History Main / PoorPredictableRock

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* ''Manga/{{Eyeshield 21}}'' plays this straight most of the time; most opposing teams have one or two defining strengths and rely almost entirely on them. The Sphinx' Pyramid Line, the Poseidons' height advantage, the Aliens' Shuttle Pass, etc. In many cases, however, these strengths are so formidable that they can usually win anyway.

** [[MadBomber Deidara's]] [[HavingABlast sole means of attack]] are [[DisihingOutDirt Earth element]] clay birds. He picks a fight with Sasuke, whose primary attack this point is the [[ShockAndAwe Lightning element Chidori and variants thereof]]. As Deidara loses in ElementalRockPaperScissors, this ends badly for him. He still manages to be one hell of a WakeUpCallBoss for Sasuke though.

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* In ''Manga/{{Naruto}}'', Deidara's sole means of attack are Earth element clay birds. He picks a fight with Sasuke, whose primary attack this point is the Lightning element Chidori and variants thereof. As Deidara loses in ElementalRockPaperScissors, this ends badly for him. He still manages to be one hell of a WakeUpCallBoss for Sasuke though.

*** Player characters learn of a white dragon, stock up and raid the lair... and it turns out to be a ''[[ZombieDragon wight]]'' [[IncrediblyLamePun dragon]] of another color.

* On ''WesternAnimation/RobotAndMonster'', Robot had this history because of his design. Whereas his obnoxious brother Gart had four-fingered hands, Robot only had clamps, so he had no choice but to always use rock and constantly lose. In the featured episode ("Between Brothers"), Robot has to beat Gart at the game in order to win back his apartment, so he invents a device that allows him to do an extra move (i.e. literally place a piece of paper on the rock fist that Gart used).

...what that means is that they have some ''very'' obvious weaknesses. Curiously, usually only the heroes get the idea of diversifying their elements. Either that, or the one-element specialists are fully aware of their situation and develop various tricks and techniques that allow them to defend, to varying degrees, against those elements which counter theirs - so that ScissorsCutsRock. In some settings, this could even be seen as a kind of MinMaxing - specializing in one element to the point where you can just brute-force your way past a more generalist opponent, at the potential cost of losing hard to ''other'' specialists who counter your element.

** All the games have trainer classes like Swimmer and Bug Catcher that openly broadcast their type specialty. But there's at least one Fisherman per game who takes it to a whole new level, by having an entire team of ''Magikarp'', a pathetically weak Pokémon that can only learn 3 attacks, one of which does nothing whatsoever... and these Magikarp specialists are often strict devotees of the do-nothing move. Inexplicably, they are just as eager to fight you as trainers with non-useless mons. Some of them, however, will have a few Magikarps and [[MagikarpPower a Gyarados]], which can catch you off-guard if you're expecting another pushover opponent.

* TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}} use to have this in the form of Armoured Companies and the Chaos Space Marines "Books of Chaos". Armoured Companies are made up solely of tanks, making them all but impervious to anti-infantry weapons and, in most cases, close combat. However because it's all tanks, only a handful of anti-tank weapons are needed to utterly cripple the entire army. Chaos Space Marines had the "Books of Chaos" and "Legion Rules" which allowed you to modify your force organisation chart to gain benefits, at the cost of losing the ability to use certain units. A World Eaters Army was horrendous in the close combat phase, but only had pistols to use during the shooting phase and, apart from the then-expensive rhinos, couldn't move that fast.
** Certain armies chose to fore go one skill in favour of another. Tau have almost no close combat skills but have access to some of the (then) best ranged weapons in the game. Dark Eldar traded durability for high damage output and Tyranids had no tanks and few powerful ranged weapons in favour of a vast array of powerful close combat beasts and biomorphs. For most of these armies if you can survive the phase they dominate in, you can easily decimate their armies (most painfully obvious for the Dark Eldar and Tau, as almost any damage can cripple your army).

*** Got those Steel- and Poison-type attacks to take on Valerie's Fairy-type Pokémon in Generation VI? Her first one is [[OxymoronicBeing the dual Steel/Fairy-type Mawile]], which averts this trope as it takes regular damage from Steel-type attacks and is ''completely damn immune'' to Poison-type moves! What's more is that it's Fairy type negates Steel's weakness to Fighting.

* When Ax was hit with an alien disease (which affected the human Animorphs too, but only gave them the flu), Erek played some Rock/Paper/Scissors with him to pass the time. He understood why scissors beat paper and why rock beat scissors, but not why paper beat rock. That's why he ended up owing Erek an million and four dollars.

* In the newer ''[[Franchise/ShinMegamiTenseiPersona Persona]]'' games, the protagonist is the only one who can switch Personae. Everyone else is stuck with one, and until you can evolve their persona (and sometimes even afterwards), they're limited to a few elements and typically have a weakness that reflects that. Chie for instance, specializes in Ice attacks [[spoiler:until you get Teddie, in which case she switches to physical]], and has a weakness toward fire until you [[LevelUpAtIntimacy5 Max her Social Link]]. The game is aware of this, so whenever you're forced to have a character in your party (more common in ''VideoGame/{{Persona 3}}'', but not unheard of in the early parts of 4) the boss will ''always'' have an attack of that type.

** Played VERY straight in the battle between Pegasus and Kaiba in Duelist Kingdom. Pegasus took advantage of the fact that Kaiba was famous for his Blue-Eyes by using Dragon Capture Jar and Dragon Piper. The second is that he also knew that Kaiba's entire deck is built with overly powerful monsters so his reversal of the Crush card virus essentially blasted Kaiba's entire strategy to pieces.

** ''Anime/YuGiOhZEXAL'': Kaito being a Number Hunter, his Galaxy-Eyes monsters are designed to counter Xyz Monster, a type of monster that literally everyone (barring one old retro man) has in their Extra Decks, even robots do.

* ''Manga/{{Bleach}}: During Ichigo's battle with Renji in Soul Society, Ichigo eventually figures out that Renji's Zabimaru has a specific attack pattern that ends up leaving him open to an attack. When Ichigo attempts to exploit this weakness, Renji simply steps aside and counters Ichigo's counter strategy. Renji is fully aware of Zabimaru's weakness, so he improved his footwork to nullify it.

** Happens again in ''Anime/YuGiOhTheMoviePyramidOfLight'', but this time it's Kaiba who beats Pegasus with this trope in mind. Having learned Pegasus still relies heavily on his toons, he also took advantage of how Toon Monsters require Toon World to be active on the field. In quickly aiming to destroy Toon World, he tore apart Pegasus's strategy in a matter of turns.

* On ''WesernAnimation/RobotAndMonster'', Robot had this history because of his design. Whereas his obnoxious brother Gart had four-fingered hands, Robot only had clamps, so he had no choice but to always use rock and constantly lose. In the featured episode ("Between Brothers"), Robot has to beat Gart at the game in order to win back his apartment, so he invents a device that allows him to do an extra move (i.e. literally place a piece of paper on the rock fist that Gart used).

[[caption-width-right:300:[- [[WebVideo/TheSpoonyExperiment I'm being attacked by Pokémon made of fire in a volcano full of fire! Oh no! They're throwing fire! What kind of technique to use? ...fire? No, that's stupid! Man, this game is hard!]]-] ]]

* In Religious Idle, the competitions with rival religions are rather silly (eating contest, rap battle, etc.); the competition with Islam is best-of-three Rock-Paper-Scissors, where [[spoiler:you defeat them with triple rock.]]

* Men actually tend to pick rock more often in rock paper scissors than could be explained by chance alone. Possibly because of the "manly" way a closed fist looks

** [[VideoGame/PokemonRubyAndSapphire Generation III]] introduced the Wonder Guard ability, which takes this trope to its logical extreme by making the Pokémon that has it completely immune to any attack that does not do super-effective damage[[note]]Though non-standard types of damage, such as damage caused by weather effects, do not count as "attacks" and will still work[[/note]]. However, the only Pokémon with this ability is a OneHitpointWonder with five elemental weaknesses[[note]]Fire, Flying, Rock, Dark and Ghost[[/note]], including [[KryptoniteIsEverywhere Flying type, which almost every team is guaranteed to have at least one of]]. It's possible, though only in double battles, to use the move Skill Swap to move Wonder Guard onto a creature which has less weaknesses - most notably, the very same generation that introduced the ability also introduced Sableye, a Pokémon which, under normal circumstances, has [[GameBreaker no weaknesses]][[note]]although the player can use Odor Sleuth or Foresight to negate its immunity to Fighting-type moves, thereby revealing its weakness to them[[/note]], which has no weakness. Later generations [[{{Nerf}} nerfed]] this, though.

** [[VideoGame/PokemonRubyAndSapphire Generation III]] introduced the Wonder Guard ability, which takes this trope to its logical extreme by making the Pokémon that has it completely immune to any attack that does not do super-effective damage[[note]]Though non-standard types of damage, like weather effects, will still do damage[[/note]]. However, the only Pokémon with this ability is a OneHitpointWonder with five elemental weaknesses[[note]]Fire, Flying, Rock, Dark and Ghost[[/note]]. , [[KryptoniteIsEverywhere including Flying type, which almost every team is guaranteed to have at least one of]].
*** It's possible, though only in double battles, to use the move Skill Swap to move it to one that has much less weaknesses, or with certain Pokémon, ''[[GameBreaker none at all]]''. Later generations [[{{Nerf}} nerfed]] this, though.

** Gym leaders from the earlier generations provide better examples of this trope being played straight. In particular, all the gym leaders in [[VideoGame/PokemonRedAndBlue Generation I]] (like Blaine and his Fire-type Pokémon, pictured above) play this trope straight by focusing almost exclusively on one type; the strategy to beating them is simply to raise Pokémon that can learn moves capable of hitting theirs for super-effective damage (such as Water-type attacks against Blaine's Pokémon). Sabrina then subverts this trope, however, since Bug-type moves are pathetic in Generation I, and Ghost-type moves were entirely ineffective due to a bug.

*** Agatha from Generation I averts this trope with her Golbat, which is the only Poison-type Pokémon on her team that is also a Flying-type. Good luck [[NoSell trying to knock it out]] with [[DishingOutDirt Earthquake or Dig]]...

** In ''VideoGame/PokemonSwordAndShield'', [[spoiler:the Macro Cosmos corporation contracts workers who utilize Steel-type Pokemon to shut out any threats, and have a decent variety thereof to help contain Eternatus... except many of them are critically weak to Fire. Most damning is that Chairman Rose is victim to this trope and can be flushed with just a Cinderace and a Bewear. The exception is Oleana, who has a more diverse team that leans towards Poison.]]

* A rare example where the ''villain'' takes advantage of this occurs in ''VideoGame/AdvanceWars 2'': one mission involves Hawke correctly anticipating that air specialist Eagle will send a massive air force against his island fortress, so he does the logical thing and surrounds it with a ''ton'' of anti-air units. Thus, the player is faced with the tough challenge of destroying his army despite having a sginificant weakness against it (not to mention Hawke's CO power, which damages all of your units at once while simultaneously healing all of his).

** Well, MagicTheGathering has [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=5698 these]] [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Paper+Tiger three]] [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=5648 cards]], but they are a very uncommon example from a joke edition.
** Tournament [[MagicTheGathering Magic]] is ''heavily'' based on rock-paper-scissors. Decks frequently fall into one of three categories: aggressive, combination, or control (aggro, combo, and control). Sometimes decks can play as either of two roles, but not as well as a deck truly dedicated to that role. The three roles fall into a rock-paper-scissors scenario: Aggro decks play multiple redundant threats to keep the pressure on and overwhelm Control decks. Combo decks use cards that are individually relatively weak but synergize to create powerful effects that can overcome even the strong threats from an Aggro deck. Control decks focus on defense foremost and use card-removal effects to dismantle combos -- if a Control deck removes one part of a three-card combo, it cripples the whole combo, while removing one of three Aggro deck cards will leave the other two to continue attacking.

** [[VideoGame/PokemonRubyAndSapphire Generation III]] introduced the Wonder Guard ability, which takes this trope to its logical extreme by making the Pokémon that has it completely immune to any attack that does not do super-effective damage[[note]]Though non-standard types of damage, like weather effects, will still do damage[[/note]]. However, the only Pokémon with this ability is a OneHitpointWonder with four elemental weaknesses, [[KryptoniteIsEverywhere including Flying type, which almost every team is guaranteed to have at least one of]].

*** Wulfric's Ice-type team in Generation VI plays with this trope in at least two ways on their own (and he even [[LampshadeHanging lampshades it]]). Abomasnow plays it straight with its 4x weakness to Fire-type moves and average defences, Cryogonal's high Special Defense deconstructs this trope versus special moves, and Avalugg's extremely high Defense stat—only slightly lower than Steelix's—deconstructs this trope versus physical moves.

* When Ax was hit with an alien disease (which affected the human Animorphs too, but only gave them the flu), Erek played some Rock/Paper/Scissors with him to pass the time. He understood why scissors beat paper and why rock beat scissors, but not why paper beat scissors. That's why he ended up owing Erek an million and four dollars.