Check for leakage: Bag Of Spilling

A nearby topic mentions that while Bag of Spilling, as written, can only occur between multiple installments, it may be picking up some mis-interpretation as any loss of items/powers, even within single installments (the name is a counterpart to Bag of Sharing, which by definition occurs within single installments).

Let's get a check on this, shall we? At 357 wikilinks and 1,293 inbounds ... this sample roughly covers the ol' ptitle and "The" ranges of related articles.

Correct (or mostly so)

• Gargoyles Quest
• Götterdämmerung (Metroid example)
• Hunter The Reckoning
• Metroid Other M
• No More Heroes 2 Desperate Struggle
• The Legend Of Zelda Majoras Mask (mixed contexts)
• You Shouldn't Know This Already
• The Decline Of Video Gaming (parodying Metroid)
• The Force Unleashed
• FanFic.The Legend Of Eevee
• The Legend Of Zelda C Di Games
• The Spellcasting Series
• The Spoony Experiment (Discussed)
• The Witcher

Nothing less than misuse

• Frontlines Fuelof War: "Each mission comes in two halves, and everything you had before the loading screen is gone after it."
• Pokemon Black And White (describes how Gen IV Mons can't hold items when being transferred to Gen V)
• The Battle Of Olympus (describes a penalty for in-game dying)
• The Computer Is a Lying Bastard (EVO Search For Eden example)
• The Heroes Of Olympus
• The Last Stand
• The Legend Of Zelda Four Swords Adventures (single installment)
• The Maw (single installment / between levels)
• The Problem with Licensed Games (Bloodwings: Pumpkinhead's Revenge)
• They Hunger
• Thief (between levels)

Ambiguous

• The Book Of Stories OCT
• The Karate Kid (non-videogame, but between installments)
• The Law Of Ueki (non-VG, between installments)
• The Massive Multifandom RPG
  • Characters.The Massive Multi Fandom RPG Season One
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon (Metroid Prime 2 example)

No context

• The Legend Of Kyrandia

Okay, so we've got 14 correct and 11 bad, plus 7 others that need further inspection — a 44% misuse ratio.

edited 14th Oct '11 10:49:32 PM by Stratadrake

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

Yeah, that's bad. It's supposed to be a Sister Trope to Warring Without Weapons, which is currently under repair for a nonindicative title. I was misusing it myself until I saw that discussion, at which point I fixed First Encounter Assault Recon's usage.

If we can't find a way to adequately differentiate the two titles, I'd say merge 'em.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

How good a name is the redirect(Equipment Reset Button)? We could also go with Sequel Equipment Loss.

Yeah, unwritten rule number one: follow all the unwritten procedures. - Camacan

Some of the strategy game examples may also be Re Inventing The Wheel.

Maybe we should expand it. The title does seem pretty broad.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

Not only does the title seem broad, but it's functionally the same trope, merely applied in different circumstances.

Specifically: Bag of Spilling, right now, is a video game trope in which the player is derived of the upgrades/weapons they acquired previously and which they then have to regain (or acquire alternative versions of). At the start of a new game.

That last part is pretty much extraneous. There's no difference in the application of this Trope when it happens at the start of a game, compared to when it happens in the middle.

It differs from Warring Without Weapons in that that trope descibes a section of a game where you're no longer able to rely on the way you've been playing so far. The Bag of Spilling trope instead describes a single moment or event, which resets you to what you were like at the start of the (previous) game. A Warring Without Weapons section may start with a Bag of Spilling moment, but both tropes can also happen separately from each other. (I even encountered a few games that end a Warring Without Weapons section with a Bag of Spilling moment in which you lose the abilities you used in place of weapons after you get your weapons back).

So yeah. Expand the Trope, don't confuse the issue by lumping incidences of Bag of Spilling in with Warring Without Weapons which is a separate Trope in it's own right, just because they don't happen at the start of the game.

(editted to fix a spelling mistake)

edited 16th Oct '11 6:18:37 AM by Robrecht

Angry gets shit done.

I'm fairly sure that not having the equipment and abilities a character could be assumed to have at the start of a game isn't the same trope as them actually being taken away.

Yeah, unwritten rule number one: follow all the unwritten procedures. - Camacan

The Metroid Prime 2 example on The Very Definately Final Dungeon is correct but needs more context. I'll take a crack at it when I'm not half asleep

My troper wall

^ I classed it as "ambiguous" because while MP 2 does have a Bag of Spilling as currently defined (no Ice/Wave/Plasma Beam or Gravity Suit mod) but everything else Samus kept from MP 1 (Grapple, Space Jump, Spider Ball, etc.) is explicitly stolen by the Ing in the first chapter, which is not the current definition.

Regardless of what the ideal name for it is, "items/skills collected in one game do not carry over to its sequel" is not lumpable with "items/skills are stolen or disappear during the plot".

edited 14th Oct '11 10:57:40 PM by Stratadrake

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

I agree. Those two concepts are not lumpable. One is an adaptation trope. The other is a form of Fake Difficulty.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Yes. With many franchise installments the acquisition of new skills/abilities is a central gameplay mechanic (especially to the Metroid Vania): Each new ability you acquire expands the area you can explore, and by carefully staging what order you pick up these abilities in the developers can predict (and control) what order you'll progress through the game, without having to do so explicitly. They don't want you, for example, Sequence Breaking the entire game by using some item from the previous installment to reach The Very Definitely Final Dungeon Where It All Began.

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

Also, not to distract from the main point of this thread, but the page is a natter nest. I'm pretty sure a review of the FX show Justified wouldn't use the word "justified" more often than this page.

@3 The redirect is apt, but I'm inclined to believe that it would lead to Trope Decay (since that suggests that it could happen within the same game) in addition to only covering half of the trope (skills and abilities also fall into this trope; Final Fantasy X 2 manages to show this off when Yuna suddenly doesn't remember how to cast Curaga in addition to misplacing all the gear that she picked up during the pilgrimage in Final Fantasy X).

Honestly, I'm tempted to just say merge this and Warring Without Weapons under this trope name. I think the difference between the two (one installment or two) is too granular to matter.

Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.

The definitions are not mergeable. But making "Bag of Spilling" a Super-Trope that encompasses the definitions might be an option.

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

Eh, I don't think Supertrope really works. They hardly have anything in common. I mean these are not the same thing:

• All your gear is temporarily taken for a mission as a form of Fake Difficulty.
• An Adaptation Trope where your character starts every new game in the series without any of the things you gained in the last game.

They're hardly related other than both being video game tropes.

edited 15th Oct '11 2:00:09 PM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

^ Not how Fake Difficulty works, but otherwise yes.

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

Technically there are two reasons for it. One is to justify De Powering the hero for gameplay reasons; the other appears in games like F.E.A.R. 3 where you can start a session at any chapter and therefore the game can't make assumptions about what you ended the last one with.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

The main difference, as pointed out in the Warring Without Weapons repair discussion, between this Trope and that one is that Bag of Spilling resets the player to their 'starting position' (be it that of the current game or a previous instalment of the series) and then has them gradually rebuilding their 'arsenal', while Warring Without Weapons is a single section of the game that starts by taking away stuff (usually to the point where the player has less to work with than they started with) and ends by giving stuff back.

Baldur's Gate 2 for instance starts off not with Bag of Spilling, but Warring Without Weapons, since it doesn't reset characters back to level 1, but instead steals all their gear and gives a portion of it back afterwards. The player does not so much spend the rest of the game rebuilding their 'arsenal' as they continue on with the same 'arsenal' after a section where some of their toys are taken (you quickly get a lot of stuff that's equal to or better than the stuff you lost).

Right now there's a lot of confusion between the two tropes because Bag of Spilling is limited to new games in a series and thus any instance where a character is (re)set to 'starting' condition during a game rather than at the start is labelled as Warring Without Weapons even though that's a different trope from what's actually happening. This is especially bad when a new game in an established series uses the 'arsenal' acquired in the previous game as A Taste of Power before taking it away, because you will then find people putting it under Warring Without Weapons, simply because the Bag of Spilling moment (which it is) doesn't happen right at the start of the game.

Angry gets shit done.

Maybe we need to rename the trope along the lines of Sequel Character Reset.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

@Rob: I've lost track of what I wanted to reply to you with, so if I may hit a random note instead....

Sequels that feature a different hero from the previous installment (optionally with different setting, e.g. Pokemon) are not applicable*

to be listed for the Bag of Spilling as defined. Even when it does, the character doesn't necessarily go out to acquire all the same skills/powers because part of the draw for a sequel is the acquisition of new skills/powers (though a number of skills/powers will nonetheless be comparable to the old ones).

But anyway. If we want to do a Trope Transplant with a new definition for "Bag of Spilling" and the current definition somewhere else, I can go with that.

edited 15th Oct '11 7:39:28 PM by Stratadrake

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

I'd agree with the displacement. Not so much, though, because I think the name of the Trope somehow matters as that 'At some point in the game your stuff gets taken away, resetting you to your basic abilities' is a Sub-trope of 'Somewhere in the game your stuff gets taken away'.

'At the start of the game, your stuff gets taken away, resetting you to your basic abilities (from the previous game)' is a sub-trope of both.

And since Bag of Spilling (being a pun on Bag of Holding) isn't, as a name, indicative of it happening at the start of the game it's better as a name for either of those Supertropes.

Warring Without Weapons, meanwhile (whatever they rename it) is also a subtrope of 'Somewhere in the game your stuff gets taken away', but not of the other two.

edited 17th Oct '11 10:02:26 AM by Robrecht

Angry gets shit done.

Bump

B-Bump.

Clocking due to lack of non-bump-related activity.

Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.

I think we could just broaden the trope's description (to not require it to be at the game's beginning) and call it a day. All examples should fit in that broadened description.

Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!