Invulnerable Civilians: Difference between revisions

* Annoyingly averted in ''[[Star Trek Online]]''. While players can't target [[NPC|NPCs]], and enemies will rarely attack them directly, they can take friendly fire (especially in the form of [[Area of Effect|AoE]] attacks) and die. This is especially irritating with plot-critical [[NPC|NPCs]], who MUST be unarmed. Whereas in Cryptic's missions, plot critical [[NPC|NPCs]] are often invulnerable, in the UGC (User created) missions, they can't be made invulnerable. If the plot for your UGC mission requires combat in an area populated by civilians, there's a pretty good chance that an unskilled player can render the mission [[Unwinnable]] by getting important [[NPC|NPCs]] killed in their crossfire.

* [[Justified]] with Namingway in ''[[Final Fantasy IV]]'''s DS remake: he has the ability to always appear in whatever location the story mandates your party to visit next, complain about his current situation, find a new calling, change his name to <Insertcurrentsituationhere> way and ask Cecil to help him out in some way and possibly reward him somehow, in no particular order. Said locations are invariably filled with lots of dangerous monsters, and the one time you actually need to fight him a good way into the game, he only has a measly 32 HP. So how does he survive? Simple: after you complete his subplot and find him in one of the randomly chosen locations afterwards, he gives you his good luck charm that he's apparently carried with him the entire time: a Safe Travel augment, which eliminates all random encounters. The game doesn't bother to elaborate if the very first monsters he runs into afterwards kill him brutally or if he barely manages to escape to a nearby town, realizes the danger he's been in the entire time and spends the rest of his life sobbing in the corner of a nearby inn.

* The webcomic ''[[RPG World]]'' lampshades this trope (just like it does for every single other video game trope in existence), in [http://rpgworldcomic.com/d/20021027.html this comic].

* In ''Might & Magic VI'', if you lured monsters into town, they'd continue attacking you, but would completely ignore the townspeople walking around (funnily enough, the townspeople would be happy to attack ''you'' if you start killing them).