Gambit Roulette

I posted this because I wanted to know if most people like gambit roulettes. So please tell me what you think about gambit roulettes.



And if you don't know what a gambit roulette is, it's a plan that required knowledge of chance events.

A convoluted plan that relies on events completely within the realm of chance yet comes off without a hitch. If your first reaction to seeing the plan unfold is "There is no way that you planned that!", then it's roulette.

Gambit roulette tries to make a character seem impressive but can break Willing Suspension of Disbelief. You really have to establish a character as The Chessmaster for them to be able to pull it off without arousing your audience's skepticism. If the character pulling the roulette is a god, a person with precognition, a hyper-advanced AI, or someone else with similar abilities interacting with mortals, it becomes somewhat more believable, but even then the suspension of disbelief can be tenuous at best.

If, as part of retconning in a new Big Bad, everything up to then (including the supposed successes of the heroes against the old villains) is all part of a new scheme, its's Arc Welding. Also often the justification of the Omniscient Morality License; their control over events is supposedly total.

May be parodied by having events obviously (and blatantly) be out of the character's control, and yet still have them take credit for it.

Note that complexity alone does not make a plan into roulette. A few separate plans may combine while individually making logical sense. When a dozen things are going on, but the actual details of the plan aren't reliant on each item fortuitously fitting into place, then it is just a regular Gambit Pileup. If the character has plans for either outcome not just the improbable one, it's Xanatos Gambit. Contrast Batman Gambit which is based on the most likely outcome, based on the planner's knowledge of the people involved, rather then a improbable one. A roulette requires the planner to say that events that were literally impossible to predict were All According to Plan.

Some Examples are:



Harry Potter:

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Dumbledore had orchestrated or manipulated almost every major event that had taken place in Harry's life since about the halfway point of The Half-Blood Prince, with the ultimate purpose of Voldemort's destruction.
Also in Deathly Hallows, Dumbledore's method of getting Harry to find the Hallows relies on random encounters - for example, Hermione only recognised the symbol in her book because she happened to meet Luna's dad at Fleur and Bill's wedding. The same goes for Harry finding out he is a Horcrux; if he hadn't been there when Snape died he would never have made his Heroic Sacrifice and Voldemort would've stayed immortal. To be fair, Snape was supposed to tell Harry - that's why he asks that Voldemort send him into Hogwarts during the Battle - but didn't do so in time. That is why he is scared when Voldemort tells him that he is going to kill him - he thinks he has failed. No excuse for the symbol, though Dumbeldore handwaves it by mentioning that Hermione wouldn't rest until she knew what it meant, so he assumed she would work it out somehow, just not necessarily from Xeno Lovegood.


In Superman: Red Son, Lex Luthor evokes this trope when, after a epic battle between the Superman-controlled communist world and his country, the USA, they are forced to join skills against a Brainiac that reveals itself to be evil, which results in Superman's apparent death. He says "One can almost be forgiven for thinking that this had all been worked out to the tenth decimal point forty years ago, eh?"

How about Lex Luthor's plan in Superman & Batman: Generations? He uses Gold Kryptonite on Superman's unborn son Joel, forever robbing him of super powers. Then several years later, he goes to Joel and plays off his inferiority complex to turn him against his family, all of which hinged entirely upon Clark and Lois having another child, one who would have powers and take up the Superman mantle. Then he posed as Lois' doctor and helped fight her cancer so she could see her daughter's wedding day - at which point Joel, who has powers thanks to Luthor, kills his sister while Lex snaps Lois' neck. Then, back at his base, Lex tells Joel about all his lies while admitting that his powers are killing him, meaning Superman's immediate family is all dead now. And the plan's still not done yet...


Spider Man's infamous Clone Saga was eventually revealed to be a massive Gambit Roulette by Norman Osborn.

In Bleach, most of Sosuke Aizen's ridiculously longwinded plans rely on this, which is odd given that he's easily powerful enough to get what he wants via brute force. Later on, this gets brought to its logical conclusion: Aizen claims the entire plot (or at least Ichigo's role) has apparently been exactly as planned. It's never fully expanded on, so it's possible he was just lying to mess with Ichigo. Also, Kisuke Urahara engages in Gambit Roulettes as well, to the point where the series can be reduced to these two Chessmasters dueling one another in a case of Aizen's "Just as Planned" attitude versus Urahara's "just as expected" attitude.

Xanatos in the Gargoyles episode "Metamorphosis." His plan to fake the death of his colleague Dr. Sevarius and get a mutated Derek Maza on his side requires that Derek jump in front of him to take the dart with the serum, the Gargoyles attack his lab at exactly the right moment before Derek is about to receive a "cure," for the cure to be destroyed in the struggle, and then for Sevarius to get knocked into his aquarium during the ensuing fight and somehow not receive a fatal charge from his two electric eels. Then again, given that Sevarius was in on it, he'd probably had other ways of making it work.

All indications are that the Illuminati was preparing for one of these in the Gargoyles comic, considering its operatives specifically told Xanatos that they wanted the Gargoyles to be accepted in society, told the leader of the Quarrymen that the organization wanted them destroyed, and told Matt Bluestone that they preferred the current status quo of uneasy distancing. Too bad it was Cut Short.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: When Princess Celestia appears at the end of the two-part pilot for the first season, she announces she'd basically planned out the whole plot in advance, in that she knew that Twilight Sparkle would end up using the Elements of Harmony to defeat the villain. How she knew she'd run into just the right group of new friends and they'd each get a chance to prove themselves along the way as fit to wield the Elements is anyone's guess. Celestia is certainly smart, and the true extent of her abilities is unknown, but predicting all that would have taken near omniscience. (So even if she has that, it's still this trope by default.)


Deconstructed in Young Justice. Nightwing starts a very complicated scheme to infiltrate The Light by sending in Aqualad and Artemis as moles. This plan will require the moles to commit genuinely villainous acts to maintain their cover, and most of Nightwing's team must be kept in the dark about the plan, meaning that they will be unaware that two of their greatest enemies are secretly allies. These two facets of the plan eventually cause the situation to spin wildly out of
Nightwing's control, and Kid Flash calls him out for putting his allies at risk with a plan that had too many variables.

Justified at Batman The Animated Series with The Clock King: Temple Fugate is an efficiency expert with Blue and Orange Morality: He believes in Harmony Versus Discipline. Fugate had chosen Discipline, and as a Clock King, he is not only a Schedule Fanatic fond of Ludicrous Precision who is Awesome by Analysis, but it seems that, for his efforts, the entire DCAU universe has decided to enable Law of Disproportionate Response granting him instant Laser-Guided Karma: Whenever Fugate sticks to his plans, no matter how convoluted, the Universe grants him a Gambit Roulette. But just as The Fundamentalist never recognizes that he could be an Hypocrite, Fugate doesn’t want to admit that he is not a perfect Disciplinarian: Whenever Fugate indulges in any Harmonian activity (like, Bond Villain Stupidity or even initiate an Indy Ploy), the Universe immediately enables Finagle's Law.