies" Ending: It's a Foregone Conclusion that all but one of the perspective characters die, by the Deadly Game premise of the series, usually by another player, mobs, by accident, or by mistake. However, there's been a tradition for each season to end on a Last Survivor Suicide (either directly or by proxy), leaving all perspective characters dead; the only season in which this has been averted so far is Secret Life.
- Evil Costume Switch: A good number of players have a separate skin for when they get knocked down to one life left, often being Red and Black and Evil All Over, with grey skin and red eyes. The list of people without a Red Life skinnote is smaller than the people who have had onenote .
- Fatal Fireworks: While their first major use in combat as explosive projectiles is on Day 6 of 3rd Life, during a skirmish at Dogwarts, it isn't until Last Life when they play a major role in a player's demise.
- For Last Life, Lizzie fills most of her hot-bar with firework-loaded crossbows and uses several to weaken Big B before killing him. Later on Day 7, she unleashes a fair amount of them onto Bdubs when he betrays her. While Lizzie loses her final life, her firework rockets weaken Bdubs enough that he's killed by his fellow Red Names when he tries to run.
- On Day 9 of Last Life, Grian and Joel arm themselves with firework rockets for their rampage and end up killing Pearl with them. Joel offhandedly mentions that the plan was made in honour of Lizzie.
- In the Double Life finale, Joel decides to utilize the same plan to kill Scott for burning the Relation-Ship in the previous episode, only with stronger rockets. He credits Lizzie for the idea from the last season.
- From Day 6 of Limited Life, the T.I.E.S. use firework-loaded crossbows as weapons in fights alongside normal bows, melee weapons, and End crystals. While other factions like the Bad Boys also use crossbows, the T.I.E.S. are the only ones to use firework rockets as projectiles.
- First-Person Dying Perspective: Excluding the few deaths across the series where the editing cuts away from the scene shortly before the actual death, this trope is standard for the Life series, with the episodes showing each person's death in their own perspective of the series.
- Game of Chicken:
- In Limited Life, the Bad Boys have a game of this on Day 1, where they each set fire to a block on the roof of the very flammable Woodland Mansion they call their base, and the last one to put out their fire wins.
- In Secret Life, Scar, Impulse, and Bdubs are assigned to play this against each other on Day 6, with success requiring any one individual to win three games. It's initially made a bit complicated by the fact that Scar has no idea what a chicken game is at first, thinking the task is referring to games revolving around chickens. Since the task never said that they couldn't keep playing games until all three of them won three each, they play nine games overall to make sure everyone can succeed at their secret task for the day.
- Geas:
- The Boogeyman curse of Last Life and Limited Life function along the lines of one: to kill another player by the end of the day, or have their life prematurely shortened, by either being forcibly dropped to their final life (Last Life) or have their life-time cut short by up to a third of its original length (Limited Life). Across both seasons, exactly one person has refused to commit the mandatory murder and accepted the penalty, and they were Yellow anyway and so only lost one life.
- The personalized secret tasks in Secret Life must be fulfilled to counter the Anti-Regeneration gimmick of the season. If a player fails their task, they get no hearts at the end of the session. If a player fails a rerolled harder task, they lose 10 hearts.
- Glass Cannon: Played With.
- Players on their Red Life are the only ones allowed to initiate PVP and directly kill other players, with their explicit goal being to take out everyone else. However, while other players will simply respawn with one life missing, a Red player's death means they're out of the game for good, meaning they have to be extremely careful about how and when they try to kill other people. Downplayed slightly in Season 4, as a player being Red means they have up to 8 hours of life-time left, so while they technically can have more than one life left and likely won't be out for good if they die, they still have to be extremely careful about murder.
- Averted with the Boogeyman from Season 2 onward, who is randomly chosen from the pool of Yellow and Green lives, and after Day 2 is granted a temporary buff after making their kill to prevent instantly getting revenge-killed afterwards by their target's allies.
- Healthy Green, Harmful Red: Players are given a certain number of lives, most commonly three. When they have all three lives, it's represented with green, and when they have only one left, it's represented with red. Their nametags reflect this. In Last Life, when a player has more than three lives, the extra lives are represented with a darker green.
- Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: No one on the server wears a helmet. Enforced in that one of the rules of the server specifies that no one is allowed to wear one, presumably so they're more recognizable in others' videos.
- Tango is executed by firing squad in Season 1 for violating this rule.
- Scar makes and puts on a helmet in Season 5 twice in brief failures to remember the rules. No one but the viewers notice it on Day 2, and he burns it at the beginning of Day 3, but then he makes another on Day 4. This time, Martyn and Joel catch him with the helmet on and tell him to "come over here and take that helmet off"; however, the Opposite Day nature of Scar's task that day requires him to run away and keep it on.
- History Repeats: Several recurring incidents have occurred without fail in multiple seasons, so much that they have been called "curses", by the fandom and sometimes the content creators themselves.
- Grian being, in one way or another, responsible for the death of at least one of his allies (or as one may put it, loved ones).
- Jimmy being always the first to be Killed Off for Real. This tradition is surprisingly broken in the fifth season, Secret Life (and doesn't reappear in Real Life, although whether that counts or not is another question).
- Mumbo being Killed Off for Real shortly after Jimmy gets Killed Off for Real, by the exact same entity (Grian in Last Life, Etho's Warden in Secret Life), in both of the seasons he has appeared in so far.
- Scott building part of his base, especially the defensive walls, out of wood, prompting Joel to burn it down just because he could. This has, so far, only come to pass in the first three seasons.
- Scott and Cleo being allied with each other, whether openly or in secret. While they initially part ways at the start of Secret Life due to being "overpowered" together, they eventually rekindle their "Widows Alliance" when everything hits the fan on Day 7.
- Tango Dying Alone for his final life, often in a seemingly "meaningless" way or by no fault of his own.
- Someone inevitably making a wolf army.
- House Fire: Griefing other factions' or players' bases by setting them on fire is a very common occurrence, to the point one of the de facto mottos to live by in the series is "If something can be burnt, it will be burnt."
- Humans Are the Real Monsters: While the in-game monsters are dangerous, the various alliances formed along with backstabbing have resulted in much drama and many players losing lives.
- Kill Tally: The fan wiki
keeps track of how many kills/eliminations (and other records) each player has per season via multiple criteria, including and not limited to overall kills, most final kills (having someone Killed Off for Real), most lives lost per session, etc. For relevance to the trope:- In terms of overall kills, Grian wins in Season 1 with 8 killsnote , Joel wins in Season 2 with 13, Joel wins again in Season 3 with 3 direct killsnote , Grian wins again in Season 4 with 20 kills, and Scar wins in Season 5 with 12 kills.
- In terms of most non-suicide final kills, Scar wins in Season 1 with 3 eliminationsnote and Pearl wins in Season 3 with 2 eliminationsnote . Season 2 has a three-way tie between Griannote , Rennote , and Scottnote with 3 eliminations each, though Scott is also credited in-game with Martyn's elimination via backfired End crystal; Season 4 has a two-way tie between Martynnote and Scottnote at 3 eliminations each, and Scar gets 6 eliminations in Season 5note .
- Killed Off for Real: Everyone who loses their final life is put into Spectator mode, only able to watch the rest of the game go on.
- Mad Bomber:
- Grian is the cause of two of the three deadliest traps in the series thus far (his triple kill in 3rd Life and quad kill in Limited Life), both of which involve TNT minecarts and are followed by positively unhinged laughter. In particular, TNT traps are his forte while under Scar's employ in 3rd Life, to the point where he even rigs the entire desert to explode in the Battle of the Red Desert. He's killed four people (Scar with a creeper on Day 1 and Ren, Jimmy, and Skizz with a TNT minecart on Day 4) with explosions in that season alone.
- In Last Life, after going down to his final life, Joel sets multiple explosive traps per day all over the map. Although the traps have only rarely succeeded, this cements Joel's reputation as a Wild Card in the series, especially combined with the fact he has the highest Kill Tally out of everyone in the season. Two seasons later in Limited Life, a vast majority of Joel's kills involve him dropping a TNT minecart on his victims, which is still saying something since everyone else was using TNT minecarts by the dozen that season.
- Mass "Oh, Crap!": Every time someone dies, especially when it means they're now on their last, Red life.
- A Molten Date with Death: Often invoked, as other than TNT and other explosives, one of the most common lethal forms of trap used throughout the series is lava.
- Monster of the Week: The Boogeyman in Seasons 2 and 4, who is randomly selected out of the living non-Red players and must kill someone to cure themselves or face a penalty relating to their lives the next day — being reduced to their final life in Last Life, and dropping to the next colour grade in hearts (i.e. losing up to 8 hours of life-time) in Limited Life.
- No Blood for Phlebotinum: Given that the world is only 700 by 700 blocks big, there's bound to be conflicts over resources.
- In 3rd Life, see Scar and Grian's attempt to create a monopoly over dark oak trees and sand, the server conflict earlier on over villagers, and people begging for and stealing cows.
- In Last Life, there's shortages of sugarcane (used in the server-specific TNT recipe) and villagers (as there was no village, making the only way to get them by curing zombie villagers).
- In Double Life, the sugarcane shortage continues when Grian starts to hoard the server's supply, and when that fails by Day 3, there's a shortage of sand because there isn't a desert on the server and Grian ends up hoarding most of the server supply of that too.
- In Limited Life, the cow shortage from Season 1 makes a brief comeback when the Bad Boys start murdering them left and right, or get killed in the middle of Boogeyman attacks, but it's not the main resource everyone is after: the very mechanism of the season enforces life-time as the primary, non-renewable resource everyone is fighting over. The hunts which the Yellow and Red Names go on to get some extra life-time back result in tremendous amounts of bloodshed, and serves as the overall motive for any non-environmental deaths across the season. As the season inches toward a close, many players even want to become the Boogeyman just so they can get their hands on more life-time for themselves.
- Obvious Rule Patch:
- In 3rd Life, in spite of being nominally Omnicidal Maniacs, all of the pre-Day 7 Red Names stayed allied with their Green (or occasionally Yellow) compatriots from before their deaths, allowing the factions to wage devastation across the server. One season later, a rule against Red Names allying with non-Reds is immediately instated, fracturing many alliances in Last Life. This new rule has been mitigated since Double Life, as the soulmate system practically requires everyone to team up; regardless, the instatement of the rule has given rise to the non-Red Life hunts for every season since Last Life.
- The KeepInventory gamerule is enabled starting with Limited Life. This is in reaction to the prevailing strategy of the two previous worlds: building up tons of resources for the sole purpose of respawning well-equipped, which wasn't particularly interesting to watch. There's also the additional justification in Limited Life that everyone can theoretically afford to die dozens of times, and being forced to recover or recreate their gear after every single death would get incredibly tedious and undermine the potential for multiple deaths.
- Omnicidal Maniac: What everyone becomes upon being reduced to their last life (or time equivalent thereof in Limited Life); their ultimate goal is to kill everyone else on the server.
- Once Done, Never Forgotten: As the series goes on, several of the players have brought up their fellow server-members' behaviour in past seasons, often as a warning to their potential allies. For instance, upon the Nosy Neighbours' team-up in Limited Life, Cleo warns Pearl about Big B's Boogeyman kill on her in Last Life, while Martyn makes an allusion to 5 AM Pearl's... questionable mental stability in Double Life.
- One-Steve Limit: Zig-zagged. Smajor and Impulse are both named Scott in real life, but Smajor is the only one who uses that name in the series. When they team up in Secret Life, their alliance is named Gem and the Scotts as a nod to this.
- Our Souls Are Different: In Martyn's "Eyes and Ears" lore, the soul of every player (other than Grian) gains a "Fragment" during each season, representing their death and trauma from said season, and only by winning the season can their Fragment be "protected" and not form. It is not yet confirmed exactly how many Fragments have to form for a soul to irreversibly break, or what happens if or when a soul is shattered permanently.In each peace lies a piece that makes up the whole
Woven the Fragments that make up a soul - Precision F-Strike: While the series is mostly PG/PG-13, there are a few moments where the creator-characters curse without it being edited out.
- On Day 1 of 3rd Life, Martyn drops the F-bomb when a skeleton surprises him in a ravine.
- On Day 7 of Last Life, Impulse and Skizz attack Ren and damage his tower, prompting him to call them bastards.
- On Day 1 of Limited Life, Scott casually describes the Woodland Mansion to burn "like a fucking wildfire". Most of the POVs cut this part out, but it is somehow not censored out in Big B's perspective of the conversation... presumably because Scott's accent made it much easier to miss.
- Red Is Violent: Those on their last life (or time equivalent in Limited Life) get a red name, and their goal becomes to take out as many people as they can.
- Running Gag: Following the massive success of Grian's TNT trap killing three people in 3rd Life, all his subsequent traps aside from the redstone-less bubble elevator trap either fail to work or somehow don't kill anyone when they do work, leading him to be increasingly exasperated at his own lack of redstone expertise. In Last Life, he outright says that it seems to be a running gag for traps to never work, leading to extreme surprise on the rare occasion a trap does work.
- Sequel Escalation: The first season, 3rd Life, lays the bare-bones groundwork for the sequels. The next seasons have twists that make it much harder to survive.
- The first season, 3rd Life, is hard on its own; a small hardcore world with limited resources where you're given three lives. If you aren't the first one to become a Red Life, then you'll have Red Lives at your throat trying to kill you. When you become Red, then you'll have to balance trying to kill people while also surviving yourself.
- The second season, Last Life, has every player randomly generate with 2-6 lives, meaning some players are given a vast disadvantage from the start. Lives can be given, meaning that they're the most valuable — but severely finite — currency on the server. Then there's the Boogeyman mechanic. Each session, at least one non-Red Life is randomly cursed to be a Boogeyman and must kill someone or else they automatically become a Red Life next session. There's also the new rules surrounding the enchanting table. There is one enchanting table set at spawn and players are unable to make any. The table is constantly stolen, traded, held hostage, or profited off of, consequently making enchanting gear and tools a hard task.
- The third season, Double Life, adds the soulmate mechanic. Although the randomly assigned lives, life transfer, and Boogeyman are absent from this season, the new twist ensures that people are twice as likely to die and twice as quick to become Red Lives. Players are randomly assigned a soulmate and the two must share a health bar. It's possible to suddenly die if your soulmate happens to brush too close to a Creeper, but in the case of both soulmates being attacked, the health bar depletes so fast that they're given little time to fight back. The Enchanting Table is given a Difficulty Spike. Like the last season, there's only one, but it's located deep underground in the Ancient City. Not only must players find it, they also must evade the strongest mob in the game, the Warden, or at least make as little sound as possible to not spawn it in (made even more difficult by an addition to Proximity Chat allowing sculk sensors to detect speech when players aren't sneaking). The first session having 4× as many deaths than Last Life's first session (4 versus 1) is a testament to its difficultynote .
- The fourth season, Limited Life, shakes things up greatly. Everyone has at most 24 hours to live, and lose an hour's worth of life if they die, and gain half an hour's worth if they kill someone. That much is simple, including the fact that Yellow Lives can kill Green Lives legally now. And then the Boogeyman system makes a return, with a twist: every Boogeyman kill is worth double the usual amount of life (victim loses 2 hours, killer gains 1), and they drop an entire colour (i.e. up to eight hours' worth of life-time) if they fail to kill someone by the end of the day. By the time the season is over, it has racked up a total death toll of more than the past three seasons combined, which ultimately serves as a testament to its difficulty.
- The fifth season, Secret Life, makes things interesting by giving everyone 30 hearts, but also removes any normal means of healing, meaning any damage taken is permanent. The only way to get health back, aside from receiving a single gifted heart from another player, is to successfully complete the secret task each player gets assigned to them at the start of each session by the Secret Keeper. Some of these tasks are simple and relatively safe to perform, but others are extremely difficult and incredibly likely to force the players to put themselves in danger, with some tasks even requiring players to sabotage or harm other players, regardless of whether they are Red or not. Failing to complete a task results in the player receiving no hearts, but succeeding results in gaining 10 hearts. Players also have the option to re-roll their task in an effort to gain more hearts, but failing a re-rolled task, which is much harder and challenging than a normal task (at times bordering on impossible), will result in the Secret Keeper taking 10 hearts. Add in the fact that Yellows can make Greens fail their tasks simply by correctly guessing them and that Reds, who regularly receive tasks that are meant to harm others, can get multiple tasks in a single session, it's little to no surprise that most of the players learn to be extremely careful with whatever they're doing, as one wrong move, one tiny little mistake such as jumping off a small ledge or not paying attention to their surroundings, could leave them dangerously close to death, with little hope of recovering.
- The Smurfette Principle: Cleo was the only feminine-leaning member of the server during 3rd Life. Later averted with the addition of Pearl and Lizzie in Last Life, and then Gem in Secret Life.
- Sole Survivor: By the Deadly Game premise of the series, the winner of each season is supposed to be the last one standing out of over a dozen server-members. However, the seasons generally play with this:
- 3rd Life ends with Grian pulling a Last Survivor Suicide, and Last Life ends with Scott being killed by supernatural means shortly after his victory before he can pull a Last Survivor Suicide. Secret Life is the only season to play this trope fully straight without an "Everybody Dies" Ending.
- Season 3, Double Life, being built on a Can't Live Without You soulmate gimmick, means it's impossible for one member of a soulmate pair to live without the other, resulting in this trope being functionally impossible. In the end, Scott decides to blow himself up to give Pearl the win, resulting in Pearl dying a split-second after Scott's self-detonation.
- Season 4, Limited Life, plays on a Death's Hourglass mechanism, resulting in an inevitable "Everybody Dies" Ending and making Martyn's status as this temporary.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial:
- Throughout Day 6 of Limited Life, "Cleo" and "Pearl" repeatedly assert they're respectively British and Australian, and that they remember the alliances and events of the series. In actuality, their content creator counterparts couldn't make it to the session and had to be subbed in by the Canadian GeminiTay and the British Lizzie... who are both very, very confused about what's going on.
- On Day 6 of Secret Life, "Tango" also repeatedly asserts he remembers how his alliance, the Heart Foundation, works and the events of past sessions. Once again, he's actually subbed in by Ren and equally confused about what's going on.
- Switching P.O.V.: Every player in the series has uploaded their perspective of the events that unfolded to YouTube, allowing viewers to watch the series from whichever perspective they like.
- Video-Game Lives: The core concept of the series. In 3rd Life, Double Life and Secret Life, everyone has 3 lives, and in Last Life, everyone has between 2 and 6. Once you have one life left, your name turns red and your primary goal is now to kill everyone else. If you die one more time? You're permanently dead, and are now out of the series.
- Yet Another Stupid Death: Because the server is on hardcore, there are plenty of people who die to very stupid and preventable means. For example, Scar became a Red Life in 3rd Life because he sprint-jumped blindly off a cliff, Scott dropped to Yellow in Last Life because he accidentally threw an ender pearl instead of eating food, soulmate duo Etho and Joel were knocked down to Yellow in Double Life because Joel broke the boat that caged an enderman when he tried to kill it, Jimmy got Killed Off for Real in Limited Life because he fell off the edge of Skynet trying to push a TNT minecart, and Mumbo became a Yellow Life in Secret Life by walking off the left side of Gem's diving board.
