Basic Trope: An attack which deals damage and heals the user.
- Straight: Bob casts "Life Drain" on Alice, damaging her and healing himself.
- Exaggerated: Bob's "Life Drain" attack keeps syphoning life from Alice even after she's dead.
- Downplayed: Bob's attack restores his HP...by 1 point.
- Justified: Bob is a vampire and is drinking Alice's blood for sustenance.
- Inverted:
- Bob is an Empathic Healer and drains his own life to heal Alice.
- Bob casts "Bond of Agony", causing both him and a chosen target to lose life energy.
- Subverted:
- Bob stands over Alice while glowy life energy leaves her body and is absorbed by Bob, but Alice isn't hurt and Bob isn't healing.
- Bob drains life from a Muck Monster, and the toxic ooze in its body causes him to lose HP instead of healing.
- Bob tries to life-drain a vampire and gets his soul ripped out through his nose.
- Double Subverted:
- Until after a few such instances, Alice develops Cancer, and Bob's tumor that he secretly had the whole time has disappeared.
- The Muck Monster does not have life force, and is in fact specifically designed to cripple life drain skills. Other living beings in the setting are proven to be vulnerable as normal to life drain.
- Parodied: Bob chews on his pet cat whenever he bangs his knee on a table.
- Zig Zagged: Bob appears to be draining health from Alice, but it turns out Alice was in fact being healed by Bob...until Alice gets cancer...as a side effect of the healing, so Bob draws the cancer into himself...but it turned out he was a cancer mage and was farming tumors inside Alice's body...because the cancer powers his Empathic Healing
- Averted: Bob throws a fireball at Alice instead.
- Enforced: "We need more ways for the player characters to heal themselves. Let's let them drain life from the bad guys."
- Lampshaded: "Not sure if I lost a year off my life, or I just gotta fart."
- Invoked: Bob becomes a vampire just to gain energy draining powers.
- Exploited: Alice gets off on having her life energy drained and goads Bob into doing so.
- Defied: "Oh no you don't, Bob! I brought my anti-draining armor!"
- Discussed: "Hey, if you wanted to suck on me, you could have taken me out to dinner first. Jeez"
- Conversed: "You know, when you think about it, it's a metaphor for Rape." "Except rape doesn't turn you into a mummy." "You just don't get metaphors, do you?"
- Implied: Any time Alice fights/interacts with Bob, she comes off looking pale and sickly. It could be some poision or disease, but who knows?
- Deconstructed:
- Alice pushes Bob into a plastic box, where he is rendered completely harmless.
- Aice is immune or resistant to the life drain effect, and simply stabs Bob in the face.
- Reconstructed:
- ...Except his powers penetrate plastic.
- ...And then Bob drains Alice's friends instead, healing his horrid face wound in the process.
- Played For Laughs:
- Getting to second base is really difficult when you drain your girl's life force.
- Black Comedy: Bob offers Alice a handshake.
- Played For Drama:
- I shall reiterate, getting to second base is really difficult when you drain your girl's life force.
- Bob's power doesn't rely on a simple, clean touch... it entails physically consuming the victim, possibly worse.
- Plot Foundation: Bob's Life Drain ability is a metaphor for sadism... he gets off on it, while somebody else suffers.
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