The Games We Play (RWBY fanfic)

"There's too much on the line for me to ever give up and... more than that, I've decided that this is what I want to do. So... I'll do it, whatever it takes, and go as far as I possibly can. Before all of this, I was always uncertain of everything and I guess I still am in a lot of ways, but at least this much I'm sure of. That asshole is up to something and he and the Grimm are playing some messed up game with the entire world—and whatever they're after, they've killed countless innocent people to get it. But... if this is a fucking game, then I'm going to win it, because I'm the fucking Gamer."

—Jaune Arc

Your power is bullshit.

—Blake Belladonna

The Games We Play is a RWBY/The Gamer crossover) by "Ryuugi". One morning, fifteen-year-old Jaune Arc wakes up to discover that his long-sought-for Semblance has unexpectedly awakened -- and it gives him an video game interface to his life. And not just an interface, but all the other mechanisms of a game as well -- including earning experience, improving his stats, gaining skills, receiving loot, and leveling up.

Jaune starts exploring his new abilities, discovering just how open-ended being The Gamer is. In the process he learns and begins mastering a legendary martial art, investigates just what Aura is, awakens the Aura of a rose, turns a dog into a sapient being -- and fights lots and lots of increasingly powerful Grimm. Doing a favor for a pretty girl ends up entangling him with the White Fang, and gains him a sort-of friend in one of their mid-level operatives, a faunus named Adam Taurus. He soon equals and then exceeds the Huntsmen and Huntresses whom he idolized and whose numbers he wanted to join.

And as Jaune continues to level up, he seeks out more and more powerful Grimm to fight -- until he discovers that they have a master. And this master is patiently waiting for Jaune to reach a level of power where he will become useful.

And not only that, but somehow, impossibly, this master and Jaune have a history together.

The Games We Play can be found at Fanfiction.net here or on Spacebattles.com here. Please note that it was written almost entirely before the end of Volume 3 of RWBY, and thus goes off in its own noncanon direction when it comes to characters and plotlines revealed after the end of that volume.

Not to be confused with the Magic: The Gathering fanfic of the same name.

WARNING! There are unmarked Spoilers ahead. Beware.

Tropes used in The Games We Play (RWBY fanfic) include:
  • Aborted Arc: Jaune frequently abandons earlier goals as greater problems and challenges pop up, and some obvious plot hooks -- like the "impending Dust shortage" plot and the Quest Arrow/Objective -- are raised only to be ignored. Some of these are obvious in-character changes of priority, but a few seem to be evidence of Ryuugi changing his mind in mid-stream.
  • Adaptational Heroism: Adam Taurus, mostly due to Jaune's influence, follows a different path starting before the Black Trailer, leading him to become more of an Anti-Hero than the Ax Crazy villain he was in canon.
  • Adorable Abomination: Autumn Rose, an ordinary plant whose Aura Jaune awakened, making it into something far more. Probably because she manifests most of the time as an attractive flower on a short vine, most people find her quite appealing -- but then there's Jaune's grandmother, who taught her to eat meat. And when she manifests more of her true self...
  • Adult Fear: Even though she agrees to train him, Jaune's mother also has a conversation with him about the dangers of a Hunter's lifestyle, and the chance of losing him and never finding out what happened to him.
  • Advice Backfire: Jaune's father gives him some advice which was intended to help him get a girlfriend -- but ends up with him hijacking an airship and becoming an internationally-wanted terrorist:

"Son, when a girl asks you if you want to come over and help her with something, the answer is yes."

  • All Your Powers Combined: As he increases in power, Jaune gains the ability to merge his elementals into more powerful and abstract elementals, ending with the Light Elemental, who is a manifestation/personification of Jaune's soul.
    • He similarly gains an ability to merge two or more of his skills to synthesize a new, more powerful skill from them.
  • Always Someone Better: Jaune's main problem throughout the story -- although to be fair by a third of the way through he's usually deliberately inflicting it on himself. No matter how high his level or advanced his skills, there is someone or something tougher and more dangerous than he is -- sometimes immensely so -- and he usually only finds this out while getting in their faces. The story ends with this still in play -- Malkuth, who is effectively a God of Evil, is still far more powerful than Jaune is, and it's only with a clever ploy that Jaune escapes from him.
  • An Arm and a Leg:
    • Jaune rips off Penny's arms and legs to end his fight with her, apologizing as he does so; he then applies a healing buff to her that allows her to regenerate and re-attach them -- just not fast enough to stop his rescue of enslaved faunus.
    • Jaune's mother loses a leg and both arms when they are amputated to save her from Conquest's infection.
  • Artifact of Doom: The Grimm masks dropped by the first of each type of Grimm Jaune kills would be this if the Gamer's Mind and the Gamer's Body didn't protect him their adverse mental and physical effects, respectively.
  • Artistic License Biology: The Grimm, In-Universe. Jaune is very aware that they shouldn't be able to exist by any understanding of the laws of nature. He intuits that understanding this will be key to determining their origin and the way to ultimately destroy them.
  • Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Ohr Ein Sof, one of Jaune's most advanced skills, turns this into an attack of sorts, letting him drag someone into a metaphysical realm where only pure willpower will maintain the integrity of your mind and personality -- and if you aren't strong enough it will dissolve you back into nothingness. It turns out that thousands of years ago Keter trapped Malkuth there -- and Malkuth, while still unimaginably powerful compared to a normal human, has been eroding and decaying around the edges ever since, and has been rendered a (relatively) weak shadow of his former self.
  • Ass Pull: Jaune is, unfortunately, prone to suddenly manifesting a new ability, and then letting the reader know he'd been working on it for quite a while, just not where the reader could see or even know about it, followed by an Info Dump on what it does and how he got it. Sometimes -- sometimes -- we're graced with the privilege of having been told the name of the ability. Once. Five or ten chapters earlier.
  • Awesomeness By Analysis: Jaune's "Observe" skill. If its subject is within 50 levels of him, he can extract a huge amount of information on them with a thorough examination, including their weaknesses. And just looking at someone reveals quite a lot of useful data.
  • Bag of Holding/Hammerspace: Jaune has an Inventory like any other RPG character, which can hold a very large quantity of, well, stuff. Unlike actual game inventories, there aren't any bizarre limitations or minimums based on shape, size or weight limiting what he can put in it.
  • Bare-Fisted Monk: Almost immediately, Jaune acquires knowlege of the White Tiger martial arts school and keeps increasing and expanding his mastery of it, in the process rescuing it from the fog of myth and and leaving more than a few scientists utterly baffled at the things it allows him to do.
  • Bavarian Fire Drill:
    • Jaune uses the classic uniform-and-clipboard method to get aboard the White Whale to hijack it.
    • He essentially takes over the White Fang simply by walking in and acting like he was already in charge. He even convinces other leaders of the White Fang that he's the real thing.
    • Hell, his entire career is one massive Bavarian Fire Drill as he juggles multiple identities with different sets of powers and different responsibilities, and keeps the wool pulled over the eyes of some of the most powerful and perceptive people in Remnant -- like Ozpin, Cinder Fall and Raven Branwen.
  • Big Bad: At first only suspected, but eventually Jaune learns he's for real, he's out there -- and he's waiting for Jaune to get powerful enough to be useful to him.
  • Big Brother Is Watching: Unlike her canon counterpart, Raven Branwen can open a portal anywhere -- and it doesn't have to be visible on the far end. She is known to use them to surveil enemies and targets.
  • Blade Run: Jaune does one while fighting Penny.
  • Breath Weapon: The Grimm Goliath and several other larger Grimm varieties include some type of breath weapon among their attacks.
  • Bullying a Dragon:
    • One of Jaune's favorite tactics for dealing with opponents who are much more powerful than him, sometimes combined with a Bavarian Fire Drill.
    • True to her personality prior to V4, Yang just can't walk away from a fight with Jaune, she has to try to escalate things. Had he been anything close to ruthless, it would have been suicide.
  • Butt Monkey: Weiss Schnee seems to always somehow get screwed over in some way whenever she encounters Jaune, however unintentionally on his part. (Given that canon!Jaune initially had a crush on her, there is no doubt some level of Mythology Gag involved as well.)
  • Cain and Abel: Ultimately the reason for the fall and destruction of Babel. Malkuth, who felt all their negative emotions, wanted to eradicate humanity to give himself peace. Keter opposed the idea. The Archangels ended up taking sides and then going to war among themselves over it -- and when it was done only Malkuth and Keter were left, and most of humanity had been destroyed as collateral damage.
  • Calling Your Attacks: Early on Jaune does this quite frequently, even though he doesn't have to. He gets out of the habit, though.
  • Can't Catch Up: Most everyone Jaune meets, even many of those initially far above him in level -- he levels up and improves his skills so ridiculously fast that he quickly equals and then surpasses them.
    • Actively defied in the case of Autumn, Gou, Adam and later Raven -- especially Adam -- all of whom Jaune adds to his "party" and power-levels far beyond what they would have achieved by themselves in the same amount of time.
    • Jaune himself, compared to Cinder/Famine, at least when we see them "on-screen". He may have finally exceeded them by the end of the story, but there's no way to know for sure.
  • Cast from Hit Points: Several of the high-end skills of the White Tiger fighting style cost both mana and HP to use.
  • Casual Danger Dialogue: Effectively immune to pain and injury thanks to The Gamer's Body, Jaune begins to treat even creatures that could crush him outright with a certain... lackadaisically humorous ennui.
  • Character Level: One of the ways Jaune's semblance measures how powerful he is. In addition to general overall improvement, whenever he gains a level Jaune gets points to put into his stats. His level is not a be-all and end-all, though, as stats and skills can be improved independent of overall level -- and hitting certain "breakpoints" on stat levels or reaching 100 on a skill will unlock new skills.
    • Jaune's semblance also gives a level rating to every living thing he looks at with his Observe skill. This is less accurate, as it's basically an approximation of how tough an opponent they'd be, factoring in not only raw power but willingness to go all out, among other things. It also refuses to give an estimate at all if the subject is 50 levels or more higher than he is.
  • Chekhov's Gun: Thoroughly littered throughout the story. Many things get mentioned, or set in motion, or simply created long before they appear center stage or are needed.
  • Cliff Hanger: Nearly every chapter ends with one; doing so seems to have been an imperative for the author.
  • Combat Pragmatist: Jaune, who uses every edge and advantage he can eke out over an opponent, including consuming Dust crystals like candy, dirty tricks and exploiting their better natures (if any). This is usually necessary because he's almost always fighting someone or something significantly more powerful than he is (at least at the start of a fight), and he needs to use every trick and stratagem he can come up with just to stay alive, let alone come out triumphant.
  • Cool Airship: The White Whale, built jointly by the Atlesian government and the Schnee Dust Company, and stolen on the day it was to be unveiled by Jaune in his first major action.
  • Cool Mask: Jaune gets an assortment of them as drops from killing Grimm, each with its own special powers (and drawbacks).
  • Cool Pet: Tiangou ("Gou" for short), a dog Jaune rescued, and whose Aura he awoke. See Familiar and Talking Animal, below.
  • Cosmic Horror Story: As part of its pattern of Serial Escalation, The Games We Play eventually evolves into this as Jaune first suspects, then learns, the origins of the Grimm, their purpose, and his own place in the world.
  • Cruel to Be Kind: The tactic Jaune's mother Isabella used to raise his older sisters -- and which resulted in them hating her for years. His training under her early in the story also partook liberally of this.

"I like to think of it as a bonding experience," I said after the feeling of a broken jaw faded and I had a moment to heal myself. "He punched me in the face, so now we’re friends."

  • Determinator: Jaune. When he settles on a course of action, he pursues it relentlessly, and nothing -- not even a God of Evil and its minions -- can turn him from his goal.
  • Eldritch Abomination: Autumn Rose, as she begins to grow, rapidly develops into one. Gou, technically, although he is far more relatable than the usual abomination. And finally, Jaune/Keter and Malkuth, who themselves are the last two surviving members of a band of ten literally godlike creatures created in the far distant past.
  • Elemental Embodiment: Almost from the first, one of Jaune's key -- indeed, almost trademark -- abilities is the summoning and binding of elementals, who mostly take humanoid forms, with personal names and individual personalities. Interestingly, they are not limited to the "classic" Western elements, but include Metal (Jaune's first elemental, in fact, and an element from Eastern magic) and Lightning. Later he learns to combine them to create new and different elementals of greater power. By the end of the story he's discovered that the elementals are actually independent aspects of himself, and when combined together produce an external embodiment of his own soul.
  • Exposition/Info Dump: Jaune-as-narrator is prone to this, especially after an Ass Pull. In some cases, it is somewhat justified as he's often narrating the process of working something out as it happens.
  • Familiar: Jaune adopts a puppy and awakens its Aura. He names the dog "Tingou" for a monstrous dog of legend (or Gou for short), and makes him a member of his party, where the dog can benefit from Leaked Experience.
  • Friendly Enemy: Penny Polendina when she first appears during the White Whale arc. And when she reappears later, as well.
  • Genius Bruiser: Strongly implied of Bai Hu and other masters of the White Tiger style, given how high Jaune had to raise both Intelligence and Wisdom in order to master its final moves.
  • God of Evil: Malkuth, and in the forgotten distant past the members of his faction among the archangels. Also, Jaune late in the story notes that all of the archangels, including his earlier incarnation, were basically monsters.
  • Going Cosmic: The plot and the opposition continually escalates, until we discover that the Big Bad is effectively a deity, so was Jaune's previous incarnation, and Jaune is well on his way to recovering that level of power himself.
  • Gone Horribly Wrong: Keter's attempt to relieve Malkuth's pain, as seen in the Tenth Interlude, is when everything went to hell, resulting in the war between the Archangels and the reduction of the world to Remnant.
  • Hammerspace: In addition to Jaune's Inventory, mentioned above under Bag of Holding, his "daughter" Autumn has some kind of extradimensional storage for the literal forests' worth of plant matter she has absorbed into herself.
  • Healing Factor: The Gamer's Body turns all the damage Jaune takes into the loss of Hit Points, leaving him visually undamaged by anything he suffers -- even the amputation of limbs and decapitation. He also has an ability to refill his Life Meter at an outrageous pace simply by resting or meditating, and later gains Regeneration at a rate that would boggle Wolverine. On top of that, he can drain Dust crystals and instantly restore his hit points (and mana points) that way. And anything that transforms, mutates or otherwise inimically changes his body without actually killing him (like, say, Petrification), he can completely shake off simply by sleeping for six hours.
  • Horsemen of the Apocalypse: About a third of the way into the story, the Horsemen -- as "The White Rider", "The Red Rider" and so on -- begin appearing as Grimm "Lieutenants". Later we find that they do indeed call themselves "Death", "Pestilence", "Famine" and "War".
  • Humanoid Abomination: Ultimately anyone possessed by one of the Four Horsemen.
    • In the backstory, the Archangels. And probably the Angels, too.
    • Autumn, once Jaune teaches her how to manifest a (vaguely) humanoid form.
  • Hyperspace Wardrobe: Jaune quickly learns that he can store and equip entire outfits to and from his Inventory, allowing him to essentially change his clothes with a thought.
  • Hypocritical Humor: Jaune's sense of humor makes liberal use of this for his own amusement.
  • I Can Still Fight: Penny Polendina keeps saying this even as Jaune begins literally taking her apart.
  • I Need You Stronger: Jaune discovers that the creator of the Grimm, who appears to have known him in a previous life, is helping him increase in power at an accelerated rate despite making it very clear that they are enemies; Jaune speculates that there is something that they need from him that he can only provide once he has "leveled up" sufficiently (and indeed, this turns out to be true).
  • If I Wanted You Dead...: In the chapter "Surprise Box", Jaune (in his guise as the godlike tiger Faunus and martial artist Jian Bing) abruptly appears in a transport carrying General Ironwood, Professor Polendina and Penny. When accused of being there to attack them, Jaune assures him that if he'd intended to attack them, he wouldn't have needed to physically appear in the transport with them.
  • Impossible Item Drop: Jaune's bizarre Semblance makes him a real-life video game character -- and that includes inexplicable drops of money, equipment and skill books when he kills the Creatures of Grimm, found neatly stacked next to their evaporating corpses after the fighting ends. In particular he initially spends a lot of time worrying about just where the money came from, specifically whether it's real or somehow "manufactured" by his power and thus some variety of counterfeit.
  • In Spite of a Nail: Despite the impact Jaune has on the world, some canon events -- like the Black and Yellow trailers -- still happen, as unlikely as that might be. Likewise, when he gets to Beacon Academy, we see that many of the canon teams still exist in some form despite the changes he's made.
  • In the Back: In the distant Backstory, Malkuth's servant Death stabbed Keter in the back repeatedly as Keter was locking himself and Malkuth away to protect the world.
  • Infinity+1 Sword: White dust. It appears to turn all Aura-driven abilities Up to Eleven Hundred. Even a speck amplifies Jaune immensely -- and considering the possibility that an enemy may have access to large quantities of it is almost an Oh Crap moment for both Jaune and Ozpin.
  • Ingesting Knowledge: This is one of the abilities Jaune gains when his semblance, "The Gamer", activates. If a book describes a skill in sufficient detail, he can "devour" it and gain a basic grasp of it, which he can then improve by grinding.
  • It Amused Me: In the chapter "Surprise Box", Jaune (in his guise as the godlike tiger Faunus and martial artist Jian Bing) abruptly appears in a transport carrying General Ironwood, Professor Polendina and Penny. When he explains that he's there to talk to them, not attack them, Ironwood demands to know why he's bothering.

"What about the entertainment value?" I asked him, giving him an enigmatic smile. "Perhaps it simply amuses me to do so?"

  • It's a Small World After All: Against all odds, Jaune keeps running into some of the same people time and time again -- such as Blake and Weiss.
  • Kill It with Fire:
    • Jaune makes frequent use of an incendiary component to his attacks, but after he achieves his most devastating attack skills about three-quarters of the way through the story, he is able to vaporize (and melt down to bedrock) areas miles across.
    • Fire is the only guaranteed method of killing the Grimm bacteria from Pandora Shells.
  • Know When to Fold'Em: Deconstructed with Jaune's grandmother, who has to be a cold, heartless bitch willing to make sacrifices of lives today in order to be able to fight tomorrow.
    • Defied by Jaune, who refuses to sacrifice anything or anyone he can still fight for.
  • Kraken and Leviathan: Once Jaune starts coming into his full power, he (and some friends) start leaving the Vale area to hunt truly monstrous Grimm. One variety they eventually face are Kaiju-sized sea-going Grimm explicitly called "Leviathans"; there are several other varieties.
  • Large Ham: Jaune's sisters, during the mass "sparring session" they have with him, love playing out deliberately overacted "death scenes".
  • Leaked Experience: Jaune's familiar Gou (a talking dog) gains experience when Jaune does, matching his level, even though Gou spends much of the story at Jaune's home, doing little or nothing. When he finally spends all the accumulated attribute points he's earned from his levels, the effect is profound. Similarly, Autumn Rose also gains experience early on by being a party member, even though Jaune doesn't actually let her travel and fight with him at first.
  • Level Grinding: What Jaune spends quite a lot of his time doing. Every time Jaune goes up a level, he gains multiple benefits, including points to add to his stats. He can grind the stats directly if he has an appropriate task, but for some -- like Luck -- there isn't really anything he can use. And naturally, it becomes harder and harder to raise a stat by grinding, so after a while the points from leveling become more efficient.
    • Members of his party also gain points from leveling and can apply them to their stats as long as they remain in the party and have access to the interface. Naturally, Jaune forms a party with a non-Ax Crazy, non-Jerkass Adam Taurus (and later adds his daughter, his familiar and Raven Branwen) with the explicit purpose of leveling them up sufficiently to face the Big Bad by killing thousands of Grimm.
  • Level-Locked Loot: Some of the drops -- both artifacts and skills -- that Jaune receives have stat or skill level minimums he must meet before he can use them.
  • Life or Limb Decision: Just about the only way anyone (other than Jaune) survives a Conquest infection. At one point, Jaune has to amputate his mother's legs and one arm to save her.
  • Limit Break: Jaune wins practically every fight with these. Every time one of his stats hits a multiple of 50, it grants him new skills or abilities; every time a skill hits 100, it transforms into a prestige version that's even more powerful and effective (and can itself be raised to 100). And he's constantly grinding dozens of skills and almost all his stats, even in the midst of battle.
  • Living Memory: In the distant Backstory, the being known as Keter did this as one of his backup plans before his final battle with his brother Malkuth. Thousands of years later, after his mindwipe and death at the hands of Malkuth, Keter's reincarnation Jaune Arc finally fights his way to the facility where his Living Memory resides and gets back enough of what he lost to carry on his fight against a greatly diminished but still terrifyingly powerful Malkuth.
  • Luck Stat: Something of a Running Gag in the story. Although Jaune's Semblance gives him stats that he can improve either by allocating points earned by Level Grinding, or by directly exercising the relevant ability, he never does get around to raising his Luck above 33 or so, having more important stats he needs to allocate level points to, and having no real clue how to exercise his Luck outside of a single night he spent gambling at Junior's club. He also has serious doubts whether high levels of Luck would actually be exclusively good Luck.
  • Mask of Power: The first time Jaune kills a Grimm of a certain type he gains a Grimm mask which grants certain powers (and side effects) related in some way to that Grimm. As the Gamer, he actually has a quest to collect every kind of Grimm mask.
  • Master of Disguise: Jaune, thanks to the various abilities and titles and status effects he gains during the course of the story.
  • Mix-and-Match Critters: Most of the higher-end "monster" Grimm seem to be assembled piecemeal from a random parts bin. Given that Ryuugi adapted actual mythological creatures for his greater monsters, this is a case of having Done The Research.
  • Money for Nothing: Naturally, Jaune gets loot from defeating enemies. Among this loot is money, in the form of Remnant's current universal currency, lien. Unsure of the origin of this cash which appears out of thin air, and uncertain if it is even genuine, Jaune simply lets it accumulate in his inventory.
  • Money Spider: The Grimm become this for Jaune, dropping lien, artifacts and skill books when he kills them, which appear neatly stacked next to their sublimating corpses.
  • Mook Maker: Like the canon Wyvern, Goliaths and Leviathans in this story can spawn smaller Grimm with which to harry their opponents.
  • Mr. Exposition:
    • Jaune at times.
    • Keter begins to serve this role later in the story but evolves beyond it.
  • Names to Run Away From Really Fast:
    • The Sea of Monsters
    • Individually, the Four Horsemen, but especially Death and Famine.
    • In-universe, any of the legendary Grimm. (Out of universe, too, as they're all virtually unstoppable monsters from real-world myth.)
  • Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Death killing Keter (at Malkuth's order) as he was locking himself and Malkuth in Metatron's Cube. It forced Malkuth to stay imprisoned for thousands of years, slowly eroding away into a shadow of himself, while Keter got a restful timeout, reincarnation as Jaune, and a chance to return to his full strength.
  • Off with His Head: Because decapitation attacks turn into HP damage and thus don't kill him, thanks to the Gamer's Body, Jaune suggests to Raven that this is an excellent way to confirm that she's talking to him and not an impostor.
  • Oh Crap:
    • For someone who manages to overcome all his foes, Jaune seems to have this reaction to just about everything he faces, starting with Penny.
    • Jaune's tough-as-nails, unfazeable grandmother has a non-verbal but visible "Oh crap" moment when he mentions Raven Branwen to her.
  • Old Master: Ren's grandfather, Lie Hui, who is one of the last practitioners of the Black Turtle martial arts style.
  • One Stat to Rule Them All: Jaune is of the opinion that Wisdom is this, and the story seems to bear it out. There are strong implications that his previous incarnation did not give as much weight to Wisdom as he did Intelligence, and suffered for it; Jaune's investment in Wisdom pays off in many ways, not the least of which are its various synergistic effects which improve his combat skills and allow him to stand up to Malkuth despite having recovered only a fraction of previous incarnation's skills and experience.
  • One-Winged Angel: It is distressingly common for the more powerful Grimm to upgrade themselves just when Jaune appears to have them defeated, starting with a Goliath that that armors itself to defend against him and ranging all the way up to Conquest and Gilgamesh -- both of whom become an avatar of their creator, Malkuth when Jaune is on the verge of destroying them.
    • Cinder has one in which she turns into a creature of Dust crystals when she reveals that she's Famine.
  • Only I Can Kill Him: Malkuth has forbidden the creatures of Grimm from killing Jaune -- because Malkuth needs Jaune to (re-)grow powerful enough to free him, and so that Malkuth can kill him afterwards.
  • Open-Minded Parent: Jacques Arc. The utterly supportive position he takes when Jaune comes to him for advice about the upcoming White Whale mission, even after Jaune intimates that it will be both illegal and dangerous, is a Crowning Moment of Heartwarning.
  • Our Souls Are Different: They're made up of different combination of ten kinds of "soul atoms", each named for an emanation of the Sefirot of the Kabbalah. They can be broken apart and recombined in different ways and in different quantities, if you have the knowledge and technology to do so. The Archangels each had a soul artificially built completely from a single kind of emanation, in quantities far larger than any natural soul possessed.
  • Poor Communication Kills: Jaune takes deliberate steps to avert this trope, by informing his allies of the exact nature of his powers, specifically saying he doesn't want their enemies to be able to use it against them at a critical moment.
  • Power Copying: Jaune eventually gains the ability to learn how to use a weapon by scanning its "memory" of its use.
  • Powers as Programs: To Jaune, the basis of just about any skill, mundane or magical, is something he can "upload" by reading the appropriate skill book.
  • Precursors: Babel, and the human civilization that produced it.
  • Reality Ensues:
    • Jaune may eventually grow into near-godlike power, but he can't use a lot of it except when deep in the wilderness or within the isolating effect of his "Naraka" skill, simply because once he passes a certain point, the collateral damage inflicted as a side effect of his attacks is so great he could accidentally demolish an entire city. Even simply moving at his higher rates of acceleration would be incredibly destructive to everything around him.
    • The swath he cuts through the hordes of Grimm outside Mistral worries someone in their government enough that they set up surveillance to find out just who is doing it, and how.
  • Reincarnation: Eventually confirmed as real in the world of Remnant -- starting with Autumn Rose (who turns out to have a part of the soul of Summer Rose, at least at first) and finally Jaune is revealed to be the reincarnation of an eons-old superbeing. A few other cases of reincarnation are strongly hinted at, but not confirmed.
  • RPG Elements: At the start of the story, Jaune suddenly gains an RPG interface to his life -- including the ability to gain XP, learn skills, raise his stats through grinding, and store an outrageous number of possessions in his Inventory. Unfortunately, there's a reason he's gained the ability to become very powerful, very fast... and it's not good.
  • RPG Mechanics Verse: The world from Jaune's point of view, and to a lesser degree that of anyone whom he's added to his Party. He's as aware of his stats and experience and skill levels as any player of a mundane game would be.
  • Running Gag:
    • Leveling up his Luck Stat.
    • "Your power is bullshit." First said by Blake, but echoed (often) by Adam.
  • Secret Identity: Taken to ridiculous extremes with both Jaune and some of his enemies, living within layers upon layers of false personae which they don and shed as need dictates.
  • Self-Destruct Mechanism: Early on, Jaune is presented with a "simple" make-up kit that is so large and complex he half-seriously thinks it might have a self-destruct.
  • Serial Escalation: The Games We Play is, basically, Serial Escalation: The Fanfic. The plot is a continuous series of incidents that unceasingly expand the scope, danger and significance of Jaune's actions (as well as his personal power). It starts out on an amusingly small and intimate level -- gaining a skill in dishwashing on practically the first day he is the Gamer -- and in one inexorable step after another ends up as a Cosmic Horror Story where Jaune faces a God of Evil on an almost even footing.
    • Jaune is always pulling something unexpected from his bag of tricks, or finally allocating earned stat points in the middle of a battle to unlock new skills which are exactly what he needs at the moment to defeat the opponent who had been outclassing him up until that point. Oddly, these aren't Deus Ex Machinae -- at least, not entirely -- because that's the way Jaune's Semblance -- thanks to the nature of Keter's soul -- works.
  • Sidekick: Adam to Jaune. But don't let Adam hear you say that.
  • Single-Stroke Battle: During his interlude, Adam defeats a Humbaba with a single strike after using its attack on him as a Power-Up. Also counts as a Moment of Awesome for Adam.
  • Sizeshifter: Once he expends his accumulated experience gains, Gou becomes able to grow to a gigantic size at will.
  • Sole Survivor: Ozpin, from a group of fourteen hunter teams that went into Jericho Falls.
  • Square-Cube Law: The largest of the Grimm ignore this with impunity, leading Jaune to hypothesize that knowing how they do this will give him a clue to their origins and how to destroy the Grimm permanently.
  • Stat Grinding: Jaune spends much of his time grinding his stats -- but after a while he gains the ability to do it "in the background" as it were, while he's doing other things.
  • Stock Super Powers: You name it, Jaune acquires it at some point.
  • Super Empowering: As the White Whale arc winds down, Jaune unlocks the Aura of a thousand or so former Faunus slaves.
    • Conquest was originally designed to be this.
  • Super Senses: Once he raises his INT score to 100, Jaune begins gaining vastly expanded senses.
  • Supernatural Martial Arts: The Four Beast Kings' fighting styles. They each involve training and refining one's Aura to enhance and empower the martial artist to become something far beyond a simple Bare-Fisted Monk.
    • The one we see the most of is Bai Hu's White Tiger style, as Jaune acquires it from a skill book and trains it all the way up to its full potential.
    • Ren and his grandfather turn out to be practitioners of Xuan Wu's Black Turtle style.
  • Summon Magic: One of the first explicitly "supernatural" abilities Jaune gains is the summoning and binding of elementals.
  • There Was a Door: On his very first mission, Jaune -- while driving a truck and in a hurry -- makes his own exit.
  • Thicker Than Water: Averted in the Backstory: Keter and Malkuth are, for all practical purposes, brothers -- but Keter is not willing to sacrifice billions of humans to relieve the psychic pain felt by Malkuth.
  • Tragic Keepsake: Weiss Schnee's necklace, which is all she has left from her mother.
  • Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Taken to infuriating extremes toward the end of the story, where Jaune-as-narrator will say practically nothing informative about his plans, strategies, or even which of his skills are close enough to hitting a Limit Break and turning into a super-powered version of themselves -- at least not until he needs to pull out something that will turn the tide of the battle for him.
  • Villain Override: Malkuth has a habit of taking over his more elite minions, reinforcing and puppeteering them just when Jaune is yea-far from destroying them.
  • Virtual Ghost: Jaune's previous incarnation -- or at least enough of his key life experiences to be a "good enough" copy -- exists as one in the computer at Jericho Falls, where it's been waiting for him to find and join with it again.
  • The Virus: Conquest, along with the Pandora Shells.
  • Voluntary Shapeshifting:
    • Both Gou and Autumn have some degree of this; Gou only once he spends his accumulated experience. Autumn is far more flexible and has no human concerns about what she looks like.
    • Jaune himself can do this by equipping or unequipping various titles and pieces of equipment -- most notably, his ability to transform into the tiger faunus martial arts grandmaster Jian Bing.
  • War in Heaven: This is revealed to be the Backstory of Remnant. In a World that appears to be Earth in the far distant future, a group of enhanced humans who called themselves Angels created even more powerful creatures they called Archangels, using morally-abhorrent means and methods. The Archangels rebelled against the Angels because of the manner of their creation and destroyed them. And then a thousand years later, the Archangels fought among themselves, with one half seeking to destroy humanity and the other half protecting them. The latter conflict turned the world into Remnant, and left only two survivors from the Archangels -- the leaders of the two factions. Then it got worse.
  • Wham! Episode: The story is regularly punctuated with these, starting when Jaune accidentally wakes Ziz. Some of the biggest "whams" come with installments that reveal the past to both Jaune and the reader.
  • Wham! Line: These seem to come every ten or fifteen chapters, and almost always herald a change in scope and scale for the story.
  • What the Hell Are You?: Asked at one remove of Jaune (in his guise as Jian Bing) by Professor Polendina, General Ironwood and the Atlesian scientists after they see the organic healing performed by Penny's robotic body in response to the regeneration buff he applied to her -- and his explanation for why it works.
  • When Trees Attack: When Autumn choses to, she can manifest as a mammoth walking (or flying) plant-monster.
  • A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing:
    • Cinder. He suspects Ozpin might be one, too. And he's afraid Ruby might be, too, unknown even to herself.
    • Jaune himself, once he masters the Conquest infection in his system and can turn it on at need.
  • Won't Work On Me: Pretty much what the Gamer's Mind does for any kind of mental attack. The Gamer's Body reduces all physical harm to HP damage and status effects. Even things like decapitation and dismemberment.
    • The skills Kavacha and Kundala add outright resistance to both physical and aura damage on top of this.
  • Zany Scheme: Blake's plan to steal the White Whale boils down to one of these.
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