Pyrrhic Victories in Tabletop Games.
- Battletech:
- The Amaris Civil War ends up as one for the SLDF. Even though they won, Kerensky's forces were so savaged as to be almost impotent to keep the Successor States from ultimately carving up the Terran Hegemony (the central state of the Star League) amongst themselves, launching the First Succession War. In the end, Kerensky orders the SLDF to leave the Inner Sphere altogether, as the Star League he'd sworn to protect and had spent 10 years and countless lives to liberate imploded around him.
- At the conclusion of the Refusal War between Clan Jade Falcon and Clan Wolf, the Falcons ended up winning it in this manner. Three reasons why it led to this outcome: 1) despite the fact that the Falcons managed to wear down the Wolves by sending in less experienced second-line units and then eventually killed off both Natasha and Ulric Kerensky with underhanded ambushes, they unknowingly failed to eliminate Vlad Ward, who eventually became a sole witness to their uncharacteristically cowardly acts and took issue with them later on, 2) after rubbing out most of the Wolves, they tried to eliminate the Wolves' offshoot faction Clan Wolf-In-Exile (which comprised of the original Warden members of their parent Clan) but were fiercely pushed back by Phelan Kell and his Kell Hounds mercenary unit, therefore failing to prevent their escape to the Inner Sphere and 3) after taking a horrendously unacceptable amount of casualties inflicted by the aforementioned factions, the Falcons were rendered completely unable to resume the Invasion of the Inner Sphere so much that they had no choice but to absorb the remaining Wolves who did not break off to join Clan Wolf-In-Exile in order to re-bolster what little manpower they had left. Things took a turn for the worse for the Falcons when Vlad Ward, who had survived the war, witnessed their suspicious strategies and called out their two highest ranked leaders, saKhan Vandervahn Chistu and Khan Elias Crichell, for their acts by initiating his own Trials of Grievance and eventually defeated them both to death; the former in traditional one-on-one BattleMech combat and the latter getting literally beaten to death in one-on-one hand-to-hand combat on the floor of the Clan Grand Council when the Falcon Khan was just elected as the next ilKhan to resume the invasion despite lacking the credentials of being a true Warrior and his Clan already saddled with the aforementioned casualties (all this despite the fact that Vlad had suffered a broken arm after the war). Vlad, now the newly appointed Wolf Khan, then reconstructed the Wolves by turning them into a Crusader Clan that bore no relevant history with the original Warden era and now resets their goal of retaking Terra and conquering the Inner Sphere again all to restore the glory of the Clan and immortalize his own name, once the Truce of Tukayyid expires.
- Blood Bowl: Congratulations, your skaven just beat the enemy orc team 2-1! You won 60,000 gold pieces... And your 80,000 gold piece stormvermin was killed and one of your 70,000 gutter runners got his neck broken, to say nothing of all the linerats they chewed through first. Only another... Five matches until you've replaced your losses.
- Games of Chess with players of similar skill inevitably wind up with the winning side having lost most of their pieces. Some historians have argued that in addition to training soldiers about strategization, it was also used to illustrate that War Is Hell due to the sheer loss of manpower on both sides.
- A game of Citadels ends when a player builds their 8th district. However, a player's score is primarily determined by the value of their districts; this means that a player can be the first to "complete" their city, only to find out that the opponent - who took the time to build rich and varied districts - is actually the winner. It's downplayed, because being the first player to "complete" a city gets you bonus points.
- In the Eberron setting, everyone came out of the Last War in bad shape and nobody really got what they wanted in the compromises that ended the War, except for King Kaius of Karrnath who just wanted it all to stop. Karrnath had been savaged by the war, forced to turn to necromancy and pacts with the Lich Queen Vol to survive at all. In return, Vol turned Kaius into a vampire and heavily infiltrated his government and army with her own agents. For Kaius, his "victory" was the mere survival of his people, but aside from the more traditional costs of this trope, it also took his humanity and left him beholden to one of the most powerful and villainous mages in the world.
- Certain famous historical heroes in Flames of War have a rule where, if they are defeated in the match, their death is such a blow to public morale that the player automatically loses a Victory Point. Said victory point (there are only 6 available) can be the difference between winning and losing the game, even if you had just slogged out a meager victory, as well as being the difference in tournaments.
- Mage: The Ascension: The Technocracy has all but won the Ascension War... and in the process created a humanity that has no interest in Ascending. This is because they won by, essentially, stamping on humanity's collective capacity for wonder, dreams, and hope, making the world more banal... and because of that overarching feeling of apathy in humanity, few humans can muster the wonderment they need to become new mages, which was the Technocracy's original goal.
- Magic: The Gathering:
- The Thran race "won" the Thran-Phyrexian war, but their civilization had been damaged too greatly to recover, and soon collapsed.
- Urza and company then won the second Phyrexian war, but at the cost of the lives of every named character, leaving behind an incredibly powerful artifact which started the next big war on Dominaria, whose conclusion left Dominaria in a state that very nearly tore the multiverse to shreds.
- This later led to the conflict on Mirrodin, both of which were caused by the phyrexian oil. The first one was won, but at the cost of basically depopulating the plane. The second one didn't go much better.
- Something tells me the Phyrexians were named that way for a reason.
- This flavor text for the card Obliterate
. Fitting.Keldon Soldier: The enemy has been destroyed, sir. So have the forest, the city, your palace, your dog... - Also Near-Death Experience:"Lands ravaged, cities in ruins, so many lives sacrificed, and yet there was no other word for it but victory."
- The trope is referenced in name by Pyrrhic Revival, which revives every players dead creatures in a weakened state, which will likely kill the weaker creatures brought back this way.They found themselves alive again, still bearing their mortal wounds.
- Necromunda, in a similar vein to Blood Bowl above, can have the winning gang achieve rather hollow victories over the enemy, especially if they suffered a lot of casualties on the playfield. Worse, the losing player may actually roll results on the injury table that are actually beneficial to their team, so assuming they get some lucky rolls and you get some bad ones, you may end up with a horribly mutilated winning gang with several dead or permanently injured gang members while the defeated gang may end up objectively stronger as a result.
- This is the real heart behind Muggle Power in the New World of Darkness. Whilst breaking the masquerade is dangerous for supernaturals on a local level, The Unmasqued World would probably not turn out very well for either humans or monsters.
- For humans, fighting a full-fledged war against the supernatural is kind of like fighting a war on terrorists turned Up to Eleven, since monsters have all the advantages of terrorists, such as being part of the general populace, blending in with "normal people", etc, but add a whole arsenal of supernatural powers to it. But what really makes the war fit this trope is that, after all the damage humanity will do to itself in the process, A: it's not really possible to stop new generations of monsters from coming into being, and B: often, those monsters are keeping something even worse in check, and so getting rid of them leads to a power vacuum. Case in point; the Uratha are scary, being a race of lupine shapeshifters with Super-Strength, human-tier intelligence and a Healing Factor powerful enough to make them Nigh-Invulnerable, especially when they go into their Unstoppable Rage. But if humanity somehow wipes out werewolves, then that leads to The Legions of Hell who inhabit an animistic Dark World now being able to swarm into the mortal world in an epidemic of Demonic Possession, as keeping those evil spirits in check is a werewolf's job. Not to mention the Spider People and Rat Men shapeshifting species who do enjoy eating human flesh will no longer have their top predator around to keep them in check.
- For monsters, not only does humanity outnumber them, but the truth of the matter is that the shape the world is in rather benefits them. All species of monsters ultimately need humans, for food and procreation, without taking into account personal attachments. To achieve a supernatural victory in a "war of man vs. monster" would require such a massive amount of casualties and planetary devastation that the world wouldn't be much fun for the monsters afterwards, either.
- And, regardless of who may be making progress towards victory, there's still one big problem that makes the fighting meaningless. Namely, the existence of God-tier Eldritch Abominations like the God-Machine and the Exarchs who actively like the world the way it is and are willing to use all their powers, up to and including resetting time and reshuffling space, to keep things as they prefer.
- The fan-game Siren: The Drowning even has this as a possible Deluge (a possible post-apocalyptic timeline one can travel to). ALL of the hunters unite, finally breaking the mask of the supernatural world! Which, because of the sheer mass of normal people that were touched by the supernatural, results in a war so big World War III doesn't even begin to do it justice. Cities are in ruin, blood runs everywhere, and paranoia abounds as no one can trust anyone else.
- Ravenloft, for both heroes and villains. The heroes won't be able to achieve particularly significant things, and it's quite likely they will die in the process of saving a handful; on the Darklords' side of the ledger... well... Count Strahd saved his homeland at the expense of his youth and became immortal at the expense of the life of the woman he loved, to name just one example. The Dark Powers don't care about the heroes winning (losses to them are the result of the glut of villains in the setting), but they make damn well sure that any victory the Darklords get comes at the price of whatever they wanted that victory for.
- Risk: Throw fifteen troops into an invasion, end up with one left to occupy the territory against the might of the entire enemy continent. Alternatively, destroy a large number of enemy troops but fall just short of actually knocking him out of the game — then watch him turn in a set of Risk Cards, and come back at your forces which are now spread thin at one army per territory.
- Spades: If a duo wins more tricks than they bid on, they may win the hand, but taking enough bags for the penalty to kick in will make the pair worse off.
- Star Trek Adventures: The Battle of Narendra III, according to Romulan Admiral Kylor Jerok in a sidebar in the core rulebook. Yes, the Romulans won, but the destruction of the Klingon outpost and the USS Enterprise-C only reinforced the Federation-Klingon alliance, freezing the Romulans out of input into galactic events.
- In Tech Infantry, every battle in the story is one of these, if not an outright defeat. The first Jurvain invasion of Rios is destroyed, at the cost of a jump gate, then a rebel attack is driven off with such heavy cost in Council Loyalist ships that when a second Jurvain invasion comes in, there's effectively nothing to stop them. The rebel fleet attacks the Federation capital in Avalon, and is again driven off at the cost of such heavy Federation casualties that future offensive operations against anyone are impossible. And the Vin Shriak is defeated, at the cost of so weakening the Federation that they are powerless to resist a subsequent invasion by the Eastern Bloc and their alien allies.
- The Obelisk Encounter from Tomb of Annihilation is a downplayed version of this. The Nalfeshnee would certainly be a horrible threat to the party at that level, but it doesn't stick around long enough to kill them (unless they're really unlucky). However, it will likely have forced them to waste valuable resources before entering one of 5th edition's most dangerous dungeons.
- Happens in Victory in the Pacific if you win a battle by mostly "disabling" opposing ships (which sends them back to port and ends their part in the battle, but inflicts no lasting damage) while most of your own losses are sunk and thus out of the game for good.
- Meet the mission's objectives in a game of Warhammer 40,000 and you win, even if doing so cost your Space Marines their Chapter Master and dozens of their greatest warriors. The fluff has even more examples:
- Exterminatus. Because sometimes, not even the Space Marines can win, and if the Space Marines can't win, then it's quite likely nobody can. So just call it a day and blow the whole planet up by shooting torpedoes at it. While the Imperium technically "wins" the fight, there's only so many planets in the whole galaxy... and the Imperium is now one less short, deprived of its vital resources, infrastructure and population while the larger defensive war rages on all around. Exterminatus orders are generally a last resort for moments when the planet falling into enemy hands would be more disastrous (for example, an Ork WAAAGH! seizing a vital foundry world that can produce Titans), when reconquest would be impossible (the planet becomes a Daemon world) or some Inquisitor has a very itchy trigger finger.
- The original Pyrrhic Victory would be the Imperium's triumph over Chaos during the Horus Heresy. The renegade Warmaster was defeated, but the Emperor was mortally wounded and placed on life support, leaving him incommunicado for the ten thousand years since. His Imperium, founded on humanism and atheistic science, degenerates into a totalitarian theocracy where he is worshiped as a god while the local "engineers" worship their tanks. Humanity is so weakened by the conflict that civilization has never recovered to its heights at the Imperium's founding. And if the Emperor had been given just a little more time to perfect his Warp Gate, he could've revolutionized galactic transportation so that it wouldn't rely on Warp travel and mutant Navigators.
- Earlier than that, the Eldar god of war, Kaela Mensha Khaine, managed to defeat the Nightbringer during the near-mythical War in Heaven, but Khaine was nearly killed and the battle gave all sentient life an intrinsic fear of death (all sentient life except the Orks, anyway). On the other hand, when Khaine battled Slaanesh during the Fall of the Eldar, even through his defeat he managed to weaken the Chaos God enough for Cegorach to escape and Nurgle to "rescue" Isha.
- Most victories against the Tyranids. It takes a staggering amount of manpower and war material to stop a Hive Fleet, and there's always another one lurking in the void. The 'Nids even use this on the battlefield, forcing their enemy to waste ammunition on swarms of Cannon Fodder before launching the attack proper. The more extreme method of using Exterminatus on worlds under Tyranid attack is a two-way Pyrrhic Victory. The Tyranids lose both the potential bio-mass of the planet they were trying to eat as well as that of the forces spent attacking it, but at the same time the Imperium has just sacrificed one of their finite and ever-shrinking number of planets, while the Tyranids seem endless.
- Specific examples of this would be the Battle of Macragge note and the Battle of Iyanden note .
- Eldrad's destruction of Abaddon's Planet Killer broke the back of the Thirteenth Black Crusade, but the Farseer locked himself in eternal conflict with the daemonic spirits controlling the warship and was hurled into the depths of the Warp.
- The Dark Angels defeated The Fallen but their home planet was destroyed.
- On a meta level, world-wide "you determine the result" campaigns fall into this, since having one side flat-out lose would irritate players. So while global campaigns have ended in Imperial (specifically Space Marine) victories, reading deeper reveals that their enemies made off with some powerful artifact or achieved their true objectives. As an example, the Dark Eldar were defeated in the Medusa campaign, but snatched so many slaves that they'll be able to gorge themselves for eons.
- A villainous example with the Fall of Cadia in the new 13th Black Crusade. Abaddon may have FINALLY defeated the defenders of Cadia (including his Arch-Enemy and tactical genius CRREEEEEEEDDD!), resulting in the planet's destruction and Chaos finally breaking through the 10,000-year stalemate to attack the Imperium en masse once again, but the thing is he wanted to CONQUER the planet, not destroy it. The Cadian Pylons were highly valuable and the entire reason he was attacking the planet in the first place. With it gone, he "won", but lost the reason he had spent so long waging war against Cadia to begin with.
- Warhammer: The Dwarfs technically "won" the War of the Beard-, uh, the War of Vengeance, something they are quick to remind everyone about, but their numbers and resources were left so depleted that their continental empire fractured not long after, and renewed warfare against the Greenskins and Skaven is slowly driving them to extinction.
- Werewolf: The Apocalypse's final book, Apocalypse, features one scenario in which the Weaver takes centre stage as the main villain of the setting instead of the Wyrm, and can actually end with the Weaver eliminating all threats to her perfect world by sealing the Gauntlet shut, separating the physical world and the spirit world once and for all. Unfortunately, this means that the spirit world is sentenced to entropic breakdown without a physical world to reflect, and the real world loses its vital spark of creativity without the spirit world to provide it; not only do humans lose their ability to dream and innovate, but all life in the universe begins a steady decline into extinction. For all intents and purposes, the Weaver's chance to create a static utopia has been lost forever, and thanks to the separation of the two worlds, there's nothing she can do to stop it.
