Divided We Fall in Tabletop Games.
- In BattleTech, the Free Worlds League is subject to a lot of infighting. And then, after the Jihad, it literally fell apart.
- During the Clan Invasion, the invading Clans all have personal grudges against each other, most notably the Jade Falcons with the Wolves. When Ulric Kerensky became the new ilKhan he deliberately used this to his advantage to sabotage the Crusader Clans' efforts. He assigned Clan Steel Viper with Jade Falcons, who the Falcons dislike as much as the Wolves, and Clan Nova Cat with Smoke Jaguar, who also dislike each other.
- This happened to the forces of evil in Dragonlance during the War Of The Lance. After the Heroes of the Lance banish Takhisis, the Dragonarmies disintegrate into five mutually hostile factions, making it much easier for the forces of good to fight them. In the original Chronicles trilogy, the Co-Dragons are more interested in fighting each other to get the Crown of Power and become the new Dragon Emperor after Tanis and Raistlin kill Ariakas than they are in stopping Caramon, Tika and Tasslehoff from getting Berem to the Foundation Stone so he can do the banishment.
- Exalted, oh so very much. Solars, Lunars, Sidereals and Dragon-Blooded are all trying to protect Creation in their own way; it's just that the Dragon-Blooded's way involves demonizing all the others to keep their orderly society going, the Sidereals' way involves manipulating said society from behind the scenes because they don't trust any of the others with power, and the Lunars' way involves tearing down said society because of its increasing corruption and instability. The end result is Creation's heroes spending a whole lot of effort fighting each other when they could be fighting the Abyssals, Deathlords, Fair Folk, and other forces who want to destroy the world.
- Warhammer has this as a consistent theme. It's emphasized again and again that when Order unites, they beat Chaos. When Order falls to infighting, Chaos takes ground. For thousands of years after banishing the daemons, the great elven and dwarf empires held the world in such a state that Chaos was a marginal threat. This was only disrupted after the elves fell to civil war and the elves and dwarfs went to war themselves later over misunderstandings and pride. This gave Chaos the foothold they needed, but even after that, Chaos was never able to take on Order at their best and only made progress when the non-corrupted humans, elves, dwarfs, and lizardmen were fighting themselves or each other. Twelve successive Everchosen led worldwide invasions, and twelve successive Everchosen were slain when Order got their act together. In the case of the second most recent, Asavar Kul's attacks in the Great War Against Chaos, his forces launched invasions of the Old World and Ulthuan while the Empire was in the middle of a civil war and the High Elves were in a dynastic struggle and being attacked by the Dark Elves. In both theaters, the old pattern played out: Chaos made early gains but were crushed when Order unified (the High Elves by combing the strength of their disparate kingdoms and later sending wizards to help the Empire, the Empire by combining the strength of their disparate electorates and drawing on forces from the Karaz Ankor Dwarfs, Kislevites, and High Elves), resulting an Order victory and the Realm of Chaos shrinking to below its pre-invasion size.
- The two main alternate timelines that ended the setting emphasize this. In the End Times, the Order factions don't work together and spend most of the arc infighting (with the most notable examples being the High Elven and Bretonnian civil wars). The ultimate result is Chaos and the Skaven destroying the planet, with only a handful of survivors making it to the new realms formed by the old world's destruction. In the Storm of Chaos, on the other hand, Order unites early on in the Conclave of Light and lays out a coherent plan of action; the High Elves use their navy to disrupt Chaos's northern flank and send an elite expeditionary force to help out on the mainland, the Empire unites fully under Emperor Karl Franz and integrates their commands with those of the Dwarfs, and the Bretonnians send their cavalry forces on crusades to the northeast to help out the Empire and Dwarfs. Even the otherwise isolationist Wood Elves send out forces to bushwhack particularly troublesome Norscan and Beastmen warbands, helping to secure Order's home front. Thus Archaon's invasion gets defeated before it even manage to take down one of the great powers; the attack still does a lot of damage but the world survives and rebuilds. Out of universe, Josh Reynolds (who wrote most of the End Times novels) confirmed that if the humans, elves, and dwarfs had unified early on, the result would have been an early and anticlimactic victory for Order. In-universe, Archaon himself acknowledges that he has little chance of victory if Order unites against him, hence why he focuses on sowing disunity.
- Coincidentally, as any player of Total War: Warhammer and its sequels will tell you, the Ordertide is quite real. What usually (not always but usually) happens in a campaign is that the Shield of Civilization diplomatic buff kicks in and the "Big Order Four" (The Empire, Bretonnia, Dwarfs and High Elves) quickly put aside their differences and form an unstoppable military alliance that curbstomps Chaos and Skaven and conquers most of the world by late game, leaving them as the de facto Final Boss for your faction.
- Warhammer: Age of Sigmar (the result of the aforementioned End Times timeline) continues this. In the Age of Myth, Sigmar united the gods and peoples of Order and delivered an unholy beatdown on Chaos, smashing every attempt they made to invade the Mortal Realms (late in the Age, the elven deities even managed to injure and imprison Slaanesh, one of the big four Chaos Gods). They then built prosperous civilizations within the Realms that eclipsed anything in the old world in both wealth and size, resulting in a thousands-year long golden age. The Age of Chaos, when Chaos forces managed to overwhelm much of the realms, was a direct result of the pantheon fragmenting and falling into their old habits. The titular Age of Sigmar is Order's counteroffensive, and it's made clear that only by sticking together can they prevail.
- Warhammer 40,000 takes this to insane levels (look at how many Literature examples it has!). A relevant Imperial propaganda piece states that 'There is no innocence, only shades of guilt.' Everyone is held in the darkest suspicion of heretical thought, entire worlds are lost while organizations bicker over their jurisdiction. The only person above reproach is named the Immortal God Emperor of Mankind and he might be dead.
- The Imperium has at least half a dozen Thoughts For The Day dedicated to this, among them "Divided we stand, united we fall". Considering the extreme hierarchical nature of the Imperium, a few higher-ups going rogue could (and has) lead to massive problems - some regiments probably only recognized their superiors turning to the side of Chaos a few weeks after being told to paint those cool spiky stars over their old insignia.
- The Imperium at present is extremely decentralized for a reason, though, because of laws enacted after the events of the Thorian Reformation, no one power group can have control over more than one function (administration, technology, etc.) of the Imperium, and there are several extremely powerful watchdog organizations in place to make sure no-one oversteps their mandated authority and to control abuses of power. And burn heretics, of course.
- This state of affairs came about as a direct result of the Age of Apostasy, where due to some complex political maneuvering one man, Goge Vandire, became head of the Administratum, the Ecclesiarchy, and the Imperial Assassins at the same time, and (as a result of controlling the entire supply chain and being able to excommunicate anyone he wanted) also became de facto leader of both the Imperial Guard and the Imperial Navy. He promptly set himself up as Emperor-in-all-but-name, established a rule that became notable in Imperial history for its tyranny, despotism, and body count even by Warhammer standards, acquired a harem/bodyguard of elite female fanatics, and had a personal fleet of warrior-priests who went around purging everyone who might be a threat. Only the Space Marines and (parts of) the Adeptus Mechanicus remained outside of his command, mostly because they withdrew into their own fiefdoms. Needless to say, nobody with knowledge of the Age of Apostasy is eager to let it happen again, hence the decentralized command structure.
- Said organisations are also hanging separately within their own ranks. The Inquisition spends hours in philosophical debate with a bolter in one hand and a power sword in the other. There's even two different factions within the Inquisition arguing over whether or not it's a good idea to euthanize the Emperor to see if he'll reincarnate. Oh dear.
- You have this problem within organizations within the Imperium, with many sub-factions constantly fighting each other, sometime literally. One common justification for Imperium players to fight each other on the tabletop is that both companies got the same order to get some holy item and bring it to their superiors, and they're fighting to the death to just make sure the other guy doesn't do it first. On a grander scale, you would think the Tau, Eldar, and Imperium would work together more often against the Cyborg skeletons, raving green brutes, galaxy eating bugs, and the literal legions of Hell, but you'd be dead wrong.
- Thankfully, this also works against the Imperium's enemies as well. Ork Waaaaghs only last for as long as a single Ork Warlord can successfully exert his authority; if he dies or gets discredited in some way, the battered defenders now face a dozen smaller Ork armies fighting each other as well.
- Chaos works like this: Khornates turn on each other if no other enemy presents itself, Slaaneshi think of defeat as yet another sensation, Nurglites will spread disease to everyone, and Tzeentchians will backstab you at the most inopportune time to carry out some massively convoluted plan (and that's not even getting into the established rivalries between servants of opposing gods). Each and every of Chaos' Black Crusades have all failed for this reason.
- Even the Eldar will occasionally fight each other, usually because two Farseers had differing visions of the future and how to bring about the best possible outcome. One White Dwarf battle report had Ulthwé fighting to stop Alaitoc from massacring a human colony based on how they saw the resulting domino effect playing out. Samm-hain also often goes to war with other craftworlds over matters of ancient honour. This is really bad because even without killing each other, they're sliding to extinction due to low birth rates and almost every other race in the universe wanting to kill them too.
- The Imperium has at least half a dozen Thoughts For The Day dedicated to this, among them "Divided we stand, united we fall". Considering the extreme hierarchical nature of the Imperium, a few higher-ups going rogue could (and has) lead to massive problems - some regiments probably only recognized their superiors turning to the side of Chaos a few weeks after being told to paint those cool spiky stars over their old insignia.
- The World of Darkness:
- Hunter: The Vigil has its own version, as a good number of the Compacts and Conspiracies are at direct odds with one another. Let's see, Task Force VALKYRIE wants to deal with the supernatural in secret, while Network Zero wants to blow open the Masquerade through new media. The Long Night are premillenialist Christians aimed at "redeeming" monsters who view the Malleus Maleficarum, the Catholic Church's black bag group, as followers of "the Great Whore of Babylon." The Philadelphia sample setting takes it a few degrees further, with the general mood of "Not In My Backyard" and an emphasis on how the hunters are more devoted to territorial pissing than, you know, monster hunting.
- Vigil gets it from its spiritual predecessor Hunter: The Reckoning, which prominently features the imbued at odds with each other over how exactly they should engage with the supernatural.
- Wraith: The Oblivion is all over this trope. The Legions of the Hierarchy squabble amongst each other, as do the Guilds, the Renegades, and the Heretics. Even the Spectres, who seek the destruction of all existence, are busily engaged in a perpetual Enemy Civil War.
