"Hey! Who are you calling an Airhead?— Is it someone I know?"
Abilities in video games typically give the user some sort of benefit; a particularly powerful ability will sometimes come with drawbacks for the sake of game balance. And then there are some abilities that are nothing but downsides.
These types of abilities can come in multiple forms. They might be passive abilities that weaken the user in some way. Others might be active abilities that either harm the user, help the enemy, or both. Still others might come in the form of items that have negative effects on the user.
There are a multitude of reasons why such abilities exist; one of the most common reasons is as a Necessary Drawback that balances out an otherwise overpowered character. Another common reason is that while the ability is bad in and of itself, it's meant to be used in conjunction with other abilities to turn it into a benefit. Sometimes these abilities are meant to be used as part of a Self-Imposed Challenge. Joke Characters and Joke Items might sometimes have these abilities as a way of even further weakening them.
People with these abilities may experience feelings of I Just Want to Be Normal. If an ability or mechanic in a game isn't intended to be this, see Scrappy Mechanic, That One Disadvantage, or That One Rule.
See also Poison Mushroom, which is the item-based counterpart, and Joke Attack. Many Deck Cloggers have a negative effect on top of clogging your deck. Compare Status Effect for (normally temporary) debuffs. Also compare Blessed with Suck and Cursed Item. Compare/Contrast Power-Up Letdown, for when something intended to be a power-up is more of a detriment. May be intended to be used by Exploiting One's Own Weakness.
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Examples from Games
Collectible Card Games
- Disney Lorcana: If one of your characters has the Reckless ability and is able to attack, you cannot end your turn. This means that you must either make that character attack (which puts it at risk of taking damage), exert it through other means so that it can't attack, or run out of valid targets. On top of that, the ability also prevents the character from questing and giving you points.
- Magic: The Gathering has a few cards like this, with the general strategy being to get it onto the battlefield and then foist it upon your opponents using an effect that forces them to gain control of it. For instance, the card Abyssal Persecutor
has the rules text "You can't win the game and your opponents can't lose the game". Negative abilities are also often used as a Necessary Drawback for creatures that are otherwise extremely powerful for their mana cost (take the Abyssal Persecutor once again - a 6/6 with flying and trample is humongous for 4 mana and extremely hard to block, and would be able to kill many opponents by itself if it weren't for its ability preventing you from doing so).
- The "Defender" keyword, which prevents a creature that has it from attacking. And that's it. Because it's purely a downside by itself, creatures with defender often get to be much bigger than their similarly-costed counterparts. However, being a keyword is a boon to the ability because there are a number of cards that interact with creatures that have defender, even if a lot of those simply let the creature attack normally as if it didn't have defender.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!:
- In general, low-level monsters with high ATK tend to have abilities that are detrimental to the player. While some, especially newer ones, also have useful abilities, others have nothing but negative effects.
- Gift Card's only effect gives the opponent 3000 life points. Its primary use is to use it while Bad Reaction to Simochi or Nurse Reficule the Fallen One is on the field, which causes the opponent to take 3000 points of damage instead.
- Dark Artist is a horribly-statted monster whose only effect is that it gets weaker when it battles a LIGHT attribute monster. This is doubly bad because having an effect at all means it doesn't even get to benefit from the plethora of very powerful Vanilla Unit support.
- There are a number of deliberate joke cards that only have negative effects, usually being inverted versions of banned cards. For example, The Gift of Greed and Pot of Generosity parody the famous Pot of Greed but respectively cause your opponent to draw two cards and cause you to shuffle two cards from your hand into your deck. The worst of its kind is probably Cold Feet, parodying Cold Wave, which does nothing but lock yourself out of using spells and traps until your next turn.
- Number 30: Acid Golem of Destruction is an easy-to-summon high-ATK Rank 3 monster that has three effects, all of which are negative. During the Standby Phase, the user must detach an XYZ material or take 2000 points of damage, its controller can't Special Summon while it's on the field, and if it has no XYZ materials, it can't attack. Most decks that use it (which are very few) usually focus on giving it to the opponent rather than trying to use it themselves.
- True Exodia has the effect of causing an automatic loss for the controller if the only monsters on the field are itself and Exodia's four limbs. Decks that revolve around it typically focus on giving it to the opponent, as the effect specifically states that the controller and not the owner automatically loses if its condition is met.
- Pokémon Trading Card Game:
- A common effect of powerful attacks, including the famous Base Set Charizard, is to make the user discard Energy attached to them, limiting their ability to use said attack. Early cards tend to require it to use the attack at all, while later cards let you use the attack even if you can't discard them; while this is a moot point for most users, any Pokémon that can copy the attack may be able to use it to their advantage.
- Other attacks inflict the user with a Special Condition. Some cards have other attacks that can benefit from the condition (for example, Snorlax-''GX'' has a powerful attack it can only use while Asleep, and another attack that makes it go to sleep), while for others it's simply a setback.
- The page image, Slowbro from Dark Explorers, has this effect, making it a two-for-one example.
- The page image, Slowbro from Dark Explorers
- Cards depicting Slaking typically have either one of the above setbacks or, like with Slaking V, have an Ability that prevents it from attacking under certain circumstances, mirroring its in-game Ability.
- There's also two different Regigigas cards that have effects that prevent them from attacking unless a certain condition is met, though unlike Slaking far more simply have high-Energy cost attacks.
- A common effect of powerful attacks, including the famous Base Set Charizard
Tabletop Games
- Ars Magica: Characters gain Flaws in character creation to balance out their Virtues and in some special circumstances, like gaining Power at a Price. Story and Personality Flaws have flexible narrative effects, but General, Hermetic, and Supernatural Flaws have straightforward penalties and restrictions, like an Experience Penalty, a stunted Skill Score, or inability to use one kind of magic.
- Burning Wheel: Many of the character Traits impose penalties or restrictions on their bearer, but they are just as valuable as any other trait - sometimes more so - in generating Artha. Blindness, missing limbs, and bad luck all have obvious and overt disadvantages, but every time these disadvantages come up, the character comes one step closer to spiritual epiphany.
- Blood on the Clocktower: Outsiders are this for the entire good team, with abilities that serve as a detriment to their team.
- Dead of Winter: Of the playable Survivors, the little old lady Huang Fen is unique in that she can't move to a new location without spending a scarce Fuel card.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- AD&D 1st Edition: The Cavalier class is unique in that it becomes uncontrollable in battle, charging the enemy full-speed in a specific order of preference (prioritizing leaders and powerful monsters; leaving Mooks for last) even if they have to trample their own allies and leave themselves surrounded by enemies.
- AD&D 2nd Edition: The Complete Book of Humanoids lists special disadvantages for each of the humanoids, requires superstitions for them, and also indicates those humanoids can't benefit from the spell Raise Dead.
- 3rd Edition: Some class features are straightforward limitations, like The Bard's restrictions on Character Alignment and The Paladin's Code of Conduct, but the Barbarian is unique in having illiteracy as a feature.
- 5th edition:
- Downplayed: Each Player Character has a Flaw, but it only serves to give the player the opportunity to gain Inspiration by roleplaying the flaw.
- Otherwise, only Dark Elves and kobolds (the latter only as presented in Volo's Guide to Monsters, not the version from Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse) have an explicit negative trait that's more severe: a sunlight sensitivity that penalizes attack rolls and Perception tests.
- Dont Let It Die: Some of the characters have a negative ability, the simplest being unable to take one of the actions.
- GURPS: There's a large set of disadvantages, which are meant to gain additional character points which may be used to purchase either related or unrelated advantages.
- Iron Kingdoms: Unleashed gives some races an explicit negative ability beyond the numerical stats. Humans also received one, giving a penalty to non-intimidation social rolls to non-humans.
- Within Warmachine this was termed "Skornergy," to describe when characters or even entire factions had rules that inherently prevented themselves from fulfilling their intended roles. In stark contrast to the usual Necessary Drawback of this trope, Skornergy arose more from trying to implement Gameplay and Story Integration, as the Skorne faction that it takes its name from are a faction that ritualistically inflicts pain and suffering on themselves and others. In one such example, a unit was designed to act as a Mook Lieutenant and Support Party Member to Immortals, by using souls harvested from allies when they died to fuel the Immortals. The problem was, Immortals don't have souls to give, so to get any use out of the Mook Lieutenant, an extra unit of ensouled Cannon Fodder would have to be purchased and included. This attempt to create an army that had to damage and sacrifice one portion of itself to fuel the other portion instead created an army where nothing did what it was supposed to, and players had to pay for two units to get the effects of what other armies got out of a single unit. As a result, 3rd edition completely reworked the faction from the ground up to almost entirely eliminate this trope.
- Lancer: Some frames have traits that, instead of giving them any ability or bonus, simply make them worse at certain rolls, like Exposed Reactor making Engineering rolls more difficult or Weak Computer doing the same for systems. It's entirely inherent to the frame and meant as a balance measure. There's also a downplayed example in the HORUS Pegasus' traits: One of them is normal and positive, but the others are an unparseable mess of glitchy words with no actual gameplay weight, meant only to demonstrate the Pegasus is especially messed up even by HORUS standards
- Red Flags: Each potential hot date has two positive traits. The player to the right plays one negative trait on the pair, in order to try preventing the target from being the ideal partner.
- The One Ring: Shadow corruption can permanently give characters negative Traits like "Brutal" or "Thieving". Inversely to normal Traits, the Game Master invokes them against the player to undo a successful roll or worsen the consequences of a failure, representing the character's worst impulses taking over.
- Town of Salem: The tabletop version has peaceful and spiteful townies, who can only vote in a specific way. There's also the politician, who appears as evil to the sheriff. These cards have a small negative virtue, meant to fine-tune the balance so that the town's virtue total is zero.
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Chaos Mutations run the gamut from Cursed with Awesome to purely negative effects, the latter including permanent stat penalties, Absurd Phobias, a Mental Shutdown or Terminal Transformation, or simply vanishing into the Realms of Chaos.
Video Games
- Advance Wars: Dual Strike: Pairing Olaf and Lash as a team give them a -20% attack penalty due to lingering hostilities and animosity for the atrocities that Lash inflicted on Olaf in the previous game. Several other tag teams give negative modifiers as well, including -10% to Hawke and the Green Earth COs (due to Hawke invading Green Earth in the previous game), and -35% to Koal and Rachel (because he constantly insults her).
- Assassin's Creed II combines this with And Your Reward Is Clothes; the reward for collecting every single Eagle Feather in the game is the Auditore Cape, a very fashionable cape bearing the insignia of Ezio's family... whose only ability is causing him to be notorious everywhere he goes in Italy, effectively negating his ability to be stealthy.
- The Battle Cats:
- The Target Only ability restricts a unit to only harming a specific type of enemy. It tends to be found on units like Takeda Shingen and Warlock & Pierre, who have absurdly high stats, but have the ability as a Necessary Drawback.
- Most units with long-distance or omnistrike attacks have an increased attack radius compared to standard units, with long-distance units having a minimum range and omnistrike units lacking one. However, some long-distance and omnistrike units, such as Hacker Cat and Baby Garu, don't gain any additional Splash Damage range on their attacks while still having gaps in their attack range, making the ability a purely negative one.
- Brotato: The Set Bonus of the Legendary weapons is the only one in the game to be a pure downside, giving a harsh penalty to maximum HP for each one past the first equipped. This encourages picking and choosing a single legendary weapon.
- Castlevania: Circle of the Moon: Played with; the ability to increase Intelligence by 25% for 4 MP a second is only useful once Intelligence hits 1600 because every 400 Intelligence is 4 Regenerating Mana Points per second.
- Civilization V: In the scenario Fall of Rome, all the playable factions have a Culture tree that unlocks gameplay bonuses as the scenario progresses. For the Barbarian factions or Persia, these are useful bonuses, but for Rome these bonuses are actually negative debuffs that indicate Rome's increasing decline as its foes overpower it.
- Cult of the Lamb: Followers can have negative traits such as Sloth (reduces work and devotion speed by 10%), Sickly (heals 15% slower when ill), and Jerk (causes trouble for other followers, like making fun of them or stealing their money).
- The Quirks system of Darkest Dungeon represents various eccentricities and behaviors that affect your heroes' ability to perform. The negative Quirks can include only getting stress relief from one activity, getting stressed out easily against certain enemy types, or being a Kleptomaniac Hero that hampers your loot collecting abilities.
- Disgaea 4: The Battle Suit unit, introduced in Chapter 8, is presented as a suit of Power Armor worn by humans to match the power of demons. Unfortunately, their primary Evility causes them to self-destruct should their turn come around and they have 10% of their HP or less.
- Disgaea 7: While Higan joins the party at around Level 40, during a time when the player is supposed to be around Level 20, her main Evility, "Sword Limitations", not only bars her from using Swords, she also takes a 25% stat penalty. To offset this, her unique skill "Unrestrained" lifts both penalties for several turns in battle. Later in the story, this Evility gets replaced, signifying a large chunk of Character Development for Higan.
- Doom Eternal: One of the cheats, "Famine Mode", disables enemies dropping health and ammo pickups, forcing the Doomslayer to rely on what he finds in the environment, on top of disabling Slayer Gates as all other cheats do.
- Dragon Quest: Conkjurers have access to the spell Kathwack. Normally this would be immensely powerful, but Conkjurers don't have enough MP to actually cast the spell. Therefore, all it ends up doing is wasting a turn.
- Don't Starve: Wes is a selectable character meant for challenging yourself and has no advantages over other characters other than his starting item, a pile of balloons, which isn't even worth using most of time because of its sanity penalty combined with his absurdly low stats. He deals 75% normal damage to enemies, is more susceptible to overheating and freezing, is more likely to be struck by lightning, and takes more time to recover from grogginess. Hounds will also prioritize attacks on Wes when there are other players on the server, and he is distinctly more likely to get targeted by them when other players are nearby. Finally, he's a Non-Ironic Mime, which means he can't Inform the Fourth Wall about hazards or status problems, forcing players to rely solely on audio cues.
- This is very common in the ''Earthbound/Mother series, where enemies would often have "moves" where they just waste their turns doing random things.
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: The Cheydinhal Mage's Guild quest has Falcar, the local guild hall's leader, task the player with recovering a "Ring of Burden" from a nearby well. The only thing the Ring does is immediately add 150 pounds of weight to the player's inventory, and since the quest is early in the game, it's quite possible for this to kill you, as your Strength stat will be overwhelmed, leading you to become immobile and drown in the well. As it turns out, Falcar was counting on that—he's secretly a Necromancer who hopes to murder Mage's Guild hopefuls so he can use their corpses for his magic.
- Evoland: The enhanced version's ability that's easiest to unlock after the Sword, are "Monsters", which exist to hurt the protagonist.
- Evolve Idle: Every species has a mix of positive, neutral and negative traits that can later be removed or added from the same genus. Negatives range from increased food consumption to needing an extra resource to build housing to only spawning in rain.
- Oddly, several traits are at odds with their usual associations: "Free Spirit" increases job stress, "Large" increases housing costs but doesn't affect combat, "Gambler" gets you more money from Casinos, etc.
- The Junk Gene modifier gives your species a random negative trait that can't be removed until you get the technology for it. Completing a run with it increases the buff you get from the associated achievement.
- The Valdi and Ooze have nothing but negative traits (all of them combined, in fact).
- Fairyside: One of the purchasable in-run upgrades is a reduction to shot speed, even after spending rare credits to boost it before the run starts.
- Final Fantasy
- Final Fantasy VI: Brave New World has the No Exp. Eggs, which eliminate experience points from whoever wears it.
- Final Fantasy X: When first obtained, te Celestial Weapons only have the ability "No AP", an Experience Penalty. By upgrading these weapons with Crests and Sigils, No AP is replaced by more useful abilities.
- Get Amped: The accessory/gear called "Soul Sickle" has a move where the user simply deals some damage to themselves. It's not without purpose, however, as the gear's passive ability allows the user to deal more damage the more HP they've lost.
- Genomancer: Summons can have abilities that hinder them, such as:
- "summon is stunned for first 2.5 seconds of combat"
- "summon loses 5 attack damage when at full health"
- "25% chance that summon's attack will deal 0 damage"
- Hades II: If she thinks a run is going too well, Eris will grant Melinoë a "blessing" which is anything but. Rather than giving any sort of benefit, like all the other divine blessings, it makes enemies do significantly more damage to you, and the effect increases with each subsequent room.
- Hearthstone:
- The Warrior weapon Cursed Blade reads "Double all damage dealt to your hero.", which is pretty much a death sentence beyond the first few turns. The only silver lining is the weapon's high durability, but even this may be considered a downside since it means the other player will benefit from dealing double damage for a longer period of time.
- Fel Reaver is a monstrous 5 mana 8/8, but it comes with the horrific downside of destroying the top three cards of your deck whenever your opponent plays a card. It's really easy to mill the entire deck in a single turn with this on the board... but if the opponent can't actually deal with the Fel Reaver, it can quickly kill them. This card was actually used in a top-tier aggro deck for a time.
- Heroes of Might and Magic:
- Heroes of Might and Magic II: There are a handful of artifacts that only have negative effects. The Fizbin of Misfortune reduces its owner's morale by 2, the Tax Lien reduces your kingdom's daily gold income, and the Hideous Mask prevents wandering monsters from offering to join your army. They're pretty much useless other than making the random artifact pool a little worse, but one potential strategy is to equip one to a weak hero and suicide them into an enemy, which will pass on the artifact and forcibly equip it to them if they have an open slot.
- Heroes of Might and Magic IV: Berserkers, and Frenzied Gnashers from the Winds of War expansion, have the Berserk ability which prevents you from controlling the unit in combat. Instead, they will always run towards the nearest enemy and attack them. Both creatures have pumped-up stats to compensate, but you can expect to lose hundreds of Berserkers in any tough battle.
- Heroes of Might and Magic V: Goblins have the special abilities Cowardice, which causes them to flee without retaliating whenever they take damage, and Treachery, which causes them to join the enemy hero when more than 70% of their stack has been killed off in a battle. Thankfully, upgraded Goblins lose the Treachery ability and only have the comparatively less bad Cowardice, while also having other beneficial abilities.
- Heroes Of Oakenhaven: Every hero starts out with 2 Flaws, which are overcome and turn into passive buffs when the right conditions have been achieved.
- Heroes of the Storm: D.Va's mount ability only has the passive effect of reducing her movement speed by 25% while she's attacking or channeling an ability in Mech Mode. It was even worse prior to her rework, where it simply reduced her Mech's speed by 15% at all times.
- Hollow Knight: Silksong: The "reward" for turning the Twisted Bud to the correct NPC is said NPC forcefully implanting it in Hornet, which replaces her crest with one that cannot equip any tools or Silk Skills. Hornet also cannot use Bind in this state and must rely on benches or hot spring water to heal. This starts a multi-part side quest to getting the parasite removed while under its crippling effects, the reward for that being a genuine crest with a Life Drain effect.
- HuniePop 2 has what is called Baggage, negative effects which activate after learning something specific about a girl. When going on a date with that girl, her Baggage takes effect. These range from things such as reducing the amount of Hunie certain Tokens give out to being unable to use items on a specific girl. The more you learn about the girls, the more Baggage you have to deal with.
- Idol Manager: Some idol traits are net drawbacks. They can take the form of having less stamina available, losing stamina faster in specific circumstances (for example, handshake events due to being Terrified of Germs) or having a negative effect on the stamina of other idols made to work alongside them. One of the perks of paying for background checks during the auditions is reducing the chances of getting such traits among the audition's finalists.
- Kingdom Hearts: "EXP Zero" is an equippable ability that prevents the equipped character from gaining Experience Points. Its only purpose is as a Level Limiter for people who want to play a Low-Level Run.
- Kingdom of Loathing:
- The Bad Moon run gives you access to the Black Cat familiar. While most familiars are beneficial, the Black Cat is the exact opposite and actively sabotages you. It can swat away items dropped to prevent you from getting them, remove your buffs, reduce your stat gains, or make you use the wrong attacks. If you use it for every battle in the run, you get to do Bad Moon runs at any time without doing the usual prerequisite.
- The O.A.F. familiar for April Fools' Day will randomly sell the items that get dropped in battle, lower your stat gains, and sometimes prevent you from using skills and combat items in favor of regular attacks.
- Kirby: If Kirby acquires the "Sleep" ability, he immediately goes to sleep for some precious seconds, then wakes up and loses the ability. Kirby gains nothing from this, and it may become a danger if there's an enemy nearby. Later games, however, do add some minor positive things to this ability, such as healing a bit of his HP while he's sleeping.
- Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2: At first, all of the survivors seem like The Immune; however, in reality, they're asymptomatic carriers of the "Green Flu" that's caused the Zombie Apocalypse. Thanks to the flu mutating so rapidly, it can literally become airborne on a moment's notice, which is why basically every rescue attempt the survivors encounter in the first game fails — they unknowingly infect the person rescuing them.
- Luck be a Landlord:
- The "Hex" symbols have a high payout of 3 coins, and a purely negative ability to balance it out. Most of them go "whenever you roll this, you have a 30% chance to suffer a negative effect". However, the Holy Water item removes the negative effects of Hexes and increases their value to boot.
- The Guillotine essence has no upside and kills you if you have at least one billion coins. Its only purpose is bragging rights (many achievements reward you for dying to it) and playing into the game's anti-billionaire theme.
- Mega Man Battle Network: NaviCust pieces classified as Program Parts must be placed on the Command Line. If the player doesn't do that, not only will the upgrade not take effect, but it will cause MegaMan to suffer from bugs such as Damage Over Time or Attack Failure Chance, depending on the malfunctioning program.
- Midnight Suns: Going into battle with a hero that's bearing an unhealed wound causes their deck to become polluted with cards representing those wounds, on top of a debuff that causes them to take damage whenever a card of theirs is played. Wound cards can't be interacted with or played, and redraws have to be spent on them in order to get them out of your hand.
- Minecraft:
- The Curse of Binding enchantment. When applied to armor, the enchantment makes it so the player cannot remove it from any armor slot. The only way to remove it is to allow the item to break or to die.
- The Curse of Vanishing enchantment. Any item with this enchantment will disappear when the wielding player dies instead of being dropped, causing it to be gone for good.
- Minion Masters: Some minions have the Blood Pact ability. This ability has the sole effect that when the minion suffers damage, the minion's Master receives 75% of the damage as well.
- Octopath Traveler II: Hikari the Master Swordsman has a mechanic whereby he can challenge NPCs to duels and learn a new skill associated with that NPC if he wins. Not all the skills he learns this way are useful... for example, dueling an old man will allow him to learn "Back Pain", giving him a debuff to his speed and evasion stats for 3 turns.
- One Step From Eden: Pinch hits the user for 1 damage.
- The Other: Airi's Adventure: Gameplay and Story Integration means that some characters get debuffs if the weather doesn't suit them.
- Palworld: The Pals can have a wide variety of passive abilities, including negative ones that increase the rate of sanity loss, satiety loss, and attack cooldown; decrease attack, defense, work speed, and stamina.
- Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door:
- Mario can buy the Double Pain badge from a salesman, which makes him take twice the damage from everything. Absolutely no benefit or bonus is gained from using it.
- The Slow Go badge, originating in Paper Mario, prevents Mario from running. While there was a very niche use for it there (sneaking past sleeping Clubbas), in The Thousand-Year Door it returns despite having no practical benefit.
- Peng Wars: Certain enemies, mainly Flying enemies such as Ted Terner and Alba, have an ability which causes the Slow status effect to last for twice as long when it's applied to them.
- Plants vs. Zombies 1: The Scaredy-Shroom, unlike all other plants, will hide underground if zombies get too close. This provides no advantage whatsoever, as the zombies still eat through the shroom upon reaching the tile it's planted on. All it means is that it loses the chance to launch the last handful of shots that could possibly kill the approaching zombie. This is a variant of Necessary Drawback, as Scaredy-Shroom would otherwise be overpowered for the nighttime stages: Planting it costs a very small amount of sun, it has a quick cooldown, and it's the only nocturnal plant that shoots with infinite range.
- Pokémon:
- Truant is an Ability making the Pokémon who possesses it skip every other turn. It was originally exclusive to Slakoth and its final form Slaking, the former being difficult to raise and evolve because of it, while the latter has it as a Necessary Drawback due to its stats rivaling those of Legendary Pokémon.
- Stall is an Ability which causes the Pokémon with it to always move last. It's the signature ability of Sableye.
- The Klutz Ability prevents the Pokémon from using held items, although there are exceptions (for example, a Lopunny with Klutz can still hold Lopunnite and Mega Evolve). However, the Ability is Not Completely Useless since it protects the Pokémon from other items with negative effects if the enemy gives it to them via Trick or Switcheroo.
- Regigigas' Slow Start Ability halves its attack and speed for its first five turns in battle.
- Archen and Archeops' Defeatist Ability lowers their stats when they're at less than half their max HP.
- Due to a programming error, in Generation I, Focus Energy decreases the user's Critical Hit rate, when it is supposed to increase it.
- In the earlier Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games, Run Away causes any AI-controlled Pokémon with it to gain the Terrified status condition at half HP, making it flee from enemies instead of attacking. No longer the case as of Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon, where it loses this effect and instead prevents the bearer from getting immobilized.
- Prayer of the Faithless: Gameplay and Story Integration gives some characters negative Passives, such as Verge of Misery:
[Bearer] is struggling to keep her mind afloat.She may be inflicted with Despair at the end of each turn.
- Project Zomboid: Because of the Point Build System used while creating a character, there are many traits that do nothing but make it even harder to survive the zombie apocalypse. These traits range from minor things like moving inventory items slowly or needing to eat more often, to major disadvantages such as being deaf, illiterate, or very under/overweight.
- Regretevator: The Anvil, is an item that can be found in-game on a shelf in the Floppy Shoppy floor, in which a player can 'eat' it for 1 coin, which will result in the player getting the anvil effect, which will slow the player's walking speed.
- Returnal: Malfuctions of Selene's suit are this, inflicted by contact with Malignant items to do things like:
- Enable Falling Damage
- Make taking damage also reduce her Obolites as well as her Suit Integrity.
- RimWorld: A principal aspect of gameplay is that all humans are given a randomized selection of traits that determine their behaviour and strengths. Some traits are good, some are only good in certain situations, while a number are outright bad, to intentionally make the task of managing your colony more interesting. Some bad traits include "Delicate", which makes your pawn take 15% more damage from attacks, "Depressive", which applies a permanent -12 mood debuff, and "Staggeringly Ugly", which applies a -40 opinion debuff from every other colonist (unless they have the "Kind" trait).
- Ruphand: An Apothecary's Adventure: Self-Imposed Challenge medals to equip at no cost other than 1 of more than 20 slots. For example, Danger Mode: "Brill takes double damage".
- Some traits in The Sims 3 only have negative effects. For example, Absent-Minded Sims have a chance to forget what they're doing, which cancels their action queue, and they perform worse at university. Losers are more likely to lose at games and receive negative moodlets from events. Subverted with the Unlucky trait, however — it makes Sims accident-prone, but the Grim Reaper finds their suffering so amusing that he won't allow them to die of anything other than old age.
- Among the trait chips for Plumbots in the Into the Future expansion, there's "Fear of Humans", which is quite self-explanatory: it makes bots unable to function properly anywhere with normal Sims (something that Oasis Landing, and most likely your home world, has a lot of), because they'll faint, run away, or leak oil.
- Slay the Spire: All Statuses and Curses clog your deck, with most of them having additional negative effects like dealing damage to you.
- Standstill Girl: The "Just Watch" skill just "Does nothing" for a turn, probably as a 0 Mana move to let the 1 Regenerating Mana / turn happen. Well, it does nothing unless the random chance to actually be a Beam Spam attack triggers.
- Temtem:
- Ganki used to have two detrimental traits. Botanophobia caused it to take more damage from Nature-type attacks, and Cold-Natured caused it to immediately become frozen when it would've gotten the cold status. These were replaced with beneficial traits in the 0.8 update.
- Both of Anahir's traits are negative, which fit with it being a tortured Hybrid Monster. Trauma lowers its corresponding defence stat whenever it's attacked, and Flawed Crystal makes it take more damage from Electric, Mental, and Toxic attacks, which it would otherwise resist.
- Tropico 3 gives each El Presidente two flaws, although some of them do have a minor positive side effect. The flaws were retired in Tropico 4, most of them were converted to traits that happen to have a side effect.
- Umamusume: Pretty Derby: Badly losing a race can give your trainee a purple skill, which provides a detrimental effect — lowering her stats in certain race conditions or slowing her down or draining her stamina at certain points. The one upside is that spending skill points to get rid of them gives a hint level for the positive version.
- The Universim: Nuggets can hold elections at the evolution tower. Each candidate proposes a law that will affect nuggets in the city for as long as they're in power, and you can influence which one your citizens will vote for. Some of these are downright negative, such as gym bans (which reduces the amount of items nuggets can carry) and nap time (which slows down work at eateries and hospitals).
- Valkyria Chronicles: Several characters have negative personal potentials that both give them personality through gameplay mechanics and forcing players to play around their weaknesses. Some negative potentials are either very situational, like Desert Allergy, which gradually drains their HP when fighting in desert, or extremely detrimental, like Humanitarian, which has the chance of the unit not only not attack when ordered but also ends their turn. Later games give characters personal missions that turn their negative potentials into positive ones when completed.
- Void Bastards: Each parolee may have a randomly assigned trait, some of them are negative. Examples include smoker (randomly coughs to alert nearby enemies), colorblindness, paranoia (randomly hears sounds from enemies that don't exist).
- Wanderers of Sorceria: In one level, Kurumi has an ability that does nothing but deal 300 damage to her. This is only available for that level since she's under a mind-control spell and uses the pain to fight it, if she's at full health for too long it's a Non-Standard Game Over as she becomes the villain's thrall. Of course if she dies it's a standard game over, fortunately she also has a permanent health regen boost for that level, hence the need for self-damage.
- Wildfrost: When the Gloom Bell is active, some cards you find have Cursed Charms attached to them, which debuff them and take up Charm slots.
- Yo-kai Watch:
- Yo-kai with the skill Annoyance may sometimes waste their turn and attack allies. Zerberker, the main Yo-kai with it, is strong enough to where it's a tangible downside but not strong enough to justify dealing with it. Suspicion, Bitter Rice and Breaking Baaad have a similar effect.
- Casanono and Pookivil's Unpopularity ability makes you less likely to recruit enemy Yo-kai. Given the rates are already pretty low, there's no possible use for this.
- Timidevil's Too Afraid just makes him skip most of his turns by loafing around.
- When Yo-kai with the skill Washed Out get inspirited, their skill also lowers all their stats.
- Curse Worsener states that it causes allies to suffer greater affects from inspirits. This is actually a typo, it makes their abilities stronger.
- The Skill Places to Be causes the Yo-kai who has it to leave the fight midway.
- Yo-kai with Tunnel Vision can only attack Yo-kai directly in front of them, including allies.
Examples from Other Media
Anime & Manga
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable: Most Stands are in some way beneficial to their user, or at least have some form of combat potential. However, if the user does not have sufficient strength of will or spirit, the Stand will either be extremely detrimental (Holly Kujo's manifests as a terminal illness that could only be undone by killing DIO) or outright hostile to its user. As an example, the only power that the piggybacking Cheap Trick has is killing its user if someone looks at their back, and then taking the witness as its next host.
- My Hero Academia: A vision that Deku receives of All For One reveals that when the phenomenon first manifested, certain Quirks — particularly those that gave physical mutations — were considered this, due to the deformities that were caused by them. Part of the reason All For One rose to power was because he used his Power Parasite abilities to remove Quirks that its owner believed were undesirable.
- One Piece:
- When Brook was alive, his Devil Fruit powers were this to him. Eating a Devil Fruit typically confers the tradeoff of superhuman abilities at the cost of losing any ability to swim, and having your powers drained by water or things with a 'water-like' aura, such as Seastone. However, Brook ate the Revive-Revive Fruit, a Devil Fruit that allows someone to come back to life exactly once after they die, and has no other abilities until that person dies. Essentially, in life, Brook was a person who couldn't swim, on a pirate crew, on a planet that's at least 80% water. This ended up being subverted after the Time Skip, as Brook has discovered more applications for his Devil Fruit, such as detaching his soul from his body to do some scout work, using energy emitted from his soul to reattach his bones (essentially, a limited form of regeneration), and infusing his sword with this energy to call forth "the chill of the underworld".
- The artificially-created SMILE Devil Fruits have a 90% chance of inflicting this. Those unfortunates who eat such a Devil Fruit are reduced to being a Stepford Smiler, unable to express any emotions but happiness, and still lose the ability to swim, gaining no positive effects in exchange. (The remaining 10% grant the eater powers related to some species of animal.)
- Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's: Yanagi's monsters only have effects that damage their controller. The key to using them is that his deck also contains Spell cards with effects that send the damage to the opponent. This was averted when his monsters were brought to the real card game, as while they retained the negative effects, they also gained new, positive effects.
Comic Books
- Chew: Tony Chu, the protagonist, sees his Food Based Superpower as this; he's a cibopath, capable of receiving visions from the items he's consumed, telling him about their past. While not unbearable if he sticks to a vegetarian diet, he's subjected to torturous and disgusting visions that overwhelm any pleasant sensations whenever he tries to eat meat, and his job as an FDA investigator repeatedly forces him to consume human remains. However, it's not all bad, as around the midpoint of the series, Tony discovers that cibopathy has Power Copying potential after he's force-fed the remains of several pro baseball players by his wife's psychotic ex, and gains the ability to throw a fastball at lethal speeds.
- Ultimate X-Men (2001): Issue #41 told the story of a mutant who had awakened his powers at puberty; unfortunately, those powers consisted exclusively of releasing a cocktail of toxins that vaporized humans and animals in a very large radius, resulting in him killing over 250 people. Wolverine Mercy Kills him, as he's completely unable to control his power or function in society.
- X-Men: Many of the sewer-dwelling Morlocks feel they have mutations like these, unlike the "pretty"-looking mutants like the X-Men who can generally pass for regular humans e.g. Cyclops only needs to wear ruby quartz glasses, Iceman and Colossus can switch off their powers, and even Rogue (who can't control her powers) is a very attractive young woman. The Morlock known as "Chicken Wings", for example, had feathers and light bones that allowed him limited flight, but not only was that ability almost useless in their underground environment it also meant he was especially susceptible to injuries that would result in broken bones.
- One mutant's "power" was to be bedridden with debilitating physical ailments, including being much, much Older Than He Looks, and to top it off, he was also resistant or immune to any kind of medication to treat the symptoms of his ailments or even numb his pain.
Literature
- Wax and Wayne:
- In The Alloy of Law, Marasi initially pretends to be a Muggle rather than admit her allomantic power: trapping herself in a bubble of slow time. Subverted when she uses it to delay the villain at a critical moment; later books cement her power as situational but highly useful, especially when the characters discover a way to trigger it remotely without Marasi being in the bubble herself.
- Allomantic aluminum and duralumin grant pure Meta Powers: aluminum neutralizes all other metals in the user's body; duralumin discharges them all in a superpowered burst. Duralumin is useful for a Mistborn with Combo Platter Powers, but a Misting with only one of those powers can have the privilege of eating precious metals for absolutely no effect other than not poisoning themselves. Aluminum is even worse, as there is almost no scenario in which even a Mistborn would want to neutralize all their metals. People with either sole power get the unfortunate In-Series Nickname of "gnats".
Live-Action TV
- Haven: Almost every single Trouble amongst the families of Haven is some form of curse. The fact that the supernatural abilities are mostly in the Blessed with Suck category is why they're called "Troubles," and the people who have them are "Troubled" or "Afflicted." You get a few that are benign to marginally useful, such as Nathan's inability to feel pain or Noelle's ability to bring people Back from the Dead but take on a lesser form of their injuries. Then you have:
- Bill McShaw, a restaurateur whose Trouble causes any food he eats when stressed, and any uneaten food from the same source, to spoil.
- Chris Brody inherited his father's Trouble of everyone adoring him on sight; while his father was a glad-handing mayor, Chris is a misanthrope and despises his condition.
- Stu Pierce, whose sweat causes people to desiccate to death; he finds this out while running a marathon.
- The Nix family experiences major organ failure and must continually harvest organs from their family in order to survive.
- The Harker family, who cause people to spontaneously drop dead when they start crying; the elder Harkers are trained to never cry when they reach puberty, but the Trouble is activated in an infant.
- Dwight Hendrickson, whose Trouble is that he attracts bullets. He is not Immune to Bullets nor does it come with a Healing Factor, he just attracts them. Not only did he find this out while deployed in the Middle East, but he has to wear a bullet-proof vest 24/7. Tragically, his daughter inherited the same Trouble, and died pre-series in a shoot-out with the Guard, who were after Dwight.
- Heroes: Maya Herrera is a Poisonous Person with the horrific power of generating a deadly airborne toxin that kills everyone in her immediate vicinity; while she can control it, it also triggers automatically whenever she's stressed. Her twin brother Alejandro also has a superhuman gift—the ability to negate Maya's by neutralizing the toxin. It's never made clear if Alejandro's power works on every kind of poison or just his sister's.
- Warehouse 13: While most artifacts in the series have a tradeoff — like a waffle iron that makes delicious waffles but melts off your skin — several others are just purely negative; for instance, a doorknob from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where almost 150 workers perished as the result of practices of an Abusive Workplace, will incinerate the person who touches it if held to their skin for long enough, or Sylvia Plath's typewriter, which induces suicidal despair in anyone close enough to type on it.
Web Original
- When discussing MMA fighter Kazuyuki Fujita's nigh-indestructible skull, Seanbaby uses this mechanic to explain how Fujita's incredible defense comes at the inverse expense of his agility:
When creating characters in video games, you often have to make sacrifices. For example, your rogue doesn't have enough points to learn Mutilate AND Killing Spree. It's the same thing when scientists create igneous-skulled punching bag monsters. If you spring for Invincible Head, there aren't enough points left over to put into Agility. Fujita actually has a -65 to Dodge, which means cars instinctively swerve into him, and it takes him 10 minutes and a man-shaped hole in the wall to get through a doorway.