Game Breaker - Television Tropes & Idioms

The Assyrians were the first people to start using iron weapons instead of bronze which, to put into a modern perspective, is sort of like showing up for a knife fight with the Death Star. Using iron made the Assyrians so near-invincible that, really, the other guys might as well have been swinging around bananas.

—Humor website Cracked on the subject of the 5 most terrifying civilizations in the world

Occasionally known as "a cheese" or "cheesing," a Game Breaker is controversial because of its vague status of "cheating". Since it does not involve outright hacking, such as a ram edit, nor exploiting an outright bug which clearly should not occur, Game Breaking utilizes some organic feature of the game in an unintentional way, resulting in Gameplay Derailment. A major reason these occur is due to the sheer persistence of some players, but sometimes they can be entirely intentional.

One example is the potentially convoluted win/make-then-sell exploit, which is common in games with customizable items. A borderline example may be the trick of saving your game before a random item appears and reloading until you get the item; also known as Save Scumming.

Occasionally, Game Breaker refers to an overpowered character, making him or her the ally equivalent to the SNK Boss. This also includes equipment and powerups. In games with a choice of playable characters, one may be much easier than the others and allow skipping parts of levels.

Patches will often seek to rectify this. However, this often leads to an outcry among players because their favored weapon/tactic/character has been nerfed. Even worse, it may result in the discovery that the game breaker was itself keeping something even more broken in check. It is also frustrating because patching a game may make a game saved under the previous version unstable or outright unloadable, although this becomes less and less common with time.

Another big problem is that in multiplayer games, where people actually care about what other people do on their games, players will often not agree what is game breaking and what isn't. Heated debates (or worse) will spread like wildfire on the Internet, or even around the house. It's obvious that the extremes of the Munchkin or the Scrub are wrong. However, there are techniques whose power is hard or even impossible to call. Nor is banning glitches and "unintentional" moves an easy solution either; sometimes it can be hard to tell whether something is a glitch or not, sometimes a glitch happens so often that you'd have to go out of your way to have it not happen, and other times it can be argued that a glitch adds more depth to a game rather than less.

The upshot is that you should probably take most of the below examples of multiplayer games with a grain of salt.

Unlike video games, many Tabletop RPGs have a built-in check in the form of the Game Master, who can abrogate published rules for better gameplay; thus, with a good Game Master, no Game Breaker is possible (unless the game is SenZar). However, this naturally carries the corollary that, with a bad Game Master, the game comes pre-broken. Just what is and isn't game breaking is, again, controversial, and many GMs have to deal with a limited player base; too heavy or too light a hand may alienate players and destroy the Game Master's plan.

Compare Disc One Nuke. A Lethal Joke Character may be one of these, as will the One Man Party if the game's balance is easily skewed. Some Boring But Practical moves/tactics may border on this, as may some Awesome Yet Practical ones too. Contrast The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard. The dramatic equivalent is Story Breaker Power. For how Game Breaking spells/items are usually treated if in limited supply, see Too Awesome To Use.

A powerup that would be a game breaker, except that it only appears when the game is essentially over, is an Infinity Plus One Sword or a Bragging Rights Reward.

Not to be confused with Game Breaking Bug, for when you can literally break the game, as in make it crash or make it Unwinnable.

Examples:

Universal

Any game with a finite number of states and which does not make use of too much recurring randomness may be mathematically solved resulting in a guaranteed win or draw for the player with the correct starting conditions. Once a game is solved and the strategy for perfect play becomes implementable the game can be considered completely broken, unless played by naive players. The most well known example of this is tic-tac-toe, which is trivially solvable by all but the least experienced players to end in a draw.