Morton's Forks in Tabletop Games.
- Bridge: There's a method of play called a Morton's Fork Coup, which gives the defender two options, both of which cost him a trick. (The relatively common elimination play that also gives the defender such a choice is not considered the Morton's Fork Coup.)
- In Chess and all of the related games (Xiangqi, Shōgi, Makruk), this is a common result of very good strategy on the part of the Morton's Fork wielder (and/or very bad strategy on the part of the forked). If the player saves their cannon, the other bags their chariot. In fact, this comes up so often in chess, it has its own term: The German word zugzwang, a situation where all possible moves are approximately equally bad, and all of them are worse than not moving at all would be, but "not moving at all" is not an option (unless you resign or, under limited circumstances, claim a draw). In fact, "forking" is a term in Chess, which closely resembles Morton's Fork: a situation where two pieces are being attacked; the defender has no choice but to give up a piece.
- Deadlands: The Agency and the Texas Rangers are both dedicated to suppressing all knowledge of the truly weird nature of the world since the Reckoning, having established that this would cause a panic, and since the Reckoners are strengthened by fear, this would just play right into their hands. Unfortunately, their efforts at suppressing this knowledge often cause as much paranoia and fear as the original monsters did, meaning they still strengthen the Reckoners. This is particularly a problem for the Agency, since they A: tend to be rather hamfisted about their coverups, and B: don't do themselves any favors by running around dressed up like The Wild West version of The Men in Black.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Dragon: One issue has a list of riddles a gynosphinx might use, with the usual deal that if the PCs fail to answer them correctly, they're lunch. One of them, to be issued when the sphinx's hunger overcomes her fairness, has as its solution "Kill me". The article does, however, state a way for the answer to be phrased so that it does ''not'' give the sphinx permission to attack, yet still answered correctly, in which case she will abide by the rules and let the intended victim live.
- A particularly infamous dilemma is the paradox of a paladin being sent by his lord to kill a succubus and then finding out that the succubus had been summoned by a wizard, and that the wizard and the demon genuinely and mutually loved each other. A paladin is bound by an oath that requires him to, among other things, protect pure love and obey commands given by a legitimate authority. Whichever choice he makes, he's violated his oath.
- Part of the Book of Exalted Deeds is dedicated to providing the paladin with a third option: when faced with this dilemma, protecting pure love is more important and takes precedence, and therefore you ignore the order. In fact, you are encouraged to figure out whether the "legitimate" authority might actually be corrupt, because a just leader wouldn't (knowingly) give you such an order. Stories and legends abound in D&D communities about sadistic Dungeon Masters who present paladin characters with similar scenarios with the sole intent of making paladins fall.
- Which said, there is actually a fourth option, albeit one which the lovers are unlikely to agree to. Since demons killed on the Material Plane respawn in the Abyss and it's possible to summon a specific creature, it would be quite possible to obtain permission to kill the succubus, then leave before the wizard indicates that he will summon her again. Exploiting Exact Words is one way to avoid Lawful Stupid for a paladin.
- A fifth option is to contact the king (whether by messenger or in person) with an update of the situation and offer up a different fork: barring proof of ill intent toward the Crown, the king either rescinds the now demonstrably unjust order, or the paladin ceases to acknowledge him as a rightful and just figure of authority.
- However, there is one way to get around one of the more common ones: namely, you can either kill a child of an Always Chaotic Evil race, which constitutes killing a child and will result in falling, or you can let the child live, which will result in a
Chaotic Evil creature being unleashed upon the world and also cause the paladin to fall... or you can adopt the child, raise it, and get it to be a different alignment. This trick has been performed more than once, and the good people of 1d4chan
have posted an article on how one guy did this with a lamia.note - The GMing technique known as the "quantum ogre", in which the players are given a choice of two doors, and the monster or trap ends up being in whichever one they choose to go into.
- Exalted:
- Storm serpents, elementals born from destructive storms, preferentially attack the pure and innocent during their rampages. This is used in some societies to determine an accused person's guilt. When a storm brews, they're left in the serpent's path; if they're guilty, they'll be ignored and afterwards punished as locally appropriate. If they're innocent, they'll be killed the moment the serpent spots them.
- The laws of Cecelyne are written on blue tablets. It is illegal for serfs to look at the color blue. It's also illegal to not know the laws, so they are always violating the law somehow. Cecelyne's laws are deliberately full of such traps, because she believes that the law is merely another tool for the strong to control the weak.
- Magic: The Gathering: Many Red and Black cards tend to let the opponent choose the way they're screwed. While on paper this sounds like a win-win situation for you, it actually results in the opponent choosing the Lesser of Two Evils. The most famous example is Vexing Devil, a card that either lets the opponent take 4 damage to the face or let you have a 4/3 creature for a measly 1 mana. The highest direct damage card at 1 mana can only deal 3 damage, and no creature exists at 4/3 for 1 mana without some crippling upkeep costs, so it seems like either result is good for you. However, the issue comes in when the opponent may simply have an answer for the devil, and thus allows you to summon it to avoid the damage. Conversely, if he's not going to lose immediately from the life loss, he'll just take the 4 damage because it saves him from wasting a card on killing a 4/3 creature that could be very problematic, especially if the Devil's owner has no other cards in his/her hand or is completely tapped out of mana.
- Paranoia is all about setting up situations where the Computer and your secret society both assign you dangerous, mutually contradictory goals, and have the means to punish you if you don't deliver. And then you have to deal with your fellow Troubleshooters and all of their contradictory goals.
- One of the best examples is from the adventure module Me and My Warbot Mark IV, which includes a "debriefing questionnaire" to be completed at the end of the adventure. Instructions on the form include the line "Answer all questions fully, completely, correctly, and honestly. Failure to do so is treason!" And of course, Question #6 is "YOUR SECURITY CLEARANCE IS INSUFFICIENT TO VIEW THIS QUESTION. HAVE A NICE DAYCYCLE." But it still has a blank for the character to write in his answer...
- A popular question is "Are you a happy Communist? Yes/No". As long as the player isn't allowed to elaborate, you either say you're a Communist (treason) or you're not happy (also treason). Heavily downplayed in most editions, as being a Communist is punishable by death while not being happy "merely" means drug therapy and re-education, so the character does have an actual choice.
- An even more insidious one, which will likely get you even if you elaborate, is "Are Communists happy? Explain why/why not". If you think Communists are happy, you imply Communism is a good way to live (Communist sympathiser!) If not, the Computer will ask why anyone would want to be a commie if it makes them unhappy (it doesn't make sense, and implies you're lying or hiding something).
- Warhammer 40,000:
- This kind of strategies are not uncommon in the game's meta:
- Certain articles present this as the key to winning. If you have a squad of Devastators positioned to cover an objective, for instance, and your foe has troops sitting on that objective, then you have presented him with two bad options: sit where you are and get blasted to pieces, or abandon a key position to go chasing after the enemy.
- This is the concept of the "Distraction Carnifex", named after the Tyranid Carnifex from 4th edition, which you could mod to be ridiculously cheap (letting you fit six of them into a single list during a time when two medium tanks were considered an extravagance). The idea is to buy something big and threatening but relatively cheap in cost and hard to put down, and throw it at the enemy. Your enemy has now two choices: spend a turn to get rid of a relatively minor target and let the opposing army get a free turn OR ignore it and hope it doesn't cause too much damage. To counter people simply ignoring them, most players either give them some kind of a weapon with a guaranteed return (usually an extremely powerful one-shot weapon that can be fired on the move, in the hopes it takes down something of equal value), or kit them out for close combat (which will rob a shooting unit of their shooting phase regardless of what they actually do). This has led to at least one instance of the victim choosing to run in circles a la Benny Hill.
- A number of in-universe punishments work in this manner.
- In one favored by the Inquisition, a person accused of heresy is put in an arena with an unarmed, unarmored Grey Knight (a Space Marine with God-Emperor-given powers). If the Grey Knight kills the accused, obviously the Emperor willed it that one of His most faithful servants destroy an enemy. If the accused somehow wins, he is obviously in league with the Ruinous Powers, and is executed on the spot.
- The Iron Snakes Space Marines test accused criminals through the Trial by Wyrm, leaving the accused on a spit of rock in Sea Serpent-infested waters and coming back in six hours to check if they got eaten. If they're still alive then they're considered guilty and executed, since the Iron Snakes don't believe that the serpents would sully themselves by eating a criminal.
- One mentioned in the background is the way a particular Inquisitor handles pleas in his court. If you plead guilty then, obviously, you are guilty. However, if you plead non-guilty then you are automatically guilty of the crime of wasting the Inquisition's time with trying you and can be immediately sentenced for that crime (which given that this is 40K presumably means immediate execution).
- Commander Kubrik Chenkov is well-known for sending vast amounts of troops into fortified citadels and other similar Suicide Missions... and shooting those who understandably have reservations about such orders. Your odds are slim working under him regardless of your decision.
- Eversor Assassins, when used as a distraction tactic, tend to work out more like this due to their sheer volume of damage that, even with their considerable drug-granted bulk, they still count as a sort of Glass Cannon. If a regular army is plopped into the battlefield along with an Eversor, the enemy must decide whether to take out the Eversor first, which will leave the army time to approach and start pelting them with heavy fire, or concentrate on the army, which will lead to the Eversor getting into range and shredding everything from infantry to giant armored tanks by his own damn self.
- The Imperial Guard are known to joke that their equipment comes in two size: too big and too small.
- This kind of strategies are not uncommon in the game's meta:
- Warhammer Fantasy Battle:
- A common trial used in ancient Nehekara to determine whether someone was guilty of murder was to throw them in a pit of scorpions and see if they were able to survive long enough to climb back out. If they did, they were judged to enjoy the favor of Sokth, the scorpion god of treachery and murderers, and to thus be guilty of the crime — and were thus swiftly put to death by being thrown in a pit of snakes.
- The Witch Hunters' blessed Silver Bullets are sometimes used as a form of this. Those tainted by Chaos or dark magic are consumed by flame if shot with these bullets; if the target doesn't burn, then they are proven innocent by their clean death. Either way the subject dies, but as the Witch Hunters see it it is better to die untainted than and to live under the sway of evil (and given some of the things Chaos puts its victims through, are likely in the right).
- Fighting the Chaos gods leads to this in both Fantasy and 40k: the gods are powered by emotion rather than faith, meaning that anytime a sentient creature feels rage, desire, despair, or hope, it strengthens that particular god. Their own champions are just as likely to turn on each other for favor as on the enemy.
- "Khorne cares not from where the blood flows" is a well-known phrase, not to mention true: Khârn the Betrayer crippled two Space Marine Legions (one of them his own) for not fighting hard enough, and was rewarded with immortality for it.
- Tzeentch is famous for his plans-within-plans failing... only for another plan to immediately take effect that required the failure of the first (Just as Planned). In his case it's by design, since a decisive victory would leave Tzeentch with nothing to do.
- The World of Darkness:
- Changeling: The Lost: Given that Changelings and The Fair Folk trade in Magically Binding Contracts, forcing an enemy into a position where they have no choice but to violate one of their Pledges and suffer the Fate-ordained consequences is a very valid gameplay strategy.
- Vampire: The Masquerade: There is a version of this in the Clan Ravnos rule book from the revised edition. It's a character concept for a Ravnos vampire who offers a choice to their enemy by pointing to one of the two guns the Ravnos is holding, whereupon the Ravnos will fire it at him. One of them is an illusion, and the other is a real gun, so it's a fifty-fifty chance. Then the quote ends with this: "Good choice. Unfortunately for you, however, the fake gun was hiding a very real knife."
- 7 Wonders Duel:
- The base game always forces you to take a card from the structure when it's your turn. So if it's your turn, you don't have any Extra Turn Wonders (or can't afford the ones you do have), and the only available card will let your opponent access something they really want (and you really don't want them to have), they will get access to the card no matter what you do.note
- A lack of Extra Turns can also hurt you if you have two available cards with similar effects that you want to deny your opponent. No matter which card you buy/discard/use to build a Wonder, your opponent gets the desired effect from the other one.
- In Yu-Gi-Oh!, Maxx "C" is infamous for forcing these situations upon players. It can be discarded from your hand on either your or your opponent's turn, after which you draw a card every time your opponent Special Summons a monster during that turn. As many decks in the modern game rely on being able to string together at least two or three Special Summons (often significantly more) in a single turn to develop a strong field, being on the receiving end of a Maxx "C" is almost always a lose-lose. You can either continue your turn as normal and execute all your combos, giving your opponent an absurd amount of resources they can use to annihilate you on their next turn, or cut your turn short to deprive your opponent of those resources, but also leave yourself defenseless, meaning your opponent likely won't need them to annihilate you anyway. The only two ways around it once it's successfully resolved are to either ensure your opponent loses before they get a next turn, or to play a deck that doesn't need more than one Special Summon to make its relevant plays. The Maxx "C" Challenge is one Difficult, but Awesome way of doing the former; running out of cards in your deck is an instant loss, and the draw effect of Maxx "C" is not optional, thus the objective of the challenge is to Special Summon enough times in one turn to force your opponent to draw their entire deck and instantly lose. Just pray they don't have Exodia.
- This is the standard strategy (insofar as such games have a strategy) for games like Tic-Tac-Toe and Connect Four: try to set up the board in such a way that you have two simultaneous winning moves, so that in blocking one the opponent must leave the other open.
