History Main / HealthDamageAsymmetry

** Blue Mage's White Wind spell heals you and any nearby party members for a certain amount of HP depending on how much you currently have. This means that, while it's an incredibly convenient spell to have overall - it's the first actual healing spell you can be reasonably expected to get with Blue Mage, and the only one you can get to heal yourself with until level 50 - and very good for healing as part of a team where someone else is taking hits for you, effective use of it while playing solo requires casting it when you least ''need'' healing, since going below half health before casting it will result in diminishing returns that, depending on how long you wait or how much damage you're taking, could ultimately end with you dying before you can heal up anyway. For comparison, a regular healer's basic Cure/Physick/what have you heals enough that, up until you start reaching the endgame of the 2.0 content, another healer or DPS of equivalent level can often go from single-digit HP to fully or near-fully healed with ''one'' cast.

* Classic example: the original ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}''. Past zombies and imps, which only have 70 health at most, demons had about 150 to 1000 health, with bosses sporting health of over 3000; the player's maximum health, ever, is 200. None of the monsters come even close to the player's arsenal of destructive power (unless you're dumb enough to get into melee range, at which point your future resides entirely in the hands of the RandomNumberGod). How big is the gap, you ask? Well, the strongest monster in the entire franchise, the Cyberdemon boss, has a rocket launcher as its primary weapon, which is exactly the same as the player's rocket launcher. And the Rocket Launcher isn't even your most powerful weapon. As a result, the single player campaign tends to be reasonably mildly paced, while in multiplayer [[RocketTagGameplay most fights are over in a matter of seconds]] -- with the introduction of the double barrelled shotgun in ''Doom 2'', sometimes a fraction of a second.

*** Grunts with [=FRG=]s, Stealth Elites with energy swords and Hunters are really easy to kill, but can dish out hideous amounts of damage, sometimes as much as simply gibbing the player on higher difficulties.

** Blue Mage's White Wind spell heals you and any nearby teammates for a certain amount of HP depending on how much you currently have. This means that, while it's an incredibly convenient spell to have - it's the first actual healing spell you can be reasonably expected to get with Blue Mage, and the only one you can get to heal yourself with until level 50 - effective use of it while playing solo requires casting it when you least ''need'' healing.

* In ''VideoGame/ChronoTrigger'', Magus as a villain has [[NumberOfTheBeast 6666]] HP (even ''after'' Lavos sucks away most of his powers), [[RedemptionDemotion but doesn't have more than 999 under player control.]] On the flipside, he seldom does over 200 damage as an enemy, but routinely does thousands as a party member. This is also one of the few games in which Confused allies do pathetic damage to each other-- seldom more than 20 or so, even at high levels and with the best weapons.

* ''VideoGame/DiabloIII'': The amount of damage you do is so utterly devastating that you could probably destroy a comatose player at your level in [=PvP=] IN FIVE SECONDS. In contrast, bosses at your level can last over a full minute against your barrage and deal attrition damage with a few strong limit breaks that can eat a chunk of your health, but can't stand up against a dexterous player who dodges and rations their healing carefully because the health damage is too minor.

* Most of the ''VideoGame/LegacyOfKain'' games appear to have largely equal health and damage between the player and enemies (before factoring in health upgrades or high tier enemies anyway) with both sides requiring a notable but not excessive number of hits to bring down the other. Then you use something like the Inspire Hate spell to SetAMookToKillAMook and you realize that it's actually a stark inversion of this trope with the player having a huge health pool but pathetic damage and every mook being some flavor of GlassCannon.

[[folder:Fighting Games]]

* Highly exaggerated in ''[[http://armorgames.com/play/15607/arcane-weapon Arcane Weapon]]. The player character only has a few hundred health points, but can deal out thousands of hit points worth of damage with his most powerful attacks, while the enemy faced in "Survival" has 2,000,000 health points but at most only deals about a hundred points worth of damage with every attack.
[[/folder]]

* Classic example: the original ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}''. Demons had about 200 to 700 health, with bosses sporting health of over 3000; the player's maximum health, ever, is 200. None of the monsters come even close to the player's arsenal of destructive power (unless you're dumb enough to get into melee range, at which point your future resides entirely in the hands of the RandomNumberGod). How big is the gap, you ask? Well, the strongest monster in the entire franchise, the Cyberdemon boss, has a rocket launcher as its primary weapon, which is exactly the same as the player's rocket launcher. And the Rocket Launcher isn't even your most powerful weapon. As a result, the single player campaign tends to be reasonably mildly paced, while in multiplayer [[RocketTagGameplay most fights are over in a matter of seconds]] -- with the introduction of the double barrelled shotgun in ''Doom 2'', sometimes a fraction of a second.

** Lower-rank Brutes are actually the tank-who-can't-dish-it-out version of this. Until you enrage them. Higher rank ones carry all sorts of destructive goodies, though.

* Brutally {{Exploited}} in ''VideoGame/BravelyDefault''. See, two of the available classes have skills that deal fixed damage equals to the amount of HP the user is missing. The problem is that Qada and Alternis, the bosses whom you have to defeat to unlock these classes, ALSO have these skills. This eventually results in repeated [[{{Cap}} 9999 damage]] attacks (which, at the point you fight them [[spoiler:for the first time]]), is almost certainly a OneHitKill.

* Classic example: the original ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}''. Demons had about 200 to 700 health, with bosses sporting health of over 3000; the player's maximum health, ever, is 200. None of the monsters come even close to the player's arsenal of destructive power (unless you're dumb enough to get into melee range, at which point your future resides entirely in the hands of the RandomNumberGod). How big is the gap, you ask? Well, the strongest monster in the entire franchise is the Cyberdemon boss, and that's only because his rocket launcher is coded to be identical to the player's. And the Rocket Launcher isn't even your most powerful weapon. As a result, the single player campaign tends to be reasonably mildly paced, while in multiplayer [[RocketTagGameplay most fights are over in a matter of seconds]] �- with the introduction of the double barrelled shotgun in ''Doom 2'', sometimes a fraction of a second.

* The ''VideoGame/KisekiSeries'' averts this by giving bosses high enough stats to deal equal or higher damage than the player characters while having more HP. This gets ridiculous on Nightmare difficulty, where their normal attacks are stronger than the player characters' [[LimitBreak S-Crafts]]. The Normal difficulty on the other hand, is fairly good about making plausible human bosses that you could get close to in terms of stats, albeit with 1.5 times more HP than you can have. In Sky when twice fighting [[spoiler:Renne]] for example, her health is at 14000 and 20000 HP respectively, her attacks while being pretty strong and having a chance of a OneHitKO does damage you could do yourself with the right Quartz setup, and in spite of her tricks and mooks, has pitiful defense. Her first form at least is definitely a build you could make at late game. Even monsters and mechs that tend to have tons of health are justified as singularly being stronger than you are.

* ''VideoGame/FateGrandOrder'' is a fairly straight example. The tankiest Servants in the game tend to max out at 20,000 HP (though some can go higher through buffs), and most others have half that or less. You start encountering standard enemies with that much HP around the fourth or fifth chapter, and bosses in the later part of the game can have HP stats in the millions. The game's TacticalRockPaperScissors mechanic also ensures that even if the player and the enemy have the same offense, the player still usually does more damage and takes less. Lastly, player teams have the ability to stack buffs much more easily, along with generally stronger skills and attacks--those bosses with HP in the millions? They ended up being so vulnerable to player attacks that the game had to essentially institute a form of MercyInvincibility to stop players from simply crushing them in one turn.

* ''VideoGame/FateGrandOrder'': Very obviously done: a player-controlled Servant fully leveled up ''might'' break 10,000 HP. Standard enemy {{Mooks}} will very often have more than that. Enemy Servants will often have over 200,000 HP when the player fights them... and if that Servant later joins the party, suddenly they will only have 8,000 HP. On the flipside, enemies will often do much less damage: an enemy Noble Phantasm might do 3,000 - 4,000 HP of damage, but a player's Noble Phantasm can often do 50,000 or more.

* ''VideoGame/FateGrandOrder'' is a fairly straight example. The tankiest Servants in the game tend to max out at 20,000 HP (though some can go higher through buffs). You start encountering standard enemies with that much HP around the fourth or fifth chapter, and bosses in the later part of the game can have HP stats in the millions. Despite this, certain team compositions were so effective at taking down these bosses in a single turn that the game had to essentially institute a form of MercyInvincibility for them.

# '''Player Rewards:''' One of the most rewarding things a player can get is a stronger weapon or a more powerful attack. This makes it much easier to kill all the enemies you've previously faced, but to avoid making things too easy as the game progresses, the monsters in later areas need to have their HP ramped up quickly, so that the new weapon becomes par for the course, and the player has to seek a newer, better weapon.

[[folder: First Person Shooter ]]

[[folder: Hack And Slash ]]

* ''[[VideoGame/{{Diablo}} Diablo]]'' has magic which can do more damage in one hit than players (but not monsters) have health. To counter this, [=PvP=] magic damage is cut in half, but magic is still so overpowered that [=PvP=] duels are very, VERY short.
* ''[[VideoGame/{{Diablo}} Diablo II]]'': There is no damage or HP cap, but players can easily deal over 10,000 damage while their own HP is below 1,000. Even with damage cut to one-sixth in [[PlayerVersusPlayer PvP]], many duels end in a single hit.

* ''[[VideoGame/{{Diablo}} Diablo III]]'': The amount of damage you do is so utterly devastating that you could probably destroy a comatose player at your level in [=PvP=] IN FIVE SECONDS. In contrast, bosses at your level can last over a full minute against your barrage and deal attrition damage with a few strong limit breaks that can eat a chunk of your health, but can't stand up against a dexterous player who dodges and rations their healing carefully because the health damage is too minor.

[[folder: MMORP Gs ]]

[[folder: Real Time Strategy ]]

[[folder: Role Playing Games ]]

[[folder: Fighting Games ]]

[[folder: Tabletop Games ]]

[[folder: Third Person Shooter ]]

* ''Videogame/{{Warframe}}'': Players and enemies use fundamentally different scaling and leveling mechanisms to compensate for the fact that players can enhance their power with mods while enemies can increase in level indefinitely. Players can stack a wide variety of large multipliers to increase their DPS to absurd heights, but health is fundamentally capped and can only scale linearly. Meanwhile, enemy damage grows fairly slowly, but health and shields scale quadratically while armor scaling is better than linear. The result is that enemies are barely tickled by their own weapons while players one-shot each other so badly it's not even funny. The original incarnation of the game's [=PvP=] mode suffered badly from RocketTagGameplay thanks to this disparity, but Update 16 balanced things by restricting the available mods and separating [=PvP=] stats from [=PvE=] stats. In [=PvE=], this is what makes enemies with Radiation damage so dangerous. The Radiation status effect simulates confusion by removing FriendlyFireproof--which means that the first sign one squad member has been afflicted by it is when everyone else in the squad instantly goes down from the ridiculously powerful attacks they've been throwing around.

[[folder: Turn Based Strategy ]]

* ''Monster Girl Quest'' plays with this. When former enemies fight on your side (whether player-controlled or AI-controlled), their damage increases, fitting this trope, but their health actually remains the same. To balance this, they take much more damage. This is especially notable in the final battle, where any AOE attack will do far more damage to them than to Luka (the main character). It's played straight in ''Monster Girl Quest: Paradox'', listed under the Role Playing Games section.

[[folder: First Person Shooter ]]

[[folder: Hack And Slash ]]

[[folder: MMORP Gs ]]

[[folder: Role Playing Games ]]

[[folder: Table Top Role Playing Games ]]

* In many RPG the players and their enemies meet on equal footing. The player characters and enemies often use the same weapons and powers, inflict the same amount of damage, and have similar levels of whatever the game uses for health. Often the players have some other edge, but not always. Games which follow this model (at least much of the time) include: Both Old and New TabletopGame/WorldOfDarkness, TabletopGame/{{Shadowrun}}, Franchise/StarWars both [[TabletopGame/StarWarsD6 under West End Games]] and [[TabletopGame/StarWarsD20 D20]], TabletopGame/{{Traveller}}, Stars Without Number, TabletopGame/UnknownArmies, Decipher's ''[[Franchise/TolkiensLegendarium Lord of the Rings]]'' adaptation, TabletopGame/DarkHeresy and its spin-offs, Creator/GreenRonin's ''TabletopGame/DragonAge'' adaptation, TabletopGame/{{Rifts}}, TabletopGame/DeadLands, and many more.

* ''[[VideoGame/{{Diablo}} Diablo]]'' has magic which can do more damage in one hit than players (but not monsters) have health. To counter this, PvP magic damage is cut in half, but magic is still so overpowered that PvP duels are very, VERY short.

* ''[[VideoGame/{{Diablo}} Diablo III]]'': The amount of damage you do is so utterly devastating that you could probably destroy a comatose player at your level in PVP IN FIVE SECONDS. In contrast, bosses at your level can last over a full minute against your barrage and deal attrition damage with a few strong limit breaks that can eat a chunk of your health, but can't stand up against a dexterous player who dodges and rations their healing carefully because the health damage is too minor.

** This was a huge problem in PvP until the introduction of the resilience stat, whose sole purpose is to decrease the damage taken by other players. Prior to ''Mists of Pandaria'', this came almost purely from specialized gear, so a player without such equipment can still die ''very'' quickly; ''Pandaria'' changed this so that all players get a base PVP resilience of 40% with gear adding more resilience to that.

* In ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'', player characters are allowed to deal a lot of damage compared to their health. This had led to issues in PvP until they introduced a defensive stat called resilience, which reduces damage taken from other players significantly. Woe to those who step into a battleground without wearing resilience equipment.

When one compares the player's characters to the monsters (and bosses), they are essentially [[GlassCannon Glass Cannons]] to [[StoneWall Stone Walls]]. Player characters tend to be able to deal out huge amounts of damage, usually well above their own HP's worth in a single hit. Monsters deal very low damage relative to their own HP. If the game allows for PlayerVersusPlayer combat, expect the damage to be scaled down immensely to prevent duels from being RocketTagGameplay. If the game has a [[{{Cap}} Damage or HP cap]], expect most late-game monsters to have HP above the player's damage cap, and well above the player's own HP cap.

[[folder: Role Playing Game ]]

[[folder: Role Playing Game ]]

* In many RPG the players and their enemies meet on equal footing. The player characters and enemies often use the same weapons and powers, inflict the same amount of damage, and have similar levels of whatever the game uses for health. Often the players have some other edge, but not always. Games which follow this model (at least much of the time) include: Both Old and New TabletopGame/WorldOfDarkness, TabletopGame/{{Shadowrun}}, Franchise/StarWars both [[TabletopGame/StarWarsD6 under West End Games]] and [[TabletopGame/StarWarsD20 D20]], TabletopGame/{{Traveller}}, Stars Without Number, TabletopGame/UnknownArmies, Decipher's LordOfTheRings adaptation, TabletopGame/DarkHeresy and its spin-offs, Creator/GreenRonin's ''TabletopGame/DragonAge'' adaptation, TabletopGame/{{Rifts}}, TabletopGame/DeadLands, and many more.

* ''VideoGame/SeikenDensetsu3'' normally plays this fairly straight, but near the end of the game, the [[BossInMookClothing Shadow Zero]] enemy turns the tables back on the player by [[MirrorBoss copying their party members]], right down to the last stat point. The end result is that the Zeroes can inflict the same boss-killing damage as your own attacks, on your party's still-PC-level hit points. And it only gets worse [[NoFairCheating if you cheated to make your party members stronger/more intelligent than their class and level would normally allow]] at that point.

Generally seen in Eastern {{Role Playing Game}}s. When one compares the player's characters to the monsters (and bosses), they are essentially [[GlassCannon Glass Cannons]] to [[StoneWall Stone Walls]]. Player characters tend to be able to deal out huge amounts of damage, usually well above their own HP's worth in a single hit. Monsters deal very low damage relative to their own HP. If the game allows for PlayerVersusPlayer combat, expect the damage to be scaled down immensely to prevent duels from being RocketTagGameplay. If the game has a [[{{Cap}} Damage or HP cap]], expect most late-game monsters to have HP above the player's damage cap, and well above the player's own HP cap.

* Classic example: the original ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}''. Demons had about 200 to 700 health, with bosses sporting health of over 3000; the player's maximum health, ever, is 200[[note]]plus up to 200 points of armor[[/note]]. None of the monsters come even close to the player's arsenal of destructive power (unless you're dumb enough to get into melee range, at which point your future resides entirely in the hands of the RandomNumberGod). How big is the gap, you ask? Well, the strongest monster in the entire franchise is the Cyberdemon boss, and that's only because his rocket launcher is coded to be identical to the player's. And the Rocket Launcher isn't even your most powerful weapon. As a result, the single player campaign tends to be reasonably mildly paced, while in multiplayer [[RocketTagGameplay most fights are over in a matter of seconds]] �- with the introduction of the double barrelled shotgun in ''Doom 2'', sometimes a fraction of a second.

** In ''VideoGame/HaloReach'', if you destroy tank guns, the tanks can be the ... well... ''tank'' variant of this.
** Warthogs (especially Gauss and Rocket) are this to tanks in general. Sure, the tank has good offense and defense, and sure, the Warthogs are fragile, but the Warthogs can pack pretty big guns, often dangerously-overkill in other circumstances.

* ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'' averts this with normal enemies, they have about the same hit points and damage as a player of the same level. (Somewhat lower on both to allow players to kill stuff of equal level.)
** However, player characters are allowed to deal a lot of damage compared to their health. This had led to issues in PvP until they introduced a defensive stat called resilience, which reduces damage taken from other players significantly. Woe to those who step into a battleground without wearing resilience equipment.

* In ''Videogame/{{Warframe}}'', players and enemies use fundamentally different scaling and leveling mechanisms to compensate for the fact that players can enhance their power with mods while enemies can increase in level indefinitely. Players can stack a wide variety of large multipliers to increase their DPS to absurd heights, but health is fundamentally capped and can only scale linearly. Meanwhile, enemy damage grows fairly slowly, but health and shields scale quadratically while armor scaling is better than linear. The result is that enemies are barely tickled by their own weapons while players one-shot each other so badly it's not even funny. The original incarnation of the game's [=PvP=] mode suffered badly from RocketTagGameplay thanks to this disparity, but Update 16 balanced things by restricting the available mods and separating [=PvP=] stats from [=PvE=] stats.

[[folder: Played Straight]]
[[AC:FirstPersonShooter]]
* Classic example: the original ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}''. Demons had about 200 to 700 health, with bosses sporting health of over 3000; the player's maximum health, ever, is 200[[note]]plus up to 200 points of armor[[/note]]. None of the monsters come even close to the player's arsenal of destructive power (unless you're dumb enough to get into melee range, at which point your future resides entirely in the hands of the RandomNumberGod). How big is the gap, you ask? Well, the strongest monster in the entire franchise is the Cyberdemon boss, and that's only because his rocket launcher is coded to be identical to the player's. And the Rocket Launcher isn't even your most powerful weapon. As a result, the single player campaign tends to be reasonably mildly paced, while in multiplayer [[RocketTagGameplay most fights are over in a matter of seconds]] –- with the introduction of the double barrelled shotgun in ''Doom 2'', sometimes a fraction of a second.

[[AC:HackAndSlash]]

[[AC:{{MMORPG}}s]]

[[AC:RealTimeStrategy]]

** Lava Hounds (airborne damage sponge available only at very high levels) are the opposite—while they have the highest health of any unit in the game, and also [[AsteroidsMonster split into smaller units when killed]], their DPS is the smallest of any unit in the game.

[[AC:RolePlayingGame]]

[[AC:{{Fighting Game}}s]]

[[AC:TabletopGames]]
* Fourth Edition ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'': While the ''amount'' of damage attacks do on each side is roughly equal, player characters have healing surges which let them recover damage for a while as long as they use their skills well. Enemies have healing surges (1 for Heroic tier, 2 for Paragon, 3 for Epic), but there are very few official monsters that have abilities which allow them to be used. The result is that enemies have many more hit points than player characters in order to keep balance.

[[AC:ThirdPersonShooter]]
* In ''Videogame/{{Warframe}}'', players and enemies use fundamentally different scaling and leveling mechanisms to compensate for the fact that players can enhance their power with mods while enemies can increase in level indefinitely. Players can stack a wide variety of large multipliers to increase their DPS to absurd heights, but health is fundamentally capped and can only scale linearly. Meanwhile, enemy damage grows fairly slowly, but health and shields scale quadratically while armor scaling is better than linear. The result is that enemies are barely tickled by their own weapons while players one-shot each other so badly it's not even funny. The original incarnation of the game's [=PvP=] mode suffered badly from RocketTagGameplay thanks to this disparity, but Update 16 balanced things by restricting the available mods and separating [=PvP=] stats from [=PvE=] stats.

[[AC:TurnBasedStrategy]]
* ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWars''. You fight against bosses (and even some mooks) with 5 to 6-digit HP figures; while it isn't very difficult to deal 5-digit damage figures yourself, it may take some time to bring down some bosses. Fortunately, even with majority of your units having 4-digit HP figures, it usually takes more than a hit from enemies to bring down a Real Robot on your team, though one-hit kills do happen.
** Adding to this, while your enemies do outnumber you, in general you have better dodge or health stats, and you can use Spirit Commands to make up for any weaknesses (i.e. dodging all attacks for one turn, having 100% accuracy for the next turn, taking only 10 damage for the next turn etc.). And in the end, most bosses only have powerful moves that target only one of your mechs, while after whittling down the enemy army you have an entire roster of your own mechs to beat them down.
* ''VideoGame/FateGrandOrder'': Very obviously done: a player-controlled Servant fully leveled up ''might'' break 10,000 HP. Standard enemy {{Mooks}} will very often have more than that. Enemy Servants will often have over 200,000 HP when the player fights them... and if that Servant later joins the party, suddenly they will only have 8,000 HP. On the flipside, enemies will often do much less damage: an enemy Noble Phantasm might do 3,000 - 4,000 HP of damage, but a player's Noble Phantasm can often do 50,000 or more.

[[folder: Exceptions]]
[[AC:FirstPersonShooter]]

[[AC:HackAndSlash]]

[[AC:{{MMORPG}}s]]

[[AC:RolePlayingGame]]

** The main ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'' games are the most well-known examples. All the Pokémon battled are capable of being used by the player, so they play by the same rules and have the same caps; this doesn't stop [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard the computer from being a cheating bastard at times, however]].

[[AC:TableTopRolePlayingGames]]

* Classic example: the original ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}''. Demons had about 200 to 700 health, with bosses sporting health of over 3000; the player's maximum health, ever, is 200[[note]]plus up to 200 points of armor[[/note]]. None of the monsters come even close to the player's arsenal of destructive power (unless you're dumb enough to get into melee range, at which point your future resides entirely in the hands of the RandomNumberGod). How big is the gap, you ask? Well, the strongest monster in the entire franchise is the Cyberdemon boss, and that's only because his rocket launcher is coded to be identical to the player's. Now remember that the Rocket Launcher isn't even your most powerful weapon.\\
As a result, the single player campaign tends to be reasonably mildly paced, while in multiplayer [[RocketTagGameplay most fights are over in a matter of seconds]] – with the introduction of the double barrelled shotgun in ''Doom 2'', sometimes a fraction of a second.

*** Anyone armed with a Plasma Pistol is the glass cannon version.

* ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'' plays this straight with bosses, particularly raid bosses, which under most circumstances deal only a tiny fraction of their health as damage. However, since they're supposed to be fought by groups of 10, 25, or in the past ''40'' players to one, this tiny fraction is still enough to OneHitKill anyone not [[StoneWall built to take it]], and even they can expect take many, many times their total health in damage over the course of a fight. From the player perspective a respectable end-game damage output would enable many damage-focused players to kill themselves, on average, in about 5 seconds. Indeed, some of the most consistently dangerous abilities in the game are variations on the theme of reflecting players' attacks back at themselves or their allies.

* The flash game ''Monsters' Den: Book of Dread'' plays this straight, but one might not notice it until the "end" boss [[spoiler: summons copies of you to his side. You can score a kill in 1-2 swings if you've been playing right - but they're ''exact copies''. Thus, [[OhCrap so can they]]]].
* ''VideoGame/DragonAgeII'' has a far stronger case of this than most Western [=RPG=]s, with your characters doing thousands in damage late in the game compared to their HP of 100-350 or so - [[OhCrap and]] it has FriendlyFire on Nightmare difficulty level. Position your area of effect spells and warriors (especially those with a {{BFS}}) carefully and don't let the AI use [=AOE=]s, or watch your party slaughter each other in seconds.

* Despite the main games averting this (see below), in the ''VideoGame/PokemonMysteryDungeon'' games, the bosses have much higher HP when you battle them than when you recruit them.
* On foot, the HP of the playable characters in ''VideoGame/{{Xenogears}}'' tops out in the hundreds. Most of the bosses towards the end of the game have HP in the thousands (the human boss with the highest HP, Graf, has [[SixHundredSixtySix 666]][[FourIsDeath 6]] HP), and per this trope, the characters are more than capable of dealing that much damage. This is less noticeable in Gear battles, where both the player gears and the enemies can have 10,000+ HP.
* Played straight in the Normal Mode of ''VideoGame/MarioAndLuigiDreamTeam''. Enemies have a ridiculous amount of health and high defenses but do less damage, whereas the Mario bros are the opposite. However, Hard Mode is another story...
* Played straight in ''VideoGame/DragonQuestIX'' for the most part. There is a skill used by both enemies and [=PC=]s that allows you to redirect an attack onto a randomly-chosen target (allied or enemy). This trope becomes horribly, horribly apparent when your LightningBruiser / MightyGlacier lands a massive three-digit-damage blow, only for it to be redirected squarely onto the SquishyWizard.

[[folder: Aversions]]

[[AC:{{Platformer}}s]]
* Many platformers where the GoombaStomp is the main way of hurting enemies (such as the [[TropeNamer trope naming]] ''Franchise/SuperMarioBros'' games). The player character usually can only take a handful of hits (frequently [[OneHitPointWonder only one]] unless there's a power-up that shields you from death), and most enemies can only take a similar amount of hits too, [[InvincibleMinorMinion if they can die at all]]. This includes bosses, where the challenge comes from actually damaging them rather than the amount of damage required.

* The {{web game|s}} ''VideoGame/GinormoSword'' usually plays the trope straight but at one point throws out a duplicate of the player with identical stats. If the player isn't careful both sides will end up with a screen-filling sword that can kill the opponent with one hit, and ComputersAreFast...

* Averted in many and RPG where the players and their enemies meet on equal footing. The player characters and enemies often use the same weapons and powers, inflict the same amount of damage, and have similar levels of whatever the game uses for health. Often the players have some other edge, but not always. Games which follow this model (at least much of the time) include: Both Old and New TabletopGame/WorldOfDarkness, TabletopGame/{{Shadowrun}}, Franchise/StarWars both [[TabletopGame/StarWarsD6 under West End Games]] and [[TabletopGame/StarWarsD20 D20]], TabletopGame/{{Traveller}}, Stars Without Number, TabletopGame/UnknownArmies, Decipher's LordOfTheRings adaptation, TabletopGame/DarkHeresy and its spin-offs, Creator/GreenRonin's ''TabletopGame/DragonAge'' adaptation, TabletopGame/{{Rifts}}, TabletopGame/DeadLands, and many more.

* Played straight in the Normal Mode of ''VideoGame/MarioAndLuigiDreamTeam''. Enemies have a ridiculous amount of health and high defenses but do less damage, whereas the Mario bros are the opposite. However...

* In ''Videogame/{{Warframe}}'', enemies have fixed health but have scaling damage mitigation from their armor based on the location's level range. Players have usually under 2000 effective health, while high-level enemies have effective health in the tens or hundreds of thousands. However, the players also have some ludicrously powerful weapons that can dump 10000+ DPS which have been [[PowerCreep steadily getting more powerful]], allowing them to nuke enemies in a single burst. In the game's original [=PvP=] mode, "Conclave", players were free to use any weapon, modification, and warframe in one on one or two on two duels; the end result was that players were [[RocketTagGameplay flying through the level at mach 1 and nuking each other in a single hit]] from hitscan machine guns. "Conclave 2.0" uses a different selection of mods and restricts certain warframes and weapons to counter the health-damage disparity.

** Adding to this, while your enemies do outnumber you, in general you have better dodge or health stats, and you can use Spirit Commands to make up for any weaknesses (ie dodging all attacks for one turn, having 100% accuracy for the next turn, taking only 10 damage for the next turn etc.). And in the end, most bosses only have powerful moves that target only one of your mechs, while after whittling down the enemy army you have an entire roster of your own mechs to beat them down.
* ''VideoGame/FateGrandOrder'': Very obviously done: a player-controlled Servant fully levelled up ''might'' break 10,000 HP. Standard enemy {{Mooks}} will very often have more than that. Enemy Servants will often have over 200,000 HP when the player fights them... and if that Servant later joins the party, suddenly they will only have 8,000 HP. On the flipside, enemies will often do much less damage: an enemy Noble Phantasm might do 3,000 - 4,000 HP of damage, but a player's Noble Phantasm can often do 50,000 or more.

* In ''VideoGame/ChronoTrigger'', Magus as a villain has [[NumberOfTheBeast 6666]] HP (even ''after'' Lavos sucks away most of his powers), [[RedemptionDemotion but doesn't have more than 999 under player control.]]
** Of course, continuing to play the trope straight, he seldom does over 200 damage as an enemy, but routinely does thousands as a party member. This is also one of the few games in which Confused allies do pathetic damage to each other-- seldom more than 20 or so, even at high levels and with the best weapons.