Level-Locked Loot/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Items of equipment have requirements that must be met in order to use them.

  • Straight: The Sword of Troperism requires the user to be at least level 42.
  • Exaggerated: ...and also requires high Stamina, high Strength, high-ranked Weapon Focus: Sword, and a light-side alignment
  • Justified: The Sword is an Empathic Weapon that refuses to be wielded by a wimp.
  • Inverted: Far from having strength requirements, the Sword actually strengthens the wielder, and may even be an Upgrade Artifact.
  • Subverted: To obtain the sword, you need to do a quest, which requires level 42. However, you can also just buy it from another player, and you can wield it at any level.
  • Double Subverted: You still need level 42 to use the sword's transformation power, which is the sword's one and only worthwhile aspect.
  • Parodied: The item appears in an RPG Mechanics Verse, and the characters actually talk about needing to Level Up to use it.
  • Deconstructed: There is nobody mighty enough to wield the Sword of Troperism, and eventually it goes to rust.
  • Reconstructed: The Chosen One who can wield it takes it to the Ultimate Blacksmith and gets it repaired.
  • Zig Zagged: Some items have requirements, some don't, some only have them on certain days of the week, and you can never find out any of this.
  • Averted: The Sword has no requirements for use.
  • Enforced: The dev team wanted to make sure that a player couldn't somehow acquire the Sword at level 6 for an instant Disc One Nuke.
  • Lampshaded: "So with 291 strength I can't even lift it, but if I had 300 strength I could wield it like a master? What's with this thing?!"
  • Invoked: Emperor Evulz forged the Sword and designed it to require an impossibly high-level wielder, knowing that the Hero will one day discover it but find it useless against him.
  • Exploited: Evulz makes this unusable sword to be his contractually-required Achilles' Heel, effectively making himself invincible.
  • Defied: The Sword is made specifically to be usable by weak characters.
  • Discussed: "Oh great, now my character has a sword that he's two levels too weak to use."
  • Conversed: "Oh great, now I have a sword that I'm two levels too weak to use."
  • Played For Laughs: The character finds out that after all that questing, he can't actually use the Sword he got from all this and has a comical Heroic BSOD.
  • Played For Drama: Something horrible happens to a low-level character because he wasn't strong enough to wield the Sword when he needed to.
  • Plotted A Good Waste: "Becoming powerful enough to use the Sword" forms an entire plotline or story arc.

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