History Main / PaddedSumoGameplay

** [[Manga/JoJosBizarreAdventure DIO]] vs. [[Manga/{{Hellsing}} Alucard]] demonstrates both vampires are pretty much immovable objects. DIO’s lies in his Stand, which is InvisibleToNormals and can [[TakesOneToKillOne only be harmed by another Stand]] and his specific brand of vampirism, which gives him a HealingFactor able to survive any physical attacks short of [[ThePowerOfTheSun sunlight-based attacks]], on top of being able to [[TimeStandsStill stop time itself]]. Alucard, meanwhile, is a living SoulJar and can use the souls of those he’s slain to take lethal damage in his place, and his true self is actually a LivingShadow. [[spoiler: Out of the two, Alucard’s means of outlasting his foe is truly finite, as DIO could burn through his reserves with his SuperSpeed and SuperStrength eventually, and Stands can interact with ethereal opponents anyways.]]

** In the Commander format is designed this way. You have double the usual starting life, effects are encouraged due to the need to address multiple opponents, and games last an hour on average. The longer games create a place where normally AwesomeButImpractical cards get a place to flourish, though there's no written rules stopping players from putting together a deck that can put out very fast wins.

** In the Commander format is designed this way. You have double the usual starting life, KillEmAll effects are encouraged due to the need to address multiple opponents, and games last an hour on average. The longer games create a place where normally AwesomeButImpractical cards get a place to flourish, though there's no written rules stopping players from putting together a deck that can put out very fast wins.

** [[Manga/JoJosBizarreAdventure DIO]] vs. [[Manga/{{Hellsing}} Alucard]] demonstrates both vampires are pretty much immovable objects. DIO’s lies in his Stand, which is InvisibleToNormals and can [[TakesOneToKillOne only be harmed by another Stand]], on top of being able to [[TimeStandsStill stop time itself]]. Alucard, meanwhile, is a living SoulJar and can use the souls of those he’s slain to take lethal damage in his place, and his true self is actually a LivingShadow. [[spoiler: Out of the two, Alucard’s means of outlasting his foe is truly finite, as DIO could burn through his reserves with his SuperSpeed and SuperStrength, and Stands can interact with etherial opponents anyways.]]

** The smarter, defensive AI used in later games, ''Days of Ruin'' in particular. Due to its habit of massing up units just outside your attack range, it requires a lot of patience to break through its lines, or else fights can easily take over 50 turns.

* Stalemates are quite common in the ''VideoGame/NintendoWars'' series. The enemies are endless unless you capture their bases, which tend to be so well-defended that rushing them is suicide, turning a lot of battles into wars of attrition where you can only advance one step at a time, if at all. This is compounded by various factors, depending on the game:
** Maps that prioritize looking cute over being fun or quick to play; a standout example is Bounty River, where nothing can really happen until your boats manage to sail through several days of nothing to reach the relevant part of the map, and if they get sunk, all you can do is build more boats and restart the process.
** Maps that give enormous advantages to the AI to compensate for its lack of intelligence, including many times more units and bases, giving you a lot to chew through.
** (''AW''-''AWDS'') Superpowers that are charged more from losing your own units than destroying others, giving a losing opponent the chance to undo the progress you made.
** (DS games) AI that's much better at countering your moves, but in a way that solidifies the stalemate as often as it does assure its victory.
** (Pre-''AW'') There's no advantage to attacking first, because both sides hit each other simultaneously in combat, instead of the defender going second and having their counterattack weakened by the health they lost. This makes indirect units extremely valuable as they don't take counterattacks, but they're very slow to use and will dissuade the opponent from engaging you even more.
** (Pre-''AW'') Only the properties you start with can produce units, ''not'' the ones you capture. Even when you're clearly winning, this can make pushing into the enemy base and actually finishing the game immensely difficult, as their reinforcements are right there, while yours are on the opposite side of the map.

** Pretty easy to do with two stall-heavy Mons, or if the battle has been going on for a while and Mons only have Struggle as their move left. Generation II competitive was especially bad about this. Reaches ridiculous levels in [[GameBreaker Wobbuffet vs. Wobbuffet]] battles, where due to a lack of actual attacks beyond counterattacks means that they can only hit with Struggle, and their high HP (and very, very low attack power) means that winning with that will take a long, long time. And heaven help you if you both have Leftovers attached, which will easily heal more HP than Struggle will hurt you for...

** The Generation II metagame has a reputation for looking like this, and not for no reason. Nearly all the top-ranked Pokémon are incredibly bulky, which is furthered by the stat system at the time allowing Pokémon to max out all their stats, the Leftovers item grants slow regeneration and sees nigh-universal use, and the Rest/Sleep Talk combo is at its height, due to the fact that Sleep Talk can roll Rest to fully heal the user. It's quite telling that the most notable offensive strategies rely on using [[TakingYouWithMe Self-Destruct or Explosion]], as that's one of the few ways to quickly break an opponent's defenses. Part of the reason the famously powerful Snorlax remains legal is a belief that, were it not for Snorlax's presence and insane offensive potential, then the game would lose the one thing keeping it from being an eternal stallfest. This was significantly lessened with the third-generation games, which retooled the stat gain system to force Pokémon to specialize, added powerful offense-boosting items like the Choice Band and Choice Specs or moves like Dragon Dance and Calm Mind, and nerfed some of the more annoying stall strategies (namely, Resttalk).

** The Generation II metagame has a reputation for looking like this, and not for no reason. Nearly all the top-ranked Pokémon are incredibly bulky, which is furthered by the stat system at the time allowing Pokémon to max out all their stats, the Leftovers item grants slow regeneration and sees nigh-universal use, and the Rest/Sleep Talk combo is at its height, due to the fact that Sleep Talk can roll Rest to fully heal the user. It's quite telling that the most notable offensive strategies rely on using [[TakingYouWithMe Self-Destruct or Explosion]], as that's one of the few ways to quickly break an opponent's defenses. Part of the reason the famously powerful Snorlax remains legal is a belief that, were it not for Snorlax's presence and insane offensive potential, then the game would be lose the one thing keeping it from being an eternal stallfest. This was significantly lessened with the third-generation games, which retooled the stat gain system to force Pokémon to specialize, added powerful offense-boosting items like the Choice Band and Choice Specs or moves like Dragon Dance and Calm Mind, and nerfed some of the more annoying stall strategies (namely, Resttalk).

** When playing with the very first sets, especially in the OCG, matches tended to devolve into this due to the fairly hefty 8000 starting LP and the vast majority of monsters being below 1000 ATK. "Hitotsu-Me Giant Beatdown" is a somewhat sarcastic term for dated and strategy-light formats, as the old cyclops was the strongest low-level monster in OCG Volume 1 (with only 1200 ATK, meaning it took a full seven turns of direct attacks to bring the opponent down). As this was before effect monsters existed, the only real strategy tended to be when to trigger Trap Hole or play an equip card.

* Pretty easy to do in ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'' with two stall-heavy Mons, or if the battle has been going on for a while and Mons only have Struggle as their move left. Generation II competitive was especially bad about this. Reaches ridiculous levels in [[GameBreaker Wobbuffet vs. Wobbuffet]] battles, where due to a lack of actual attacks beyond counterattacks means that they can only hit with Struggle, and their high HP (and very, very low attack power) means that winning with that will take a long, long time. And heaven help you if you both have Leftovers attached, which will easily heal more HP than Struggle will hurt you for...

** The Generation II metagame has a reputation for looking like this, and not for no reason. Nearly all the top-ranked Pokémon are incredibly bulky, which is furthered by the stat system at the time allowing Pokémon to max out all their stats, the Leftovers item grants slow regeneration and sees nigh-universal use, and the Rest/Sleep Talk combo is at its height, due to the fact that Sleep Talk can roll Rest to fully heal the user. It's quite telling that the most notable offensive strategies rely on using [[TakingYouWithMe Self-Destruct or Explosion]], as that's one of the few ways to quickly break an opponent's defenses. Part of the reason the famously powerful Snorlax remains legal is a belief that, were it not for Snorlax's presence and insane offensive potential, then the game would be lose the one thing keeping it from being an eternal stallfest.

Compare DamageSpongeBoss, usually referred to as "bullet sponges" in shooters. Contrast the inversion, RocketTagGameplay, which is a case of mutually ineffective defenses instead of mutually ineffective methods of attack as this trope.

** Back in the Generation II days, competitive battles had a habit of looking like this. Rest-Talk (Rest put the user to sleep and recovered health, Sleep Talk had you use a random move if you were asleep) was by far the most common set, Skarmory and Blissey were at full power, and Leftovers was pretty much the only item anyone used. This created a meta of extremely tanky defensive types, with Snorlax sitting pretty as the king of them all. Later generations nerfed the mechanics of Rest-Talk to make it a lot less reliable--you used to be able to use Rest ''while sleeping'' if Sleep Talk rolled it.

* ''[[VideoGame/{{Warcraft}} Warcraft III]] has this as a core philosophy, as unlike ''Warcraft I & II'' or ''[[VideoGame/StarCraft StarCraft I & II]]'', hitpoints are in much greater proportion to the damage values to promote a micromanagement playstyle. The ArbitraryHeadcountLimit is also 100 instead of 200 supply units as in ''Starcraft'' and combat units usually require at least two supply units (with few exceptions) to make each unit a more significant presence in your army. This gets subverted somewhat in the endgame with units like Gryphon Riders who can devastate heavy-armor units quickly in sufficient numbers.

* ''[[VideoGame/{{Warcraft}} Warcraft III]] has this as a core philosophy, as unlike ''Warcraft I & II'' or ''[[VideoGame/StarCraft I & II]]'', hitpoints are in much greater proportion to the damage values to promote a micromanagement playstyle. The ArbitraryHeadcountLimit is also 100 instead of 200 supply units as in ''Starcraft'' and combat units usually require at least two supply units (with few exceptions) to make each unit a more significant contribution to battles. This gets subverted somewhat in the endgame with units like Gryphon Riders who can devastate heavy-armor units quickly in sufficient numbers.

* Endgame ''VideoGame/RiseOfNations'' turns into this, due to the fact that the last part of the tech tree is laden with options that pretty much destroy the game's time and resource systems--building troops instantly, for instance. This basically turns the match into a contest of who can mash up their armies against each other the longest.

* ''WebOriginal/TheDeathOfBasketball'' has this occur by way of flooding drafts with the worst possible players the game's systems allow. Once all the actual players have retired, you end up with a court full of minuscule weaklings who barely know the rules and behave as if they're suffering from catastrophic brain damage. While this results in terrible defense, offense is even worse, as these "doomsday players" can barely keep the ball going in a straight line, much less make a shot. The last recorded championship game, between the Denver Nuggets and the Orlando Magic, went on for twelve overtimes and ended with 0-3.

* ''D20 Future'' (an offshoot of ''TabletopGame/D20Modern takes this UpToEleven with the combat between capital ships: namely, capital ships typically have tens of thousands of HitPoints, whereas the most powerful ship weapons only do damage in the hundreds of points. Even worse: ships get a size penalty to attack rolls just like creatures do (-8 for colossal size, which all capital ships are), as a result, the ships typically have a really low attack bonus and miss a lot, dragging on the interminable fight even longer.

* The later games in the ''VideoGame/SuperSmashBros'' series can be set up like this in custom fights: High-gravity, metal battles will typically result in everyone involved hitting several hundred damage at ''least'' before a KO is remotely feasible. This is also a lot of the fame and infamy behind maps like Hyrule Temple; the stage is so gigantic that even a Home-Run Bat isn't going to guarantee a KO unless used near the edge. The enclosed cave area near the bottom of the stage is ''very'' difficult to get knocked out of there.

* Stalemates are quite common in the ''VideoGame/NintendoWars'' series. The enemies are endless unless you capture their bases, which tend to be so well-defended that rushing them is suicide, turning a lot of battles into wars of attrition where you can only advance one step at a time, if at all. This is compounded by various factors: superpowers that are charged more from losing your own units than destroying others, giving a losing opponent the chance to undo the progress you made; the maps that give enormous advantages to the AI to compensate for its lack of intelligence; the AI in the DS games, which is much better at countering your moves, but in a way that just tends to solidify the stalemate even more, rather than assuring its victory; and in the pre-GBA games, there is no advantage to attacking first, because both sides hit each other simultaneously in combat, instead of the defender going second and having their counterattack weakened by the health they lost.

* ''Film/Deadpool2016'' has [[ChromeChampion Colossus]] versus [[BrawnHilda Angel Dust]] in the climactic fight. Colossus is unwilling to go all-out on a lady. Angel can hit hard enough to send him flying, but not enough to damage. The result is that the best they can do to one another is incapacitation until [[AwesomeMcCoolName Negasonic Teenage Warhead]] gets in on it.

* Stalemates are quite common in the ''VideoGame/NintendoWars'' series. The enemies are endless unless you capture their bases, which tend to be so well-defended that rushing them is suicide, turning a lot of battles into wars of attrition where you can only advance one step at a time, if at all. This is compounded by various factors: superpowers that are charged more from losing your own units than destroying others, giving a losing opponent the chance to undo the progress you made; the maps that give enormous advantages to the AI to compensate for its lack of intelligence; and also the AI in the DS games, which is much better at countering your moves, but in a way that just tends to solidify the stalemate even more, rather than assuring its victory.

* A recurring problem in the ''VideoGame/NintendoWars'' series. The enemies are endless unless you capture their bases, which tend to be so well-defended that rushing them is suicide, turning a lot of battles into wars of attrition where you can only advance one step at a time, if at all. This is compounded by various factors: superpowers that are charged more from losing your own units than destroying others, giving a losing opponent the chance to undo the progress you made; the maps that give enormous advantages to the AI to compensate for its lack of intelligence; and also the AI in the DS games, which is much better at countering your moves, but in a way that just tends to solidify the stalemate even more, rather than assuring its victory.

* Trench warfare in UsefulNotes/WorldWarI is often regarded as this, particularly on the Western Front and in the early phases of the war where tanks were still in development. With the advancements to machine guns, artillery, and similar technologies, there was no easy way for soldiers to close the gap and earn a decisive victory, barring overwhelming numbers or total incompetence on the part of the enemy. Consequently, most battles came down to shelling the opponent at a distance with artillery, but both sides would typically be entrenched, minimizing the damage of that as well, resulting in slow grinding battles of attrition.

* ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'' has this in spades in one-on-one [[PlayerVersusPlayer PvP]]. Every healer class in adequate [=PvP=] gear is capable of outhealing any damage dealt by a damage-dealing class in a matter of several seconds while their offensive abilities are rather unimpressive. Tanks have multiple abilities to absorb and negate damage, while damage-dealing classes have higher than average amount of escape abilities. Nearly all tanks and damage-dealers may regenerate their health to some extent, and may often stall matches by being efficient at running away or incapacitating the enemy while their health goes up. While one-on-one duels are not something the game is balanced around, duels occur often between sole survivors at the end of the arena match, making the winner typically the one who made the least mistakes. However, the expansion ''Wrath of the Lich King'' was well known for its RocketTag gameplay.

* The later games in the ''VideoGame/SuperSmashBros'' series can be set up like this in custom fights: High-gravity, metal battles will typically result in everyone involved hitting several hundred damage at ''least'' before a KO is remotely feasible. This is also a lot of the fame and infamy behind maps like Hyrule Temple; the stage is so gigantic that even a Home-Run Bat isn't going to guarantee a KO unless used near the edge. The enclosed cave area near the bottom of the stage has the FanNickname of [[https://supersmashbros.fandom.com/wiki/Temple#Fight_Club "Fight Club"]] because it is ''very'' difficult to get knocked out of there.