Dungeons & Dragons Online

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Nice doggy...

Dungeons & Dragons Online (or DDO) is the MMORPG counterpart to the pen-and-paper game we all know and love/hate (mostly based on edition 3.5). As such, it has all the dice-rolling, kobold-smacking goodness of Dungeons and Dragons, with all the button-mashing, leet-speaking addiction of an MMORPG.

It was launched by Turbine in 2006 as Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach. The game has since been renamed Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited. (The latest[when?] update appears to have removed Eberron Unlimited from the logo, but is still referred to as such in reference materials and on the main website.) It is based in the campaign world of Eberron (yeah, the Magitek one) and is set on the fictional continent of Xen'drik. After years of being a pay-to-play game, it was rebranded as a free-to-play game with premium content that could be accessed by becoming a VIP (which is simply maintaining a paid subscription) or spending Turbine Points on it.

The player character is initially thrust into a plot that involves an evil Devourer cult, sahuagin, a dragon, and a lot of snow.

For additional examples, see Eberron for the general setting, and the Dungeons and Dragons page for general gameplay tropes.

Tropes used in Dungeons & Dragons Online include:
  • Absurdly Sharp Blade: Vorpal weapons.
  • Absurdly Spacious Sewer: ALL of them! Why else would there be monsters down there for you to kill?
  • Actual Pacifist: You get bonus experience for completing a quest without killing anything. Good luck with that.
  • Adjective Animal Alehouse: The Wayward Lobster and The One-Eared Bugbear Inn.
  • Arbitrary Headcount Limit: You can only fit 6 people into a typical party quest. For raids, you're allowed 12 heads.
    • The game tries to justify that in one raid, Zawabi's Revenge, in which the Djinn that teleports you to the quest asserts he only has energy to transport 12 people into the Demon Queen's refuge.
      • You'll need all of them too. It's a 12th level raid, and the end boss is level 22.
  • All Monks Know Kung Fu: The Monk class can follow two prestige paths, both a type of Warrior Monk where you are a Whirling Dervish of punching destruction or a serious bane to undead or extra-planar creatures with some Cleric abilities. The Monks have it cool by using Ki Attacks and not spellpoints (mana) to power their elemental and special attacks.
  • All Trolls Are Different: These ones are tall, green, have tusks, and regenerate from anything and everything unless you hit them with a dose of fire or acid after knocking them out.
  • Allegedly Free Game: Theoretically playable for free after about level 12... but only if you're willing to do a lot of grinding. Or suffer from major Alt-Itis. Which is quite likely.
    • Mind you, you will probably accumulate enough Turbine Points by then to buy an adventure pack. Also,with the new Lordsmarch Plaza free to play chain and some high level free to play quests afer that,you can get that number higher.
  • Alt-Itis: The extensive character customization and the number of paths you can take tends to encourage this in players.
  • An Adventurer Is You: And everyone ELSE, too! Including several of the NPCs, apparently, but they're worse at it than you are.
  • Annoying Arrows: Enemies with ranged attacks are pretty pathetic compared to enemy spellcasters. You can take several arrows to the face and keep going, relying on your magical equipment and lots of hitpoints to keep you alive, but there's not a lot that can save a low-medium level character from a Disintegrate, Harm, or Touch of Death spell.
  • Another Dimension: Shavarath, Xoriat, Dal Quor, and a couple of demiplanes are all accessible as part of quests.
  • Arm Cannon: The Artificers' Rune Arms.
  • Back Stab: The Sneak Attack ability is pretty much the only way for a rogue to do damage. But when they do...
  • Bag of Holding: Including sew-on pockets that can hold fifteen sets of plate mail. And then you can get another inventory page by paying an NPC to craft a broken Portable Hole into a literal pocket dimension.
  • Big Bad: None, really, but the closest the game has are Horoth, the Black Abbot, the Stormreaver, the Devourer of Dreams, and in the near future, Lolth.
  • The Big Guy: The melee classes: Fighter, Barbarian, Paladin, and (to a lesser extent, it depends on the build) Monk. Clerics have a bunch of Hit Points and good armor, and shields, too.
  • Brainwashed and Crazy: Happens a few times.
    • The Cultists in the Korthos Island chain.
      • And their dragon. Upon being freed, she kills her controller and leaves.
    • Near the end of the Maleficent Cabal chain, Yewil d'Phiarlan and her troops are victim to this, and eventually Die As Themselves.
    • The Silver Flame agents who were sent into the Cursed Crypt. Also, if you linger too long in there, the player characters.
    • You find out that this is the case after picking up the first journal in Let Sleeping Dust Lie with regards to the Crimson Feet.
    • The cultists in Lords of Dust.
    • Silver Flame agents again in Wrath of the Flame. By the same person who brainwashed Yewil back in the Big Top.
    • Pretty much any and all Inspired.
    • And finally, in a late-game raid, the Lord of Blades himself, by quori. Though he likely would have tried to kill you on his own anyway.
  • Breast Plate: Averted for the most part; armor for characters in general tends to look more or less the same whether you're playing a guy or a girl. The Armor Appearance kits, on the other hand...
    • After the update that turned the game into Eberron Unlimited, a number of these kind of armors have shown up for female characters. They even vary in... erm, "capacity" depending on race.
  • Bribing Your Way to Victory: Costly flippin' skill books...
  • Capital City: Stormreach in general.
  • Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: Switching armor takes time but swapping between or to robes and outfits is instantaneous.
  • Character Alignment: This matters if you want to use armor of stability (which requires a True Neutral alignment) or a True Law/True Chaos/Pure Good weapon. Or if you're dealing with something capable of dealing alignment damage. Or if you want to be a Paladin/Bard (you can't; paladins must be Lawful Good, bards must be nonlawful.)
    • Evil items will give you a permanent negative level until you take them off, unless you are of neutral alignment.
  • Character Customization: Stat-wise, this is one of the most flexible games on the market. Appearance-wise... maybe not so much.
  • Cheap Gold Coins: The currency in the game is worth a hundred silver to one gold and a hundred coppers to one silver.
  • Class and Level System: Much like D&D 3.5 core.
  • Climbing the Cliffs of Insanity:
    • Jumping (or getting thrown) off of the top of Tempest Spine while wearing a feather-falling item can make you float a really long way. Jumping (or getting thrown) off of the top of Tempest Spire while NOT wearing a feather-falling item can make you die from falling damage, and your teammates are going to be reluctant to come pick up your corpse so you can get your loot, because it is a long way back up, and likely involves running past fields of fire elementals.
    • The Coalescence Chamber in the Vale of Twilight, filled with several very deep shafts, will make the best of friends want to tear each other's throat out and pick-up groups wind up with squelching angry, inexperienced and frustrated players about 90% of the time.
  • Compelling Voice: Bards. Compelling enemies to sit still and listen to your lute (which doesn't even appear in your inventory, let alone contribute to encumbrance), to compelling your allies to feats of Heroism. Also, the Charm/Dominate Person/Monster spells, and Suggestion.
    • Players can earn the items "Voice of the Master" and "Mantle of the Worldshaper" from the quests that the D&D creators narrated. Worn together, the player receives the True Seeing ability (Hello, hidden doors!).
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: At least in terms of computer-controlled casters. They have no spellpoints bar and seem to ignore the cooldown rules on spells that limit a player's spell use, especially obnoxious when the computer caster in question is a healer who can full-heal quickly with their infinite violating the Vancian Magic rule with unlimited spell points. Damage almost never interrupts their spells, either, as if enemies have all of their spells quickened.
    • In a somewhat related note, computer-controlled ally Hirelings have no metamagic feats and thus can't improve any of their spells in a pinch.
      • Hirelings also DO have spell point bars, though typically slightly higher than player characters. The end result? Enemies have unlimited spells, but your party has a cut-off.
  • Convection, Schmonvection: Swimming IN lava causes a moderate amount of fire damage, but nothing serious. But walking right next to it (or on those METALLIC catwalks in the Firebrand Mines and Burning City) seems to have no ill effects.
  • Creator Cameo: Gary Gygax is the DM/narrator in a certain series of quests.
  • Death Is Cheap: Well, except for when it comes to your equipment.
    • Death becomes less cheap when there's no healer and no resurrection shrine nearby. In that case, the only way to revive yourself on the spot is to buy an item from the DDO store.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything? / Double Entendre:
    • The world "Melf" in Melf's Acid Arrow tends to be spelled with the wrong vowel.
    • "We beat them off... this time."
    • Jeets Shimis (speaking to the female cleric Cellimas): "Ha, I still got plenty of stamina! I can go all night long!" Jeets in general has a lot of things to say similar to this, usually related to Cellimas. "Tell her to keep her knickers on." "Don't worry, Cellimas. I'm here to watch your behind, now."
  • Dual-Wielding: Basically the whole point of a melee-based ranger. Any class can do this to varying degrees of success.
  • Dungeon Crawling: Or, with the tumble skill, dungeon rolling or even dungeon backflipping!
  • Dungeon Punk: With a late 2011 update, the world of Eberron reemphasized how Dungeon Punky it is by now filling it with gadgeteers of gears and magic: The Artificer class.
  • Elite Mooks: There seems to be a couple of these in every major dungeon. Commonly referred to by the players as "nameds," or "named monsters" because they have a name and a treasure box.
    • Can be more specifically referred to as "orange-" or, in higher levels, "red-names". Reds are normally "bosses," in the sense that they command the other enemies. Most of them are just Pallet Swaps or regular Mooks.
  • Enemy Mine: Pretty much the entire storyline in the Necropolis quests regarding The Emerald Claw and the Silver Flame.
  • Escort Mission:
    • The crazed, ineffective magic attacks of Coyle, a non-player character you must protect for 15 eternally-long minutes in a Ruins of Threnal quest chain. If he dies, you fail the quest. Keeping the little bastard from attracting any attention that will get himself killed was made a little easier when the game developers allowed players to give Coyle a Tap on the Head as required.
    • Gladewatch Outpost Defense involves protecting the captain of a defense regiment while she defends the outpost from attacking goblinoids and ogres. Oh yeah, and she left her soldiers at home too, so it's just your team and her. Make sure to have at least two healers, since she tends to run off to attack whenever a new enemy spawns. You can try to talk her out of it, but even then you have to make sure she doesn't see anything hostile on the way to wherever you're hiding her.
  • Fake Balance: Rogues get the shallow end of the DPS pool. Sure, sneak attack can do some massive damage, but it doesn't catch up to a fighter's damage output until about level 12, and even then it doesn't work against undead, elementals, oozes, constucts, an enemy with a Fortification (depending on how much it gives) item, or other human players in 1-on-1 PvP.
  • Fan Service Pack: Game updates in late 2010 added armor kits, which allows a player to make their character's armor or clothing more cosmetically exciting, intimidating, or attractive. Female outfits and robes often (among other things) Bare Your Midriff, add a Cleavage Window, or grant a Leotard of Power.
  • Five Races: Eight, actually: Humans, Elves, Halflings, Dwarves, Warforged, Drow (which are like other elves, but with more stat boosts), half-orcs and half-elves.
  • Gadgeteer Genius: The Artificer class.
  • Game Master: A well-voiced narration to help set the tone.
    • One of the quest areas is even GM'd by Gary Gygax himself, and another by fellow D&D creator Dave Arneson.
  • Golem: the Warforged race, a living construct that (paying) players can choose to use. Not-so-nice golems populate the dungeons as well.
  • Go Look At the Distraction:
    • The Intimidate skill. Technically more of a "come here and look at me distracting you," but still.
    • Would be more suited to the Diplomacy skill. "Hey, here's a great idea. Go lodge your axe in my friend's skull instead."
    • Bluff fits even better; it works even when you're alone. Also the best skill for Rogues, because it opens up the target to Sneak Attacks.
  • Good Is Dumb: In the case of the Catacombs, a crypt under the tower of the Silver Flame. You'd think a church dedicated to destroying the undead could deal with an undead infestation in their basement, but no, it's time to call in the adventurers. Adventurers who, by the way, are likely to destroy each and every sarcophagus they find so they get more experience points, and will expect you to pay them with expensive magic items when they're done.
    • The Silver Flame is a bit of a Corrupt Church in places, mired in their own bureaucracy that hobbles them from working as well or as effectively as they could.
    • The Good Is Dumb trope is actually lampshaded by Archbishop Dryden, who refers to the guards as "quarter-wits." At the time he was possessed by his wraith brother, so we don't know how valid this statement is.
    • They also had a rakshasa in their ranks for several years, and no one had a clue.
  • Gotta Catch Em All: Collectibles, trade-able items, quests, favor... take your pick.
  • Highly-Visible Ninja: If your teammate is using the Hide command, you see them crouching with their avatar slightly darkened, and 1-5 luminescent eyes next to them to indicate how much light is hitting them. Also, some enemies will use the Sneak command, with almost no effect due to their pitiful skill checks; you can still tab-target them and hit them just fine.
  • Hit Points: Notably changed from the paper-and-pencil version in that every character starts with the Heroic Durability feat, granting 20 hit points. Toughness's effect is also increased from just 3 HP to 3 HP at 1st level and 1 HP every level thereafter, without losing the stacking ability of the original.
  • Hyperactive Metabolism: Averted. You'll heal Hit Points and Mana naturally when standing around in Stormreach city, but you can drastically increase your regeneration rate for a couple minutes by eating food and drinking juice. Or consuming oil, if you're a Warforged.
  • Ingesting Knowledge: Until a recent update, your character used stat-enhancing books pretty much exactly like this.
  • Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Averted by the characters' ability to jump, or clamber over shorter objects like large crates. Occasionally played straight as part of an...
  • Invisible Wall: There are some places in Stormreach harbor or marketplace that you just can't get your character to go, despite logic. This was made especially evident when Turbine released the Head In The Clouds festive buff; your character can jump insanely high, but if you jump too high you hit your head on Stormreach's invisible ceiling.
  • Kamehame Hadoken: The Touch of Death Ki Attack by dark Monks often kills most enemies in a single strike. Not quite used at a distance, however.
  • Kill It with Fire: Neophyte spell-casting adventurers will throw Walls of Fire at the blink of an eye. That's fine and all until they realize that the enemy AI sets its sights on them and squishes them flat. Not a tactic against Iron Golems (fire heals them) or Devils and Demons (they eat fire for breakfast).
  • Knight Templar: Inquisitor Gnomon of the Silver Flame. He has characters wipe out a shrine to the Sovereign Host. Turns out that he's actually a powerful rakshasa working for the Lords of Dust, so it makes sense that he would try to corrupt any adventurers that pop up.
  • Large Ham: Lars Heyton coincidentally has the same initials as this trope. "Sahuagin SCUM! Keep coming, I won't die that easily!"
    • The DM for the new version of Heyton's Rest is also quite given to hammery.
  • Leeroy Jenkins: Player characters that do a Leeroy in a quest are likely to get themselves (and any guild they represent) a blackballing reputation. While in a quest, a party leader can't dismiss a player, but others may choose not to heal the offending player or even carry his Soulstone (death token) to where he has a chance to revive.
  • Le Parkour:
    • Running around on top of the buildings in the Stormreach marketplace can be kinda fun. It more or less requires a Feather Fall spell of some kind, though.
    • Players with light or no armor and high Jump skills often use this way to get about town very quickly. For Monks, it fits their Wuxia style, obviously.
  • Level Grinding: Thankfully, every character gets bonus experience for doing a quest on any difficulty the first time, and most quests come with 3 or 4 difficulty levels to shake things up a little bit. You also get bonus XP for Breaking everything you can, killing everything you can, not killing anything, not dying, not leaving the quest until it's done, and disabling traps/finding secret doors.
  • Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Just like the original DnD; Fighters (and the like) start off doing respectable damage that increases slowly over time, while wizards go from their 1d6 Magic Missile damage to spamming Quickened Meteor Swarm for 4 times 8d6 damage twice a second, not to mention the crapton of damage boosts they get by that point.
  • Literally Shattered Lives: The common fate of enemies who die to a cold weapon or cold-related spell.
  • Lost Forever:
    • You get one and only one ember weapon per character, and they're non-tradeable. Here's hoping you have some other way to attack with fire or acid when you finally meet some trolls.
    • In a more abstract way, your starting stats. Put too much strength on your wizard? Well, you can either start over or buy a Heart of Wood (rerolling token) and fix those stats.
  • MacGuffin: The entire game is filled with enough of these for an adventurer to open their own shop. From the early-level Seal of Shan-to-Kor, to the three artifacts for the Demon Queen, to the ridiculous Sigil Frame of eight pieces in the last Necropolis quest, this game lives and breathes this stuff.
    • Some of the objects actually do stuff, and others are just valuable.
  • Made of Explodium: Lots of stuff.
    • Trap boxes explode if you fail badly enough when trying to disarm them, certain barrels will explode if you hit them with anything (including but not limited to: your fists, swords or clubs, arrows, crossbow bolts, shurikens, and elemental magic (even ice magic), symbols of fire ignite if you go anywhere near them, and if you kill an enemy with a fire attack, its corpse will light on fire and burn away. Frozen enemies explode into ice fragments.
    • In the "Irestone Inlet" quest, you rig a boat with barrels of gunpowder and light the fuse. It's even possible to do this without the guards on board realizing you're there. Oh, and if you're standing too close to the boat when it blows up, the shockwave pushes you away.
    • Players in the quest "Siegebreaker" encounter an entire room filled with explosive barrels that cascade their explosions. There are two HUGE super-barrels that will outright kill anyone on exploding if the player is on the same plane of the things. The Dungeon Master voice puts a light on this humorously.
    • Also the "Blown to Bits" quest, where the crates of weapons get Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Even has an optional golem boss who offensively uses mines.
  • Magitek: The cranes in Stormreach Harbor, for instance. Also pretty much every light source in the game, except the sun and a few fire pits.
  • Mass Monster Slaughter Sidequest:
    • The Slayer bonus, which gives you experience for killing X amount of enemies in a wilderness instance.
    • Certain dungeon quests, such as "The Butcher's Path," will also have you killing X amount of monsters as one of your objectives on the quest, either as a main objective, or as an optional objective for extra experience.
  • Mechanical Lifeforms:
    • The Warforged, created and given souls by ancient and vaguely defined magic.
    • There's also the Iron Defenders, which Artificers get as pets, and which you fight every now and then.
  • The Medic: Don't leave Stormreach without one. If an enemy comes with his own healer, he's FIRST on your list to kill.
  • Min-Maxing:
    • Find a full-cleric with more than 14 intelligence. Go on, try.
    • Non-divine Drow spellcasters. +2 to intelligence and charisma? They're popular for a reason. Actually, even Clerics might want to play a drow, since they'll get another turning check.
    • Leads to some amusement when a DDO player also plays tabletop D&D, as if they forget which system they're building for they'll turn up with a character sheet that is completely inappropriate for a tabletop game (e.g. a healbot cleric with no strength or combat ability).
  • No OSHA Compliance: House Deneith's trash incinerator, "The Pit," is a multi-level subterranean building dug out around two Lava Pits, which are inhabited by man- and equipment-eating Oozes. The only way to move from one level to the other is to use a network of twisting, railing-less walkways that extend across the lava pits. In addition, the system's "Security System" is really just a series of deadly traps that blast said narrow walkways at 10-second intervals. The system is electrically powered, and the circuit breakers inexplicably channel the electricity through the room they're housed in. In addition, if you turn the trash incinerating furnaces on in the wrong order, you'll blow up half the city. (You can't do this because the rooms unlock in order, but it's stated in the quest introduction)
  • Not the Fall That Kills You:
  • Opening the Sandbox: You leave Korthos and get to Stormreach, and BAM! Look how many quests are suddenly available to you! Then, you play through all the free stuff, and if you decide to upgrade to a premium account, look at how many MORE dungeons you can buy!
  • Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Short, bearded, gruff people who like beer and digging. Except perhaps for the Duergar, who will kill you on sight.
    • Oddly, most NPC dwarves in Stormreach have no facial hair at all and are quite polite. The lore for them plays this straight, though.
  • Our Elves Are Better: Playing a drow for any non-melee-combat-specialized class is what you might call optimized, since they receive more bonus stats than they lose (all other races' stats balance out).
  • Oxygen Meter: Used when you swim. Wearing an amulet or ring of Underwater Action gives you Super Not-Drowning Skills.
  • Platform Hell:
    • "The Pit" quest, again. Two rooms involve platform puzzles. One involves running around on pipes while jets of steam push you backwards and fire elementals shoot at you, but is relatively easy if you are prepared for it. The other one involves co-ordinating at least four team members, two of whom must be simply ludicrous at platforming (jumping some 15 feet horizontally to catch some crosswise pipes and pull yourself up) while your friends on the ground deal with equipment-eating oozes that respawn indefinitely while manipulating the correct valves for the platforming team. Also, if you get hit while using a valve, your action stops. Oozes are immune to almost all status effects and most elemental magic (varies by color)? Oh, and watch out for the hobgoblins with bows, and the room at the top that's full of exploding barrels an ooze drops down in that room and tries to attack you, occasionally igniting the boxes.
    • As stated above, "The Coalescence Chamber." You have to navigate up a winding spiral of narrow ledges while being assaulted by troglodyte snipers and sorcerers. The real pain in the ass here is that jumping will sometimes cause you to be pushed away from the ledge, resulting in a hair-tearing plummet all the way back down to the bottom. Note that it's usually impossible to make your way back up without help from fellow party members because the monsters respawn.
    • "The Tear of Dhakaan" also has a couple platform sections... with most of the platforms trapped. Imagine the surprise of many players who, going in for the first time, realized that their first leap landed them in the middle of an acid spewer.
  • Prestige Class: Just a few of them, and they aren't technically classes, but you can use your action points from levelling up to specialize in one of your class' abilities.
  • Purely Aesthetic Gender: Naturally, this causes several male players to create female characters.
  • Repeatable Quest: Adventures are infinitely repeatable on four different difficulty levels each. The first play on each adventure/difficulty combo gives an array of experience bonuses, while subsequent replays start adding penalties, eventually hard-capping the XP gain at a very low number for extreme repetition. Ironically, it's more efficient to not repeat quests too heavily (except for crafting purposes).
  • Resurrection Sickness: The effects of death will cause more hardship on your spirit (and poor gameplay) if you die repeatedly.
  • Rouge Angles of Satin: To be expected in a "free" MMORPG where one of the playable classes is a rogue.
    • Most commonly seen misspelling in the game's Groups window where help for quests are asked. "How much damage does my powder puff do, again?"
    • Just to be funny, the developers created a quest chain giver in House Phiarlan (a village of elven performers cum spymasters) named "Rouge".
  • Scars Are Forever: Some of the appearance customization are a scar somewhere on the face. Naturally, nothing short of reincarnation (basically reroll, but keep used tomes, equipment and levels) can remove it.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: There are several boss monsters that are or were imprisoned in some fashion. Three of them are arc villains, and can be punched out. The Devourer cult at the beginning of the game tries to release a "Devourer beast" that cannot be punched out, meaning that you have to reverse their efforts to thaw it out.
  • Self-Imposed Challenge: The Perma-Death Challenge.
  • Squishy Wizard: Even with 20 extra hit points at start, it's still not a good idea for most sorcerers or wizards to get into melee, especially at lower levels.
  • Steampunk: Considering the setting, the game has this and Dungeon Punk all over the place, from the low-level The Waterworks and Shan-To-Kor, to the advanced adversaries in the Cannith Manufactuary.
  • Talking Is a Free Action: Ehh... kinda. If you have a microphone, you can talk to your party while you play (sound quality varies). If you stop in the middle of combat to type to your teammates, you're likely to die unless your cleric is particularly competent.
    • Subverted when fighting a boss or mini-boss with dialogue, whom you can kill before they're done with their Monologuing or Evil Gloating. Nothing says Shut UP, Hannibal like a Holy Burst greatsword to the face.
  • Take That: Broccoli or the Beholder?
    • There's rumors that they are making the Broccoli a playable class with veggie themed attacks.
    • There's a quest-giving NPC that asks you to retrieve 10 rat tails. When your character reacts incredulously ("You can NOT be serious!"), the NPC's whole table bursts out laughing. He then gives you the REAL mission.
  • The Undead: They tend to be Goddamn Bats to rogues, because a +5 Holy Shortsword of Disruption is a mite costly at lower levels (and can't be used anyway until you're MUCH higher in character level).
  • Understatement: After you destroy the Quori Mindsunder in "Misery's Peak," the Dungeon Master notes that the dragon you just freed from its power looks "very annoyed" -- as she uses her ice breath on the Mind Flayer that had her under its thrall and turns it into a popsicle.
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Fred, the resident Eldritch Abomination brain-eater/feat retrainer.
  • Useless Useful Spell: Plenty of them:
    • Anything that does stat damage (including all poison and disease effects), which rarely has enough effect to be significant.
    • Turn Undead, which can incapacitate or destroy targets but seldom works on anything powerful enough to be worth fighting in the first place.
    • Fear, which mostly causes weak enemies to run away and thus take longer to kill.
    • Bosses, of course, are largely immune to all three, along with all other forms of instant death, level drain, paralysis, charm, stun, petrification, knockdown and immobilization.
    • As an inversion, however, several of these effects are highly useful against anything that isn't completely immune.
    • Enhancements, spells, and item effects can be used to increase the effectiveness of all three. That said, the spell and equipment slots, as well as the Action Points needed for enhancements, are probably better used for something else unless you're specializing.
  • Vancian Magic: Played straight on points one (spells do one thing and only that one thing) and three (spell levels, caster levels, must rest to recharge spells), averted on point two: spellcasting players have a Mana Meter.
  • Villain Ball: Suulomades apparently grabbed this while planning his attack on Stormreach. As opposed to simply waltzing through a city where not a single living soul is strong enough to take him on, he sends an army of mid-level Mooks to do his dirty work while he was back on Shavarath. This resulted in the devils losing the battle when it could have been won with very little effort.
    • Tremas also does this when he tries to kill Suulomades by aging him to death. Suulomades then does it again while overlapping with Lawful Stupid by taking Tremas to Shavarath to face the prescribed punishment (torture) instead of entering a battle that his much weaker minions are losing.
  • Villain Forgot to Level Grind: Averted. Malicia is the main antagonist of a level 5 story arc, and is also the main antagonist of a level 18 quest. In both cases she is of a higher level than the characters.
  • Walking on Water: Become a Monk, choose the Path of Inevitable Dominion (dark) path, choose the right enhancements and eventually gain the ability to focus your ki to walk (well, run, really) on water (and lava, but you might still take damage). Your Remo Williams and Master Chiun dreams come true.
  • You All Look Familiar:
    • Inverted. The NPCs are fairly varied... it's the player characters who tend to all look the same.
    • The enemy NPCs (i.e. monsters) will all use the same character model. Any given batch of cultists will look an awful lot like any other given batch of cultists.
    • The final quest of Korthos Island has the player (or player in front, if in a party) turn a corner to see several cultists dressed in all white marching in a 2x3 formation. All identical down to walking in step.
  • You Have to Burn the Web: Some of the earlier quests involve webs that block your progress. You can get through them with a cutting weapon, a flaming weapon, or a fire spell... Or any other mundane weapon, or your fists, or any kind of attack spell. It's worth noting though, that the webs WILL simply shrivel away if you light them on fire.
    • The actual Web spell can be burned away with a fireball or burning hands spells or some other fire area effect.
  • Zerg Rush: Kobolds and zombies are fond of this tactic. There is a quest where the player must kill 200 kobolds, who come in large waves.
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