Let's hope no one asked for her to repeat that.
"What's he up to now? It'll be something devious and over-complicated. He'd get dizzy if he tried to walk in a straight line."
— The Rani (about the Master), Doctor Who, "The Mark of the Rani"
A character comes up with a ridiculously elaborate plot that is so meticulously planned out that it can't possibly fail. But of course, it will. So why didn't they come up with a simpler plan?
Because the character has a Complexity Addiction. They simply can't help themselves from coming up with schemes that are far more complicated than they need to be. These plans might have glaring flaws to everyone else, such as relying entirely on luck or unpredictable factors, missing a few steps in the plan, not really thinking the plan through or being unable to fill in the gaps when asked about it, and maybe even grabbing the Idiot Ball with how complex they're making this whole thing out to be. But for whatever reason, the character can't help but make an overdone, overblown plan for even the most simple and straightforward of tasks.
Maybe they're insane. Maybe they're bored. Maybe they view it as being artistic. Maybe they're really smart and want people to see how smart they are. Maybe simple plans aren't as amusing or as evil or are just too boring for them. Maybe they consider their enemies worthy opponents and that only an equally worthy plan should be used to defeat them. Maybe they don't even know the reason. It's Funny, or it's Dramatic, or it's Cool; that's all that matters.
If a work's creator ever shows a character with a Complexity Addiction making a plan, the Unspoken Plan Guarantee assures that this plan is not going to work. The reasons for this can be summed up by the classic KISS design principle: "Keep It Simple, Stupid". The more complicated a plan is, the more places there are that a plan can fail, and thus more opportunities for drama. Also, including such a plan onscreen and then executing it to perfection would mean that the creator just put a spoiler for their story in the work itself. Generally speaking, you can expect the complicated plan to fail whenever it's put into action. From there, the plan may just be made up as it goes along, with some Xanatos Speed Chess necessary to try and salvage whatever's left of the plan.
Expect a smarter character to point out the existence of a simpler solution, often something along the lines of "Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?." These characters frequently suffer from Bond Villain Stupidity. May overlap with Villain Ball and/or Fair-Play Villain.
Compare Awesome, but Impractical, Zany Scheme, Overcomplicated Menu Order, and Combat Aestheticist. Compare and contrast A Simple Plan (a very simple plan should have worked, but goes horribly awry). Contrast Didn't See That Coming, Cutting the Knot, Combat Pragmatist, and Simple Solution Won't Work when the complexity is necessary.
See Rube Goldberg Device for machinery built by people with a Complexity Addiction, Puzzle Thriller for stories built for them, and Zany Scheme Chicken when the complexity arises from trying to counter already absurd schemes. Compare Too Clever by Half, which describes the more general case of a character coming up with plans that exceed their ability to successfully carry them out.
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Comic Strips
- 'As members of the secret club "G.R.O.S.S." (Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS), Calvin and Hobbes often come up with schemes to annoy and/or terrorize their neighbor Susie. In the 1993-08-05 strip, Calvin devises a scheme that involves writing a message in code which Susie will believe was written by Calvin for Hobbes, and "accidentally" letting Susie discover and read the note, which says that Calvin doesn't want Susie to go behind their house at noon. Calvin thinks this will naturally draw her to the back of his house at noon, at which point he and Hobbes can hit her with water balloons. Hobbes asks why they don't just hit her with water balloons right where she's sitting now. Calvin replies, "You're a good officer, Hobbes. But let's face it, you don't have an executive mind." Hobbes still thinks his idea sort of makes sense.
- The original appearance of the Rube Goldberg Device was in newspaper comics, in which a hugely complicated and often ridiculous device was built to accomplish some mundane function, e.g., ringing a doorbell by having a button release a cat that chases a mouse along a track, which generates a breeze which pushes on a series of fans which rings the bell.
- FoxTrot: Jason may be a Child Prodigy—he once put a toy rocket into low-Earth orbit—but he tends to go for massively complex solutions to problems rather than simple ones.
- Jason spends hours vainly trying to get past a monstrous creature in a computer game, dying each time no matter what offense he tries. Paige ends up passing the level by just walking right by the guy.
Jason: Look at him! He's huge! He's strong! He's sitting on a pile of skulls! How are you not supposed to fight him?
Paige: What is your IQ again? - Another strip shows Jason sketching out elaborate plans to catapult himself and his friend Marcus into Paige's bedroom through the window so they can spray her with squirt guns. The plan fails when Paige closes her window, prompting a panicked Jason and Marcus to try and stop the catapult while older brother Peter looks on and snarks "From such smarts, such stupidity."
- Jason spends hours vainly trying to get past a monstrous creature in a computer game, dying each time no matter what offense he tries. Paige ends up passing the level by just walking right by the guy.
Fairy Tales
- In "The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs", a king is determined to avoid a prophecy that a poor boy will get married to his daughter. Rather than stab the baby to death, which most assuredly would accomplish his goal, the king puts the baby into a box and dumps it into a river...Thus setting a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in motion.
Music
- Quoth Peter Sinfield, one-time lyricist for King Crimson:
"We had an Ethos in Crimson...we just refused to play anything that sounded anything like a Tin Pan Alley record. If it sounded at all popular, it was out. So it had to be complicated, it had to be more expansive chords, it had to have strange influences. If it sounded, like, too simple, we'd make it more complicated, we'd play it in 7/8 or 5/8, just to show off."
- The premise of the Johnny Cash song "One Piece at a Time"...An automotive factory worker conspires with a friend an elaborate plan to steal an expensive sports car by sneaking the necessary parts off of the assembly line one at a time, spread out over multiple years and putting them together at home. Things become extra complicated when he realizes he didn't factor in the changes in car designs across successive model years.
- Eminem, well known for his virtuoso rapping, often jokes in songs about how his rapping is so musically and semantically complex that nobody can understand it, which much criticism of his music tends to agree with. In interviews, he's attributed this to his addictive personality, claiming that the part of him that led to him not knowing when to stop with drugs is the same part of him that doesn't know when to stop with lyrics.
Professional Wrestling
- CHIKARA's The Whisper's Finishing Move The Aftermath is a one-armed Vertabreaker setup into a face first over the back slam.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer, Warhammer: Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40,000:
- Tzeentch, being essentially a god of Magnificent Bastards, acts almost exclusively through Gambit Roulettes, even when a more straightforward solution might be possible. Many of his plans appear to be in direct conflict with each other, and it's been suggested that he doesn't actually have an ultimate goal. In fact, a popular fan theory is that Tzeentch has a LITERAL complexity addiction. If he ever wins, that is to say becomes the utterly dominant Chaos power and overruns reality, then there will be no more schemes for him to enact. Which will mean he ceases to exist at the very instant of his victory. That's why so many of his goals are in opposition to each other — he cannot afford to ever actually win, but nor can he cease trying to. Mind you, he does seem to enjoy it, as well...
- Before the Horus Heresy, Primarch Roboute Guilliman criticised Primarch Alpharius of the Alpha Legion for this — Alpharius' elaborate plans may in narrow terms have been highly successful, thoroughly crushing all opposition with limited losses for his legion, but they were also wasteful in time and resources (not helped by Alpharius' tendency to sometimes take counter-productive actions like warning enemies and giving them time to fortify solely to make his victories look more impressive).
- Alpharius' overly complicated plots also extends to his Legion. In the wake of the Horus Heresy, the remnants of the Alpha Legion have kept up their guerrilla war against the Imperium of Man, with many of their tactics boiling down to absurdly complex long-term plots which are so labyrinthine that it can take them centuries to see any resuls. However, said results are often devastating, such as infecting the inhabitants of a Space Marine chapter's recruiting planet with a long-term memetic virus that causes half the chapter to suddenly turn traitor with no warning a century later.
- Exalted's Infernals suffer from Torment, which punishes them if they don't obey their (literally) Hellish masters. In order to appease them, they can perform Acts of Villainy that pander to their patrons' urges. Intentionally leaving clues to attract heroes to oppose you, setting up a fiendish death trap and gloating about your plans before leaving them for dead are all acceptable. Better still, you are rewarded whether or not you are successful; thus, rebellious Infernals can intentionally set themselves up to fail, in order to escape punishment for not doing their jobs.
- Tinker gnomes in Dungeons & Dragons's Dragonlance and Spelljammer settings have this. It's most obvious in the Rube Goldberg Devices they're (in)famous for, but they're perfectly capable of falling in love with just about any "brilliant" idea or scheme at a moment's notice as well. (Some examples of their naming conventions would seem to indicate that their brains may indeed run a mile a minute — they'd have to just to cope with all the information they try to put into a "proper" name — they just do so without bothering to stop for common sense along the way.)
- A lot of Collectible Card Game players focused on the creative deck-building side of the game are motivated by a desire to see their convoluted deck concept or some Awesome, but Impractical card actually win something, even if picking up a tried-and-true cookie-cutter meta deck would have a higher success rate. In Magic: The Gathering, such people are called "Johnnies" or "Jennies", and they're viewed as one of the three main player psychographics (the others being Timmies/Tammies, who play for the experience of casting big creatures and entertaining spells, and Spikes, who play for tactical satisfaction and the joy of winning). Many Magic sets will include at least a handful of cards that attempt something in a needlessly complicated way solely to give Johnny/Jenny a new toy, whether that's a fiddly and limited reanimation spell that can be used to exploit enter-the-battlefield triggers
, a confusing artifact where spells get traded out for other spells when you cast them, or an entire mechanic about merging your creatures in ways that stack activation triggers. Lampshaded by one such card:
Laboratory Maniac: His mind whirled with grand plans, never thinking of what might happen if he were to succeed.- Alternative win conditions in general are made with this in mind. The conditions are generally difficult enough to fulfill that the player would need to be so in control on the match they could have plausibly won by doing anything else or so close to losing that the plan would be extremely risky (or both), and that's not considering that almost all of them need a whole turn to go off, during which the opponent can just destroy the win condition and throw the plan in disarray. For this reason, the alternative win con Thassa's Oracle is much maligned by the playerbase and considered a design mistake by the developers, as it has a low mana cost and goes off as soon as it hits the field, making it less of a payoff to a harebrained scheme and more of a card that is actually the preferrable way to win the game in some formats.
- There's a little bit of a complexity epidemic in Rocket Age, as many villains won't simply shoot the heroes, they'll tie them under a Rocket Engine, unleash mutant collared peccaries, or thrown into an arena. There's even one instance of a group of fanatical but otherwise perfectly sensible Soviet agents putting a hostage on a furnace's conveyor belt. A certain degree of justification exists in that the whole game runs on Indiana Jones-style Pulp sensitivities.
- The Discworld Roleplaying Game enforces this trope by offering dark lord characters their own Code of Honour disadvantage — which includes the rule "Use overcomplicated death-traps and ornate, flared, barbed, and smokeblackened blades". Note that, on the Discworld, Narrative Causality ensures that villains who act this way are generally guaranteed to survive their many defeats, in an equally stereotyped way — and the game supports this too.
Theatre
- Cleopatra from Antony and Cleopatra. She can't simply say something straight to your face or ask you for something, she'll make sure to manipulate your emotions and thoughts to get what she wants, even when it's completely unnecessary or even counterproductive.
Toys
- BIONICLE: Makuta's original plan failed. So he came with something even more complicated that required thousands of years of precise timing, careful execution, reliance on his opponents doing exactly what he expected them to do in trying to foil his schemes, and even his own potential death. Some of his allies seriously complain about the over-complexity, wanting to simply use brute force instead, and a running joke among the Brotherhood was that he had back-up plans in place for his breakfast. Heck, Makuta himself even seemed aware of his addiction, as at several points he admitted to having "schemes within schemes" that would tear apart his enemies' minds if they tried to seriously decipher them (this is, in fact, Not Hyperbole-look at Zaktan). And it WORKED, with no one the wiser until he literally came out and revealed it.
- The board game Mouse Trap, where the Rube Goldberg mechanism for catching the mice was so complicated that it rarely if ever worked. As the 1990's commercial describes the proceedings:
Just turn the crank
And snap the plank
And boot the ball right down the shoot.
Now watch it roll
And hit the pole
Knock the ball in the rub-a-dub tub
Which flips the man
Into the pan.
The trap is set
Here comes the net!
Mouse Trap—I guarantee!
It's the craziest trap you'll ever see.
Urban Legends
- There's an urban legend that NASA spent a decade and twelve billion dollars (or whatever) developing a ballpoint pen that could write in zero-g... while the Russians just used a pencil. The truth, for the record, is that pencils were used by both until it was realised snapped pencil tips floating around in space capsules were a hazard, so a guy called Paul C. Fisher spent his own money to develop a "space pen" and offered it to NASA.
- This is why so many conspiracy theories fall apart under Fridge Logic, because the conspiracies are needlessly complicated to accomplish their goals.
- John F. Kennedy couldn't have just been shot by a nut with a sniper rifle in an empty building, it had to be a massive coordinated effort between the Soviet Union, the Mafia, Cuba, and the military-industrial complex. A secret, incredibly powerful group with enough power to rule the world would rather waste time and resources hiding in the shadows and trying to look nondescript instead of just brute-forcing their rule. Interestingly enough, the Soviet government worried that their own internal complexity addiction might have screwed them over; the top brass genuinely didn't want JFK dead (they were doing just fine without pissing off the most powerful nation in the world, thank you kindly), but they had to launch an investigation into the KGB just to see if, somewhere in their Vast Bureaucracy, some extremist hadn't gone unnoticed long enough to order the assassination without party approval (for what it's worth, they didn't find anything).
- The moon landing was faked and everyone involved kept it a secret even though the technology was available. Even the "alledged" rival Soviet Union, which was allegedly doing everything in its power to uncover any hint of falsehoods in this mission, couldn't find even a crumb of doubt!
- The 9/11 attacks were faked by flying two remote-controlled planes into the Twin Towers which were secretly rigged for demolition, flying a missile designed to look like a plane into the Pentagon, putting airplane parts in a hole in a field in PA ...somehow, quietly disposed of hundreds of passengers on 4 planes, and just to top it off, the bad guys somehow rigged WTC 7 to also be secretly demolished,note because they knew the Towers' collapse wouldn't screw up the 7 demo charges.note All this demolition was done with secret experimental "super-thermite", which conveniently has exactly the unprecedented and un-reproducible properties to make the Towers and 7 collapse with the speed of explosives, but as quietly as thermite, explaining the lack of deafening explosions and local barotrauma.note
- Don't forget the part where none of the fake terrorists used to justify a war in Iraq and Afghanistan were from Iraq or Afghanistan. In fact, most of them were Saudi, and the crime was pinned on a Saudi mastermind, even though Saudi Arabia is a US ally. The genius planners also never decided to plant fake WMDs in Iraq to justify the war, which would be a lot easier than pulling off the 9/11 attacks.
Web Animation
- Helluva Boss: In "Unhappy Campers", Moxxie is delighted to finally be in charge of an operation, and one that involves not only killing someone as per their usual business but investigating whom to kill first. He prepares extensively, including concocting personas for himself disguised as a teenaged human girl and his wife as a boy... so when they arrive on the spot and immediately see someone up to his ears in circumstantial evidence of being the murderer they need to murder, he's not going to let a little detail like that derail his plan to investigate.
Web Originals
- Gavin Free of Achievement Hunter has this problem sometimes, going for grandiose or flashy gimmicks when it would be better to do something simple. This is most evident in the group's various Let's Plays of the Worms series, where a well-known running gag is him using the grappling hook or jetpack to drop bombs on people which more often than not causes the death of his own worm instead when he panics and lets go at the wrong time. A more recent example would be in one of their Let's Plays of the Terrorist Hunt mode or Rainbow Six: Vegas, where he continually uses breach charges on doors just because it's cool instead of just opening them. The last time this happens he ends up killing a teammate.
- Carykh has a video in which he discusses how to reach a certain part of a text with the fewest keystrokes possible in order to save time to fix potential typos, followed by an extensive analysis of what text layout grants the user the best accessibility to the other letters. His excuse for not simply using his mouse to hover over the typo is that he can't trust mice after seeing what Jerry did to Tom.
- Tom Collins in Demo Reel doesn't just kidnap Donnie, hold him hostage and force Rebecca and Tacoma to give up the show that way, instead he has his associates dump him in the woods, which results in the rest of SWAG leaving in disgust, Tom going through Sanity Slippage and ends up with a beatdown from Rebecca, Donnie and Karl.
- The eponymous Dr. Horrible of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog feels that "killing is beneath him", and, as a result, uses non-lethal weapons such as the freeze ray. At first, anyway...
- The Evil Overlord List, item #85:
I will not use any plan in which the final step is horribly complicated, e.g. "Align the 12 Stones of Power on the sacred altar then activate the medallion at the moment of total eclipse." Instead it will be more along the lines of "Push the button."
- During the Hermitcraft Season 9 crossover with Empires SMP Season 2, a game of Tag is started where the tagged player from one server must kill a player from the other server using a randomly assigned method. In the game, Grian is assigned with killing an Empires player by letting them fall into the Void. He initially attempts to recreate some aspects of the Boatem Hole from Hermitcraft Season 8 for this... which eventually devolves into him being just a bit extra by setting up an entire "Tea Party" in the Void with some of Lizzie's Frog Men villagers. In spite of questioning his life choices in committing to the bit, after everything is said and done, he deems it all Worth It.
Grian: [while building a minecart track to transport a frog villager into the Void-hole] This plan has turned into something... just insane now. I don't even know what I'm doing anymore. This is a game of tag! Why am I... committing to the flair of a tea party?
- Whateley Universe:
- Invoked in "Razzle Dazzle" when Mephisto the Mentalist is up against Chicago Champion. The Champ isn't the brightest superhero, so Mephisto's overly complex plans confuse him as a distraction for the real plan.
- A number of villains in the series have this as their besetting flaw, most notably the Bell Witch and the Troll Bride. A few of the heroes seem to have this problem, as well.
