Basic Trope: Well known meta concepts given different names to stand out.
- Straight: A Life Meter is referred to as "stability", and the status for being dead is "buckled over".
- Exaggerated: The words for life meters and death are Perfectly Cromulent Words.
- Downplayed: A life meter is referred to as "well-being", and the status for being dead is "out cold".
- Justified:
- Just saying "HP" and "dead" would make the game too much like a standard RPG.
- "buckled over" refers to the period between (seemingly) dying and being pronounced dead by a doctor. note
- Inverted: The Superboss's incredibly complicated health system is presented with simple terms like "hit points".
- Subverted: "Stability" is actually the name of a secondary life bar representing mental stability, or the accuracy of spells being casted. The normal life bar is just titled "health".
- Double Subverted: "Buckled over", however, is always the term for being dead.
- Parodied: A life meter is referred to as "set of symbols indicating how many attacks the character may endure" and the status for being dead is "state in which the character can no longer act".
- Zig Zagged: Terms flop back and forth. An Auto-Revive may be described to "automatically heal and bring back a character once they are dead", while the combat system may refer to being dead as "buckled over".
- Averted: Well-known concepts use normal terms, even if in-universe concepts don't.
- Enforced:
- "We're making a bizarre game, so we need bizarre terms for things, no matter how well-known those things are."
- "We need to remove mentions of death for a lower rating, so call dying "buckling over."
- Lampshaded:NPC: Careful. If your stability drops to nothing, you'll find yourself buckled over.
Bob: Uh, you mean "dead"? - Invoked: A character under the influence of Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness temporarily becomes leader of the Player Party, causing most standard in-game terms to become more verbose.
- Exploited: The protagonist, while knowingly being spied on, refers to his "stability," misleading the spy about what he was describing.
- Defied: A character who paints the medium, when involved in any sort of battle, will usually scratch out "buckled over" when it appears and write "dead" over it.
- Implied: Next to the protagonist's health meter, "STB." is written, but it is never said what this stands for.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: "So instead of saying how much health you have, it's saying how much stability you have. Is quirky terminology a selling point for games these days?"
- Played For Laughs: Life meters are called “Meters of Potential Ouch”, and being dead is called “Definitely Just Napping”.
- Played For Drama: Being dead is called “sleeping”, because most of the party members are children, and the leader of the party doesn’t want them to be sad when their friends die.
Exit to Reference a Life Meter as a "Fnord"
