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| - Let's face it: in Real Life, if a weapon is powerful, it's mass-produced. If an animal is powerful, it flourishes. If a nation is powerful, it can effectively Take Over the World. That's not the case with games, though. Generally, for balancing purposes, the more powerful an item/mon/etc. is in a game, the harder it is to find. While various reasons are given in the plot (if at all) as to why these things are so rare, in the meta-sense, it's for balance. If the player has unlimited access to game-changing stuff, then the game is tipped entirely in their favor.
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| abstract
| - Let's face it: in Real Life, if a weapon is powerful, it's mass-produced. If an animal is powerful, it flourishes. If a nation is powerful, it can effectively Take Over the World. That's not the case with games, though. Generally, for balancing purposes, the more powerful an item/mon/etc. is in a game, the harder it is to find. While various reasons are given in the plot (if at all) as to why these things are so rare, in the meta-sense, it's for balance. If the player has unlimited access to game-changing stuff, then the game is tipped entirely in their favor. This is seen most commonly in Role Playing Games, both tabletop and video, so that the character/party doesn't get so powerful the Big Bad is killed off as fast as a mook, and in collectible games, so that not every player has a game-breaker, and the number of game-breakers out there are limited. Sometimes, the rules of a game specifically will limit an item/mon/card/etc. to only one per player (often retroactively, once it comes to light that the object in question is So Good Its Banned). Generally speaking, people have come to associate rarity with power, and vice versa. In any collectible game which have common, uncommon, and rare items, it's generally understood that the rarer individuals should be the most powerful; mechanics which would only be okay as a rare are considered incredibly powerful as uncommons, for example. Even in games where the creators actively say that rarity means crap in relevance to power, people will still associate rarity with overall power, even when it isn't. In certain TCG formats, the disproportionate distribution of power between the common and rare cards could lead to Fake Balance. The basic reasoning for this may come from, of all things, history and mythology, wherein the most powerful items, supposedly-magical or knowingly mundane, were of exceptional quality, but very scarce. This is understandable, though, because the time, resources, and skill needed to create any weapon beyond a sharp stick or axe was great, and an exceptional weapon like Excalibur could, realistically, be made only once in an artisan's lifetime (and was probably the most valuable item in a king's treasury for good reason). For a video game item (MMO's in particular) that's exceptionally rare and powerful, it has a chance of causing Loot Drama. Contrast Junk Rare and Promotional Powerless Piece of Garbage for the "rare" and "promo" inversions of this trope. Compare Game Breaker for a retroactive application of this trope, for when something is so broken you might only be able to use one in a deck/army/etc. Often present in games with Level-Locked Loot. Related to Commonplace Rare, when a useful item that by all logic should be easy to get turns out to be extremely difficult. Examples of Power Equals Rarity include:
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