Yet Another Stupid Death

Who'd have thought a heavily-armed spaceship would be so dangerous?

"YOU JUMPED INTO A SWORD. YOU RETARD!"

—The Legend of Zelda section of I Wanna Be the Guy

There are lots of ways to die in video games. One particular type of video game, the Roguelike, has lots and lots of ways to die. Some of these deaths are just bad luck; the player got a raw deal. Or perhaps the player got overconfident. Then there are deaths that, in retrospect, were utterly avoidable. Roguelike players tend to tell stories about these deaths, and their stories tend to have a title in common: Yet Another Stupid Death.

Yet Another Stupid Death often happens when you Press X to Die, or when Everything Is Trying to Kill You.

This will often overlap with Have a Nice Death if the game decides to mock you for your stupidity. When player stupidity wipes out an entire party in an MMORPG, it's also Total Party Kill.

Examples of Yet Another Stupid Death include:

• Nethack is the Trope Namer. Good luck finding a habitual Nethack player who doesn't have a YASD story. Same goes for Rogue, Angband, Dwarf Fortress, and Japanese console Roguelikes.^[1]
• Scorched Earth - firing a superweapon (or napalm) at just the right angle...and 0 power.
• The first Command & Conquer game has a good reason why you should NEVER group soldiers together if they're all carrying Flamethrowers.
• Killed by standing in fire in Diablo. Another would be people killed by repeatedly attacking bosses with a damage reflecting shield up, because any time you have to hit yourself to death you deserve to die.
• World of Warcraft: any game mechanic that can kill a player who is standing still is referred to as a "retard check", at least as long as there's some warning before it goes off.
  • It's not at all rare for people putting a raid together to specify that you must be able to move out of the fire.
• Space Quest series: Roger Wilco is notable for the many and interesting ways he can die, including from player stupidity. There's even a site devoted to chronicling them. They are also among the few games where replaying value largely comes from finding out new, interesting ways to die.
• As with Space Quest, Quest for Glory is a Sierra game, giving the player ample opportunity to kill yourself through player stupidity, carelessness, dickery, or obviously biting off more than you can chew. The stupidest of these being that the player can actually jam his own lockpick up his nose and kill himself.
  • Since the command "pick lock" caused you to use your lockpick to probe around inside a door lock, this was the logical result of the command "pick nose". However, death only resulted if your skill at Pick Locks was too low; if you had sufficient skill, "pick nose" would just provide valuable practice with the tools. ("Success! You now have an open nose.")
• Mainline Shin Megami Tensei games are also conducive to YASD, since it is necessary for the player to learn to exploit the battle system in order to get through battles while taking as little damage as possible. Fighting the right enemies with the wrong Mons is a great way to earn a Game Over screen.
  • Enemy that reflects physical attacks+Accessory that triggers an uber-powerful, physical counterattack=Fun.
• Entering The Mortuary in Doom: The Roguelike without an invulnerability powerup and a nuke on any difficulty level other than HNTR is tantamount to suicide. A virtually limitless supply of dead monsters and five Archviles at the very least means even a BFG is going to have trouble clearing out this bonus map.
  • How so? It's not that harder than, say, Spider's Lair. By that time you're probably beefy enough to clear it on UV or steal some loot at Nightmare.
• In one level of Ghost Trick you must save Cabanela from being shot by swapping the bullet with something of the same shape right after it's fired. The right object is a soft knit hat, but you can also swap it with a metal hard hat... which, since it's still traveling at bullet speeds, will kill Cabanela even more brutally than the bullet would.
  • In an earlier level, you have to save a truck driver from being incapacitated by a loud noise he hears from his headphones and crashing into a restaurant. If you end up in the truck while he's driving it,at which point it's already too late to save him you might end up trying to manipulate his recliner seat. This winds up with him flat on his back while the truck is still driving, you can't put it back up due to his weight and to top it all off, he falls backwards hard enough to actually tear off the steering wheel. He ends up crashing in the same way, just in a more ludicrous position.
• The comparatively obscure puzzle game The Omega Stone deliberately invites these. Attempt to "use" an electric fence at your own risk, and save the game before pressing any giant red buttons.
• Infiniminer: Find any good player that plays on servers that have lava in them and ask how many times they accidentally dug right under lava with no means of escape.
  • Another common unintentional suicide is digging straight down and digging out a tile that has a 12-tile or more drop under it. for reference, you can take a fall of exactly 11 tiles and live when running an unmodified client. This does lead to some unusual traps, such as an 11-tile drop landing on a blue force field (which means blues can't survive the fall).
• "Your pony died because it wasn't pretty enough? NOOOO!"
• The first Goomba, anyone?
  • Your first Goomba in 'New Super Mario Bros will probably do this all over again. Goombas now do little hops in time with the background music. If you head right as soon as you have control over Mario, the Goomba will hop just as you try to jump on it.
  • Picking up a Poison Mushroom in SMB Japan / Lost Levels when you've played it before.
  • In New Super Mario Bros Wii multiplayer, you can retreat into a bubble whenever you like, float past the hard stuff, and get someone to pop you out later on. This can lead to situations where you're playing with 4 players, and everyone decides at the same time "this part's too hard, time for the bubble!", resulting in four trapped players and a trip back to the last checkpoint.
    • The game itself hangs a lampshade on the stupidity of this death - if everyone is in the bubble, you get a special "level failed" music riff, instead of the normal tune if the players die in normal ways.
• After the 2nd mission in Just Cause 2, you are tasked with attaching Karl Blaine's car to a tractor and pulling it out of a trash heap. However, you can accidentally flip the car over, resulting in an immediate game over.
  • There you are, doing a bit of stunt flying in a high speed jet, you exit the aircraft to start skydiving and BAM!. You get killed by the wing of your own plane.
• Fire Emblem's healers. Probably true of a lot of Tactical RPGs, but in a lot of circumstances they will go down with one hit (or two, but that's generally only one enemy attack since their speed isn't very good). There's a lot of ways to accidentally leave them in range of one or two enemies, usually involving planning something out ahead of time, moving your healer, changing your plan without thinking about the healer, moving around other guys that were originally protecting (or were about to protect) the healer, and... oops. They're usually very valuable too.
  • A weapon breaks, and the character auto-equips a Devil Axe they picked up earlier. When the next enemy attacks him, your character crits himself and dies.
• Worms. Destructible terrain + weapons that make large explosions = your hilarious yet stupid death. For added laughs, factor in weapons affected by the wind and poor aim, coupled with chain reactions involving worms self-destructing at 0 hp, mines, and explosive barrels. Bonus points if a whole island formation is partially gutted and leveled by the result.
  • Hilariously, if the homing pigeon in Worms 3D can't find its target (which, most of the time if fired by a human player, it can't), it will execute a "return to sender" maneuver.
  • Another one involves the graphics of the game. It is very possible to be blown by a missile to the edge of the lake, and survive despite being neck high in water. However any attempts at moving that worm will instantly kill him.
  • Finally, 30 worms + 1 Holy hand grenade + 1 freakishly high tower = Atmospheric point of view as you watch the tiny dots with name labels fly past the skybox.
• Some deaths/endgames in the Nancy Drew games fall under this. Notable ones include repeatedly spraying pesticide into your face, deliberately lowering a suspended chandelier into your skull, and eating baking soda and jellyfish sandwiches.
  • You don't actually lower the chandelier onto your head - you just smash it on the floor and get kicked out of the house for being a vandal. Still stupid, though.
• In X-COM, poor preparation can cause all sorts of stupidly funny, yet avoidable deaths:
  • Letting agents stay too clustered together when one of them is carrying a primed, unthrown grenade.
  • A documented bug that some people will try to use makes this all the more likely. In short, grenades can ONLY explode when on the ground, and unconscious/dead agents have their grenades treated as if they're on the ground.
  • Using Auto-fire at medium-to-long ranges when scouts are at risk of getting hit.
  • Letting the weak-minded carry all sorts of powerful or explosive weaponry when facing enemies with psionics. Bonus points if they're holding armed grenades when they panic. Jackpot if a soldier holding a loaded Blaster Launcher goes berserk.
  • Forgetting to use Aimed Shot when wielding a Rocket Launcher armed with Large Rockets.
  • Poor usage of Blaster Bombs in general, ranging from riskily placed waypoints with no compensation for slight drift to usage of directly vertically placed waypoints in certain versions of the game.
  • Allowing an agent to Reaction Fire a loaded Blaster Launcher or Rocket Launcher.
  • Forgetting where you placed armed Proximity Grenades and letting Agents trip them off while hunting down the last aliens.
  • A tank missile blowing up on the ground right in front of the tank. Miraculously, nobody was killed.
  • An entire squad choking and dying from smoke inhalation.
  • Ill-conceived use of full-auto mode in any area with explosive world objects, thanks to recruits being graduates of the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy.
• King's Quest VII: had so many of these, and it took so much effort to find them, and the "Game Over" screens were so mercilessly (and hilariously) condescending, half of them might as well be Easter Eggs. In particular, there is a puzzle that involves a wandering ghost-traveler who died of thirst and now aimlessly meanders about the desert. Valanice can, with some puzzle solving, turn as salt water into fresh water as she likes, one clay potful at a time, but this first requires her to gain salt water as an inventory item. Giving the Far-Walker fresh water allows him to slake his thirst, but giving him salt water pisses him off. Doing it enough times makes him kill you.
  • It also has such delightful lines as, "Well, it would seem that keeping a lit firecracker in one's pocket isn't the best course of action."
• Spelunky. This playthrough features a particularly nasty one a few minutes in.
• Shadow Caster:
  • Forgetting to change to Kahpa (or at the very least back to Kirt from Maorin, who drowns quickly [as in less than one second after you submerge]) when going underwater.
  • Switching to Caun when there's a mobile enemy anywhere near you. Super regeneration doesn't help when you're practically as fragile as glass!
• In the adventure game Torin's Passage, funny deaths were often a few seconds away, but your last act of the game invites the chance to make such an incredible Violation of Common Sense, that a secret message from producer Al Lowe plays over the death screen pointing out how utterly insane a player must be to sneak up silently behind the Big Bad only to start playing the bagpipes. (Yes, it's another Sierra game, why do you ask?)
• I Wanna Be the Guy: One section of the game is a take off of Zelda. Where in The Legend of Zelda you can pick up a sword by moving over its icon, here you get "YOU JUMPED INTO A SWORD, YOU RETARD!"
• In SaGa Frontier, you can fall off the Cygnus ship in the part where Red has to run across the pathway of the bridge, while on the outside. Which is required to go to the engine room. And, at a later date in the game, when you are forced to fight enemies and a possible Big Bad. Which in turn kills you, bringing you back to the title screen.
• In Return to Zork, there are a lot of not-so-obvious ways to die, such as opening both hatches on the furnace at the same time. Then there's stuff that is very obvious, such as the broken bridge in West Shanbar (see 3:12 in). Darwin award, however, goes out to deliberately setting things up for grues to get you, such as removing illuminyte from your equipment in the tunnels.
  • The entire Zork saga has a plethora of these. Special mention must go to wandering around without a light source in any Zork game (the game even warns you first!), jumping in the Bottomless Pit in Zork: Grand Inquisitor, or staying in the same room with the plastic explosive in Zork II and waiting for it to go off.
• The Neverhood: The only possible way to die is pretty obvious: falling down a bottomless pit. What makes it so obvious, you may ask? Oh, I don't know, maybe those whose signposts right next to it that read "DANGER!", "Don't jump in the drain!" and "You will die!" respectively?
• One of the options near the end of the Fate route in Fate/stay night is after being hit by Gilgamesh's Wave Motion Sword Ea whether you want to get up or not. Taiga is not pleased if you choose to stay down here.
• Warship Gunner, Aegis System and Nukes and firing at it point blank... ouch.
• Cave Story. "One touch means instant death!"
  • If you're playing with only 3HP, have fun dying from enemies and their unpredictable acting.^[2]
• You will suffer this in ADOM if you just Attack! Attack! Attack!, but even veterans aren't immune to forgetting to equip a weapon after dropping it on an altar. Other YASDs: accidentally using Fireball on your vastly more powerful companion; fighting ghuls without paralyzation resistance; coming across a greater mimic and trying to melee it; stepping onto a chaotic altar when an intelligent chaotic monster is nearby and many, many more.
• ThunderDome MUD is full of these, among them: trying to kill Justice, an invincible NPC integral to the game's court mechanic, drinking gasoline (it's stupid enough keeping gasoline in the same container type as your water), jumping a bike across a river and pausing, speedwalking through a desert known to be trap-infested, and attacking what appears without close examination to be 'a guy' who turns out to be a well-known self-reviving killing machine.
• A funny one from a Let's Play of Might and Magic VI. THE LAVA 'IS' INSTANT DEATH! "This is why you can't have nice things!"
• Demon's Souls. The game will punish you for your avoidable mistakes... HARSHLY.
  • One of the stupidest and most avoidable death traps happens early on in the game. In Boletaria Palace 1-1, there's an obvious pit in the floor surrounded by enemies. Nobody would DREAM of jumping into that, right? It's actually a very common occurrence due to the fact that there are swirly blue glowing things in the middle of the abyss. Countless players have thought that it was some sort of portal to another area, or that there was an item down below, only to step boldly in and turn themselves into a red stain at the bottom of the pit three stories below. YASD indeed.
  • Same for Dark Souls. Just because you've fought an enemy hundreds of times doesn't mean you can get sloppy.
• There's an elevator shaft in Metroid: Other M with an elevator that you need to drop on an enemy in order to proceed. Hang from a ledge in the shaft and fire a missile at the cables and debris keeping it suspended. Makes one serving of dead Samus.
• In the RuneScape Dungeoneering skill, you can actually win awards by dying like this. Fortunately, they do not affect gameplay at all.
• Minecraft has plenty of these. The stupidest (and most avoidable) is digging straight up, especially when you're very deep underground, which often leads to gravel, sand, or water landing on your head, suffocating you. Or lava. Another common death is digging straight down, either as an efficient way to mine or while working on some building project, and then you realize there's a gaping chasm below you... Ever since the "creep" mechanic was introduced (which allows you to stand on the very edge of something, making it easier to build bridges, etc.), death by falling has increased dramatically when people accidentally let up on the SHIFT key and go plummeting hundreds of feet to the ground!
  • "Don't dig straight down" actually reached memetic status briefly on the official forums, just because it seemed to be happening so much.
    • Funny story: At least one fellow on the official forums seemed to think this was some kind of actual rule (as opposed to just being sound advice) and acted as though he was some kind of iconoclast for doing it on a regular basis.
      • You can't say without giving us links! It's practically impossible to search.
• While the modern Prince of Persia games are fairly easy, at some point you won't know where the hell to go, so you'll have to rely on "what if I jump this way". Good thing you can rewind time and die yet again.
  • By the way, if you die in battle and not rewind back enough chances are you will die again in the exact same manner, forcing you to rewind yet again.
    • Though that's the same stupid death a second time. Where it gets really annoying is when you realise you only had enough sand to rewind once...
• Jurassic Park: Trespasser is a first person shooter which introduced a number of innovative features, notably modelling a full player body in the game world which included a fully articulated and very awkward to control arm. This resulted in some of the most amusingly stupid ways to kill oneself including beating oneself to death with a baseball bat and flailing a loaded shotgun against a wall in a vain attempt to point it towards an oncoming raptor, only to have it go off in ones fac'e.
• Soul Calibur III: In the event match against the Colossus, the entire match is fought hacking at the enemy's ankles, as he's much larger than you. If you win, he finally falls. Forward. Don't just stand there.
• Dungeons of Dredmor actually gives you Achievements on Steam for several stupid deaths, from trying to fight the demon running the shops, to blowing yourself up with a Horadic Lutefisk Cube, to spraining your ankle kicking a door when you're on 1HP.
  • You also get achievements for dying in the tutorial, dying to a Diggle (the Mascot Mook / Goomba of the game), and also dying to a Thrusty, whose only form of attack is...pelvic thrusting. Interestingly enough, you also get an achievement if the game itself dies a stupid death (that is, the game crashes).
• The early Tomb Raider series offers more than enough opportunities to die horribly and/or embarrassingly, such as hanging out on subway tracks, touching electrified fences despite signs and other warnings and stepping on a giant disembodied hand in a level named after King Midas. Or you could skip the middleman and just dive head first onto solid ground and break your neck. If you haven't already accidentally stumbled off of a ledge and died on impact.
• In Baldur's Gate II, there is a corridor where both sides look kind of like a clamp. Take a step in the middle of them, and they will close, killing you.
• In Time Gal, when Time Stop is active, you have to choose the correct answer before time runs out. Let's take one of the levels for example. If you use Time Stop, you have three choices; Pray God, Jump into the ocean, or Jump to the ship. Two of them are incorrect answers; you can't select "Jump to the ship," because Reika will not make it. You cannot select "Pray God," either, because Reika will end up going to heaven after the plane blows up, so the right answer is "Jump into the ocean."
• In Skyrim falling to your death. Its rare in this game for the player to be put into a position where falling to their death could be anybody else's fault. The Deathlords and Ulfric Stormcloak, pretty much the only enemies really capable of knocking you around are almost always encountered in enclosed areas.
• In Vampire Quest, from www.vampyou.com, there are a good few of these that are rather fun. One of which, which unlocks a seperate little mini-mode, is purposely lighting four braziers that are bluntly said to only be lit if you want to turn yourself into a vampire. Since the goal is to defeat the vampires...it's acknowledged as ridiculously stupid. Each leads to a rather fun scene, generally.

1. ↑ The community distinguishes between this trope -- when it's (almost) entirely the player's fault that they died - and Yet Another Annoying Death -- for when the Random Number God is out to get you (common with some of the One-Hit Kill methods of death).
2. ↑ Gaudi... just... Gaudi