Examples of Luck-Based Mission on Turn-Based Strategy games.
- Getting all of the rare and legendary equipment in Disgaea. Especially the ones that only appear as a boss's stealable equipment, so you have to hope the Random Number God decides that it has a rarer version than usual this time. Or the items that never appear as enemy equipment, like the absolute cheapest weapons and the usable items.
- It gets even worse when you try and find residents, which you can use to soup up your weapons stats beyond leveling them up manually. Sometimes they will be on terrain that's nigh-impossible to reach; you must be the one to kill them to recruit them, and they attack both nearby allies and enemies. It's even more luck based when you have to re-roll shop loadouts to find the resident type you want (you may even find a Gladiator in a healing item, for crying out loud!).
- Final Fantasy Tactics has the Roof Of Riovanes Castle mission, where you lose if Rafa/Rapha, a computer-controlled ally, is killed. Unfortunately, she begins the fight closer to the enemies than any of your characters, one of them can kill her in a single counterattack, and her AI can be charitably described as "suicidal." Because of her (and the enemies) high speeds, it's entirely possible (if not probable) that you'll lose the battle before you get a single turn.
- There is one trick to keeping her from going kamikaze on you. Have a faster unit use a Cure series spell that is within her movement range, and will activate after her turn. Rafa will move into said spell's range 99% of the time. Of course, having a faster unit is the problem, as Rafa herself is quite fast...
- Or the "naked strategy." At least in the original version, enemies always go for the weakest target. Bring one or two nude soldiers in your lineup and the really dangerous enemies will nearly always ignore her.
- Even worse than the Riovanes Rooftop is the Walled City of Yardrow battle when you first meet Rapha, at least in the PSP rerelease. Your enemies include two Ninjas, who will always go before your own ninjas(if you even have one), and they start close enough to Rapha to immediately run over and throw a Katana at her, collectively killing her.
- Tactics A2 has a late-game mission that forces you to protect a team of five underleveled Moogles against a powerful enemy clan. The Moogles have two members that can be described as, at best, incompetent, and at worst outright traitorous. The first is the Thief, with all the low defensive powers the class implies and considerably less than the intelligence needed to make the class not die, particularly for a Moogle Thief. The second is a Gadgeteer, whose Pandora spells hit either your entire party or the enemy's randomly, and who does love his Haste Pandora. Keep in mind, if a single Moogle falls, you've lost.
- There's a repeatable quest where you spar with those moogles to train them. Every time you beat it they get stronger; run it a few times and they will have no trouble beating the enemy clan senseless as long as you provide a little healing.
- Final Fantasy Tactics A2 is horrible when it comes to these, thanks to new rules for the Law System which - in many instances- turns a randomly occurring critical hit on your side into something to be feared. Examples of such laws are "No knockbacks" (a critical hit automatically knocks the enemy back) and "No dealing more than 50pts of damage" (a critical will almost certainly push the damage above that). What about "No targeting units two or more squares away"? Well, since a critical hit will knock an enemy one square away so it ends its turn two squares away from you, oops! It counts as a violation. Normally, breaking a law doesn't punish you too badly, but when it comes to the Clan Trials, breaking a law counts as instant failure.
- In another example from A2, the highest-ranking Clan Trial for "Aptitude I" presents you with six identical barrels and asks you to find the "winning" one in two rounds. You don't have enough time to check all six in two rounds.
- Then there is the trial for "Teamwork-Aptitude". Clearing the Rank 5 trial gives your clan the ever-useful "MP Efficiency" clan privilege. Problem is, it all comes down to where the Jar spawns. Sometimes it spawns is always past a group of enemies who will inflict Confuse with 100% Accuracy (Making you often waste TWO turns, that of the Confused unit and that of the one that will have to attack the Confused unit back to their senses). And if you hope to use a wise combination of speed-ground Viera and Gria equipped with hard-earned Ninja Tabis and Ribbons...the monsters will use Roulette, the game's titular and true Luck Based Attack.Namely, it kills an unit at random.It can either make your day by thinning the enemy numbers, or ruin your plans completely.
- Another really nasty one is a mission requiring you to intentionally step on a series of traps while not using the attack function. Except that half of these traps will inflict the charm status, which causes your party members to attack each other. Which in this case will instantly fail the mission.
- Finished all 300 missions and are doing The Last Quest? You might as well hack your game when you face off against the Thrill Seekers. You fight against a Juggler/Time Mage, Seer/Illusionist, a Ranger, and two Tonberry Kings. The moogle will spam Haste and Quicken on his party, the Ranger will either hide or use Mirror Elixir (reduces HP and MP to 1) on you, the Seer will spam Magick Frenzy (hits targets with magic and then the user's weapon), and the Tonberry Kings will just one hit kill you. Now they all go at least two or three times [[before your party can even take a turn in the beginning, so it is possible to outright lose without even doing anything. Even with careful planning, you still need god's luck and hope that you can survive long enough to take the enemies down.
- There is one trick to keeping her from going kamikaze on you. Have a faster unit use a Cure series spell that is within her movement range, and will activate after her turn. Rafa will move into said spell's range 99% of the time. Of course, having a faster unit is the problem, as Rafa herself is quite fast...
- Fire Emblem as a series is very fond of this trope; the stated design ethos for some of the earliest games was to encourage replay value by making the campaign reasonably easy to beat, as long as the player knows what they're doing, but very difficult to manage a perfect run of. The presence of randomized stat growths, percentage-based hit rates, critical hits, and Permadeath can frequently result in the player losing at least one character, item, or objective if the dice fall too poorly.
- In Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, on the chapter where you have to protect Zephiel, you need to protect Jaffar and get Nino (a level 5 MAGE) to talk to him to unlock a side-quest. Unfortunately, it's very possible for him to get killed before you're anywhere near, forcing you to restart if you want any chance at the side-chapter. In fact, ZEPHIEL HIMSELF can be killed quickly on the Hard difficulty, forcing you to restart, period. Oh, and did we mention Ursula starts moving on the last turns and can easily ruin that one attempt that doesn't get sidewinded by luck? God forbid if there are any one-of-a-kind treasures on the map too, and accessed faster by the enemy Thieves no less. Oh wait. There are. Too late.
- In Path of Radiance, Ike's ultimate battle with the Black Knight requires you to beat him within a certain number of turns (the game continues if you can survive these turns without beating him, though it means their rivalry ends with a whimper and Nasir dies...maybe, so it's not a preferable option). However, even with a maxed-out Ike, the Black Knight is so tanky that Ike simply can't kill him in the alloted time with normal attacks, and that means either managing to proc Aether or managing to get a crit from Wrath, both of which are luck-based. Ultimately, the fight comes down to whether Ike can trigger Aether or get a crit at least twice in three turns—at maximum rate, Aether has only a 27% chance of triggering, while Wrath has a 52% chance but can only trigger if Ike has already taken a few hits. Oh, and the Black Knight also has the Luna skill, so sometimes he can deal a lot more damage than you'd expect, requiring that Ike either take a turn off to heal or rely on healing from Mist (who can herself be stat-screwed or just not raised at all). More or less, it's already an arduous fight that demands balancing Ike's attacks with the damage he's taking, and the fact that Ike needs to get lucky makes it much worse. Not helping at all is that the fight happens at the end of a rather long chapter, so if Ike's decided he doesn't want to use Aether or get a crit today, you're going to have to repeat the whole thing over.
- While we're on the subject, there's critical hits. Any unit, ally or otherwise, can get them, but normally the high stats of your party mean the only times they're an issue are when myrmidons attack generals, and that will still only do single digit damage. However, on Hard Mode for several games, normal enemies get both power boosts and the critical-friendly weapons. This means that many enemy attacks have a chance of one-shot-killing your units, and you often have several of these on a map in a game where death is permanent. Not the best way to go...
- There is always at least one chapter where you are storming a castle. This castle is a maze, treasure chests are scattered randomly through it (unless you are lucky, in which case they are collected in rooms), and between one and five Thief class NPCs will always begin placed on the map. These thieves will make a beeline for the chests, and then race for the exit. There is no way you will ever beat them to the chests, but if you get unlucky bashing your way through the enemy force, you may not be able to kill them and retrieve your treasure in time, which is the true challenge.
- Although it's relatively easy to block the exit with your Fragile Speedster (read Pegasus Knight) and force them to take the long way around, as in most cases the thieves will run from you rather than fight, either making them cower in a corner away from your units or go suicidal and try to run past your main group in a desperate race for freedom.
- To a lesser extent, character growth is a Luck Based Mission since stat gains are randomly determined. Some characters may be consistently good, and the law of averages will usually win out, but too many go between spectacular failures or battlefield-dominating beasts. It's most infuriating with characters you're forced to use, like Eliwood in the seventh game.
- Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 has a number of cases like this, owing to the mixture of its rather quirky staff mechanics (staves can miss if the healer has low Skill), lack of the player-favoring double-roll RNG, and certain map designs being fairly nasty. A fine example is Chapter 11, where, to get a special chapter, the player has to keep an allied paladin safe while they escape to the south while there are two ballistas that can kill him in three hits. As he's a neutral unit, he can't be healed by the player: he will use a healing item if he's at low health, but a single shot doesn't put him in that danger threshold, so it's possible for them to hit him once on the first turn, then hit him twice on the second, without him ever bothering to heal. Your best bet is generally to put a less durable unit in range so that the ballistas will target them instead, though even that isn't completely foolproof.
- Some chapters and some games are worse than others, but the Hard Modes in most Fire Emblem games, unfortunately, rely on this as their main source of difficulty increase. At worst, there are chapters which are virtually un-winnable without cheats and with no character fatalities (which are notably permanent in the series) because the mathematical probability of all of your characters dodging enough attacks to survive is essentially zero.
- Fire Emblem: Awakening's Lunatic+ difficulty practically runs on this during the first couple of chapters. While Lunatic is somewhat manageable through clever use of your Tactician and Frederick, Lunatic+ adds a layer of randomness which places it firmly in this trope, by assigning random skills to your enemies in the form of souped up versions of the regular ones exclusive to this difficulty. One particular combo that will ruin any flawless strategy is Hawkeye and Luna+ because it makes the aforementioned heavily armored Frederick completely useless as a much-needed damage sponge. If any enemies during the first chapters gets this combo or too many of them gets Luna+, then you have to reset the chapter until they get a more manageable combination of skills, because you will not survive.
- On that note, Fire Emblem Gaiden/Echoes. Being one of the earliest games in the series, Resistance growth rates are atrocious, with even the most resistant characters having only a 10% chance of gaining a point of resistance and many characters being completely unable to gain Res from level-ups. Witches are magic-wielding units with the ability to teleport to any square on the map. If two or three witches decide to target the same unit, they're probably screwed.
- In Front Mission 4, the evade stat was changed from how it operated in its predecessor. Whereas in FM 3 (and most RPGs) evade functioned as a penalty to the attacker's accuracy (which stacked with other accuracy-reducing factors like cover and would merely reduce the number of hits a round of machine gun fire or a shotgun blast would land), in FM 4 evade was a wanzer's base chance of completely evading an attack, calculated completely separately from all other factors. There were various conditions and exceptions, but since some wanzers could easily have an evade rating of well over 50%, it would become quite possible (even common) for a wanzer to come under fire from an entire army and come out without even a scratch. This varied in function from being the only thing stopping you from crushing your enemy like a lame hedgehog in some missions, to being the only thing standing between you and a horrible death in others.
- Godzilla 2 War Of The Monsters for the NES used an on-screen slot-machine to decide how much damage you deliver and take in each battle with the monsters. It was so very random, you could take out Godzilla or Ghidorah with a simple gun on a truck meant to deliver parts for the Moonlight SY3, or conversely, watch as Baragon took out the Moonlight SY3. How you rolled at the start mostly determines the entire game.
- Heroes of Might and Magic IV, the final map of the Order Campaign could inadvertently become this. In a locked-off area of the map you are given a computer ally who story-wise is holding off the big bad to buy you time to find the Macguffin. The Luck comes in with the fact that the 'mission victory condition' is specifically set so that YOU must be the one to kill the Big Bad, yet it is entirely possible that your 'speed bump' of an ally will somehow manage to take him out first, making the mission un-winnable.
- If you get the Map extension that inflicts the Gamble status in Makai Kingdom, you either hit the enemy for all it's health or Whiff entirely, the same goes for your party as well since the extension will affect everyone on the current map.
- Most high scores, including many 450s, in Advance Wars: Days of Ruin relies on abusing A.I. Roulette or luck damage. The day-to-day guide for Wedding Ring is particularly bad because when the Infantry is starting its HQ capture, it is in range of the B-Copter that is expected to attack the T-Copter instead. And of course, if the Infantry takes luck damage on the next two enemy phases, you will lose because the enemy will have an Infantry taking your HQ. But this is nothing to Metro Map, which despite being a map that desperately needs a Day-To-Day guide just loves to horribly screw over the sole one that is available.
- The mission "Greyfield Strikes" is a particularly insidious example; every four turns, Admiral Greyfield will shut down one of your unit types, preventing them from doing anything that turn. If he chooses to shut down your Landers or Gunboats, good luck getting any of your isolated land units to the mainland where the enemy is before the enemy snipes them into oblivion.
- And in Dual Strike, just surviving on Crystal Calamity in Normal Campaign is this if you don't cheap out money forces or Colin. If Black Hole sends the Black Bomb toward Red Star, you're screwed, simple as that, as you will get cut off from the silos.
- ANY time you play as Flak or Jugger in a balanced match you are devoting to this, as their abilities randomly are stronger or weaker than normal purely at random. Either you get lucky, hit hard, and do well, or you get unlucky, hit poorly, and lose units, simple as that.
