Basic Trope: The guards are really, really stupid.
- Straight: Emperor Evulz' guards fail to notice obvious things and only investigate for intruders when someone's right in front of them.
- Exaggerated: The heroes practically walk into the Emperor's front door unaccosted by guards — they only get suspicious after the heroes kill several of their coworkers in front of them. And even then, it's only to ask, "Hey, what's the big deal?"
- Downplayed: They fire when the heroes arrive, but ignored the mysterious camera flashes that allowed the heroes to come in the first place.
- Justified:
- The guards don't actually care about their employer. Or they actually are crazy.
- Emperor Evulz didn't bother to do background checks with his employees.
- Due to constant attacks by the heroes leaving his more competent guards dead, there's a shortage of good recruitment material in Evulz' empire, and he's forced to draft incompetents.
- Quantity Versus Quality: Evulz wants a large fighting force for cheap. He got what he paid for.
- The guards in question are normal security guards who are underpaid and have almost no training on how to deal with serious emergencies, such as the heroes breaking into the facility.
- Inverted: The guards are hyper-competent — every noise out of place is checked immediately, all guards remove their masks every few minutes to ensure that no one's an impostor, and if anything isn't up to snuff, they all shoot at it.
- Subverted:
- Bob tries to sneak around the Emperor's lair. His guards round him up immediately.
- Guard #24, who patrolled the area where Bob entered, was his inside man pretending to have failed to notice him.
- Double Subverted:
- ...but only to ask him to stop making so much noise.
- Alternatively the guards are Paper Tigers such that Bob despite lacking any prior fighting experience is able to effortlessly beat up all thirty guards in the prison.
- ...or so Evulz thinks.
- Parodied: When hiring the guards, Emperor Evulz had to follow certain Troperia-mandated rules about hiring the mentally deficient.
- Zig Zagged: Bob tries sneaking around the lair, but the guards accost him immediately… to ask him to stop making so much noise. Then they kill him.
- The guards are of very mixed quality. They follow procedures flawlessly, cannot be bribed, and are good fighters but as aliens find human features indistinguishable such that a woman could wear Emperor Evulz's costume (which lacks a top) and present his ID and they would accept her as him. They can see into infrared but are completely deaf to frequencies within human hearing range making some methods impossible but others trivial to do a prison break.
- Averted: The guards are as competent as one would expect for their station. The guards on the outside of the castle are fairly competent, while the Emperor's personal guards are elite.
- Enforced: "We can't make the guards competent! We need the hero to be able to infiltrate Emperor Evulz' base without getting caught."
- Lampshaded:
- "Why did I use that bargain guard hiring service?"
- "This is what I get for hiring locals."
- Invoked: The Emperor's Magnificent Bastard cousin, Emperor Wykkid, suggests that Evulz use a cheap guard service so his own Evil Empire has one less competitor.
- Exploited: After noticing the guards' lack of competence, the hero uses the chance to perform a successful Bavarian Fire Drill gambit.
- Defied: All the Emperor Guards must pass a strict qualification exam before entering full service. Plus, they are on continual evaluation and training to keep their standard of competence.
- Discussed: "They don't look very competent… escape should be easier than I thought."
- Conversed: "How did the guards not notice something was up?"
- Deconstructed: It turns out the guards allowed the heroes to escape so they could be tracked back to their secret base, or they allowed the heroes to sneak into a trap.
- Reconstructed: But that was a momentary lapse of judgment — once they're at the base, they forget what to do.
What was that noise? I need to go back to The Guards Must Be Crazy to investigate. You intruders just stay put… remember, you're on the honor system.
