Basic Trope: A single drug affects different people in exactly the same way, despite differences in size, body mass, constitution, etc.
- Straight: Carol serves Alice and Bob a mug of poisoned coffee each. Alice and Bob die within seconds of each other, even though Bob is twice the size of Alice and Alice drank far more of the coffee than Bob.
- Exaggerated: Alice ingested an infinitesimally small dose of cyanide, while Bob was injected with several hundred times the lethal dose for a human being. Alice is young and in excellent shape, while Bob is old and frail. Alice is an elephant and Bob is a mouse. Nevertheless, they both die within half a second of each other.
- Downplayed:
- Carol serves Alice and Bob poisoned coffee. It's mentioned later on that they died within a short space of time from each other, but it's never specified exactly how long this space of time was. Both drank most of their coffee, and Bob is just a little bit taller and heavier than Alice.
- Underdosing makes it more likely a drug can be shrugged off but its effects saturate. Meaning a "standard dose" is just one which uses overkill amounts.
- Justified:
- Instead of cyanide, Carol used some fictional poison, with some impressive-sounding Technobabble to justify how it can kill multiple people at the same time, regardless of their size, body mass or how much of the poison they consumed.
- It is explicitly a magical spell bound to the ingredients. The only proportional limits are how much energy the caster can put out and the maximum amount that the reagents may hold.
- Inverted: Carol serves the poisoned coffee to Alice and Bobbi, who are identical twins with exactly the same height, weight and constitutions, and who drink the same amount of coffee. Nevertheless, there's an hour-long interval between Alice's death and Bobbi's.
- Subverted: Carol serves poisoned coffee to Alice and Bob. Shortly afterwards both of them start coughing and clutching at their chests, and within seconds both are dead. Except that Bob was just having an unrelated cardiac arrest, and is fine a few minutes later.
- Double Subverted: ... then it turns out Alice is Not Quite Dead. Immediately afterwards the poison takes effect, and Alice and Bob die within a few seconds of each other.
- Parodied:
- Carol makes a big pot of coffee for a hundred guests and adds a little drop of poison in it. All guests die, even the ones who just sniffed their coffee.
- Alice and Bob both start coughing and clutching at their chests shortly after taking a sip of Carol's poisoned coffee. It turns out that this is not due to the poison. Carol's coffee is just that awful.
- Zig Zagged: Carol serves poisoned coffee to Alice, Bob and Drew. Alice drank her cup whole, while Bob and Drew took no more than a few sips. Alice and Bob die, while Drew just falls ill.
- Averted: Carol serves poisoned coffee to Alice and Bob. The effects of the poison are portrayed realistically, and Alice dies much sooner than Bob does.
- Enforced:
- The creators had intended to portray the effects of the drug realistically, but the meddling executives thought it'd be more dramatic to have Alice and Bob both die within a few seconds of each other.
- It's a video game where you play as Carol. A prototype of the game had a mechanic that forced you to match the doses to the victims' constitutions. However, it was removed because test players found it annoying and felt that it was not a meaningful test of their skills.
- The creators wanted to teach the audience about what medicine(s) to use without encouraging them to exceed nonprescription dosages.
- Lampshaded:
- "How come they died so quickly? Bob's twice the size of Alice, and he barely touched his coffee!"
- "We will poison those idiots. Here, have these two pills, they will work no matter what the dose is!"
- Invoked: Carol is a Mad Scientist who designs the poison so that its effect is the same regardless of the dose.
- Carol specifically makes sure the anesthetic breaks down to something harmless when concentration gets too high in a subject's body to keep it a knock out drug instead of a lethal toxin.
- Exploited: Carol decides to add a very small amount of poison in Alice and Bob's coffee. Not only does she succeed in killing them, she has enough poison left to kill Drew, Eric and Fred...
- Defied: Carol decides not to poison Alice and Bob with coffee, and lets them drink coffee alone in a room while she is filling it with poison gas.
- Discussed: "I do suspect Carol, but that pesky doctor said he sold her only half of a gram of poison! This should not be enough to kill two grown-up people!"
- Conversed: "What was the screenwriter thinking? Does not he know how poison works?"
- Implied: Carol serves Alice and Bob poisoned coffee. Their deaths aren't shown, but their dead bodies are found next to the chairs they sat on. This suggests that they collapsed and died within seconds of each other - after all, if one collapsed much earlier than the other, the other would rush to help.
- Played For Laughs: Alice and Bob drink their poisoned coffee with seemingly no ill effects - at least until Carol starts describing the symptoms of the poisoning, and they simultaneously experience them in exactly the sequence Carol is describing.
- Played For Drama: Alice finishes her coffee and notices that something is horribly wrong. She clutches her chest, starts coughing and barely manages to tell Bob to get her some help, or at least seek medical attention for himself if she doesn't make it. Then she looks up and realizes that Bob is doing just as poorly as she is.
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