Gameplay and Story Segregation: Difference between revisions

* [[Arbitrary Headcount Limit]] <br />Arbitrary requirement that stops you from having too many characters in a party or unit.

** [[Lazy Backup]] <br />If you're only allowed three out of eighteen party members, and those three are killed, you get a Game Over even though the rest are still alive.

* [[Canon Shadow]] <br />A character or item that seems to be in the party, but other than giving stats, doesn't affect the plot at all.

* [[Commonplace Rare]] <br />When a seemingly common item takes an excessive amount of effort to acquire.

* [[Cutscene Incompetence]] <br />The character can destroy giant monsters in battle, but in cutscenes, they're just normal.

* [[Cutscene Power to the Max]] <br />The character is incredibly powerful - but only in cutscenes; in gameplay, their stats are about average.

* [[Day Old Legend]] <br />Even though you just made that item using the crafting system, its flavor text gives it several hundred years' worth of backstory.

* [[Dude, Where's My Respect?]] <br />You may have saved the world or completed impossible quests, but that won't stop you from being given extremely meager quests and generally treated like crap.

* [[Fight Like a Card Player]]<br />The story has almost nothing to do with cards, but a lot of the gameplay revolves around them.

* [[Follow the Plotted Line]] <br />You somehow always end up where the plot says you should be, no matter how little sense it makes that you should be there.

* [[Improbable Power Discrepancy]] <br />Enemies in RPGs are given statistics based on how powerful you are expected to be at that point, not how strong that enemy would be based on common sense.

* [[Irrelevant Sidequest]] <br />In RPGs, people have an alarming tendency to entrust powerful items to random strangers for doing the most mundane of things, and regardless of whether the stranger has any meaningful level of skill at the random thing in question.

* [[Menu Time Lockout]] <br />The inventory menu allows you to pause the game and change your armour and weaponry to immediate effect in the middle of a battle.

* [[Overrated and Underleveled]] <br />A character introduced as being really powerful ends up, statistics-wise, as being weaker than the main character.

* [[Plot Coupon That Does Something]] <br />A form of aversion of this trope, where a story important item also influences the gameplay.

* [[Plotline Death]] <br />All cutscene deaths are final; your "revive" spells and items won't work here. Nor will you be revived if you have [[Video Game Lives|extra lives left]].

* [[Schrodinger's Player Character]] <br />The game offers multiple characters to choose from with various backstories, but only the character you choose as your PC ever appears in the game.

* [[Selective Condemnation]] <br />The slaughter of a single NPC is a tragedy; the slaughter of [[What Measure Is a Mook?|one thousand]] [[Mooks]] is a [[A Million Is a Statistic|statistic]].

* [[Separate but Identical]] <br />In strategy games, some sub-factions are said to be different in composition, outlook etc., but ultimately only differ [[Palette Swap|in their color palette]].

* [[Simultaneous Warning and Action]] <br />Enemy [[NPC]]s will always attack you, even when they yell things that indicate they're going to arrest you.

* [[Solve the Soup Cans]] <br />A puzzle with bizarre and disconnected elements included in a game purely to serve as an obstacle to the player.

** [[Alphabet Soup Cans]] <br />''Educational'' obstacles that are bizarre and disconnected.

* [[Space Compression]] <br />Lores and tales of the world tell about the history of large cities [[Thriving Ghost Town|in the size of small villages]] and vast lands which can be crossed within minutes on foot.

* [[Statistically Speaking]] <br />No matter how high your strength, speed, etc. goes, you still will not be able to do certain mundane things, like [[Insurmountable Waist High Fence|moving that chair out of your way]]. It must be glued to the floor.

* [[Story Overwrite]] <br />When the storyline ignores, overwrites or [[Retcon|RetCons]] one of the player's in-game accomplishments.

** [[Cutscene Drop]] <br />When a cutscene begins, a character may be "teleported" to where the plot says they should be, rather than where they really are.

** [[No Cutscene Inventory Inertia]] <br />No matter what weapon or armor you have equipped, you will be shown with specific (often default) equipment in [[cutscene]]s.

** [[The Battle Didn't Count]] <br />After beating a boss, instead of dying, he pulls a [[Villain Exit Stage Left]]. Or worse....

*** [[Heads I Win, Tails You Lose]] <br />A boss battle where you get a [[Game Over]] if you lose, but if you win, the boss activates ''his'' [[Cutscene Power to the Max]] and overrides it.

* [[Take Your Time]] <br />You can take as long as you want to finish your sidequests, and that [[Final Fantasy VII|world-destroying meteor]] will just hang in the sky till you're done.

** [[Continue Your Mission, Dammit!]] <br />Even given the above, [[Stop Helping Me!|Helpful]] NPCs will constantly remind you that you "need" to keep going.

* [[Took a Shortcut]] <br />You spent all that time going through the dungeon and beating all the puzzles, so how the heck did those NPCs get here first?

* [[Video Game Lives]] <br />If mentioned in the plot, [[This Is Reality|death is treated as permanent]].

* [[Video Game Time]] <br />Fake use of a time scale means that empires rise and fall in the time it takes to take the trash out.

* [[Timed Mission]] <br />When a mission is timed without presenting any reason for it in the story.

** [[Always Close]] <br />The cutscenes that follow a [[Timed Mission]] don't reflect the actual amount of time the player had left to complete it; they always treat it as if the player escaped at the very last second.

* [[You Have Researched Breathing]] <br />You have to research things that have no logical reason to even ''need'' to be learned.