The TVTropes Trope Finder is where you can come to ask questions like "Do we have this one?" and "What's the trope about...?" Trying to rediscover a long lost show or other medium but need a little help? Head to Media Finder and try your luck there. Want to propose a new trope? You should be over at the Trope Launch Pad.
Find a Trope:
resolved I also live in ANONYMOUS_PROXY Videogame
There's a thing I've seen in videogame RP Gs, where whatever name the player chooses turns out to be relevant to the plot, or whatever random sequence a player chooses means the character has some hidden knowledge.
For instance, an intro to a game:
- King: what's your name, young man?Hero: My name is...(player is taken to the name choice menu)Hero: Dickbutt420.King: Dickbutt420? Our oldest legends tell a hero with that name will come to deliver us from our opressors!
And so on...
Edited by Mac_Rresolved Hivemind Damage Boss Videogame
A videogame boss made of multiple parts, where hurting enough of one part makes the entire boss die, even if there's no plot explanation for it.
resolved Fine-tuned Difficulty Adjustment Videogame
While some games have difficulty levels, others are more fine-tuned such that you can customize specific aspects of a game to suit your preferred difficulty level. For example, To the Rescue! lets you adjust the speed of the In-Universe Game Clock and the rate at which diseases spread across dogs. Is there are specific subtrope for this since Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels are for difficulty levels with different names from the standard?
resolved What is this gambit trope? Videogame
So when playing The Room VR: A Dark Matter, one plot point had a gambit. Let me explain: [[spoiler the detective (aka. the player character) stumbles across the Hedgewitch's hut and has to solve all the puzzles. After that's done, the Hedgewitch deliberately traps her own soul in an artefact that the Craftsman wants to collect. After placing all of the artefacts on an altar that the Craftsman presented and he remarks in a note that it was foolish for the Hedgewitch to make use of the artefact and betrays the Detective. The Hedgewitch's soul breaks out of one of the artefacts and guides the detective to an Egyptian temple where they can trap the Craftsman and trap his soul in an artefact]].
resolved Games that are usually played with mods Videogame
Is there an Audience Reaction for games where playing them without GameMods is relatively uncommon? Or at least ones with a particularly expensive modding community? I can think of off three examples off the top of my head: Cities: Skylines, Kerbal Space Program, and Neverending Legacynote made by Orteil of Cookie Clicker fame. A lot of the time when you see someone playing these games fully vanilla, it's because they just started out and therefore either aren't aware of or are overwhelmed by how many mods are available.
resolved About... pets that have various effects Videogame
Castle Crashers have Animal Orbs, which are the pet companion system of the game, and there are various type of effects for these, however based on a topic I asked in Ask the Tropers, It cannot be classified under Fighter Mage Thief, let alone as Character Class System due to no proper classifications for those animals. However I doubt it might be still possibly another trope due to each animal orb giving various type of effects ranging from simply stat changes, utility or even help attacking enemies. How should we properly describe this one?
Edited by JustNormalMusicLoverresolved Help on redefining character trait for Medicine. Videogame
Touhou Kaeidzuka ~ Phantasmagoria of Flower View might have a problem with defining a character's violent reaction to humans in general, and currently it is listed as Straw Nihilist but I'm not sure if that's the correct trope.
Wouldn't this description would fit more in bills of Fantastic Racism?
Or does it fit in another trope instead of either of these two?
Edited by JustNormalMusicLoverresolved Hunger meter Videogame
Is there a trope for when there's a bar that shows how hungry you are and fills back up when you eat food? I can't find it on the Stat Meters index. I have 3 examples so I could pitch it to TLP if it's not here already
Edited by moefoxesresolved Resource Cards Videogame
I am trying to find a trope about card games that have certain cards that are used as resources for casting spells, summoning monsters, etc. I can think of three examples:
- Magic The Gathering has Mana cards that need to be drawn from the deck and then tapped to cast a spell or summon a creature.
- Future Card Buddyfight has the Gauge where players can charge it with one card per turn so they can play spell cards.
- Force Of Will used Magic Stone cards that are drawn from a separate deck to make Will and Will is used for summoning a Resonator, playing a Chant, playing an Addition, or activating an ability.
resolved matryoshka mook Videogame
do we have a trope for enemies that split apart into smaller versions of themselves?
Edited by masterpenguresolved No final boss fight Videogame
Is there a trope for when a game which does have boss fights in general (so no Life Sim, Sports Game etc.) does not have a final boss fight at all and the game just ends? I know there is No Final Boss for You, but it has the constraint that it's up to a player's decisions in the game that the actual boss fight is denied to him. I know of two games which fit this description, the Ice Age 2 PS 2 game and, more recently and way more notably, It Takes Two.
Thank you in anticipation!
resolved The Most Terrifying Sound Videogame
A trope for sounds in video games that cause experienced players to get scared. (e.g. the Cloaker's scream from Payday 2, or the hiss of a creeper from Minecraft that is about to explode.)
Edited by masterpenguresolved Enemy in the wrong place Videogame
What's the trope name for where a Roaming Enemy or Mook in a video game, ends up in a location where it shouldn't be? For example, an aquatic monster appearing in a desert area. Sometimes this is Played for Laughs like the 'regretful eskimo' appearing inside a volcano stage in the Megaman Sprite Comic video game.
resolved Defib Debuff Videogame
When a character who has undergone Critical Existence Failure and subsequent Combat Resuscitation receives an indefinite debuff that can only be removed by going out of the player's way to address the issue (e.g. Medical Attention, resting out of combat, expending resources). Serves as a mitigation to Critical Existence Failure - the character fights at full effectiveness down to their last hit point, but losing that hit point represents a major injury that impedes their effectiveness.
Examples:
- In Pillars of Eternity characters have two health bars that simultaneously take damage from attacks: Health, representing overall bodily integrity that is the much larger of the two, but can only be restored with rare, limited abilities or by resting at an inn/campfire and Endurance, a smaller pool representing short-term fighting spirit which can be easily restored by consumables and abilities. If a character loses all their Endurance but has Health remaining then they will fall unconscious until either they are revived by a party member or when the current combat ends after which they will receive an Injury: a status condition that reduces their stats and/or defences and cannot be mitigated or removed until the party rests. Similarly, if a character loses all their Health, then they will revive after combat ends with a Mortal Wound, severely debuffing them, limiting their Health and Endurance to 1, and dying permanently if they go down again which can also only be removed via resting.
- In Darkest Dungeon Losing all a character's HP doesn't incapacitate them, but applies the Death's Door condition - severely reducing their stats and giving each subsequent attack a chance to kill them outright. Raising their HP back above 0 will replace the Death's Door condition with Death's Door Recovery, a less severe stat debuff that can only be removed by certain limited camping skills or between missions.
resolved Show-Your-Work Gameplay Videogame
A puzzle in a videogame can only be solved if the character knows the answer In-Universe - meaning, if the player knows the answer beforehand, he still has to go through the motions of having the character 'discover' it. For instance, in Resident Evil, there's a code to unlock the room with chemicals to kill that giant plant. no matter what combination the player presses, the room won't unlock until the character goes to the pool room and 'learns' what the solution is.
resolved The reset thing in Crush Crush Videogame
Do we have a trope for when you can reset a game in the middle to get benefits like speeding it up (like soft reset in Crush Crush)?
resolved Meta-puzzle Videogame
Contrary to intuition (because the majority of the puzzles in the game are standalone), you can't solve this level yet because
- The solution partially resides within another level
- The entire level needs to be manipulated from the overworld
- The overworld is the puzzle and the level is one part of its solution
resolved I'll be leaving right after you walk out the door Videogame
An early Japanese Role-Playing Game trope and a form of Gameplay and Story Segregation - after triggering a reaction from an NPC, the character is supposed to leave the location and show up somewhere else... but he doesn't. He'll just say something about being on his way, or urge you to hurry. Then, you'll see the character on the other location, having "walked" there while you weren't looking.
Of course, what happened is the game's programming isn't sophisticated enough to actually show the sprite moving out of the room and arriving somewhere else, you're just supposed to accept he moved through a different path. Also happens with characters that aren't represented by a sprite.
resolved Unwinnable Battle Videogame
A trope for when you are put into a fight which you cannot possibly win, and your only choice is to run/die, like the ending of Halo Reach, or the sequence in Black Ops 3 where there are endless waves of androids that you need to escape from by hiding in a garage.

Is there a trope for a videogame boss that's considered hard or annoying not because he's deadly, but because he runs/teleports so often it's almost impossible to land a hit on him? So the difficulty for the player isn't really to avoid dying, but to beat him before running out of time or resources?
I mean 'cowardly' not as a characteristic of the character, but as something perceived by players.