From the original YKTTW
, in reference to a proposed Dresden Files example that sounded more like When All You Have Is a Hammer…:
A. A choice. B. A stupid, irrational decision to pick the worst possible choice. (Well, a decision that may appear irrational. I suppose if the character is a Magnificent Bastard they may have a convoluted reason for picking it, it'd still be this trope, it just has to appear to be the worst possible skill in their repretoire they could pick).
This trope isn't just, "he only has fire spells, and gets called out on it." It's more of "you have lightning spells, you have ice spells, you have goddamn Nuclear Mega Fusion Destructicon Ultimate Meteor Blast and, on the goddamn water mage, you chose to use FIREBALL of all things." Now the trope would be an example if he, frequently, was learning new spells, and despite the fact that he frequently comes up against fire resistant enemies, or knows that he will definitely, very soon, come into a situation in which fire is useless, still chooses to not learn a new element of spell (until later), it would be this trope.
On the plus side, the sponsor acknowledged that the trope wasn't necessarily about Elemental Powers even as they adopted the Elemental Ignorance name, only adopting it as the best suggested name to that point. (A lot of the suggested names followed the You Fail X Forever snowclone pattern that had only recently been deprecated.)
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I didn't even realize Poor, Predictable Rock was a trope. That does read like the more objective version of what this is trying to cover. I also agree that When All You Have Is a Hammer… seems to over the more broader concept I brought up, especially given that the original drafter didn't even mean to make it Elemental Powers specific anyways. I think a merge into Poor, Predictable Rock makes the most sense and I'll get on a wick check to prep it for TRS.
ETA: oh it's only wicked to 19 pages. Cut or merge then.
Edited by amathieu13 on Jun 1st 2023 at 9:36:30 AM
So for related TRS reasons, I was looking at Elemental Ignorance and reading it over, I can't tell if this is actually a thing or not.
The description (don't refer to the laconic which isn't fully correct per usual) is seemingly that an Elemental Power user chooses to fight in a situation at which they are at a disadvantage. Disregarding that "character chooses to fight in a situation in which they are at a disadvantage" need not be limited to Elemental Powers, there's already some murkiness.
Take this line from paragraph 2:
This doesn't read like the character is choosing un-ideal fighting conditions, or rather, what's influencing the choice has nothing to do with the fighting conditions. It's a bad matchup, but that info seems like a non-factor to the character's choice. And many of the on page examples read like Fridge Logic.
Edited by amathieu13 on May 31st 2023 at 8:41:41 AM