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"Nothing makes me believe in the genius that went into this title like seeing the square representing a sweaty mass of spearmen tearing apart a pile of attack helicopters. What did they fucking do, jam their rotors with their corpses? Did they form together like Voltron and turn into a thousand foot tall spear and a huge robotic arm? Answer me Meier, you worthless sow!" — Zack Parsons, Your Favorite Games Suck
That which does not kill you leaves you weaker for the next, and the next, and the next...
— Unknown
Never underestimate the power of overwhelming stupidity in overwhelming numbers.
In many video games, especially Turn Based and Real Time Strategy games, if you can hit something with your weapon, you can damage it, however slightly. And if you can damage it, you can defeat it just by hitting it enough times. While most games do try to balance this out by matching up varying armor or attack types, the fact remains that in many games, a few squads worth of infantry can usually kill a main battle tank or destroy an armored bunker using only their rifles. Crippling Overspecialization can make this even worse, if it isn't properly balanced.
Though granted, as the riddle of The Hobbit said of Time: " This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel, Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, and beats high mountain down." So, technically, if you hit anything enough times with anything, the first anything will go apart.
Note that there is some Truth In Television here: by the final years of World War II, infantry units had worked out how to take on tanks even without armor support. Presumably the spearmen attacking helicopters have picked up some black-market rocket-propelled grenades along the way.
Compare Wafer Thin Mint. See also Zerg Rush and Cherry Tapping. Depending on how heavily protected the target is, More Dakka may be involved. If it succeeds, the victim may suffer a Rasputinian Death.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- As pictured above, Mahou Sensei Negima references this trope when Negi's inferiority complex causes him to imagine various gaps between himself and, in this case, a small cat. Because a single cat has a mere 0.5 in power to his 500, he reasons that at least 1001 cats working together would easily overpower him.
 ◊
- Byakuya Kuchiki's attacks in Bleach use this quite literally.
- Naruto's Rasenshuriken attack does this also quite literally, cutting and killing Kakuzu with so many cuts that Kakashi's Sharingan couldn't count them all (it counts really fast).
- In Claymore, this is actually very common, with monsters slowly being chopped apart. Rigaldo is one of the more famous victims of this sort of death.
Card Games
- In Magic The Gathering, the "Tim" deck is an old standby, dating back to the very earliest days of the game. A blue player stocks up on Prodigal Sorcerers (and similar cards such as the Zuran Spellcaster to get around the 4-card maximum in tournament play), which all deal one damage when tapped (the name is a reference to Tim the Enchanter from Monty Python And The Holy Grail). The resulting "wall of pokes" can be devastating to the opposing player.
- And let's not forget the actual card Death of A Thousand Stings, which drains away just the tiniest bit of life but can potentially be reused.
- Death Of A Thousand Cuts is one way to get past the Circle of Protection cards. There are others, but that one's the most obvious.
- In Yu-Gi-Oh! there is a card called "Solar Flare Dragon" that inflicts 500 damage to your opponent every turn.With even 1 out, you can often, if protected, chip away at their Life Points.
- Plus, if there are two, they protect each other. And the damage stacks. Unless your opponent doesn't pull some Monster Removal in eight turns, he dies.
- The Yata-Lock works like this. Your opponent has no cards in his hand or on the field, attack with Yata-Garasu, deal 200 damage and your opponent can't draw, meaning they can't do anything, repeat. This continues for about 10 turns or until your opponent surrenders. It's very effective, to the point that the card was banned solely for this.
Literature
- In Joe Abercrombie's Before They Are Hanged, Logen, while explaining what he's done in the past as the feared Bloody-Nine, says he once tried to tear down a wall during a siege with his bare hands. It didn't work, but he didn't stop until one of the defenders dropped a rock on him.
- Harry Dresden used this technique on the ax crazy Summer Lady Aurora, by having the fairy Toot-toot among others, cut her with box knives.
- In Lucky Wander Boy, this is the signature attack of the protagonist's favorite chacacter in the Eviscerator game in his company's breakroom(there because they're making The Threequel to the film of the game), as well as the main story of the film and short story he finds parallels to the titular(I know it's wrong, but it has "tit" in it, and I'm quite immature) game about which he is obsessing a bit too much, ending in a bit of Nightmare Fuel.
Live Action TV
- Played quite literally in one episode of Fringe, in which an office worker is killed after being mobbed by butterflies with razor-sharp wings.
- Except that the attack is actually a drug which causes Your Mind Makes It Real and the guy wasn't really killed by butterflies — he was killed by thinking there were butterflies and his body creating the wounds.
- Getting killed by a mob of imaginary butterflies might be a stronger example.
- He didn't die because of the imaginary butterflies, he died because he jumped out of the window of the 36th floor to escape the imaginary butterflies.
Tabletop Games
- Druids in Dungeons And Dragons have a high level spell called Creeping Doom, which allows the caster to summon one thousand tiny insects that each deal a single point of damage before dying. Unfortunately, by the time you are able to cast it, most monsters you'd want to actually use it on have damage reduction, rendering it a Useless Useful Spell.
- The spell was reworked in the 3.5 edition to simply summon a large amounts of insect swarms (which, due to their pathetic damage, didn't improve matters).
- However it is helpful that swarms are totally immune to most conventional attacks, and are extremely distracting to anyone inside them.
- The effect of creeping doom was a plot point in ''The Intercontinental Union of Disgusting Characters'': it's used to take down the villain Peter Perfect, but when Dirk the Destructive tells Peter's corpse that the spell shouldn't have affected him (He's not "...subject to normal attacks..." which also applies to nearly every character in the story), his skeletal remains jump up and his body reforms, ready to free his comrades and menace the heroes again.
- The original version of the spell lives on as the epic spell Crown of Vermin, which ignores EPIC damage reduction - though it does not bypass damage reduction based on weapon material or alignment.
- Dungeons And Dragons uses this straight as well. When you hit with an attack, you always deal at least one point of damage barring damage reduction, so an epic-level fighter could theoretically be killed by a sufficient amount of pebbles, or even a house cat. Made even worse when you consider that, due to the dexterity bonuses house cats receive, they are an extremely dangerous opponent to Commoners and even first-level characters, killing them at least 50% of the time in a theoretical battle. However, only a very bad (or very humorous) DM wouldn't compensate for this.
- It gets worse when you factor in a cat's bonus to Hide and Move Silently checks. The cat will almost always get a surprise round, and that makes the cat vs commoner matchup come out clearly in the cat's favor.
- The book Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition for Dummies uses this trope by name while describing a fighter power that can still deal a little damage on a miss ("If you're fighting an enemy that you just can't seem to hit, you may have to settle for the Death of a Thousand Cuts.")
- Warhammer 40000: This is the standard tactic of the Imperial Guard to bring down something big when tanks aren't around: point many, many lasguns at the target, and it will eventually go down.
- "That's a whole lotta diddly."◊
- Tyranid players often employ this trope by the use of Gaunts with the special rule 'Without Number', though in this case, the cuts are quite often actual cuts.
- This is of course complete nonsense; lasguns don't work very well on Marines because power armor is extremely heat resistant, rendering them virtually immune to the much vaunted Pulse Rifles as well (See Kill Team). Against the opponents that the Guard actually fights (That is Orks, Tyranids, and Chaos Cultists) a lasgun is more than sufficent, capable of blowing fist-sized chunks out of the target while being about the most reliable weapons that anyone has.
- That's a damn lie. One pulse rifle wound in three will still go through. Same with lasguns and hellguns. Pulse rifles are just twice as likely to make the To Wound roll as lasguns.
- Of course Hellgun now rip right threw power armour, also the Guard's newest tank the leman russ punisher is this in tank form (with a galting gun) it can fire a total of 29 S5 shots (its galting gun and three heavy bolters) but lacks armor penetration (minus the heavy bolters)
- The new World Of Darkness: All objects have a durability rating. Only damage in excess of that rating will count against the object. For example, if six damage is done to an object with durability five, only one damage is done to the structure. Not an aversion; damage rolls are open-ended, and so even the weeniest attack has a nonzero chance of beating any given durability. If you keep hacking at a brick wall with spoons you'll eventually grind it to dust. Eventually.
- Exalted subverts this trope and plays it straight. It has a feature called hardness. If something does not defeat hardness it doesn't affect the character (hardness is normally abysmally low, but it prevents things like rocks). On the other hand, if an attack hits, it does at least your Essence Rating in damage; even if your armour would negate it to zero. Or something. This troper isn't that good at Exalted.
- No matter how good the opponent's armor is, you still get to roll at least your Essence Rating in damage dice; it is still possible to deal zero damage with an attack.
- GURPS: Powers introduces Damage Resistance which divides damage a few fold but can't drop it below one. As a result a mob of totally normal people can beat a superhero to death. Players rectified this by also giving such characters a couple points of Damage Reduction which allows a character to ignore a specific amount of damage.
Video Games
- Battle For Wesnoth suffers from this at times to time. For example the Undead faction has a unit called Walking corpse, which the main purpose is this trope.
- Plus, even though your unit can have a 100% resistance against a particular type of attack, the attack will always deal 1 damage. So you can nibble that target to death with 1 dmg, assume that there's no way for that target to heal and the attacker don't die first.
- The Final Fantasy games feature a monster called the Cactuar, which uses an attack called "One Thousand Needles" that deals exactly 1,000 HP damage to your character in really fast 1 HP increments. In some games, there also exists a Jumbo Cactuar, which uses a "Ten Thousand Needles" attack that kills a character outright (since the HP cap in most FF games usually tops out at 9,999, and you take One needle too many).
- Final Fantasy X has an ability that lets you break the HP limit so you can go over 9999. A bonus monster called the Cactuar King has an attack called 99,999 Needles and it does exactly just that, so don't think you can outwit it by having 99,999 HP.
- At least in Final Fantasy XII, you can learn 1000 needles. It's actually quite helpful in taking down bosses whose defense increases as their HP decreases.
- Command And Conquer is the classic "Riflemen killing a tank" example, offset by the fact that a tank can usually save itself by running the infantry over. A particularly bad example is found in Yuri's Revenge, where the Hero Unit Boris is capable, when powered up, of killing heavy tanks in two or three bursts of his AK-47.
- One of the add-on packs for Red Alert featured a mission with a Soviet Super Soldier who was ridiculously tough and did twice as much damage to anything he fought as they did to him. This reached an absurd height when you had him take on a battleship and win easily.
- In Command And Conquer 3 this trope was averted somewhat. The game introduced a very rock-paper-scissors sort of combat where only units of a certain type could take out others. (Only anti-armor infantry could effectively fight tanks, but were weak against regular enemy infantry, for example) It was still possible to take down enemy armor with riflemen if given enough time, however.
- Starcraft is also particularly replete with this, where a few massed infantry are capable of taking down starships.
- At least this isn't possible with Zerglings, if only because they can't attack air units...
- Of course, the purpose of it in Starcraft is to make sure that all units have a purpose throughout the game.
- On custom maps units can have far more armor; it is possible for one unit to have more armor than the damage of the opposing unit at which point it takes one half a point of damage. 19998 hits can actually happen surprisingly quickly.
- The Civilization series. In the original game, one lucky roll could allow a warrior with a spear to beat an armored vehicle. Later games in the series expand the rules to make this far more unlikely, but it's still possible.
- In Total Annihilation, a fun but useless attack is to build hundreds of "Fleas" and sic them on the enemy. A more useful attack is the "Peewee rush" in which dozens of Peewees can obliterate a base in mere moments.
- Also, a couple of dozen Construction Aircraft given orders to recycle can quickly erase enemy structures and units from the map. About the only thing they can't wipe out is the enemy commander, and that's only because he can blow them all up with one shot from his Disintegration Gun.
- This is evident even in fighting games such as Marvel Vs Capcom 2, where certain characters can spam multiple-hitting special attacks repeatedly. Even if the attacks are blocked, they still inflict minor damage. After enough attacks, you may find yourself in a position to be cherry tapped. Most likely you will lose from cheese (death from block damage is Street Fighter is evidenced by a cheese-wedge icon), as your opponent revs up a Super Combo, because There Is No Kill Like Overkill.
- Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door averts this, as damage is small enough that the calculation by subtracting defense from attack (used in some other RPGs such as Dragon Warrior) is a big deal, and thus attacks that do many weak hits (like Yoshi's stampede) do no damage to enemies with any defense unless their base attack value is boosted.
- Still, each multi-hit does less damage than the previous, but as long as the first one does damage, the rest will also do at least 1 HP worth of damage.
- In Disgaea, certain characters (the Prinnies come to mind) perform multiple weak attacks instead of one regular-powered attack. But when linked into a combo, the attack value of each hit goes up. Put a Prinny at the end of a multi-character combo and watch every hit (and they land about ten) deal a squidload of damage...
- Barring combos, however, the trope is averted; reach a high enough level difference and opponents can no longer harm you — if they even hit you at all.
- An odd version was present in the second War Craft game, where gold mines could be destroyed, though their HP was as high as the game's engine would allow for a unit or structure. This led to interesting sights, such as a group of footmen hacking away at a mine... until it collapsed.
- Not to mention archers attacking mines, or other brick structures.
- Advance Wars has this. In fact, "infantry spam" is a slow-but-effective strategy for succeeding in any ground war.
- To be fair, it's more spamming expendable infantry spam to meat-shield artillery. But it's definitely possible to bring down even the heaviest tanks with infantry.
- The word 'eventually' should be in here. It will take a huge amount of infantry to manage it with any tank larger than the base. One can assume that they swarm the tank and shoot the folk inside.
- There's the luck factor, though: In all games, there's Nell the Born Lucky CO, while Black Hole Rising adds Flak, who sometimes does some extra damage (and sometimes less). Dual Strike spices it up even further with Nell's little sister Rachel who's almost as lucky, a Flak clone Jugger, a special ability involving luck, and a general luck factor that gives all units a small chance of dealing extra damage, regardless of CO. These facts considering, a bunch of infantry can actually be quite an effective force.
- The other advantage of an infantry swarm is that, at most, a unit can destroy one other unit per turn (there are ways to attack multiple units, but none of these in any game can actually destroy that unit). Only the most powerful units can one-hit an infantry unit from full health, so it can be quite tricky to fight back the wall, the only problem to using only infantry, as opposed to infantry meat shielding artillery and rockets, is that it takes just as much time and structures to build an infantry as a MegaTank (just much more cash). A Mechanized Infantry rush (Mechs can do considerable damage to any land unit if they strike first) is generally more effective (Especially against very large units, where the mech can move up, do a small but notable amount of damage, and get gunned down to make way for more mechs)
- Fire Emblem: Fighting a dragon by slashing it over and over for 1 damage each.
- Fire Emblem is actually a rather good aversion of this, as if you are too weak, you will deal "No Damage". Thus even if you can only deal one hit point, the concept is that you are strong enough to damage whatever you are fighting, if only barely.
- You could play this trope straight in the fourth game. If a unit's attack is lower than the opponent's defense, they'll still do 1 point of damage. Many times has this troper had a Fragile Speedster defeat a Mighty Glacier in the arena this way, with their sword almost always breaking in the process.
- In the original Wing Commander, it was possible for even the weakest fighter to destroy any capital ship if you could shoot it enough times. Later games made large capital ships invulnerable to everything except special "torpedo" missiles.
- Similarly, Descent: Freespace allowed a player's guns to do damage to capital ships — very slowly. Freespace 2 averted this trope: Fighter guns could only do a certain amount of damage to capital ships, which had to be killed by either torpedoes or other capital ships.
- The early Playstation game Lone Soldier has the titular beefslab soldier being able to destroy tanks, walls, armoured bunkers and the like with the default infinite ammo-laden Uzi. By spending several minutes firing at anything destructible in the game (and making it flash to make the player aware of it's status of being hurt) a torrent of 9mm bullets could make buildings not only be destroyed, but destroyed in a giant plume of flame.
- In the Grand Theft Auto series, punching (with bare hands, no less), kicking and stomping on a car enough times will result in denting, windows breaking, doors and body panels falling off, and eventually, the car exploding. In that order. Never mind that the characters should have bruised, cut and fractured hands doing so — they're perfectly healthy even after punching three trucks to explosion.
- In the Star Wars: X-Wing series, a fighter can kill any capital ship with just its laser blasters, though avoiding the capital ship's own turbolaser turrets is a problem. A fighter's ion guns can disable even a Star Destroyer in a few shots, if the shields are down. Tie Fighter and later instalments even allow you to destroy the guns on capital ships. Once you clear away enough guns, you can literally park your fighter beside the ship, put a rubber band around the trigger, and go get coffee while the Star Destroyer or Mon Calamari Cruiser slowly dies.
- In the Star Wars universe, fighters are considered a major threat to capital ships if they use mass-fire tactics with missile weapons. In fairness to the trope, their lasers are usually depicted as too weak to deal any major damage to a capital ship, but the point stands that Rebel fighters were such a threat to Imperial capital ships that a special ship design composed mostly of a hull and a metric buttload of laser cannons, the Lancer-class frigate, was made just to kill fighters.
- In Eve Online, a large enough swarm of completely expendable small ships can destroy a flagship costing millions and billions of ISK.
- In Homeworld 2, several ships are built especially to inflict death of a thousand cuts, particularly the bombers and the Vaygr Laser Corvettes. Actually, most small ships can overrun the big guns when given time. Somewhat averted in the sense that some ships do carry enough hull defenses to eventually clear the space of the little ships assailing them.
- In Half Life, you can shoot down helicopters using machine guns. In the Playstation 2-only Expansion Pack Half-Life: Decay, you have to. Half-Life 2 was much more sensible about this.
- You can shoot down a helicopter with a machine gun, but only if you're extremely lucky. Such incidents did happen for example in the Vietnam War.
- Prior to getting the Mega Buster chargeable Arm Cannon, several Mega Man games had a weapon that was no more effective in damage than the normal gun, but had such a fast rate of fire that players would use them exclusively unless they were out of power or not effective against a given enemy. Examples include the Metal Blade (MM2) (aimable) and Needle Cannon (MM3) (full-auto in three round bursts).
- Vulcans in the Battle Network series are probably some form of subversion. They dealt between 10 and 20 damage and hit 3-5 times, which is decent. The trick was that any attack-increasing chip attached to one powers up each bullet. Entire folders were created based on boosting up a Super Vulcan as high as it would go, resulting in a chip with an attack strength of around 150 - times twelve. The same applies to any multiple-hitting chip, actually - Tornado, Twister, and even Bubbleman.
- Model HX in ZX turned out to be a Game Breaker because of this. One of its moves is to create a tornado that sits in once place and attacks 16 times. The final boss was (of course) a One Winged Angel, and its stationary damage point was just asking to be tornado'd to death.
- In the Mechwarrior 4 computer game, an effective means of taking down the heaviest mechs is to load another ultra-heavy mech with as many light weapons (AC2s work well due to also having long range, but machine guns will work if range isn't an issue) as you can fit and pouring firepower into the target until it dies. Ironically, the heavy weapons are more effective on light mechs, as the things are often too agile to keep a bead on, but it's usually fairly easy to get them in your sights for the split-second necessary to hit them with a PPC or similar weapon.
- Theoretically averted in Warhammer 40000: Dawn Of War, where the armour types system means that most basic infantry are not supposed to scratch the toughest armour types. In practice, however, Scratch Damage still occurs. Nevertheless, fans have made mods that indeed make buildings impervious to small arms.
- In a later Relic game, Company of Heroes, this is completely averted in the case of actual tanks. While rifles may indeed do light damage to armored cars or scout vehicles, they will do NOTHING to a tank, even attacking their weaker rear armor.
- This trend was continued with the sequel to Dawn of War, with the notable exception that some common weapons really are powerful enough to do light damage to tanks— the Space Marine bolter fires high explosive rockets, and Ork weapons aren't too much weaker than that, especially since they bring more dakka.
- In the original Halo, it is possible to bring down most Covenant vehicles simply by shooting them enough with small arms and grenades. You can also do this in the later games in the series, though getting enough ammunition to pull this off takes some time, and the enemy vehicles are much better at killing infantrymen.
- Ghosts are your friend. Its possible to take out EVERYTHING DESTROYABLE in that game with these nimble machines. Problem is, they're not too durable themselves... but you can take on a Phantom and disable ALL of its guns without dying.
- Halo Wars has this, specifically with the Elephant Tank. This tank can train its own infantry, allowing you to set up small bases of power independent of your main base. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your mood), most players just park a handful of Elephant Tanks near the enemy and use their production capabilites to feed cannon-fodder into the nearest battle, conveyor belt style.
- In Freelancer, it's not rare to find yourself taking out entire fleets by yourself with just your guns, enough repair supplies, and the will of the Holy Spirit, and this is thanks to each shot dealing at least a little bit of damage. In fact, a popular Self Imposed Challenge in one of the late missions involves destroying 3 battleships, 5 cruisers and 6 gunships.
- In Age Of Empires 1 and 2, a large enough number of guys with swords can storm a castle. Age of Empires 3 has all characters who can damage a building use a separate siege attack — an inexhaustible supply of torches.
- Doesn't even need to be a large number - if the building can't shoot arrows at you (or sometimes even that, as towers need technology to shoot at their feet) one swordsman is enough!
- Ginormo Sword. While the object (sorta) of the game is to boost your weapon of choice to levels at which it covers the entire screen, the strongest monsters can still take hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of hits to suffer any sort of dent in their HP — even when your strength stat is in the thousands.
- Ragnarok Online's battle system takes into account how many enemies are attacking you at a given time. If the number of enemies you are fighting goes above a certain threshold, your DEF and FLEE get reduced by a certain amount per enemy. Therefore, it is possible to have a sufficient number of Porings handily trounce a level 99 knight.
- Also, fear the summoned Shining Plant.
- Poring, meet Magnum Break and Bowling Bash.
- Averted somewhat in Fallout 1, 2 and Tactics: final attack damage is calculated first by subtracting any Damage Threshold offered by a character's armor from the attacker's rolled damage, then subtracting from any leftover damage the character's Damage Resistance, a percentile: for example, Power Armor in the first game had 12/40 protection against normal damage, making the sniper rifle the only weapon guarenteed to cause damage outside of critical hits. Bethesda's Fallout 3 eliminates DT and only uses DR for armor, meaning that even the toughest hombre wearing heavy-duty powered armor can still be stabbed to death with a kitchen knife.
- Given rather odd forms sometimes with the ability to target specific areas on your enemies. The Deathclaw's weakness (in the first game) are its eyes, but it's a tough enemy to beat even if you know that... So you'll end up shooting and hitting it in the eyes and severaly damaging them again and again for several minutes before it actually has any effect (and the creature dies).
- The Jojo's Bizarre Adventure game averts this trope. If you continuously block hits while not having a Stand out, you will suffer Scratch Damage until your health reaches zero, at which point you will stop taking Scratch Damage. This prevents you from dying by this method, although it's relatively easy to get past one's guard in this game, so turtling is still not an option.
- Both of the Touhou fighters do this as well. Making this even more annoying in the first fighter is the fact that certain moves explicitly cannot kill a blocking opponent even if that block is incorrect and the blocker is guard crushed.
- In Deus Ex, the toughest single standard enemy is likely the military bot. These are like fifteen feet tall, and have chainguns and rocket launchers. Destroying them usually requires multiple hits from a rocket launcher. But one thing: they can only shoot forward, and they turn slowly. So it's not only possible, but easy to destroy one with a combat knife, as long as no other enemies are around: stand behind it and attack continuously for a few minutes, walking in circles to stay behind as it turns to face you. Eventually it will blow up. If you're not careful you'll lose a limb, admittedly, but at least you won't have wasted any ammo.
- In Battlefield 2142, heavily-armored battlewalkers have a Weak Spot that can be attacked with everything but your combat knife. Unless it's an actual anti-vehicle weapon, each hit will do Scratch Damage. Fortunately for the walker pilot, no applicable firearm can wear down the walker in one salvo: all non-machine guns have limited rounds per magazine, and all machine guns suffer from overheating.
- A better example would be the Titan battleships. Once its shields have come down, its vital components can be attacked with, again, everything but knives. Granted, it takes more bullets than any one player carries at one time to wear down everything, but it's entirely possible to take down a Titan by shooting enough lead at its tender spots.
- Mostly averted in Bliztkrige where weaponry needs to have a sufficient penetration value in order to pierce the armor of a vehicle. If the armor of the vehicle being shot at is higher then the penetration value there's a chance that the shell will fail to do any damage. If the armor is higher by a large enough margin, then the shell will never do damage. Hence anti-tank rifles, light AT guns, and armored cars are useless against a Panther or KV tank.
- On the other hand, infantry carry anti-tank grenades, which in addition to doing a small amount of damage, can also disable the treads of a tank, leaving it paralyzed until a support vehicle repairs it.
- The Monster Hunter franchise lives off this trope, with many of the monsters commonly taking over half an hour to slay.
- Age of Mythology The Titans makes this necessary, as nothing in the game can kill a Titan in one shot. Not even the instant-kill god power Bolt, which only takes out 1300 of the Titan's 8000 HP. Typical human units do about 10 points of damage to the Titan and try to wear it down.
- Happens in Star Wars: Empire at War. [[Pyromaniac1337 This troper]] has a fond memory of taking down 5 AT-AT (separately) with 5 squads of blaster-pistol-wielding infantry.
- Turn-based strategy games in general tend to have this as a strategy: Go up to a unit. Attack it. You do some damage, it kills you. Pick your next guy. Go up to a unit... In Battle For Wesnoth it's actually such a prevalent strategy for the Undead that many fans of the game use the term "Walker-corpsing" to refer to this strategy in other games.
- Averted in the Cossacks series of games, where infantry cannot attack buildings with muskets. Buildings can thus only be destroyed by grenades, fire arrows or artillery.
- In Castlevania, the Iron Golem enemies have maximum defense and will only take one damage from any attack. At this point, strong techniques and spells are nearly useless because the enemies have such thick skin. Weaker moves that hit quicker, however, suddenly become much more useful.
- Subverted on many occasions. The Iron Golem in Aria of Sorrow takes 9999 hits to kill... assuming you normal attack it. But using a certain soul can swap its monster Hp with its inexistant MP, killing it in well... one hit. Then we have the Dawn of Sorrow Iron golem which although it has an abnormally high defense, its threshold is not infinite. A sufficiently charged Skeleton Archer soul can take out effectively 13 HP on full charge. (and over half your MP bar, but that is not a problem with the chaos ring).On another note, hitting an iron golem with the Yorick soul in the correct way (kicking it) also results in more than one damage (2). Finally we also have what this troper calls the Gravity Kick where by using the Medusa soul and inducing a kick, one can charge its strength without having gathered any distance making it much easier to aim the kick. The resulting damage is greater than 1.
- Actually, the Aria of Sorrow Golem has one MP, so it doesn't quite kill it. Except the Killer Mantle soul(which swaps MP and HP) deals a small amount of damage. Like say, 1.
- The Knife item crash. Knives/daggers are usually pitifully weak and a waste of Hearts, but throw dozens of them...Some of the crashes don't even take Hearts, but use constantly regenerating MP. Very good in Harmony of Dissonance and Symphony of the Night; the latter features Richter Belmont shredding even Galamoth with it. Portrait of Ruin fittingly calls it something like "1,000 Blades".
- The Jurassic Park-based game Chaos Island includes many playable characters from the movies, and also assistants you can recruit for menial tasks. If you face a T-Rex, you can send in your stronger characters, and risk getting them killed- or send an army of assistants, who all have weak attacks. If you do this, the T-rex will be confused and spin around without actually attacking anyone. It takes a while, but eventually the weak assistants will be able to kill it.
- The modus operandi of Metaknight in Super Smash Brothers. However, subverted in that some of his moves have a lot of knockback, particularly his Final Smash.
- In [1], this is a pretty good way of taking out hero units, since although they can have defenses of over a hundred, all attacks cause at least one point of damage (and you typically attack with several hundred at a time). Also inverted, since one of the best strategies in the game is to create a horde of skeletons (cheapest unit, cost-wise) and about a hundred skeleton captains (who give an unlimited stacking bonus of +1 to defense). The result is an army of 1000 creatures with 30 hp each taking on pretty much anything else in the game.
- Most high level raid bosses in World Of Warcraft die this way, especially those from before the expansions.
- One of the more resilient examples occurs in the Battle of Skyhook in the Shadows Of The Empire game. At one point in the battle, a Star Destroyer shows up and starts unleashing TIE fighters. It is possible to damage the Destroyer with your single ship's lasers and unlimited missles, but the damage is hardly noticeable. This troper remembers a dedicated friend who said he pounded on it for hours before the damage registered from 100% to 99%.
- Compare that to how quickly they go down in the movies.
- Sarevok, the Big Bad from Baldurs Gate 1, naturally takes quite a few hits to take down in the game. Well, in the cinematics at the beginning of the sequel, he's shown in a flashback as having died with about fifteen arrows and four larger implements still sticking out of his chest. These aren't small injuries, mind; presumably he was just that tough.
- One strategy for beating some Gym Leaders in the Pokémon games, especially with underleveled Pokémon, is to spam moves like Growl or Sand attack with one's lead Pokémon, or Defense Curl, etc. with the strongest (though still underleveled) [[Mons Mon]] on the team, or perhaps X Attack or X Defend. After that, it's usually a matter of slooooooowly taking down the leader's first Pokémon, and repeating Attack-stat debuffs when the next one comes out. This is notably used on the first gym leaders who use Rock-types: Brock, Roxanne, and (I forgot the D/P/Pl one's name).
- Subverted in O Game whenever the '1 percent' rule comes into play. Assuming an attack would deal less damage than one percent of the target ship's shield strength, that attack is negated entirely - thus making the amusing prospect of taking down a Death Star with a Light Fighter impossible.
Web Original
Real Life
- The Grand Canyon, or any other land mass sculpted by water or wind.
- The name "Death of a Thousand Cuts" originally referred to a Chinese method of execution where the victim was tied up and pieces slowly removed. Biology being what it is however this didn't usually take the form of a very slow Critical Existence Failure. Actually doesn't fit the rest of the trope as it's not generally disputed that sharp knife beats tied up victim.
- A (supposedly) favoured execution method of the original Caligula, accompanied by words to the effect of 'Let him feel that he is dying.'
- BEHOLD! THE AIRSOFT MINIGUN! it fires B Bs at 3000 rounds a minute. Proof that this trope and More Dakka are not mutually exclusive!
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