Heroic Sacrifices in Tabletop Games.
- BattleTech: During the Clan Invasion, Tyra Miraborg rammed her crippled aerospace fighter into the Clans' flagship, the Dire Wolf, striking the ship's bridge and killing ilKhan Leo Showers. This act forced the Clans to delay the invasion for a year while they elected a new ilKhan and bought the Inner Sphere much needed time to regroup and rearm before the offensive resumed. Tyra actually had no clue that she was attacking such a vital target, she just knew that her fighter was too badly damaged to survive and got extremely lucky with her Taking You with Me.
- The tabletop game Dread uses a Jenga tower instead of dice. In situations where your life or the life of another is at stake, you pull a block from the tower and place it. If you succeed, your action succeeds. If the tower falls over, someone dies. Or you can deliberately knock the tower over. This means you will absolutely die, but it could very well save everyone else.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Book of Exalted Deeds advises DMs to go easy on resurrection penalties for good characters who go out on one of these; there's even the Risen Martyr prestige class.
- Oriental Adventures: Honor Points can be awarded to a character posthumously (which benefits future characters created by the player) and dying heroically in this manner gains such characters a lot of them.
- 5th Edition has some mechanics that allow Players to try and pull this off — the Shield Master feat and the Oath of the Crown subclass both allow someone to put themselves in harm's way and save another character at the expense of taking the damage themselves.
- Fabula Ultima makes this trope into a gameplay mechanic. A player character that has fallen to 0 hit points can choose to sacrifice themselves instead of surrendering, achieving some great feat at the cost of their own life. Since the game ascribes to All Deaths Final, there is generally no coming back from this, so the rules encourage the player to go hog-wild in their character's final moments.
- Magic: The Gathering: In the War of the Spark set, Liliana is forced by Nicol Bolas to lead his army of zombies across Ravnica. When she finally turns the army against him, she does so knowing that the price will be an agonizing death, even if she managed to kill him. Except that Gideon Jura takes the price of her betrayal upon himself.
- In Nomine:
- To a Cherub, her attuned charge is more important than her own life. If one must lay down her own life to ensure its safety, she will gladly do so.
- The Archangel Raphael gave her life in 1008 AD to destroy the mad Demon Prince Legion, who threatened to consume the entirety of the mortal world.
- In The Final Trumpet, the players get Thor to battle against the awakened Jormungandr. As prophesied, the thunder god successfully kills the monster and prevents it from destroying the world, but perishes in the fight.
- The Others (2015): As the manual says, it doesn't matter if the Sin player kills the last F.A.I.T.H. player and the F.A.I.T.H. players would lose. If, in their death, they managed to successfully complete the final objective, they win. As such, it is an entirely valid strategy to rush into a room with eight enemies inside whom deal an instant death damage total of five. If the hero only landed 7 hits and killed only one monster, but that one monster was the objective target (the player gets to choose), then the Sin player could have dealt five billion damage and had a thousand enemies in that one room for all it mattered.
- Pathfinder: There's an alternate set of abilities for monks in the Advanced Player's Handbook that allows a monk to do this at high levels, reviving his entire party and healing them to full health. However, it's a true heroic sacrifice in a world where Death Is Cheap: if a monk does this, not only are they killed for good, their name can never be spoken or written again, making their sacrifice doomed to be forgotten.
- Shadowrun: Just after his inaugural speech President Dunkelzahn rips out his own heart in an effort to stop the effects of Blood Magic and is assumed assassinated.
- Shadows over Camelot: Some actions cost a Life point, but player characters who run out of Life points die at the end of their turn, so it's possible for them to sacrifice themselves in an act to support their faction's victory, like fighting off the Progression of Evil or taking an extra action on their turn.
- TORG: One of the subplot cards the players can use is Martyr which, once set up, will allow the player to automatically succeed at something by heroically sacrificing their own life.
- Traveller, Double Adventure 5 The Chamax Plague/Horde. In Horde, the planet Raschev is suffering an Alien Invasion by voracious and quick-breeding creatures using Generation Ships. When a pilot sees an alien ship landing, he flies his plane into it, damaging it and causing it to crash. The ship is damaged enough so that almost all of the aliens aboard are killed and the survivors can be easily disposed of by the PCs. His heroic action prevents the invaders from gaining a foothold that would have ended in the deaths of the entire human population of the planet.
- Victory in the Pacific: This is the usual result of sending a single ship up against a large enemy force to take out the lone enemy patrolling vessel, or to destroy the lone enemy amphibious force.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- The Imperial Guard, period. Their entire existence is a heroic sacrifice. Against a galaxy crawling with monstrous Tyrannid bugs that outnumber them by an exponentially large ratio, the Lovecraftian horrors of Chaos, the Orkish hordes, life-sucking skeleton-men, mutants, psychics, barbarians and technologically advanced aliens... they're basically conscripts with a ridiculously obsolete lasgun in their hands and some flak armor. They're cannon fodder for the Space Marines who can't be everywhere at once. Unlike the Space Marines, they're not elite super-soldiers with demigod-like training and equipment, just regular people living in a dangerous and uncaring universe full of superpowered evil. And, despite this, they Hold the Line.
- The Apocalypse Reload book gave them a new strategic asset: Fire On My Coordinates. Choose a soldier in your army with a communications backpack and have a cruiser in orbit fire a torpedo/plasma blast right on top of them (though they have to pass a morale test to do it). You can just see the squad crouching in the trenches, most of them desperately holding the enemy off while the main army retreats, the communications trooper shouting "fire on my coordinates!" into the microphone, blasting the advancing Ork/Tyranid/Chaos/etc. horde and the squad into very small pieces.
- Also important to mention is the Imperial Guard Saint Ollanius Pius, the guardsman (or Terminator Captain, or Custodes, Depending on the Writer) who threw himself between the Emperor and Horus, even though he just saw Horus tear apart Sanguinius, arguably the greatest of all the Primarchs. Ollanius was rended from existence by Horus' sheer power, but it was this final act that finally convinced the Emperor that Horus was beyond saving.
- Speaking of, Sanguinius. Wounded, exhausted and having seen his own death in the future (yes, Sanguinius was able to divine the future to a certain degree), resisted Horus' promises of power, wealth, fame and (most importantly) life in favour of certain death to inflict a chink in Horus' armour which the Emperor would later exploit to bring him down.
- The final stand of the Astral Knights chapter. To wit, a Necron World Engine (think the Death Star piloted by Omnicidal Maniac killbots) was flying straight towards Terra, and the Imperial Navy along with some Space Marine ships were dispatched to destroy it. Every attempt to destroy it failed due to powerful shielding, and the Imperial Navy took heavy losses. So the Astral Knights flew their battlebarge Tempestus straight into it at full speed, punching through its shields and smashing into the surface. Seven hundred and seventy two Space Marines poured out of the wreckage with the intention of destroying every cannon, power node and command module they came across, beset on all sides by tens of thousands of Necrons. The battle lasted for a hundred hours, and ended only when the Chapter Master himself and the last five remaining warriors penetrated their way deep into the World Engine and destroyed the main power nodes with melta-bombs, bringing down the shields and crippling most of the weapons systems and allowing the Navy to blast the World Engine to kingdom come with huge volleys of cyclonic torpedoes. After the battle a monument was erected on the planet Safehold, constructed of the wreckage of the Tempestus and guarded by volunteers from other chapters who were present at the battle, with 772 statues of Astartes each representing the Astral Knights marines who gave their lives to protect the Imperium. You can cry now.
- Older fluff has one story of an Eldar force who covered the escape of an Imperial contingent, including civilians, from a massive horde of Tyranids. The Imperials managed to escape successfully, but the Eldar were wiped out.
- After the defection of Primarch Magnus the Red to Chaos, Malcador the Sigillite was the only man left in the Imperium of Man who had the power to temporarily replace the God-Emperor on the Golden Throne, to allow the Emperor to battle Horus. Being a mere mortal, Malcador was fully aware that it was a task that would end his life, but it was necessary to protect the human built sections of the Webway from a massive daemonic invasion. When the mortally wounded Emperor was brought back to the Golden Throne, Malcador the Sigillite mustered the last of his power to temporarily revive the Emperor, allowing him to dictate to Rogal Dorn plans to turn the Golden Throne into an arcane life support system. This allowed the Emperor to keep himself in a state of near death for over 10,000 years to maintain the Astronomicon and protect humanity from the Warp. Malcador's body turned into dust after this last act.
- Most Space Marines have badass or threatening Battle Cries. Not the Lamenters chapter. For them, it's "For those we cherish, we die in glory", and they mean it. When the Lamenters launch an assault on an Ork stronghold world, they won't nuke the planet and call it a day; they will save all three million slaves on the planet first, or die to the man trying.
- Another heroic sacrifice from the Lamenters, mixed with a Last Stand: when the Tyranids of Hive Fleet Kraken invaded the planet Malvolion, several hundred Space Marines from the Lamenters fought to the last man against the xenos. They all perished, but their sacrifice bought time for dozens of refugee ships to escape.
