Power Incontinence in Tabletop Games.
- Ars Magica: This is treated as a fairly ordinary quirk of apprenticeship in the Order of Hermes, especially if the apprentice in question has an affinity for say, fire magic, or, in the case of Bjornaer magi, if they have a particularly ornery or excitable heart-beast form and haven't learned to shift properly yet.
- CthulhuTech has this sort of thing with its psychics. Run out of magic points? Don't worry, you can still Cast from Hit Points. You just have a chance of Burning for hours afterwards.
- Deviant: The Renegades: The main issue faced by Coactives is that their powers, or the entities that they are bound to, do not want to be contained. They need to walk a fine line between releasing their powers too freely, which risks both alerting their pursuers and unleashing devastation, and bottling them up for too long and losing control when the pressure grows too great.
- Don't Rest Your Head: Those who tap into their Madness Powers discover that losing control means losing control. And those who are particularly stupid or unlucky will discover what happens when you keep pushing your limits.
- Dungeons & Dragons: The psionics rules include a psychic disease known as Cascade Flu, which causes those infected to manifest all their powers, one after another, with random targets. This can be amusing if you have nothing but, say, the powers that create (but not shoot) arrows out of thin air and let you jump really well, but it can be outright deadly if you happen to have more than one attack power.
- A variant for the Barbarian's Rage ability in 3.5 Edition can be this. Instead of flying into a berserk rage at will a set number of times per day, any form of damage requires a saving throw to avoid going into Rage, which can also only be ended by a successful save. Meaning that a character tripping over a log could lead to events with a body count.
- Gamma World: This can be a problem with one's party if you get the wrong aura effects. Hi-larity will ensue as your party draws and quarters your character for killing Dave The Robot Demon the hundredth time.
- In GURPS Supers (the GURPS rule supplement that fleshed out superpowers), the point cost to buy individual powers can be reduced if the player accepts limitations on them, for example "Always On" or "Uncontrollable", or takes specific disadvantages linked to it. "Body of Fire, Always On" means the character is a walking fire elemental. "Uncontrollable Telekinesis" manifests as poltergeist phenomena. Telepaths who cannot shut their telepathy off suffer massive distraction and headaches if they are in a crowd. Teleporters may find they're not sleepwalking, but sleepteleporting, with embarrassing or life-threatening results.
- Hero System: One of the Disadvantages you can add to a Power to decrease its cost is Always On, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
- Plenty of Mega-Heroes from Heroes Unlimited have some problem controlling their powers. For example: Hazmat has the powers to control radiation and transform into living plasma. The problem? He can't transform back, meaning he has to permanently stay in a specially designed Hazmat Suit.
- The "broken" creeds of Hunter: The Reckoning, Hermits and Waywards, suffer from this, among other things. Waywards have their "second sight" always on, meaning they can always see any monsters around them, non-stop, 24/7. Given that every Wayward is on a personal mission to eliminate the supernatural from the world, this does not do much to help their mental stability. Hermits have a constant connection to the Powers That Be; unfortunately, the strength of the connection is so powerful that left unchecked, it would destroy a human mind, so a Hermit's subconscious must suppress much of the connection in self-preservation. The stress of this results in the Hermit suffering permanent and painful mental 'static', which only gets worse around supernaturals and other Hunters.
- The Marauders of Mage: The Ascension can be divided into two types. One has their perception of the world around them unconsciously warped into a delusion, and act accordingly; the other unconsciously warps the world around them to fit their delusions.
- The Mad of Mage: The Awakening have had their souls broken, causing their magic to subconsciously leak out into the world.
- Princess: The Hopeful: Most of the titular Princesses are standard Henshin Hero fare: they have a human default form with minimal powers, can temporarily assume a more powerful and blatantly magical form, and have to make an effort to stay in that form for long periods of time. Princesses of Mirrors, on the other hand, default to their magical form and have to make an effort to assume or stay in their human form.
- Many other point-based systems allow that as well, such as Mutants & Masterminds or Big Eyes, Small Mouth. "Uncontrollable" comes with an even worse version of this trope where your power is actively malicious toward you.
- Although it's not necessarily your powers (but it can be), this is how some Afflictions work in Nobilis — they provide a constant stream of miracles whenever the HG thinks they should, but you have no control over which miracles they are or how they are used. One like "My Estate frequently does things in my area without my consent" can lead to much hilarity, although depending on your choice of Estate, this could be anything from randomly inflicting despair on people to the creation of pine cones out of thin air. And you get MP every time an Affliction proves inconvenient to you.
- Promethean: The Created: Prometheans are fueled by the Divine Fire, Azoth, The Flame of Life. The problem is that the Divine Fire has adverse effects on the physical world, and Prometheans continually shed its radiations from their body. This causes humans to grow increasingly disdainful towards them and slowly poisons the land around them.
- The Dreamer from Sentinels of the Multiverse is a six-year-old girl whose abrupt manifestation of her Psychic Powers rendered her comatose and allowed her nightmares to manifest in the real world. Unlike the other villain decks in the game, the heroes aren't trying to beat her so much as wake her up before her projections cause too much damage.
- This can happen to your character in Tales from the Floating Vagabond if the Game Master feels you're overusing your character's Shtick. A character with the Trench Coat Effect may fall victim to Rummage Fail, while a character with the Escher Effect may find that the laws of physics stop working at the most inconvenient times.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- Psykers (psychically sensitive humans) generally can't control their powers... which leads to them usually being hunted down as witches and burned at the stake. Believe it or not, the alternative is actually worse.
- Ork pskyers, or Weirdboyz, have even less control of their psychic abilities. They generally live apart from the other boyz because the gestalt Waaagh! energy that pervades the Orkish race ends up being vented through the Weirdboy, with negative effects for those around him. In game terms, this means that Weirdboyz must use a psychic power each turn, and the exact ability used is determined randomly. And the power appears randomly, sometimes taking other orks around the Weirdboy off.
- The Kroot have a Cannibalism Superpower version of Adaptive Ability, allowing them to evolve new traits by consuming the flesh of critters with those traits — eat strong, tough creatures, like Orks, and the Kroot will grow stronger and tougher. The downside is, they can't turn this off, so if they don't eat a balanced diet — and, more importantly, regularly eat the flesh of sapient beings — they'll eventually devolve into mindless animals. The entire animal ecology of their homeworld, Pech, is now based on devolved Kroot.
