Too Dumb To Live / Video Games

"Alright, let's do this! LEEEEEROY JEEEENKIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINS!" *thud*

"Do not play Pokémon GO while driving."

—Pokémon GO startup message

Too Dumb to Live stupidity that occurs from characters in a video game, whether it's Artificial Stupidity, scripted, or otherwise. For player instances of potential stupidity, see Yet Another Stupid Death.

Note: As a Death Trope, all spoilers on this page are unmarked.

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# - C

• Civilians in every Arcade Shooter ever. Here's a tip, people: If you're a hostage or otherwise in a building full of nasty evil things and the heroes come to rescue you, get down on the floor in full view of the rescuers and don't get up until they tell you it's all clear. Do NOT jump out from behind crates and surprise them!
• In many games, perhaps too many to name, AI characters have the tendency to fire small arms at large, heavily armored vehicles. Word of advice, unless you're in Halo, your pistol is not gonna hurt that M1 Abrams barreling down the street.
• Nearly all NPCs in any game that allows and encourages stealth kills. When you have a brand new arrow sticking into the back of your head, then maybe, just maybe, "It must have been nothing" might not be a good answer.
• Pretty much every target of an Escort Mission ever. Taking the longer but safer route? Nah, let's take the way through the heavily populated monster village!
• 7 Days a Skeptic:
  • Something has been killing off the members of a starship. The three surviving crew members have just been attacked by the revived corpse of the captain, the first to die. They defeated it, but they're not sure whatever animated it is really dead. Then they realize they can flee the ship on the escape pods... after a good night's rest. In separate rooms. (Not to mention the fact that the escape pods are restricted access!)
  • The whole ship was built with massive and illogical design flaws, explicitly with the assumption that nothing would go wrong. (Any engineer in any field can attest how stupid that is.) In addition, the crew are either incompetent or unwilling to do their job — the engineer routinely sends the counselor to fix things while he hides in the mess hall. Yahtzee has admitted that many things were left this way because the plot wouldn't work otherwise.
  • If you think that's bad, they didn't choose to have a good night's rest before they used the escape pods. That's how long it took the automated systems to prepare the pods to be used. Either the people who designed the ship were really confident that nothing would go wrong, or they expected the escape pods to be used more like Save Scumming than actual emergency measures.
• In Age of Empires III: The War Chief's campaign Sheriff Billy Holme, cornered by his ex-partner Chayton (Holme had a Face–Heel Turn), chooses to back into a cliff face surrounded by TNT. After talking for a bit, Holme attempts a Quick Draw shot on Chayton, forgetting that A) his gun is at his back while Chayton has his at his side and B) Native Tribes have a quick reaction time and Chayton is half Sioux. You can guess how it ends.
• The Big Bad of Alice: Madness Returns, Dr. Angus Bumby, taunts Alice, whose family he murdered after raping and murdering her sister, that he will get away with that and selling countless children into sexual slavery due to his high social status at the climax of the game. He apparently thought it was a good idea to do this while standing in between her and train tracks, swiftly causing his demise at the hands of an oncoming train.
• Alien: Isolation: Survivors, while comprehensibly scared by the creature murdering everybody and expecting other people to be armed and bad-intentioned just to survive, are way so trigger happy even against other civilians like you, that they will more often than not just attract the xenomorph with the sound of their guns. A sly player can use them to lure and distract it.
• In Anachronox, the entire population of Democratus suffer this chronically. As the name suggests, it's a planet where they vote on everything. Because of this, the place is paralysed with indecision and it's full of unimaginative, don't-rock-the-boat middle-management types who get nothing done. At one point, Democratus is attacked by a Horde of Alien Locusts and one of the High Council seriously suggests they have no evidence that the missiles being launched at them are even destructive in nature, leading to the exasperated Only Sane Man crying "What exactly do you think is inside those warheads? Gift baskets!?" An alien ambassador comments that he gives the planet six months before it self-destructs.
• In Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, Fantastic Racism is pretty common, especially against Half-Orcs. However, racism against Half-Ogres is quite rare, due to the fact that the few people who openly pick on such big and strong individuals usually wind up dead.
• In Arc the Lad General Yagun's dialogue includes flat-out accusing your party of either "...having guts or [being] too damned stupid to live." about a quarter of the way down this page of the walkthrough.
• ARMA:
  • The AI in general, across all games in the series, is unbelievably awful, and AI soldiers constantly do stupid things that get either themselves or the player killed. Whether it's their terrible driving skills, rushing straight towards enemies that are firing at them, or blowing up vehicles with rocket launchers when a player is trying to repair, steal, or destroy it with explosives, the AI of ARMA's soldiers never ceases to amaze and annoy.
  • The Altis Armed Forces in 3 are complete idiots, doing routinely stupid things such as going on a patrol during a training exercise and forgetting to bring a map, which results in the patrol getting lost and having to call for help. Their training as a whole isn't particularly efficient, and you spend the bulk of 3's campaign racking up kills on AAF personnel who fall for obvious traps and diversions set up by the FIA and NATO alike. It's little wonder that once their CSAT allies throw them under the bus towards the end of the campaign, they surrender to NATO very shortly thereafter.
  • In the climax of 3's Contact expansion, the Livonian Defense Force attempts to destroy an alien root-like mass with as many bombs, rockets, and missiles as possible, even though said root-like mass, if ruptured, could explode with enough force to destroy the entirety of their home country (and likely the surrounding regions, to include Kaliningrad, Lithuania, Belarus, and Poland). They also attack the alien probes on sight, which always results in the complete annihilation of their forces upon doing so.
• The Excuse Plot of the 1979 arcade classic Asteroids is that a spaceship pilot didn't realize what a stupid idea it is to park themselves in the middle of a hectic asteroid field. As a result, the pilot is forced to fire shots at the asteroids to destroy them, and one touch is instant death.
• The Baldur's Gate series:
  • The AI in the first game is very limited and frequently makes enemies do near-suicidal things. The second game is moderately better about it, but the AI is still so poor in general that there are several Game Mods out there that provide improved AI scripts. Some of these, like Tactics or Sword Coast Stratagems, can actually make the game Nintendo Hard.
  • Baldur's Gate: Eldoth can potentially be killed by Shar-Teel if they are kept in the same party. Given the massive difference in fighting ability between Shar-Teel (an incredibly physically strong shieldmaiden-esque warrior woman) and him (a Quirky Bard), it could be considered death by failure to keep his mouth shut.
  • In his epilogue for Baldur's Gate II, Edwin receives a Fate Worse than Death variant where he's dumb enough to try and pick a Wizard Duel with Elminster. Elminster slaps him down and turns him into Edwina, as well as implicitly stripping Edwina of her magic in the process.
  • In Baldur's Gate III, when venturing into the lair of Astarion's vampire master Cazador, the party can discover the diary of Cazador's chamberlain, who intended to use a potion for Faking the Dead and had an identical-looking bottle of acid to make it look real. The party finds the chamberlain's mangled corpse and the potion in the neighboring room.
• Battleborn: The wolf sentry bot in the mission "The Void's Edge" is tasked with destroying a Varelsi portal by leaping into it and detonating a huge pack of explosives. Because this will obviously kill him, Kleese programmed him to be totally oblivious to the suicidal outcome of the mission, literally making him too dumb to live. When Kleese explains what the wolf sentry has to do, the sentry bot replies "Awesome, that sounds both fun and safe."
• BattleTech: Crescent Hawk's Inception allows the character to stage a jailbreak using a Humongous Mecha. The guards get this, first for storing said 'Mech on the prison grounds without some kind of security, allowing the player to hightail it to a 'Mech and steal it to make the escape. However, this can get flipped around, since the player can go back to the jail after the break… which means they would have to go in on foot, without the benefit of the 'Mech as a trump card. Cue guards swarming and executing the player.
• In Bejeweled 3, the butterfly jewels fly up towards the spider, even though they seem to know it will eat them, leaving the player to save them by matching them with gems of the same colour.
• In Bendy and the Ink Machine, "Bendy" will kill everything that comes near him. Some of the lesser antagonists, such as the Butcher Gang, don't run away from him. They've even been seen running toward "Bendy" if Henry is in the same direction.
• BioShock:
  • Dr Suchong, who created the Big Daddies, was having trouble imprinting the Big Daddies on the Little Sisters. In an audio diary, it is shown that he got angry and slapped a Little Sister while a Big Daddy was in the room. You find his body drilled to his worktable. Burial at Sea reveals that he added a side of stupid to his slap-sandwich — the Big Daddy wasn't behind reinforced glass, it was literally in the doorway, having followed two little sisters despite Suchong's insistence that it had no imprint on the kids. Then Suchong just stared at the angry red lights and said "What." without putting two and two together.
  • Splicers in general. Let's see, one type of Big Daddy has a massive drill that can bore through one's stomach and the other has a rivet gun and proximity mines. A wrench will definitely work. The first time you're shown a Big Daddy in action is a good demonstration of this. A Leadhead Splicer (who at least has a revolver) spots a Little Sister. Believing, despite what past experience has to have shown him, that she is alone, he attacks. You see this on the other side of a reinforced plate glass window; five seconds later, you can loot the splicer's corpse after he's thrown through said window. This is a justified example, though, since the splicers are insane because of drug abuse.
• In Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, wandering around a human settlement without glamouring yourself will cause certain able-bodied humans in your vicinity to try to kill you. These attempts range from reasonable but ill-advised (guardsmen, butchers, and the like) to downright suicidal (unarmed ladies chasing you down to give you a slap, and the relentless hostility of some hapless peasants in general, who'd do much better to run as fast as they can).
• Fritz in Brain Dead 13 at times. For example, in the intro, when Fritz is gonna blow up Lance with a cannon, Lance tricks Fritz by shouting, "BOOM!" Fritz evilly laughs, but stops, and the screen cuts to Lance saying, "Hiya, pal." Fritz then screams as his eyes pop out of his head, then checks if the cannon fired, and gets blasted in the face. Fritz is invincible, however.
• Half the enemy leaders in Centurion: Defender of Rome lead their army from the front and charge, often causing them to be the battle's very first casualty. To add insult to injury, their death cripples the enemy morale, so the enemy army soon flees.
• They're technically not alive, but Champions of Norrath has a level where you must escort souls to freedom. They don't bother to stay behind you, they run into lava, and when they're attacked, they just stop and kneel, letting the enemies beat on them. What's worse, if all of them are killed, you have to restart the level. And there are several of these escort levels.
• Buster Badshot from Exidy's Arcade Game Cheyenne is implied to be this. He's supposedly a bounty hunter who goes after various gangs (with various "creative" names), but all he ever does is walk around the stage (or drive the stagecoach in one level) while the player has to protect him (and get the gangs). Indeed, even his last name alone seems to imply this.
• The people in the mall in Choice of Zombies. They have no quarantine or even medical examination period of any sort, they don't post lookouts, and they insist everyone store guns and ammo separately. In the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse. Unsurprisingly, it turns out someone was infected and turns, then infects their whole medical ward.
• City of Heroes:
  • Paragon City is actually nicknamed "The City of Heroes" in-universe, a fact that is well-known and well-publicized throughout the city and beyond. So the street thugs you meet at the lowest levels should know better by now than to draw their weapons and charge at the people in funny costumes. Even if they do know better, it doesn't stop them from trying, anyway.
  • While it was a case of various AI-related issues piling up, special mention has to go to both Lady Jay and Fusionette; they used to have near-unlimited sight range, but their ranged powers were strangely short-ranged. They also didn't understand that you don't have to go chasing after someone that ran away. Which means that while the group running the mission was doing perfectly fine, they suddenly got "MISSION FAILED" because the character they were leading around decided to chase after one runner, directly into the path of three full-sized mob groups and then fight them all. This was fixed by toning down their aggro range, toning up their attack range, and sometimes just letting you beat the mission even after they're defeated.
• In Civilization, AI players that are losing against you may offer a peace treaty. The stupidity comes in when they will, with very few exceptions, accept nothing less than unconditional peace, even when they still have gold and resources to offer in tribute. Never mind that if you're kicking their teeth in hard enough that they feel the need to beg for peace, you probably have the forces needed to finish them off. A sensible person would probably offer everything he has in an attempt to stave off his defeat, but not the AI, oh no!
• Clive Barker's Undying:
  • Jeremiah. Let's go over his plans again: You are the weakest of the five undead siblings that no mortal weapon can kill for real. You trick the hero into finding a supernatural weapon that actually can and into using said weapon for killing your stronger siblings, their armies of demonic mooks, and extremely powerful evil wizards. So far so good. Very smart of and good for you. Revealing everything to and mocking/threatening said hero while you have no demonic armies or powers to hurt him in any way? Not so much. Possibly justified by the fact that Jeremiah could have known that he had no chance against Patrick, and therefore could have decided (if not from the very start) to just free the undying king for the lolz. To achieve that, however, it was necessary to lure Patrick into killing him with the scythe, because Jeremiah's soul was the last remaining seal between the king and freedom. It's generally known, however, that the game went into a kind of Development Hell in its final phases, so there are quite a few plot holes in the story.
  • There are still servants working at the Covenant Manor, despite the fact that many have died from demonic beasts. One guy finally decides he's had enough and leaves, only to get killed at the front gate, so it's not clear whether sticking around or trying to get out of Dodge (with a substantial chance of failing) is the better option.
  • Hey guys, you know what sounds like fun? Let's read a ritual out of this weird occult book near some creepy standing stones. Nothing could possibly go wrong!
• Command & Conquer:
  • In Red Alert 2, the Soviets decide to give the character Yuri Mind Control powers, and then not do anything to keep him from running amok with them, which he does. Using his powers, he gains a private army, and creates some mind control machines that he plans to use to control the whole planet, and nobody pays any attention to them. Later, he radios the allied intelligence lieutenant and mind controls her, but doesn't use any secure or scrambled lines, leading to his call being traced back to his main base. It is, however, implied that for all his intelligence and psychic capability, Yuri himself does not have a very solid grasp of military tactics. He mostly just relies on sheer psychic power to overcome his foes.
  • Tiberium Wars has some nominees in the form of the grunt soldiers. Even after being ordered to retreat, as soon as they take any fire, they'll charge directly at the thing that's attacking them. And again, and again. Even if they're one squad of riflemen up against a Zerg Rush of tanks. It gets to the point that you might as well just write them off the second they get close to the enemy.
  • In Red Alert 3, the Soviets go back in time to kill Einstein to keep him from developing the technology that allowed the Allies to beat them (again). That works, but in the new timeline, Japan is turned into a global superpower called the Empire of the Rising Sun, which the Soviets pay no attention to while they are trying to invade Europe, which causes them to get invaded. The Allies display similar incompetence when it turns out that there was a city-destroying laser weapon that could hit targets across the globe in Mt. Rushmore, which they could have used to easily defeat the Soviets, but the American President only decides to use it on the Soviets when they and the Allies have to team up against the Empire. Granted, there is some speculation that the president was really a robot set up by the Empire (he turns out to be in the Empire campaign). The Allies later fail to pick up that the Soviets turned on them until a Soviet scientist defects to them. They apparently didn't learn their lesson in the expansion, because in the Allied campaign they decide to trust the Empire's crown prince Tatsu to help them deal with some insurgents, and then not anticipate him turning on them. At the end of the Soviet campaign, the Soviets note that the Allies are starting to make the mistake of trusting them again after the Soviets defeat an evil mega-corporation.
• In Crash Tag Team Racing, some of the Die-O-Rama FMVs involve Crash displaying extremely poor judgment prior to his demise. They include him spinning into a large pile of explosives, spinning into a high-tech chamber that explodes and knocks him on his head, tilting an uncooperative vending machine until it falls on him, and grabbing an exposed wire.

D - E

• Jin in Dead Island. It's hard to interpret her actions as anything less than Driven to Suicide. She starts by hijacking a truck and threatening abandonment unless you help everyone, which results in a number of survivors being killed. She then runs off to help prisoners at the police station, which gets a survivor at the church killed before she is gang raped. Then in the maximum security prison, she doesn't want to be there, which is fair enough, but Yerema points out her mental state and when confronted by Ryder White at gunpoint, she angers him about trying to kill everyone, before releasing his infected wife, who promptly attacks him. Ryder reacts by shooting Jin, which at this stage is clearly Suicide by Cop. She also insists on going alone to (re)kill her zombified father (for sentimental reasons, as he is locked away and not a threat). Despite having no combat experience, she goes back to his workshop unaccompanied and releases him. She actually manages to shoot and kill him with no problem, but this could have gone really badly and she gained nothing by doing it.
• The Dead Rising franchise:
  • Lindsay in Dead Rising. Could have avoided the plot if she hadn't opened the mall's front door, which a horde of zombies is clawing at right now, in order to let her precious little poochy in. The dog is clearly also a zombie. (The glowing red eyes are a "dead" giveaway.) The dev team clearly knew what people would think of her, though, and in the bonus Infinity Mode, where food-hoarding survivors are trying to kill you just as hard as the zombies, she dies as soon as you see her.
  • Dead Rising 2: A nameless mercenary mook on a motorbike sees Chuck Greene pick up a long, thin metal bar and crouch around the side of a stack of shelves. Instead of driving into sight of Chuck from a safe distance, he guns his bike right alongside the shelves, and is promptly speared.
  • Dead Rising 3 continues the trend with a Callback to the first game. In the intro after Nick has reunited with Rhonda, one hysterical woman wants to leave the diner they're holed up in once it gets swarmed by zombies, and she does so by running right out the front door straight into the waiting horde, despite there being a back door. Yes, panic tends to impede rational thought, but one would think that a panicking person would be running away from danger rather than directly into it.
• Truly, many AI characters are Too Dumb to Live in ways the programmers probably didn't intend. One example in Deus Ex: Miguel, the NSF member whom you may invite with you on your escape from the Majestic 12 prison. He doesn't believe in stealth and is liable to charge as soon as he sees an enemy, wielding only a combat knife. Keeping him alive to the exit without going ahead to kill all your enemies first is a very difficult feat.
• Doom:
  • The entirety of the UAC in Doom (2016), bar maybe the members who are just flat-out cultists, fall into this for trying to use Hell as a power source. Special mention, though, goes to the people who decided it'd be a great idea to weaponize demons, and a very special mention to the people who decided to do this to the Cyberdemon, a twenty-foot Genius Bruiser that they had absolutely no way of controlling, going so far as to shove experimental energy cores and superweapons into its body.
  • Doom Eternal:
    • The Khan Maykr has two impeccably bright ideas back to back. First was resurrecting the Icon of Sin, a reality-warping, universe-annihilating Eldritch Abomination in her home dimension of Urdak. The second one was telling the Doom Slayer the plan. Needless to say, the end result not only killed her, it doomed Urdak and the Maykr race as a whole. Samuel Hayden straight-up admits that while the Doom Slayer played a major part of why Urdak has literally gone to Hell, it's the Khan Maykr's arrogance which bears the primary blame.
    • Cacodemons gain a fun new trait where they will catch and swallow grenades when you fire one at their faces at the right time, leaving them stunned and ripe for a glory kill.
    • Deag Grav, the last Hell Priest alive after the Doom Slayer literally decapitated his brethren within 30 seconds of getting close to them each and had just defeated the guardian that ensures that he stays alive, decides that being on holy ground is enough to protect him from the Slayer and mocks him to his face. He should be immensely thankful that the Slayer opts for the Super Shotgun to his face instead of what he usually does to other demons.
• It's a running gag in Dragalia Lost that Prince Euden's willingness to take any offers of help at face value and accept people into the Halidom, no matter how sketchy or clearly unstable they may be, is almost certainly going to get him killed one day. Euden protests, arguing that his existing social network and The Power of Friendship is strong enough to bail him out of any assassination attempts before they happen, but his vassals aren't particularly happy with that. In Cursed Connections, this is the cause of the event's plot, as Euden just let Doman in without a thorough background check first, which leads to things going pear-shaped before you can say "Happy New Year!" To be fair, in Rage of Chronos, he was instantly suspicious of the Chronos-shaped "Malinda", but put up with him for Vania's sake; turned out his suspicions were well-founded.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins:
    • Vaughn, the antagonist of the City Elf starter area, decides to kidnap a bunch of elven women from a wedding so he and his lads can have a "party". Somehow the player character walking into his room, literally coated in the blood of the people he paid to protect him, only convinces him to offer a bribe so s/he will go away and he can continue his planned rapes. And this is someone who has been smacked, bottled, or otherwise beaten in pretty much every scene he's in. Made perhaps more idiotic by the fact that his initial argument for why he shouldn't be gutted is fairly reasonable-if-gray (that he's the son of the Arl and his death will lead to the whole elven ghetto being leveled in retaliation). His "solution" being to make the player complicit in his crimes rather than cutting his losses for the day pretty much seals his fate.
    • Arl Howe thinks it's a wonderful idea to taunt the Human Noble Warden about how he butchered your family.
    • Lampshaded by the NPC Sergeant Kylon: "And people actually voluntarily attack you? Are they stupid?" It's also lampshaded in Dragon Age II by Sergeant Joanna during the quest "The Conspirators": "But this is the Hero of Ferelden. Same one that defeated Loghain, an Archdemon, the Mother, and no doubt more. Who do you think will win?"
    • Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening: Bann Esmerelle and the other nobles conspire to get rid of the Warden Commander if the Warden Commander is the Ferelden Grey Warden imported from Origins. They do this knowing fully that the Warden has both faced and claimed victory over including but not limited to: several dragons, an Archdemon, the Witch of the Wilds, a Pride Demon, a broodmother, and Tevinter slavers led by a powerful Magister. Not to mention he/she (with hardly any effort) dispatches bandit gangs on a regular basis, defeated a Fereldan war hero in one-on-one combat, stormed an Arl's estate and either killed several of the previously mentioned war hero's top knights, or escaped from the largest Fereldan prison while leaving dozens of corpses in his/her wake, and plows through countless numbers of darkspawn while coming out with hardly a scratch. They even achieve nothing, as one of Hero of Ferelden's options is hire a broker to learn Bann Esmerelle and her followers' names and made an example of them by destroying them one by one though accidents, disappearances and suicides, with the result of scaring the rest of the nobility and prevent them of doing the same.
    • For that matter, any enemy of a Fereldan Warden Commander in Awakening. Some of them can be excused by not knowing exactly whom they're facing, but it's averted in one case, where revealing that you're The Commander of the Grey causes your enemies to panic. Most of the mooks run away, and one actually jumps off a cliff rather than face you.
    • Ser Rylock manages a staggeringly impressive display in Anders's personal quest. She sets a trap for Anders and the Warden-Commander in the room after some high-quality mage robes and lyrium potions, using a force of only three Templars with no mage support, to attack four people, one of whom is not only the Hero of Ferelden and a stone-cold dragon-killing badass but may well be the Prince-Consort or Queen of Ferelden (and if not, there's a significant chance they're a hero of the dwarven people). It's especially hilarious since Anders is outside her jurisdiction by this point anyway by virtue of being a Grey Warden, meaning that she's trying to cause an international incident and/or piss off the King/Queen of Ferelden by attacking someone who chews up small armies and spits them out in the name of recapturing someone she can't legally hold.
  • Dragon Age II:
    • By Act 3, the random gangs of thugs attacking your character at night definitely count. Bonus points when they do it in front of the huge statue built in your honor for saving the city from the Qunari, possibly by fighting the leader of their entire military in a one-on-one duel.
    • Zevran Arainai mentions that he fails to understand why people insist on attacking both Hawke and the Warden.
    • The Mark of the Assassin DLC also gives us a sterling example in Duke Prosper Montfort, who dies mostly because he spends his last moments monologuing, while clinging to the edge of a cliff. Lampshaded by both Snarky!Hawke and Varric.
    • Baron Arlange, also from Mark of the Assassin, manages to, depending on player choices, be too dumb to live twice. The first time, he decides to try to kill your party after you've just killed a Wyvern, because he had paid to be the first person to kill one in the hunt. You can choose to spare him after kicking his ass. If you do, you'll end up facing him later, never mind how easily you curbstomped him the last time you fought.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition mentions a short-lived Apocalypse Cult known as the Empty Ones, who believed that the darkspawn were the Maker's tool for ending the world. They were completely wiped out during the Second Blight when their entire membership gathered before The Horde.
• The titular character of Drake of the 99 Dragons, upon realizing he now had superpowers, declared himself invincible and jumped off the roof of a skyscraper. He spent the next few minutes in the afterlife being chewed out by the beings who blessed him.
• In Drakengard 3, the land is being conquered by Intoners, who can tear ordinary soldiers apart like tinfoil and brainwash people by singing at them, because they're nascent Eldritch Abominations who only look human. And Dito knows this. So when he comes across an Intoner dancing mindlessly around the corpse of her latest victim — who, incidentally, was one of the strongest warriors in their World of Badass — his decision to charge at her waving his sword looks really fucking stupid.
• The pack beasts from Dungeon Siege tend to fall victim to this trope — you have to protect them very carefully, or they have a tendency to wander into the line of fire. It gets worse in the expansion, Legends of Arranna, when you get pack beasts which have attacks — they continue to target and attack enemies even when they're hopelessly outclassed. You'll waste more resurrection spells on the pack beasts than anyone else.
• Dwarf Fortress:
  • "Being on fire sure makes you thirsty! I feel like a good beer." A dwarf that goes to get a beer will find himself in your booze stockpile, which, more often than not, will be full of wooden barrels full of things vastly more potent than beer... (Also, at least in Real Life, beer is also flammable.)
  • The Dwarves will also drop everything to collect the fallen items of the dead, even if it's next to an Elephant or on fire, or a Flaming Elephant that's on fire.
  • Sometimes a mason will build a wall from the wrong direction, leaving him trapped. If the player doesn't notice in time, said mason dies of dehydration or starvation.
  • Military dwarves will not run away from a monster they're chasing if restationed somewhere else or told to kill something else. In the case of titans or megabeasts, this results in Fun.
  • Dear Urist McMiner, do not sleep in the aquifer. Sincerely, Save Scumming.
  • Some dwarven soldiers seem to think that a goblin siege is the best time to go on break. Or get drunk.
• At one point in Earth Defense Force 5, word gets around that there are anti-war protesters taking issue with the EDF's response to the Primer invasion and that they would be attempting peace talks. Said Primers have, at this point, cut the human population by a fifth and show absolutely no signs of stopping until Earth is completely depopulated. To the surprise of no one, the peace talks end with the anti-war protesters being summarily slaughtered.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Series-wide, this applies to any mortal who has ever thought it would be a good idea to betray a Daedric Prince. One example is the nameless female thief in the in-game book "Purloined Shadows". She spies on a witch coven summoning the Daedric Prince Nocturnal. Why? To mug her, of course! Even worse, she was set up to get caught from the very beginning. When someone says "Hey, let's rob a Daedric Prince while surrounded by her coven of worshipers", don't listen.
  • Skyrim:
    • Arniel Gane actually wants to replicate the event that caused the Dwemer to vanish from existence. Fortunately for the world, the shortcuts he takes in his experiment ensure that he is the only one to be killed by his stupidity. Better yet, his ghost becomes a very powerful combat summon. What makes it worse is his methods: He finally gets his hands on Keening, one of three tools necessary to perform the experiment he's trying to replicate. You'd think he'd be cautious and scientific with his use of it, right? Or at least have some actual plan for using it, especially considering he's working with a bare fraction of what he would actually need? Nope! Right after giving a lecture about how dangerous Keening is, he just starts swinging it in the general direction of his bargain-basement Heart of Lorkhan facsimile. Humanity is probably lucky that he wasn't smart enough to hurt anyone besides himself.
    • Silus Vesuius wants to recreate Mehrunes' Razor, the artifact of Mehrunes Dagon, the Daedric Prince of Destruction, due to his belief that the Mythic Dawn of the previous game should be celebrated for nearly destroying the world. Not to mention that he thinks he will be rewarded for assembling the pieces of the Razor when he's making you do all the work. Even the nice Daedric Princes don't hand out prizes to layabouts; Mehrunes Dagon decides that Silus can at least assist in testing your dedication in handling his weapon.
    • Astrid, the leader of Skyrim's Dark Brotherhood. She felt threatened by the authority of the Night Mother, who the Brotherhood believe to be the wife of their god, and sells out the Dragonborn out of spite in exchange for the Emperor's security force leaving them alone. The only problem was that she honestly expected Commander Maro to go through with the deal after the Brotherhood murdered the Emperor's cousin at her own wedding, killed Maro's son and framed him for treason, and made an attempt on the Emperor's life. Her naivete ends up getting half the chapter killed (including her husband), their Sanctuary put to the torch, and she herself executed by the Dragonborn while on the verge of death from her severe burns.
      
      For extra points, Astrid's attempt to contact the Dragonborn after they stole one of the Brotherhood's kills is to abduct them out of their bed as they sleep, and then lock herself in a room with them. Long story short, the Dragonborn isn't the one Alone with the Psycho in that scenario. If you don't take kindly to being kidnapped (a very understandable reaction), this gets not only Astrid, but the entire Dark Brotherhood killed.
    • Estormo is even more arrogant and foolish than your average Thalmor: provoking the Dragonborn after they have just killed a powerful Dragon Priest is a horrible idea. Provoking the Dragonborn after they just got a staff that drains magicka when you're a squishy Altmer mage who is both dependent on and especially vulnerable to magic is an even worse idea.
    • In Ravenscar Hollow, you find a bandit mook who begs you to free him from the Hagravens who have captured him and put him in a cage. When you do, he turns around and tries to mug you. Obviously, the fact that you very likely just killed three Hagravens single-handedly to get him out of there completely eluded him.
    • Bandits in general would count, seeing as they're mostly decked out in furs and armed with poorly-made iron weapons and all completely eager to take on a mighty hero who has a plethora of powerful magical artifacts and a suit of armor made from the bones of the various dragons they've killed. Special mention to the bandit gang that decides it would be a great idea to kidnap the Dragonborn's spouse and demand a ransom. Yeah, let's just piss off the badass who eats the souls of dragons and wears their skin as a hat, no way that could possibly turn out badly for us.
    • The mad necromancer in Rannvieg's Fast who smugly explains how he's going to kill you while slowly walking away with his back to you. You can easily pick the lock to the cage you're in and then bash his head in from behind before he finishes his monologue.
    • And then there's that fire mage coven who decided that Sunderstone Gorge, a massive cavern filled with pools of flammable oil, would be a good place to hole up and train. Impressively, they somehow haven't managed to blow themselves up when you come a-knocking, although you can very easily fix that.
    • "I shouldn't have hired those sellswords in the first place. Perhaps there's no need. This place is just a tomb, after all, and there are no obvious signs of habitation. It isn't as though the thousand-year dead will mind if I have a look around." Extract from Heddic's notes in Volunruud, found next to his corpse. Obviously, they did mind.
    • Any dragon that tries to attack the College of Winterhold qualifies. Key word: "Tries". As it turns out, attacking a place where all the best mages in Skyrim gather is not very good for one's health.
    • One Daedric quest involves you going along with someone to kill a giant. The person you're accompanying is a Small Name, Big Ego guy, who is hailed as brave and strong in his village for his previous fights against enemies. In reality, he's a Dirty Coward and tells you to go kill the giant... and after you do, he tries to kill you. Someone who just killed the giant he was afraid to fight, and probably did it relatively easily. And if you refuse to kill the giant for him, he charges it brainlessly and promptly gets killed for his trouble. (Well, at least he stopped being a Dirty Coward?)
    • A number of the random encounters you run into fall into this. There's the thief, for example, who will walk up and demand the Dragonborn's money. The Dragonborn, who may be wearing armor made from the hearts of Daedra (which he killed), a mask ripped from the face of a Dragon Priest (which he killed), and weapons made from the bones of dragons (which he killed). Worse still, the thief won't take no for an answer — he can't be persuaded to stand down, though some lucky thieves escape with their lives (but not their cash) after trying to mug their own Guildmaster.
    • Animals such as wolves and even skeevers (which are large rats, but still no bigger than a Jack Russell terrier) attack on sight, even though you are larger. Real-life animals usually show more sense than to pick a fight with a large, potentially dangerous animal unless they have a pressing reason to; real-life wolves, for example, tend to avoid humans. But all the predators practically rush to be impaled on your sword.
    • Shavari, one of the dumbest assassins in the history of ever. Being a Khajiit in the middle of a Skyrim city should already make her suspicious enough, but she also thinks she can get away with attacking the Dragonborn in broad daylight in the middle of Riften, one of the biggest Wretched Hives in the setting, with only plain clothes and a dagger. While you're accompanied by a powerful mage who just helped you destroy a heavily-armed Thalmor hit squad. She tends to get smeared across the ground in short order even if you don't lift a finger.
    • Mogrul, a Loan Shark slash Evil Debt Collector in the Dragonborn DLC certainly qualifies. After you help one of his clients get a job with the local Mad Scientist wizard, Mogrul will approach you and tell you that since the man is now untouchable due to working for said wizard, his steep debt (of 1000 gold) is now your responsibility, and he'll keep sending thugs after you until you pony up. Never mind the fact that not only are you a legendary hero who regularly beats dragons to a pulp, but also saved the whole island from certain doom at the hands of another guy who does just that, you're also well-regarded by the higher-ups in the city for saving them from an assassination plot, and you're in good with the aforementioned wizard considering you helped him find a new employee... The game even straight up lets you tell him, "Or I could just kill you now." That being said, he's at least smart enough to not provoke you and stay in public areas with a bodyguard, meaning that you have to get creative if you want to take him out without being charged for murder.
• Exile: Escape from the Pit:
  • Erika Redmark is one of three immensely powerful archmages that was tossed into Exile for being on the wrong side of a political struggle in the Mage's Guild on the surface. Not being very genre savvy, the Emperor apparently never even paused to consider that pissing off one of the (if not the) most powerful Sorceresses in the world would have consequences. It's not like she could construct a portal back to the surface that leads directly to your throne room, right? To be fair, the Emperor's mages did give her a curse so powerful that even she could not repeal (and just that demanded the collective effort of hundreds of the Empire's best mages). What they did not expect was that once banished in Avernum, she would prove capable and cunning enough to change the local ecosystem to make the caves more habitable and build a whole civilization from the ground up as a tool to get her revenge. They knew she was the most powerful mage of the Empire, they just did not realize by what margin.
  • The First Expedition to explore the underworld. "They were arrogant. They were stupid. And they were slaughtered."

F - G

• In the Lost Chapters version of Fable, the evil option of the final choice is this. The options are either A) throw an evil talking mask into the lava (good) or B) put on the talking mask that tempts you with power and obviously just wants you to put it on so it can possess you (evil).
• Fallout:
  • Enclave officers as a whole tend to be Too Dumb To Live. Other factions tend to realize that their field commanders need to not be easy to kill; NCR officers and Rangers take to the field wearing good armor and armed with the best guns available, Brotherhood of Steel Paladins practically never go anywhere without Powered Armor and energy rifles or heavy weaponry, Legion Centurion armor may look ramshackle, but it's deceptively high-quality and is usually paired with a good weapon like an Anti-Materiel Rifle or a Brush Gun, and even raiders tend to have their best weapons and armor worn by their leaders. However, even though the Enclave has more Powered Armor and energy rifles than it knows what to do with (it being hinted that the Enclave is one of the few factions with a functioning manufacturing base), most Enclave officers wear an unarmored uniform that couldn't stop a particularly determined BB and only carry an energy pistol that was designed for use as a backup weapon.
  • Fallout 3:
    • Ahzrukhal, bar owner and drug dealer, holds the contract for Charon, a brainwashed ghoul sniper who's brainwashed to be obedient to the owner of his contract. Ahzrukhal knows that Charon would like very much to kill him, and the only thing keeping him safe is the contract. Ahzrukhal will still sell the contract to the Lone Wanderer for 2000 caps (less with a high Barter skill) or the death of his most troublesome competitor. Once Charon no longer has to obey Ahzrukhal, he does exactly what anyone with two functioning brain cells would expect him to do to Ahzrukhal. Maybe Ahzrukhal thought that the Lone Wanderer would stop Charon from killing him, but if the Lone Wanderer has a reputation for being good, they probably don't think someone like Ahzrukhal deserves to live, and if they have a reputation for being evil, they probably wouldn't think twice about letting Charon kill him once they have what they want from him.
    • There's a potential random encounter with a would-be mugger who threatens the Lone Wanderer with nothing but a cheap shotgun. The shotgun doesn't have any shells in it, not that he would be able to hit anything anyway when he's shaking like a leaf. Add to that the fact that the Lone Wanderer might be decked out in Powered Armor, carrying a BFG, and traveling with a Brotherhood paladin, a Gatling Laser-toting Super Mutant, or a seven-foot-tall ghoul sniper. Maybe the Lone Wanderer is feeling merciful, but even if they are, the mugger is likely to get themselves killed the next time they try to shake down someone with any combat experience whatsoever (which, this being the Wasteland, a lot of people do).
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • Too many to count, but the thugs in Camp Searchlight stand out. This gang of looters are hanging out in a basement in a very radioactive town full of giant scorpions and ghouls, looking for radsuits. You know, the things you'd expect to bring before going in? It's a real wonder how they haven't turned into (feral) ghouls yet, seeing as the basement is also teeming with radiation and they're still in their non-radiation-shielding metal suits. If you bring them the wayward suit package, they'll agree to split the loot with you, if you help them loot the police station and the fire station. Note that the fire station is home to a gigantic queen scorpion, which you'll have to help take down. Once you've looted everything (because the thugs do nothing but loiter around), their leader tells you that he's going to kill you now, choosing the worst possible time to double cross you. At this point, you're probably pointing your powerful gun at his face already, who seriously didn't take into account the fact that you've probably already taken several levels in badass and are clad in power armor or whatever protective suit you're wearing, and blow him away (and possibly a few of his men, if you have the action points for it) the moment he stops talking. Winner takes all.
    • There's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it Easter egg that counts under this trope. In Jacobstown, there are former resort bungalows which can be entered. One has a long-dead skeleton in an overturned chair next to a table where a card game clearly went awry. No points for guessing that the corpse on the floor was shot for being a cheater, as this trope first comes into play when the cheater's cards on the table are examined. Five kings. All of the same suit. It's entirely possible that they were shot for being terminally stupid, rather than just being dishonest.
    • Caesar comes close to this. When you leave the Lucky 38, you get an audience with him and full forgiveness for crimes against the Legion, even if you've been using Legionaries for target practice. When you meet with him, he asks you to destroy a Securitron army in a bunker underneath the Fort. He has confiscated your Platinum Chip, which is the only way to enter the bunker, but gives it back and sends you in there fully armed and unsupervised. If you activate the army for your or Mr. House's use, Caesar will assume that you destroyed it nonetheless. This might just be bad programming, but after destroying/activating the Securitron army, you can kill the guards in the weather station and return to the Fort fully armed.
    • Some of Caesar's troops in his Fort fit this. If you play a female Courier, some will attempt to insult and belittle you. Even if you're walking around in power armor and wielding a plasma rifle. While they're wearing salvaged football gear and armed with a machete.
    • Speaking of the Legion, Vulpes Inculta is usually a nightmarishly intelligent Manipulative Bastard, but he makes perhaps the dumbest decision in the entire game: choosing to deliver the Mark of Caesar to the Courier, alone. With no guards, or even anyone to report back to Caesar if something goes wrong. Regardless of how many Legionaries you've already killed. Heck, even if you haven't killed any Legionaries, the Legion in general and Inculta in particular are hated by almost everyone. It's hardly unlikely that someone with a grudge against the Legion might see him on the Strip and decide to get rid of him, or that Robert House might decide he's enough of an annoyance to get rid of, and it can only be attributed to luck that no one else kills him if you let him leave.
    • If you killed Vulpes in Nipton, his replacement, Alerio, is even dumber. At least Vulpes had the excuse of you not having tried to kill him when you last encountered him, which might suggest to him that you either sympathize with or are afraid of the Legion. Alerio knows you don't and you aren't, yet he still doesn't think to bring anyone with him to protect him.
    • President Kimball gives a speech maybe a half-mile from Caesar's Fort. This is slightly mitigated by the fact that he's doing it deliberately to show the Legion that he isn't afraid of them, and more-than-slightly aggravated by the fact that his security has so many holes that multiple Legion assassins manage to infiltrate the venue anyway.
    • Speaking of security with more holes than swiss cheese, House really should have changed the login credentials for the entrance to the room with his life support capsule, especially if the Courier has been overly friendly with the NCR or the Legion lately. Or installed an override to the elevator to his life support room. Or maybe just not put an elevator to his life support room in the Lucky 38.
    • The Omerta bosses decide to try to ally with the Legion in order to take over Vegas for themselves. This could not end well. Even without taking the Courier into account, should they go through with their plan and bomb the Strip, either the Omertas will be killed by the Legion, enslaved by the Legion, conscripted by the Legion, some combination of the three, or killed by the NCR should they beat back the Legion. Worse, they think they'll get the better of House with poison gas bombs. Between the Omertas and House's Securitrons, one of those forces is immune to poison gas, and it isn't the Omertas.
    • Pacer seems to be under the impression that the Kings would be able to kick the NCR out of Freeside. The Kings number in the dozens, tops. The NCR numbers in the thousands. Yeah, they're busy with the Legion, but they're not so busy that they can't send enough men to wipe out the Kings if it comes to that. Furthermore, if the King decides to make peace with the NCR, he won't accept it unless the Courier used their favor with the King to get him to make it happen (in which case he recognizes that the King has to stick to his word and goes along with it), and he and two other Kings try to kill the King in front of a dozen other Kings and a dozen NCR soldiers. He gets shot down quickly.
    • Bruce Isaac had to flee New Reno because he robbed a mob boss and had sex with said mob boss's daughter. Both were… not smart moves.
    • And how about that idiot who found a radiation suit and assumed it made him completely immune to radiation because he couldn't "feel" any radiation in highly radioactive areas? You typically can't feel radiation anyway, only the after-effects, and by the time you are able to feel it, you're as good as dead several times over. Anyway, you can find this guy dead next to a radioactive dump site, and the note on his body shows that he was preparing to drench himself in some goop that was so horrifically radioactive that it would've been an extreme hazard to every living thing within a hundred feet. The Geckos inhabiting the area (and probably what killed him) undoubtedly did the Mojave a favour.
    • In the same vein, there's Trash, a girl who decided that life as a human sucks, so she'd become a ghoul. How? By exposing herself to excessive amounts of radiation, naturally. She lives in a shack on the southern edge of the map, in an old nuclear test site. How she even got there is a mystery considering it's surrounded by tough-as-nails feral ghouls. Of course, the odds of ghoulification are very low, but she assumes it's a sure thing, and when you reach the shack where she's staying, she's usually dead (she may spawn alive as a bug). Basically, mixing radiation and idiots are a fatal combination, at least for the idiot.
    • Benny counts. He's a Smug Snake to begin with whose regular betrayals mean that he's run short on allies, but a female Courier with the Black Widow perk can seduce him and then murder him after sex. How exactly did he think things were going to turn out with the person he'd already tried to kill once? Furthermore, if you don't kill him (whether you forgive him or just don't get the chance), he decides his way out is to activate the Securitrons under Fortification Hill. Where Caesar has camped out. This is likely to be what gets him killed, unless you're really interested in saving him, but even if the Legion hadn't been there, the Securitrons are still controlled by House, who knows Benny betrayed him.
    • If you have high enough fame with a faction, you can start indiscriminately killing their members. They'll fight back in the moment, but you can leave and come back later, and they won't know whether you're an enemy or not. After all, you may have killed dozens of them, but you took the jobs they offered you first, so you're so confusing!
    • This could just be Gameplay and Story Segregation, but if you wear faction armor from a faction, most members of that faction will not recognize you as an enemy even if you are Vilified by that faction. The Powder Gangers and the Legion are no exception, regardless of whether you're playing as a female Courier. The Powder Gangers and the Legion are both entirely comprised of men.
    • During the final assault on Legate Lanius' camp, two NCR Rangers arrive before the player and head up the climb toward the Legion's military leader. NCR Rangers are famed sharpshooters, while Lanius is the greatest hand-to-hand combatant in an army that specializes in hand-to-hand combat. Naturally, the NCR rangers decide to run at Lanius with knives and are taken out in short order.
  • Fallout 4:
    • During the Pre-War rush segment, you encounter a neighbor who is preoccupied with packing up his luggage instead of running directly to the Vault, despite the fact that the bombs will fall at any second.
    • Rory Rigwell from the Irish Pride Industries Shipyard, who had the bright idea to try to domesticate Mirelurks. To absolutely no one's surprise, you find his body down below in the shipyard, presumably killed by his beloved "pets".
    • The Railroad can also be viewed as this, considering that despite their status as a supposedly super-secretive organisation, the password to their underground hideout is "Railroad".
  • Fallout 76 has an NPC named Ford that can spawn that accidentally blew himself up with an explosive device that he stole.
• Many of the "be weird" options in Fantasy Quest are fatal and pretty obviously so. Like, say, jumping off a cliff.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy II: Leila accuses the party of this after she tricks them onto her ship with the intent of robbing them of their possessions. Unfortunately for her, the three dupes she tricked are the Rebellion's top agents, more than a match for her pirate crew. And fortunately for her, they're willing to offer her a Heel–Face Turn.
  • In Final Fantasy VI, check before sending Sabin, Gau, or Strago into a Colosseum fight. Each one may have learned a skill designed to hurt or heal others at the expense of his own life. No longer under control of the player, they may fail to realize that these moves make sense only in team battles, if ever. When fighting alone, it's instant defeat.
  • In Final Fantasy VII, Aeris/Aerith's iconic death is the result of a string of idiocy from everybody involved except the villain himself. Aeris goes to the City of the Ancients, alone, for no reason which is apparent to the party at the time, without even explaining to anybody but Cloud where she's going or why (and even her words to Cloud aren't straightforward), under the belief that she can somehow deal with Sephiroth by herself, in order to pray there to get the Holy Materia to stop the Black Materia. There's no reason she had to go there by herself, nor any indication she even knew how to activate the Holy Materia and was doing anything other than trying to get it to work on blind faith, and it's only Sephiroth's own sadistic desire to screw with Cloud that keeps him from murdering her long before the party even shows up. The party themselves don't help, since once they find Aeris, they send Cloud across the pool to her, alone, despite the fact that he's already demonstrated that Sephiroth can mind control him. It's only the party snapping Cloud back to his senses at the last second that prevents him from killing Aeris himself.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics:
    • Rapha (or Rafa in the original translation) becomes Too Dumb To Live in the Riovanes Castle Roof battle of Chapter 3, where she charges blindly into Elmdore and his Assassins, even though she barely has enough HP to withstand more than two hits and the Assassins can kill instantly. Considering the battle is lost if Rapha dies, and she starts out closer to the enemy than Ramza's party does, keeping her alive proves extremely frustrating for all but the fastest-moving parties. Her steadfast determination to get herself killed eventually prompted the "Rafa Syndrome" description for AI-controlled characters. However, it should be noted that this is actually a Justified Trope, as Rapha has recently become suicidally depressed.
    • The Assassins themselves are actually Too Dumb to Live as well, though more in a "Skewed Priorities of enemy AI" kind of way. The easiest way to beat the Riovanes Roof battle is to unequip one of your characters, lowering their HP. Rather than go for the instant win in Rafa, they will try to kill your naked character, leaving you ample time to win the battle.^note Then again, in-universe, they would probably still have to deal with your party after killing Rafa anyways, either as justifiably-enraged enemy combatants or as witnesses to their crime, so it does make a certain amount of sense for them to divert their attention.
  • Final Fantasy VIII:
    • Rinoa. Hey! Let's go alone and sneak into the room of an all-powerful evil sorceress and ask her to put on a bracelet that will neutralize her power! Of course she will be gullible enough to accept jewelry from a complete stranger who's trespassing in her home and not, say, mind control you and put you in peril, forcing your friends to drop what they're doing and come rescue you — wait, nope, that's exactly what happens. Though to be fair, the realization of her mistakes and that she can't keep up with the rest of the professional soldiers in the party is a part of her character development and she becomes much less impulsive and foolish as the game progresses.
    • Quistis (and by association the entire gateway team) ends up an even worse case: she quite rightly rips Rinoa's plan to shreds and scolds her for not taking the situation seriously enough... but then she feels guilty for being mean to Rinoa and insists on going back to apologize in the middle of the mission. She does at least order Zell and Selphie to remain at their post, but the two of them decide to accompany her anyway and she does nothing to stop them, with the result that all three of them wind up accidentally locked into Caraway's study and forced into a lengthy, dangerous sewer-crawl. It's only by pure luck that they blunder their way back to where they were supposed to be just in time to complete their assigned task, and unlike Rinoa, all three of them are professional soldiers who should know better.
  • Final Fantasy XII: The early villain Judge Ghis. Upon receiving a very important and very powerful piece of rock, one that he knows kingdoms were conquered and vast resources spent to acquire, he decides to find out what it does. By hooking it up to his giant airship's power supply. Said MacGuffin turns out to be a magic-absorbing stone. A magic-absorbing stone being inserted into the power supply of an airship powered by magic stones. This is only minutes after Larsa's weaker, but still magic-absorbing stone eats a magic attack intended to kill the entire party, right in front of Ghis. And he did this in mid-flight, for some reason.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics A2:
    • In several Escort Missions, some of the units you have to protect are several levels lower than the enemy party, yet they will gleefully run up and try to attack them when their damage is equivalent to poking someone with a stick. And yes, doing this will invariably activate the enemy's counter attack skill, which is likely to kill them in one hit. So be sure to have your Paladins covering them at all times, 'kay?
    • An egregious example are the Editor and the Head Chief, two Seeq that fight on your side and sometimes against you. By the time you'll be facing them, your regular units will be around level 20 at the very least. The Editor is a level 10 Ranger who only knows Vanish. The Chief is a level 1 Berserker with no skills. Even with mercenaries to even up the playing field, they will still gladly go toe to toe with enemies who can tear them apart with a thought.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: Teledji Adeledji, one of the antagonists leading up to the Heavensward expansion. Having just broken the news of the Sultana's (supposed) assassination to Raubahn (her best friend and general of her armies, no less), he all but rubs it in Raubahn's face, gloating that the Sultana's death is quite beneficial to him and his machinations. It hardly needs saying that a barely-three-foot-high unarmed Smug Snake doing this to a seven foot tall killing machine is a bad idea — and Teledji learns this quite quickly when Raubahn, in a blind rage, cuts him completely in half, only allowing him one moment of pure terror before he dies. Lolorito nearly joins him when he picks up where Teledji left off; the only thing saving him is Illberd stepping in and cutting off Raubahn's arm.
• Fire Emblem:
  • The series in general can be really bad about this. Almost any game in the series will have at least one map where a green (NPC) character will attempt to fight his/her way through the entire enemy army and die, or a recruitable enemy will rush your party and get slaughtered by your counterattacks. The only ways to end the Artificial Stupidity is to either have your army haul ass and recruit the character as quickly as possible, or rescue the character until no enemies are present.
  • Astrid in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance when you first meet her. Despite being an archer and having barely any Speed, Defense, or HP, she rushes straight towards the enemy and will usually be killed on the first turn if Ike doesn't get to her, which requires a great deal of shoving from the other party members.
  • In Awakening, the villager NPCs in one mission are completely unarmed, and yet will still rush towards the enemy and get themselves killed as a result, even if you just wasted a Rescue staff trying to pull them out of danger in the first place!
  • A tragic example occurs in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, as Dimitri in the Golden Deer route is so blinded by his Roaring Rampage of Revenge that he labels the Alliance as enemies just for "being in his way" and sends his forces to attack his former friends despite them trying to accomplish the exact same thing. After his forces are predictably slaughtered in the two-front battle he started, he's unceremoniously Killed Offscreen after trying to charge at Edelgard and what's left of her army (which is more than what's left of his) all by himself.
  • Fire Emblem Engage: Not one, but both kings of Elyos get hit with this:
    • Morion, King of Brodia, is engaged^note no pun intended in a war with Elusia, when the king demands to fight Morion personally. Diamant thinks that there's something fishy about all of this, so he advises his father to stay put and let him and Alear handle this. Morion ignores his son's warnings, Leeroy Jenkins into battle by himself with little protection in Chapter 9, and, predictably, Hyacinth doesn't hesitate to use the opportunity to kill Morion then and there.
    • Hyacinth himself isn't immune either, since, in the very next chapter, Hyacinth helps revive Sombron. The reason why he wanted Morion specifically is because Sombron feeds on the blood of royals. However, since Hyacinth himself is a royal as well, it's easy to guess what happens to him once Sombron gets revived.
• The entire Armacham research team in charge of Project Perseus in First Encounter Assault Recon aside from Chuck Habegger, Marshall Disler, and Harlan Wade. When Paxton Fettel, the psychic commander that was born and raised to control an army of mindless meat puppet soldiers, was 10 years old, Alma Wade connected to his mind in what was called a "synchronicity event", and whatever happened was apparently catastrophic. At the time of the first game, Fettel is an adult and fully in charge of the clone army, and Chuck Habegger starts seeing evidence that another synchronicity event is coming. Everyone except Disler and Harlan Wade ignore his warnings, and when they take his side, they are also ignored, until finally the synchronicity event occurs and hundreds of Armacham employees are slaughtered in the ensuing chaos.
• Five Nights at Freddy's:
  • The protagonist of the first game keeps coming back to the pizzeria filled with dangerous animatronics for some crazy reason. He even turns the killer animatronics to their most dangerous levels on Night Seven.^note Though to be fair, he can also tone down their levels. Either Mike Schmidt has a death wish, or he's just that confident in his abilities.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's 2 has Jeremy Fitzgerald, who also keeps coming back, despite him having to deal with even more animatronics than Mike. Though he at least doesn't come in on Night 7… where Fritz Smith takes his place, and he can change the animatronics' threat level up to its maximum if he so desires (he even gets fired after one night, dumbfounding even the management). This also makes Jeremy look dumber, seeing how he never once got the idea to do that.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's 3 has the most egregious example with its unnamed protagonist. While Mike, Jeremy, and Fritz were surrounded by animatronics with no real safe way to an exit (thus effectively trapping them in the building), not only does this one have to deal with just one animatronic, but they have an exit right next to them, meaning that they could leave the building at any time. And they still come back every night.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location blatantly lampshades it. Twice. First Baby asks out loud what kind of person would willingly return to such a place, and later, the AI voice will compliment that one of the traits they enjoy in a worker is the absence of a survival instinct. Of course, if the player actually had any survival instinct, he wouldn't have listened to Baby's instructions to go to the scooping room and been disemboweled.
  • Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator eventually reveals that all the protagonists were the same guy, William Afton's son, Michael Afton, who was trying to destroy his father after William's machinations led to Michael dying and coming back as something… less than human, thus explaining the "stupidity".
• FTL: Faster Than Light occasionally has Auto-Scout ships with no shields. There are also asteroid field environments where asteroids will periodically pelt both ships, weakening their shields (if any) and damaging their hulls if they run out of shield. Shieldless Auto-Scout ships can occasionally be found in asteroid fields. Should this incident happen, you can win without firing a single shot at all. Even worse, it's possible for scouts to be equipped with only beam weapons, which any ship equipped with a shield can No-Sell. The only ships without shields are the Zoltan Cruiser B (fixable for the low price of 100 scrap), the Stealth Cruiser (which the enemy would have no way of knowing exist), and other auto-ships.
• Game & Watch: The civilians in Manhole will walk right into an open pit. That's why it's your job to make sure that they don't.
• Throughout the beginning of Gears of War, one thing is clearly established: Take Cover! or die. Poor Anthony Carmine complains about his gun getting jammed and rises up out of cover, quickly earning him a bullet through his skull.
• Most of the Mooks in one of the levels of The Getaway. Instead of trying to escape a ship that has a bomb on it, a major gunfight ensues and they start killing each other.
  Frank Carter: Half the waterfront's about to go up and you're STILL arguing!
• The Godfather:
  • You will encounter citizens who run in the same direction as your car and throw themselves in its path. These same citizens' the best solutions for when two gangsters are having a shootout are to a) run right between the gangsters, b) simply keep walking between the gangsters; maybe they'll mi—BANG, or c) if they're already in the middle, just stand with their arms up and go "AAAAHHH!"
  • Almost all of the shopkeepers and racket bosses may qualify — if you push them too far, they will fight back, despite your proving to them that you won't flinch from beating the crap out of them or shooting them or others. It's almost as if they know they're indispensable and that you'll be worse off for killing them.
• Played for Laughs in God Hand. In one cutscene, Gene punches two Mooks through a window, turning them into A Twinkle in the Sky. When a third is about to attack, Gene gestures to him to stand in front of the same window. Guess what...
• God of War Ragnarök: Kratos is a god-killer, has single-handedly wiped out an entire pantheon, and is clearly unaffected by Heimdall's Combat Clairvoyance. When Kratos tries to show mercy, how does Heimdall respond? By repeatedly threatening to murder Kratos's son. Suffice it to say, no one holds it against Kratos when he finishes Heimdall off.
• Golden Axe: As the page image above demonstrates, the player can invoke this on enemy NPCs that think it's a good idea to lunge at your character while the latter is at the edge of a bottomless pit. Simply sidestep your foes and laugh as they throw themselves into the abyss to their Epic Fail deaths.
• In the Grand Theft Auto series:
  • Civilians.
    A car is driving close to the sidewalk at high speeds; do you:

    A. Run or dive in the opposite direction of the car. "I'm not going to risk it!"
    B. Not do anything. "It doesn't look like the car is going to come close enough to hit me."
    C. Strategically dive into its path, making sure your head lines up perfectly with the front tire. "Ha! This close call should teach you a lesson about driving reckle—"
    If you answered C, congratulations! You are qualified to be a civilian in the GTA universe.

    A possible rationale for this behaviour comes from one of the game's fake radio ads, for a legal firm that will "even teach you how to throw yourself in front of a bus and pretend to be injured" with the intention of then suing the driver. Unfortunately, the player character tends to be the guy who 1) doesn't give a shit about lawsuits, and 2) is often driving fast enough that the hapless civilians in his path don't have to "pretend" to be injured… or dead.

  • Grand Theft Auto 2: Many of the nonplayable characters in seem to qualify, from fellow carjackers who drive into burning cars that are already on the verge of exploding, to gang members who side with the player character no matter how many members of their gang you killed, so long as you have killed a higher number of people from a gang they hate.
  • Lance Vance from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. To put it shortly, anyone who's stupid enough to betray their former partner out of spite, especially one who got the nickname "The Harwood Butcher" for a reason, is officially just asking to get iced.
• In a Newgrounds flash game called Gretel and Hansel, Hansel (the older brother and leader in the original fairytale) is very, very, very mentally challenged. He watches his little sister burn to death and doesn't seem fazed when she dies horribly in front of him in Part 2. Speaking of Part 2: Instead of saving his sister from the pit she fell into, he chases after a fairy and leaves Gretel to deal with a tree monster. When Gretel needs saving a second time, he shoves the fairy who's willing to help into his mouth, cuts that same fairy in half with scissors, and even swallows those scissors. He then stands on a cliff's edge tip-toed. No wonder Gretel is our protagonist.
• In Guns, Gore & Cannoli, the Big Bad fights you in an airship while you're standing on a roof of a skyscraper while poison gas is rising upward and zombies are coming up the stairs. He could just leave you to your death and fly away. Then again, at the end of the fight he gets Thrown from the Zeppelin and survives to return in the sequel, so maybe he was trying to make certain you die.

H - M

• Hades: Played for Laughs. The early access version of the game lacked a true ending, so when Zagreus escapes the Underworld and reaches the surface, there has to be some excuse for why he returns to the Underworld for another run. So the Narrator provides stupid ways to die, such as trying to befriend snakes, bears, and mountain goats, hitting himself in the head with a rake, and running into a wall painted to look like an open door. (Oh, and they return in the full game after you complete ten successful runs.)
• Halo: Sure, charge headfirst into that angry Hunter who'll kill you with one swipe of its shield, or drive your Warthog straight into the enemy kill box; no wonder the friendly AI have such a bad reputation.
• In Haunting Ground, Lorenzo witnesses Fiona escape and kill not one, but three crazed murderers bent on torturing her. She did this without weapons or prior knowledge of any kind, even though one of those murderers could turn invisible at will, and another was a giant of a man who could snap her limbs like twigs. So obviously, the only logical course of action is for Lorenzo to declare, in front of Fiona herself, that he also wants to kill her. Right before trying to attack her. This does not end well for him.
• Heavy Rain:
  • Jason, the 10-year-old kid who acts about 3. Despite repeated admonitions from his father to "stay here", and having already wandered off once, Jason wanders off in the middle of a crowded shopping center, gets outside, and somehow crosses the street. When his father gets outside, Jason darts into traffic, prompting Ethan to dive after him… and Jason dies, despite not being directly struck by the car.
  • In the past, John Sheppard dies playing hide and seek on a construction site, having gotten his foot stuck in an exposed, flooding water main and drowned. It didn't suddenly flood, because it's been raining all day, and he didn't fall in, because he would have been washed down the pipe and never seen again, so how did he end up in the pipe to begin with? He climbed down into it to hide. He also managed to drown with his face still above water, somehow, and apparently it never occurred to him to try to take his shoe off. (The failure to remove the shoe can be chalked up to panic, though.)
  • Madison, oh God, Madison. It's optional in that the player can take the hint that the doctor she's investigating is Obviously Evil and get the hell out of there, but the game seems to assume that Madison takes the obligatory torture porn route. This involves accepting an alcoholic drink, in the middle of the day, from a strange man who just agreed to give her prescription sedatives and who associates with violent criminals.
  • Pretty much every fatal or near-fatal situation Norman Jaden gets into could be avoided if he would simply bring backup with him when he goes to investigate.
  • Ethan is pretty terrible at this, too. While he’s protected by Plot Armour, he: refuses to try and get some sort of aid to help find his son despite not being threatened not to, crawls through a vent littered with glass instead of trying to sweep it out of the way with his sweatshirt-covered arm, continues doing the Origami Killer’s trials without looking around after the Bear trial revealed his reward was next to him the whole time, and feels the urge to continue doing the trials despite it being faster^note while the trials on their own are theoretically faster, they’re very painful and require some recovery time he wouldn’t need if he merely searched and less dangerous to complete two or three and check the possible addresses it could be.
• Hector: Badge of Carnage has many of the inhabitants of the town of Clapper's Wreake qualify, but the town's police force qualifies almost to a man. By the time Hector takes over the hostage negotiations, they have lost 37 hostage negotiators. They just keep sending them forward and the Terrorist keeps shooting them in the head with a sniper rifle. You'd think they'd eventually realize that the terrorist isn't interested in negotiating (or at least not with the script they're using, which they really should have changed at some point…)
• The Henry Stickmin Series is built on having many humorous Epic Fail endings that as often as not have an element of this. Some can at least be excused by the game being inconsistent with whether real-life logic, fiction logic, or no logic will apply to any given action, but even so, some actions couldn’t end well no matter what, such as Henry trying to open a door with a bomb when he has no room to get out of the blast radius.
• Inverted in Hi-Fi RUSH — Chai is too dumb to die. Despite getting a lot of Amusing Injuries, he survives everything, including being shot from a cannon into the top of Vandelay's HQ (as a part of his own plan), pretty much unscathed.
• The later House of the Dead games are actually surprisingly good at averting this. 3 and 4 simply don't have any civilians to worry about, and House of the Dead: OVERKILL has civilians waiting out in plain sight and clearly shouting for help instead of surprising you and startling you into shooting them — they are still sometimes Too Dumb to Live in other ways, though, such as standing stock still in places where they end up blocking your shots at the mutants, or running toward hordes of them, rather than away.
• In The Legend of Zelda game Hyrule Warriors, watch your allies crowd around giant bosses and just die by the bushel when they make huge, sweeping attacks.
• In Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, the Big Bad Nazi scientist has found a machine that is supposed to turn anyone it's used on into a god, but instead just kills everyone it's used on. When he finishes running all his soldiers through the machine and killing them, he decides to test a new setting of it on the heroes who've been trying to stop him. When Indy points out that, if the experiment succeeds, the scientist will be facing an enraged god, the scientist turns the machine on himself instead. And is killed.
• Jade Empire has a sequence where you can help the target of a bounty escape the city. To do so, you have to talk to the city guards while he leaves, telling them he's left the city. Only, instead of simply walking out like a normal traveler, he takes the opportunity to practice walking in a fashion obviously designed to call attention to himself. Then he goes back and does it again. It's like the game's begging you to tell the guard, "You know what, I guess he hasn't left yet. See that idiot? That's him."
• One of the bosses of the "Three Kings" mission in Just Cause 2 uses a sort of satellite missile system to try and kill you. Thing is, you're on top of a building, without much room, and if you stand in certain spots, he'll happily blow himself up without even touching you.
• Cindy from Kindergarten is this in both the first game and its sequel thanks to the games' "Groundhog Day" Loop mechanic:
  • In the first game, the player can choose to empty a bucket of blood over her head, instead of Lily like she wants. If they do so, she'll run into the street (which doesn't have as much as a fence separating it from the kindergarten playground) in a panic and get run over by a car.
  • The second game is an even bigger example, since she doesn't even have the excuse of being panicked this time. The protagonist needs to cause a distraction, and does so by telling Cindy to stick a fork in an electrical socket. She complies, with predictable results.
• Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep: Many fans feel that his real problem isn't Eraqus's Black-and-White Morality (which he has plenty of Properly Paranoid reason for, actually), but his lousy actual decisions. His scars? In a flashback, he tried to Leeroy Jenkins a Motive Rant-ing Xehanort (instead of using Light from a safe distance), who "pepper-sprayed" him with Darkness when he got close enough. Terra's Darkness? Tempered by Xehanort, who — thanks to Eraqus's Easily Forgiven invitation — has a front-row seat at the Mark of Mastery. Ven's the Living MacGuffin for Xehanort's plan, and Terra won't let Eraqus Shoot the Dog for the greater good? Eraqus should've just explained everything to both boys. While Eraqus does finally learn his lesson, it's too late, as Xehanort kills him In the Back for his stupidity. However, in the secret ending, it's revealed that Eraqus did manage one competent thing mid-death: hiding his Light-heavy Heart in Terra to preemptively protect him from Xehanort's full Demonic Possession-via-Darkness.
• Knights of the Old Republic: Xor, a washed-up, Psycho for Hire mercenary with a predilection for female Cathar. How stupid do you gotta be to walk up to a human and a Cathar who are packing lightsabers in an era where they are either Jedi who can kick your ass if provoked, Sith who don't even bother waiting for provocation, or someone who has killed either and taken their lightsabers who can definitely kick your ass, and offer to buy the Cathar woman who is packing a lightsaber? And despite being fortunate enough to get away with your head, limbs, and other appendages attached, how stupid do you gotta be to come back to their ship with a couple of your low-rent mercenary buddies and try Bullying the Dragon against two Force wielders and whichever heavily-armed companion they take off the ship at that point?
• The Last of Us:
  • Unlike in most video games where the protagonist cuts their way through an army of foes, Joel and Ellie often run into enemies who have heard of them solely because they have a reputation for leaving a trail of bodies everywhere they go, and never seem to take that into account when they think about stepping up to oppose them.
  • Jerry, the surgeon whose death at the hands of Joel in the finale is what kicks off the plot of Part II (see below). Getting in the way of a heavily-armed Papa Wolf who has just slaughtered many of your colleagues to get to you with only a scalpel for your protection is not a smart move.
• A lot of people in The Last of Us Part II:
  • While it is an impressive display of loyalty to her friends, Mel's decision to willingly opt into frontline combat duty while five months pregnant leaves everyone around her urging her to just stay behind for the sake of her child. Sending a woman who can't run, crouch, or climb and might need medical attention and a safe place at any possible moment out In Harm's Way is clearly not a good idea at all. She tries to stab Ellie with a knife and Ellie is forced to kill her in self-defence.
  • Nora. Because when held at gunpoint by somebody when they know you participated in the brutal battering of her father-figure, it is certainly not a good idea to brag about how you still remember his screaming and how he was a little bitch who deserved to die.
  • Perhaps the biggest example of all is Whitney, the WLF soldier girl with the PS Vita. Plugging in your earpods and getting immersed in a game is just an obviously bad idea in a Zombie Apocalypse. It allows Ellie to sneak up and give her an Impromptu Tracheotomy, and even Ellie comments that it was a pretty stupid way to die.
• The special infected AI in Left 4 Dead are not always bright, but in Left 4 Dead 2, a Hunter and Jockey will be too happy to try to pounce you, despite the fact that you are revving a chainsaw aimed at their undersides!
• Lemmings:
  • The lemmings will merrily march into Bottomless Pits or Booby Traps if nothing stands in between.
  • The spin-off The Adventures of Lomax also qualifies: defeated enemies turn into normal lemmings. It can be heartwarming to see them happily run away and then float away on their umbrellas... until you reach the levels with water and then see them merrily jump into water and drown immediately after being rescued.
• Chloe of Life Is Strange could be the poster girl for Too Dumb to Live. Most of the early game revolves around rescuing her from the consequences of her own actions. Highlights include playing with a pistol in a junkyard and shooting herself, lounging on a popular and well-used train track, and provoking unstable and violent drug pushers.
• Like a Dragon:
  • The street trash in the games seem to be this in general, since it doesn't seem to matter how many of them get utterly and painfully thrashed by Kiryu, Majima, Akiyama, et al; if they see you, they charge straight at you for a fight. You'd think that after the fifth guy got a bicycle smashed over his head, they'd take the hint...
  • Kurohyo Ryu Ga Gotoku Shinsho and its sequel attempt to justify this by stating that, among Kamurocho's street gangs, getting into a scrap with Kiryu et al is a Rite of Passage: if you can get into a scrap with the Dragon of Dojima and walk away with your life, you're in.
  • In Yakuza 0, Yoneda smashes Tachibana's face with a sledgehammer even after his boss Kuze explicitly tells him that they need him alive to interrogate him and that further torture clearly isn't going to work. For his insubordination and monumental fuck-up, Kuze smashes his head against the floor and kills him.
  • In the second game, Sengoku is already in a bad way after Goda sliced him open for taking the young Haruka hostage to get at Kiryu. But then he proves incapable of keeping his mouth shut, as he accuses Goda of only getting where he is was only because of his father. Three guesses how well Goda takes that and the first two don't count.
• Love of Magic: Emily's Disposable Fiancé.
  Emily: I can forgive the infidelity, there were no emotional strings between us. But I cannot forgive stupidity in my future consort, and trying to cuckold a Council Battlemage was not a great sign of intelligence.
• The Poe Twins from Lunar Knights brag to the two main characters that their Casket Armors are unbeatable because one is immune to gunfire and the other is immune to swords. One of the main characters has a gun and the other has a sword, so you can guess how well that works out for the Poes. To be fair, Eddie (the gunproof one) was doing a bang-up job mopping up the Guild in Old Culiacan due to their adherence to the use of Solar Guns. It's when Lucian gets "drafted" that things go south for them.
• LunarLux: After the first phase of the Final Boss, Saros revealed that the Murk Serum he used on himself has 99% resonance, which he thought was enough to control his powers. He ends up getting screwed by that last 1% when he loses control of his powers and becomes a feral boss Murk, Chaos.
• Mari and the Black Tower: Harold's party continues venturing higher into the Black Tower, even after it's established that only Abbie is immune to miasma and is the only one who can cure others from it. On the HELLGATE floor, Vera kills them and revives them as miasma slaves.
• The Mass Effect franchise:
  • Conrad Verner deserves honorable mention. He's Shepard (the protagonist)'s biggest fan and asks you to make him a fellow Spectre despite having no combat experience. If Shepard blows him off, he picks a fight with a street gang and gets himself killed. If he survives, you can meet him again in Mass Effect 2 where he harasses a barkeeper over alleged red sand sales (which are actually legal on the planet they're on). If Shepard blows him off this time, he tries to arrest a gang on top of a flying bus... only to fall off, get hit by several cars, and fall into a turbine. Subverted in Mass Effect 3 (if he lives), because after forming a charity foundation and actually helping, he will take a bullet for Shepard unless you completed a certain quest all the way back in the first game.
  • Mass Effect:
    • On Feros, the Corrupt Corporate Executive in charge of the colony fed people to a mind-controlling Starfish Alien as a science experiment. When you go to arrest him, assuming you can't talk him down, he pulls a gun on you. Being Alliance military and a Spectre, you're a much faster draw.
    • Lampshaded when Wrex uses this as justification for fighting members of his own Dying Race.
      Wrex: Anyone who faces us is either stupid, or on Saren's payroll. Killing the latter is business. Killing the former is a favor to the galaxy.
  • Mass Effect 2:
    • Warden Kuril, who was supposed to give Shepard a prisoner from his jail, but instead decides to capture Shepard and hold them for ransom or to sell as a slave. Yes, he tries to take the galaxy's biggest badass, who is well-known for preventing an apocalypse two years ago, prisoner. Without even taking away their guns. Needless to say, it does not end well for him. And Shepard still gets the prisoner they want. The icing on the cake is Kuril boasting that the facility can easily handle three armed guests... he was wrong, of course, and things get worse when Shepard lets Jack out. The only time he isn't this is when you see the precautions for keeping Jack imprisoned; she's shackled in cryogenic storage and guarded by a trio of powerful Mecha-Mooks. But that still wasn't enough!
    • Admiral Rael'Zorah and his research team. They were experimenting on geth (robot) parts to design better weapons against them. What did they do? They deliberately allowed every geth to be part of a network even though they knew that geth grow more intelligent when more of them are linked together. They had absolutely no low-tech way of handling the threat of the geth taking over, such as a simple bomb. When their computer network was slow, they deliberately took down the firewalls to speed it up while the geth were fully networked. And they did all this on a ship with weapons. If not for the very fortunate actions of one of the researchers, far more people than just those on the ship would've probably been killed.
  • Mass Effect 3: Maya Brooks in the Citadel DLC. After getting unmasked as a Big Bad Friend, she's arrested and handcuffed. She only has a little time before the authorities arrive, so she decides to give Shepard a You Wouldn't Shoot Me speech while picking the cuffs behind her back, then run for it. However, she failed to notice Shepard's two teammates present, who are both also armed and hate her. If Shepard doesn't shoot her, she makes it about ten steps before someone else does.
    Liara: As escape attempts go, I've seen better.
  • One particularly stupid guy in Mass Effect: Andromeda took a loan out from Sloan Kelley's Outcasts, and seemed surprised when the vicious crooks demanded he pay them back. That alone would be plenty stupid, but he flees into the Kadara wastelands, where the unfiltered water is full of sulphur. After a few days, this idiot decides maybe everyone was just making this up, and takes a drink. Ryder eventually finds a recording of this decision, right next to the guy's corpse.
• The Big Bad of Max: The Curse of Brotherhood actually succeeds with his Body Surf plan before you catch up to him. The finale is a Puzzle Boss sequence where you have to reconnect his headset back to the mind-switching machine. If the boss simply moved too far away for you to do that or took the headset off, there would be no way to stop him.
• In Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, there are portions of the game where you are with a platoon of NPCs. If a grenade is thrown within radius of your team (regardless of whether the grenade came from the enemy or from you), the team member that spots it will run to the grenade and attempt to kick it away from the area. Ideally, this can potentially save lives if they spot a grenade you didn't see and kick it before all of you become a bigger bloody firework than The Kid, but then the usefulness also depends on how far the grenade is from the would-be-hero. If the grenade is far enough from the NPC, that NPC who sees it will run toward the grenade (sometimes even involving more than one NPC in the area seeing it and dashing toward it) and attempt to kick it, but arrive just in time for all of them to explode on impact. They will never figure out just how much time it'll take to get to the grenade to be worth risking their ass to save the platoon, nor if said grenade is within a distance that (as close as it is) is still avoidable by the rest of the platoon who are smart enough not to run to their death, and there are quite a bit of lols to be had when you're doing a casual play on one of the earlier levels where the stage is practically set up for making the friendly-mooks run to their deaths.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man (Classic):
    • Pretty much every enemy, but some are just laughable at how dumb they are. An enemy that runs toward you only to pole jump over your head and run back toward where they came, Metools that can be baited into pits...
    • However, the true winners of the Dumbest Beings on Earth award are some of the bosses. Toad Man either dances and gets interrupted by being shot or jumps about, Star Man can go the entire battle without shooting a Star Crash at you because of Water Wave, Metal Man is fatally weak to his own weapon, and Cold Man stands still in the opposite end of the room and attacks you with an ice wall or summons a cloud enemy that doesn't harm you directly but hinders your mobility and shooting if you get caught.
    • On the subject of story, Mega Man 9 takes the cake. Dr. Wily convinces eight of Dr. Light's robots to follow him and then sets them on the city, and then pins the blame for it on Dr. Light while claiming to be reformed. Somehow the entire world actually falls for this and calls for Light's arrest, despite the fact that Wily has tried to take over the world several times before. The actual good guys aren't much better. Wily claims to be reformed and trying to help Dr. Light solve the current crisis at least four separate times in the series, and every time it turns out he was behind everything the entire time while usually taking Light out, robbing him of several pieces of tech in the process, before escaping to his fortress. Somehow, Dr. Light and Mega Man keep falling for this.
    • Mega Man 11: Torch Man, as his name implies, is a fire-type Robot Master. As a type of training, he decided on Meditating Under a Waterfall. He survived, but it took months for him to recover.
  • The unnamed Neo Arcadian council in charge of Dr. Weil's punishment between the X series and Mega Man Zero. The man who single-handedly was responsible for a conflict that killed 60% of mankind and 90% of all reploidkind? Turned into a regenerating Reploid and exiled from the only populated city left on Earth to suffer. Because they put eight Judges he personally created in charge of the proceedings. Somehow no one realized that he could simply wait everything out for his plans to come into action, which he did and nearly screwed the world over on. In fact, one might as well say that humanity in general in the franchise are too dumb to live, starting with poorly handling Dr. Wily's constant world domination attempts and then truly coming into a neverending flux with their mix of discrimination and repeated ignorance involving Reploids. Like the whole Copy generation of Reploids that could literally impersonate anyone they have in their data.
  • The entirety of the Mega Man Battle Network universe is this. Almost everything in their world is not just connected to the internet but able to be completely controlled by it, including things that have no reason to be. The end result being that someone can remotely do things like make a stove go berserk spewing flame everywhere, lock doors to classrooms, cause traffic accidents, etc. The plans of the villains hinge entirely on the fact that everybody was too dumb to realize the number of potential vulnerabilities this sort of system creates. Then again...
• Metroid:
  • The Space Pirates decided to reverse engineer Samus Aran's vast and dangerous weaponry and other such functions of the Power Suit she wears. This was all well and good up until they tried to replicate the Morph Ball, which they know jack about. Since it's been made clear that Science Team has vapor for brains, they went ahead anyway. Result:
    Pirate Log: Aran's Power Suit technology remains a mystery, especially the curious Morph Ball function. All attempts at duplicating it have ended in disaster: four test subjects were horribly broken and twisted when they engaged our Morph Ball prototypes. Science Team wisely decided to move on afterward.
  • The leaders of the Galactic Federation aren't much better. After sending Samus to eradicate the Metroids, some of the higher-ups decide to create a top-secret testing/breeding facility for Metroids using the DNA of the Metroid Hatchling that Samus spared on SR388. At this facility, they decide to genetically alter the already-highly-deadly Metroids in order to remove their only weakness. Later on, when the X-Parasites infest the BSL Research Station (another secret Metroid breeding facility), they get the bright idea to try weaponizing the X-Parasites, despite figuring out by this point that the X are just as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than the Metroids that prey on the X.
• Minecraft: Snow Golems, who have some of the lowest health in the game, throw snowballs at any hostile mob in sight. Snowballs don't deal damage, but they do enrage the targets. They are also perfectly willing to attack highly dangerous mobs like the Warden, Ravagers, Creepers, or Piglin Brutes.
• In Mutant Football League, a low Intelligence stat makes for a clumsy player with poor reaction time who is likely to stumble onto a landmine or get eaten by a Sand Worm. Intelligence is an essential stat for most positions, but especially quarterback; the dumb QBs of the Orcs of Hazzard tend to wander off and step on a Bear Trap or what have you after they throw the ball, especially on their home field.
• Esher from Myst V: End of Ages. He admits to Watson that he considers his Mengele-esque experiments on the Bahro essential. And he wondered why Watson did not give him the tablet?

N - P

• The Neverhood: One of the stories written on the (very long) wall of the Hall of Records is the story of Klee, a retelling of the story of Joseph and his brothers. The retelling lampshades that the brothers are dumb as rocks for a) not realizing they're facing the brother they sold into slavery, b) falling for the same trick not twice (as in the Biblical story) but three times, c) not remembering their brother even after he tells them who he is.
• Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer: Provided you chose to proceed with the invasion of the Fugue Plane instead of defending against said invasion, Araman pulls a Last Villain Stand on you after the battle when Kelemvor has already agreed to let you try to get your soul back. Factor in that your party most likely consists of four 30th-level characters at this point.
• Vice-Admiral Arthur Norbank in Nexus: The Jupiter Incident is a subversion of the trope. His almost complete ineptitude in all things military regularly results in huge casualties and embarrassing defeats (sometimes at the hands of an inferior force). Unfortunately, despite many players wishing it was so, he can never seem to die. There is a mission where the player has the option to rescue the thought-to-be-dead vice-admiral. Fortunately, the player can choose not to save him without any consequences. The real problem is how the Nova Command even let this guy command his own shuttle, much less entire fleets, as his only real military victory owed much to the element of surprise (the enemy were prepared to fight Technical Pacifists and had never before encountered humans).
• In Night Ripper, Rachel is aware that there's a serial killer preying on women in the slummy area of the city she works in. A coworker offers to drive her home after her nightshift, but she turns him down, instead opting to walk home a long way in the pitch black night, unarmed. Her logic is that she'll be safe because the killer has only targeted prostitutes so far, but it doesn't seem to occur to her that he could very easily mistake her for one, too.
• Octopath Traveler:
  • Two antagonists from Primrose Azelhart's route qualify for suicidal stupidity.
    • Helgenish fatally stabs Yusufa, Primrose's Only Friend, in front of her as punishment for leaving his tavern in pursuit of Rufus, the Left Hand of the Crow, and heartlessly mocks Yusufa's tearful last words after her death. He apparently thought this was a good idea even though Primrose had just come out of the Sunshade Catacombs, a dungeon with Random Encounters, alive, indicating that she has combat capabilities. Sure enough, this results in Primrose revealing that her empty-headed, submissive persona was a façade all along and turning on Helgenish with the intent to kill.
    • Helgenish manages to Dig Himself Deeper into Too Dumb to Live territory after being defeated in battle. He asks Primrose to perform one last dance for him... and follows this up by sinisterly chuckling to himself, all but giving away his intent to stab her while her back is turned. Result: Primrose sees this "plan" coming from a mile away, runs past Helgenish and slits his throat.
    • Albus, the Right Hand of the Crow, as one of the three men who murdered Primrose's father, thus kickstarting her quest for vengeance, had already caused more than enough pain by the time she confronts him accompanied by Revello Forsythe, who is disgusted that a man he believed to be just and honourable had betrayed Geoffrey Azelhart for petty Evil Pays Better purposes. For his treachery and murdering Geoffrey, Albus would have had to fight Primrose to the death either way, but he decides it's a good idea to insult her deceased father to her face, claiming that he was a fool for remaining adamant to his faith and dying in the name of his convictions. Sure, Albus, What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Result: He dies painfully.
  • In general, the player can potentially invoke this on any enemy/boss that uses magic attacks by using the Cleric skill Reflective Veil to reflect their magic attacks back at them, with hilarious results. A well-known Cheese Strategy is Sealticge's Seduction + Reflective Veil, which is very effective against the all-powerful Sorcerer god Dreisang.
• Octopath Traveler II:
  • In Ochette's Chapter 1, some human villagers try to pressure the Beastlings into giving them more land. While most of them try to do so diplomatically (if a little aggressively), one particularly salty villager decides that it's a great idea to sicc a knife on the Beastlings in front of Juvah the white lion. Needless to say, if Ochette hadn't driven the villagers off in time, the one with a knife would have been mauled by Juvah.
  • During the Extra Stories, Mindt, a minor character in Temenos' route, is revealed to be Arcanette, the leader of the Moonshade Order. She reveals herself just to enrage Temenos and his companions out of sadism. Result: She gets killed by them.
• The Outer Worlds gives players the option to play as an Idiot Hero with bonus dialogue options for dumb characters. One particular option late in the game allows the player to insist they can handle a manual skip jump because they "know numbers really good". This results in their ship flying directly into the sun, killing everyone aboard and ending the game.
• Outlast:
  • The player character Miles Upshurt is a freelance journalist who does everything it takes for a story. He follows a tip to head into an insane asylum where supposedly evil, bad things are going down. And he heads there at night. With no proper means of protection.
  • The player character Waylon Park in the DLC episode Whistleblower could count, too, given that he sends out an e-mail (the aforementioned tip) to journalists about the things going down in the asylum. Subverted since he at least attempted to hide the sending of the e-mail by using his personal laptop and routing it through a different firewall and server. Unfortunately, it didn't work and it was still discovered.
• Outlaws: So... apparently the villain thought that the correct way to deal with an ex-lawman who was fired for "shooting a few men before the jury gave him the go-ahead" was "burn his home, kill his wife, and kidnap his daughter". The villain's henchmen lampshade this with increasing vigor as the body count rises.
• Overlord: The peasants coming to bring you news about the world. It's already dumb enough to come visit the leader of the evil army who's wrecking the world in the heart of his fortress and expect anything good to come from that, but demanding to be compensated (some even ask for a night with the Overlady)? Pit of Death it is.
• The civilians in PAYDAY: The Heist are quite suicidal and will usually be your source of money lost at the end of a successful heist. When a heist begins, all the civilians stand up and sometimes run around in a panic, even if they're in the crossfire during your shoot out with the police. Most people would find a place to hide and stay there or at least lie on the ground and don't move till the shooting stops, but the civilians in the game will freeze in place while the cops will gladly shoot through the civilians to hit you. You have to shout at the civilians at least two or three times to get them to stay down, but they may get back up anyway to get shot by you while Bain scolds you for shooting innocents.
• PAYDAY 2:
  • Pager Guy, the security dispatcher who contacts guards whenever they're in some form of distress, is a subversion. He's the most gullible idiot alive, including male American guards responding to pages with female voices, heavy non-American accents, or just plain not in English, on top of the hilariously bad excuses they give him for why they called in the first place. The subversion is the fact that Pager Guy is never physically present and can't be killed, but every time he believes that a Scottish lady's dog Binky was chewing on the radio and paged him accidentally, it pretty much guarantees that at least one person is dead and the establishment that his company was hired to protect is being thoroughly raided by the Payday gang. He will sound the alarm after four call-ins, but that is mostly due to him getting annoyed at the excuses rather than knowing that the calls were fake.
  • Jimmy gets a turn with this trope in the Hardcore Henry trailer. He manages to capture Chains, Wolf, and Hoxton, which is more than reason enough for the gang to want him immediately dead, but then he gives them back their guns after proving that he's a more credible threat than almost any of the gang's actual enemies. He ends up having to kill himself to make amends, leaving the energetic, weirdly affectionate coke-fiend version of himself to become the Payday Gang's Maniac.
  • Any Player becomes this during Birth of Sky when they jump out the plane without a parachute- intentionally or not.
  • Civillians in Stealth:
    • In the various Bank Heists, certain civillians are programmed to run towards the back to hit a panic button. The dumb part is that they are hitting the alarm on the Payday Gang, who should have body counts (Civillian or police) in the thousands. Most players often answers the "Hero" back with a rain of bullets- and usually doesn't keep them as a hostage if the heist continues in loud.
    • If they are not tied down, after a while, they will get back up and call the police, or worse, press a panic button. Most players answers back with a bullet and take the cash hit penalty to keep the heist in stealth.
• The Meat Sims in Perfect Dark have horrible aim, run past you, and will stand still in order to make it easier for you to kill them. Playing against them in the Combat Simulator is like squeezing a stress ball.
• Phantasy Star has Odin, who gets himself turned to stone when confronting Medusa. To his credit, he did remember to secure a potion that would cure petrification beforehand... but then he gives the bottle to a cat. Who doesn't have thumbs. The player has to rescue him from being literally Too Dumb to Live.
• Pikmin:
  • The titular little creatures have a bad habit of being this, on accord of automatic AI decisions getting them into often-perilous situations.
  • Louie inverts this trope when he is left behind on PNF-404. His obsessive hunger and lack of impulse control actually keep him alive.
• Plague Inc.:
  • Most humans on Casual. The Plague is threatening the world? Let's hug the infected and never wash our hands.
  • In turn, in Cure Mode, on Brutal sick people inject themselves with disinfectant and on Mega-Brutal everyone watches fake news. And they will refuse to shut down everything even if a hyper-contagious disease kills thousands in the country.
  • Most of the world in the Science Denial scenario. "Screw science, what would really help cure this horrific disease making our organs shut down is healing crystals and snake oil! The super-science utopia where all the scientists left just died off to this plague? I KNEW IT! Quarantine doesn't work, open everything up!". Really, if your plague hadn't wiped them out, global warming or MMS would have done them in anyways.
• Numerous Pokémon have some Too Dumb to Live behaviors. Regarding how one would expect the computer to know to pick the smartest move available when they know your types, and how they always send a mon with a move effective against you... they still do some pretty stupid things. These include:
  • Pokémon using Dig, hoping you're too stupid to pick Earthquake or Magnitude.
  • Pokémon using Fly or Bounce, hoping you're too stupid to pick Thunder or Smack Down.
  • Using Sunny Day so they can use Solarbeam, even if you have it on the currently selected Pokémon. (Does not count if it's Groudon or Kyogre, as their abilities trigger the same effects as Sunny Day and Rain Dance, respectively. The same applies to some Ninetales, some Politoed, and Mega Charizard Y.) It also applies when your current Pokémon can use even a single, weak Fire-type attack. It's as if the opponent is wearing a "Kill Me With Fire" sign. It gets even worse when it's a Grass-type using it, such as Cherrim.
  • Using Rain Dance so they can spam Thunder, even if your currently selected Pokémon can use Thunder (or any Water-type move, for that matter), or when you're using a Water/Ground type (giving you the double advantage of getting an attack bonus from Rain Dance and being immune to Electric attacks).
  • Using Selfdestruct or Explosion when the Pokémon out currently is a Ghost-type, or to a lesser extent, Rock-type or Steel-type. It also applies when you are in the middle of a two-turn move with a semi-invulnerable turn like Fly, Dig, or Phantom Force. Or when you have a Substitute around. Or when the Pokémon ordered to do so is the trainer's last one and their opponent still has multiple 'mons left.
  • Using Perish Song as their last Pokémon when you still have at least one other Mon conscious in your team.
  • In the Battle Tower's Multi-Battle mode, this trope occurs when your computer partner uses Earthquake and the only Pokémon affected on the field is the player's, while both of the opponents are immune to the Ground-type, whether through being Flying-type or via the ability Levitate.
  • Attacking with a barrage of Swallow, Spit Up, and Fling, despite not once using Stockpile or holding an item.
  • The move Curse does something different when a Ghost-type uses it. It deals 50% maximum HP damage to the user and lays a curse (like a poison damage-over-time effect) on the opponent. Phoebe's Pokémon in Generation III and Karen's Spiritomb in Generation IV will do this when they're below 50% HP (thus making the Pokémon faint), which could at least be seen as screwing the player. That doesn't, however, excuse wild Haunter who use it... it can sometimes make catching them a bit needlessly frustrating.
  • In Pokémon Emerald Version, Phoebe's first Dusclops will constantly spam the move Protect until it fails, leaving the player to freely use items and non-damage-dealing (Status) moves, then go to town when Protect's PP expires.
  • Graveler seems to have specifically evolved against the will of natural selection and appears biologically programmed to explode at the sight of other Pokémon. The same may also be said of Electrode, though it will at least put out a contractually obligated Thundershock or Tackle before choosing "death before dishonor."
  • Graveler's pre-evolved state, Geodude, can act pretty stupid when they appear in hordes in Pokémon X and Y. If you use an attack capable of hitting all of them at once (like Surf or Earthquake), most of them will survive on 1HP due to Sturdy. But then if one of them uses Magnitude, it will KO all four of its friends. (The urge not to laugh when it happens is very hard to resist.) It's less funny if one happens to be a shiny however.^note You aren't allowed to throw a Pokéball unless only one wild Pokémon is present, so you need to defeat every opponent except the one you wish to catch, which is harder when they are busy killing each other.
  • Anytime the computer (or player) uses Encore (a move which forces your opponent to repeat their last move) after your opponent uses a highly damaging move. Garchomp used Earthquake! Clefable used Encore!^note It should be said, though, that in competitive play this same move would actually work very well, as the player using Clefable could then simply switch out to a team member immune to Earthquake and leave Garchomp still Encored and in a checkmate position. Of course, you have to survive said damaging move with your Encore mon, making Encore a solid example of Difficult, but Awesome.
  • Starmie used Hydro Pump! It doesn't affect Groudon... ^note The area around Sootopolis is rife with Water-type Pokemon and their trainers, including Wallace, who make copious use of Water-type attacks. Primal Groudon's Desolate Land negates these attacks completely, making its compound Water-type weakness moot.
  • If you send out a Pokémon with extremely high physical defense against a special attacker who has a physical move you are weak to. Your opponent will keep using that physical move despite your defenses and their low attack stat even though the rest of their moves would do 3 to 4x more damage (and the same for the opposite stats).
  • Pyukumuku is stated to never leave a spot it likes, to the point of starving to death. Can't get more Too Dumb to Live than that.
  • As Pokémon GO is an Augmented Reality game involving visiting points of interest in real life, Niantic takes steps to prevent players from becoming real-life examples of this, such as pop-up messages warning the player not to trespass, drive, or enter dangerous areas while playing, measures to stop certain game functions if the player is detected to be traveling over 30 mph, and a "be aware of your surroundings" warning on the loading screen with an illustration of someone playing the game while unaware that he's walking towards a very angry Gyarados.
  • The fifteenth chapter of Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon has the Hero Killer of a villain targeting various Legendary Pokemon and turning them into stone send out messages claiming that they will turn Entei into stone at Showdown Mountain not long after they managed to petrify Latios and Latias. Said Pokemon are capable of flying faster than jet planes, turning invisible, and have enough psychic power to level a tidal wave. You have one guess where Entei goes to after the message is sent.
  • In Pokémon Trading Card Game, there is a character called Imakari? (yes, the question mark is part of his name) that hangs out in the side room of one of the gyms and will play against you if you challenge him. One of the cards in the deck is named after him, and all it does is confuse his Pokémon. Not yours, his.
• Pony Island: Digging through the code (and cryptic information Baphomet reveals) shows the crusader Theodore died because he failed to storm Jerusalem. The reason? He tried to go in through the Golden Gate. Of all the eight gates to the city, it's the only one that's permanently closed.
• Portal:
  • The entirety of Aperture Science deserves a posthumous stupidity award for empowering their AI Master Computer, who had already been proven to have murderous intentions, to release a deadly neurotoxin throughout the facility. Portal 2 explores this further by revealing that when they ran out of test subjects in the 1980s, the researchers began testing their inventions on themselves. The founder, Cave Johnson, died of respiratory problems from exposure to ground-up moon rocks.
  • Portal 2:
    • Inverted. A Logic Bomb that fries a bunch of robot Mooks and nearly kills GLaDOS does absolutely nothing to Wheatley. He is literally Too Dumb to Be Killed.
      GLaDOS: This. Sentence. Is. FALSE! [to self] don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it...
      Wheatley: Um... TRUE. I'll go "true". Huh. That was easy. I'll be honest, I might have heard that one before, though. Sort of cheating.
      GLaDOS: It's a PARADOX! There IS no answer!
    • During the Perpetual Testing Initiative, you encounter several alternate Caves, one of whom continually reminds the testers that they are in space every time he's on the recording. People still regularly blow through the hull searching for the big secret.
      Space!Cave: And another hull breach. Let's all give a big hand to the test subjects of sphere eighteen for briefly uncovering the company-wide conspiracy, which is that there's no air in space. Once again. We're in space. It's not a secret. I am sincerely regretting my decision not to install windows in this thing.
• Prey (2017) gives us Grant Lockwood, a cargo handler working aboard a space station orbiting the Moon. After being fired for gross incompetence, he never turned up to board the shuttle home. It turns out that this is because he decided to steal company property and spacewalk back to Earth. It goes about as well for him as you'd expect.
• [PROTOTYPE]:
  • The citizens of New York. You're driving a tank, and they think it's a good idea to run right to you. That's at least partially because they have this bizarre aversion to crossing the street at any place but a designated crosswalk. Clearly whoever programmed that was not a New Yorker.
  • Practically anyone who thinks it's a good idea to go one-on-one with Alex Mercer and isn't a Super-Soldier. Hell, anyone who thinks it's a good idea to be in the same state as Mercer, let alone actively engage him, unless they're a Super-Soldier. Even then, it's a risk.
  • GenTek undoubtedly qualifies, for making a viral superweapon as deadly as Redlight and not creating an antiviral agent capable of destroying it until after it had been released. And when they send troops after the guy who stole a vial of the more potent strain, Blacklight, and he threatens to break the vial, the troops assume he's bluffing and shoot him. Even if he had been bluffing, the vial could have easily shattered just from hitting the ground when he fell.
• As the Punisher is ascending some stairs in The Punisher, a group of mafia soldiers blow themselves up while trying to set an explosive trap. The Punisher even comments something to the effect of "Gnuccis and explosives. Bad combination."

R - Y

• Ratchet & Clank:
  • In Ratchet & Clank (2002), the Infobot for Aridia shows Skidd McMarx and his agent being shot at by missiles above the planet's surface. While Skidd has an appropriate reaction and sends out a distress signal, his agent thinks that the missiles are a fireworks display in Skidd's honor.
  • In Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, one of the Galactic Ranger missions on Tyhrranosis involves them trying to deactivate a forcefield offscreen while you assault the Tyhrranoid forces. One of the Rangers suggests that another stick his finger in the transformer, and once he's convinced he does so and is vaporized, which also lowers the forcefield.
• Rayman:
  • In Rayman Origins, most of the enemies lack any common sense.
    • In particular the Livingstones. Sure, stand in an area where a huge platform or wheel is a touch away from crushing you, or stand on an unstable platform over something dangerous. I'm sure nothing bad will ever happen.
    • The Waiter Dragons will bounce on gelatin limes into dangerous objects.
    • The Hunters. There are two types. The first type shoots blue missiles, which travel in a straight line and can be used as platforms. Since the hunter shoots the platform-missiles, they can easily be used to get to the Hunter and kill it. The second type is slightly smarter, and they shoot red missiles that seek out the player. If you stand near the Hunter, the missile will kill the Hunter.
  • Rayman Legends has somewhat smarter enemies. However, some enemies just stomp on Teensies. These enemies are harmless and immobile, and therefore easily defeated.
• Quite a few examples from Resident Evil:
  • After a large number of zombie outbreaks and failed business ventures resulting from said outbreaks, you'd think that Umbrella Corporation would move on to something different or at least put in stricter containment protocols, but nooooo... This ultimately has grievous consequences for Umbrella, as the United States government, infuriated over having to nuke one of their own cities to contain an outbreak, immediately drops the hammer on the corporation once it has proof of their culpability, leading to Umbrella ceasing to exist between the third and fourth games.
  • Subverted in Resident Evil: Wesker standing in front of the Tyrant about to impale him on the tip of its claw? Sounds dumb until you consider the fact that he planned for this to happen to unleash his Death-Activated Superpower.
  • In Resident Evil 2 we have the guy driving the truck during the opening. The zombie apocalypse is about a week old at this point. The police have been annihilated, the city has been cordoned off by the Army, the streets are on fire, routinely barricaded, and soaked with blood, most of the population is dead, dying, or undead... and this guy is still merrily cruising around the city wondering why the hitchhiker he just picked up bit off half his bicep.
  • Resident Evil 3: Nemesis:
    • The fat guy in the warehouse in the beginning of the game. His choices in this tough and horrifying Zombie Apocalypse scenario are A) risk tagging along with the highly competent and well-armed police officer and try to head for safety or B) tell said officer to go screw herself and instead try your luck hiding unarmed and alone in a shipping container in an unlocked warehouse. Guess which one he picks? Yep. Upon returning to the warehouse, you find that the shipping container has been broken into and not far outside it is the guy's lifeless corpse, being picked at by a pair of zombies.
    • Jill and her "pals" in the U.B.C.S. have a moment later on as well. They come across a cable car in dire need of some repairs, and it takes a solid hour-ish of gameplay to find the parts you need. After they finally scrounge together a power cord, oil, and a fuse, they fire the darned thing up and go full speed out of the city without bothering to check anything else on it, like the brakes. Cue epic cable car crash that separates and almost kills them.
  • Resident Evil 6:
    • In the Leon/Helena story arc, the two hapless victims in the first chapter who are trying to call for help by waving and hollering at the security camera. What makes them stupid is that both of them are doing the hollering and waving, whereas the smart thing to do would be for one of them to check down the hallway for any danger. A horde of zombies easily sneak up behind the two idiots while their attention is focused entirely on the camera and they get devoured for their trouble.
    • The valiant but ridiculously stupid helicopter gunner from the prologue, who jumps out and buys time for Leon and Helena to run to the safety of the waiting helicopter. Oh, but they're not running from zombies or bioweapons, they're running from a wall of flame. Yeah... Shooting a wall of flame isn't going to slow it down, buddy.
    • There's also the woman who opens a shutter door trying to find her husband, ignoring the loud banging and moaning on the other side, and gets dragged under and eaten for her trouble. And the Jerkass who decides he's better off on the streets of Tall Oaks than inside a fortified gun store, steals his girlfriend's weapon, and runs outside to immediately and unsurprisingly get killed. There's plenty of C-List Fodder in RE6, but several of them are impossible to feel sorry for because of how overbearingly stupid they are.
  • In the beginning of Resident Evil 7, Ethan, after getting an email from his missing wife Mia, who was presumed dead for years, decides that he will go look for her alone. With no weapons. Or any way to guard himself. Even after seeing odd (main gate is padlocked, no answer on the intercom, which is admittedly not that bad, but Ethan decides to continue by trespassing), disturbing (a... "scene" made of strung-up deer carcasses and buzzsaws, which he has no reaction to), foreboding (charred remains of Mia's belongings thrown outside the house, a sign that says "accept her gift"), or downright mentally traumatizing (watching a VHS of a a guy found with his mouth impaled on a pipe, then the bodies being dragged away horror movie style) sights, not once does Ethan consider going back. In fact, he's mostly unfazed. Better explained in the beginner's guide by Super Butter Buns:
    [describing Ethan] A stupidly determined, over-loyal husband who receives a "totally normal" update message from his wife Mia, who has been warning Ethan to "stay away" and being the total smartypants that he is decides to do the exact opposite of that and goes looking for Mia at the last place she was seen at [...] But quickly after arriving, it's very apparent something ain't quite right in the creepy house in the middle of nowhere, I dunno, could be that abandoned TV vans, that's kinda weird, or maybe that dead horse gateway into sludeland, that should raise a few red flags or MAYBE THAT TAPE THAT SHOWS PEOPLE GETTING KILLED IN THE HOUSE THAT YOU'RE CURRENTLY IN?!? NOPE?!? STILL GOING?! ALRIGHT!!!
• As his name implies, the protagonist of Retardo and the Iron Golem is stupid enough to mindlessly run into a spiked door (which he can clearly see) or getting himself impaled on a stalactite in cave by mindlessly jumping.
• Return Of The Obra Dinn:
  • Thomas Sefton walks up to a creature that has already killed several of the crew and starts poking at it and making jokes. It gets not only him killed, but a crewman just down the stairs is taken out as a consequence.
  • Marcus Gibbs engages a spike-hurling crab monster by standing directly in front of it and throwing an axe while smarter crew members, including his boss, tell him to get down.
  • Abigail Hoscut Witterel goes up on deck to try and find her husband, while the ship is under attack by a kraken.
    Martin Perrott: Have you lost your mind? Get back inside!
• Rimworld pawns have several needs, and an AI that can direct them to fulfill these needs. Unfortunately, "safety" is not among these needs. Many early colonies are ruined by a hungry pawn wandering into an insect nest to snack on some insect jelly or getting food poisoning from eating raw meat, being too impatient to wait for the cook to turn it into a safe-to-eat meal. They are also decidedly not Friendly Fire Proof and in the unmodded game they also don't consider anyone in their firing line so a colonist with an automatic weapon can pose more danger to your own people than to the enemy. Pawns on mental breaks are also prone to suicidal antics including trying to destroy an anti-grain warhead or going on a firestarting spree in the middle of a wooden base.
  • Tribal raiders are perfectly willing to raid colonies of space-age cyborg supersoldiers. It usually doesn't end well for them.
• The guests in RollerCoaster Tycoon can be this if you're feeling cruel. Sure, let's ride that incomplete rollercoaster. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
• There's a minigame in RuneScape that requires you to escort people through an extremely dangerous swamp for rewards. There are six people, two being easy to escort, two being a medium-difficulty escort, and the last two being hard difficulty. While one of the two hard escorts seems to understand that anything other than hiding behind a rock will get her killed, the other, a rowdy and excited old man, will gladly assault the giant snakes, panther-like monsters, spirits, giant snails, and the boat-eating tentacle monsters, with little consideration for the fact that he's more fragile than soggy toilet paper.
• See that big, tough-looking guy/gal clad in the crazy outfit and tattoos? The one that is followed by a legion of men and women in purple? That's the Boss of the Third Street Saints in Saints Row. He/she is also the harbinger of destruction who can survive whatever you dish out on him/her. Do you really want him/her to focus his/her entire attention on you? Many, many people throughout the series think that's a good idea. Very few of them survive after Boss is through with them.
• The Sapling has an instinct system that allows players (and random mutations in sandbox mode) to make species react to different stimuli in specific ways. Because of this, it is entirely possible for animals to do things like actively walking towards predators or extreme environments. And if they don't have another trait to help compensate for this behavior, the species will very quickly find itself going extinct.
• Scarface: The World Is Yours averts this sometimes. The last two guys in a gang of fifty will wise up and run away… or sometimes come back. Yes, Tony Montana just shot dozens of your friends dead with a LMG. You, with your pistol, will succeed.
• The enemy A.I. in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game isn't smart enough to avoid obvious and fatal environmental hazards. They'll walk into pitfalls and through roaring fires without a second thought.
• Shadowgate: Some of the deaths really show off the protagonist's stupidity. For example, the player can command him to go down a well. Rather than climb down in case the well is dry or the water is shallow, the text states that the hero dives headfirst into what ends up being a dry well.
  • Uninvited, from the same creators, also has some deaths that showcase the character's stupidity. For example, the game warns you not to go underneath the small hole in the church. You can ignore the game's multiple warnings not to go in and get mauled by a giant poisonous spider in the process.
• Nearly every single character in every Silent Hill game; player characters, villains, minor characters, and even characters who don't appear. Usually justified by them being a) trapped against their will, b) searching for someone important to them, c) completely batshit insane, or d) all of the above, and sometimes... it isn't. Special mention goes to Alex Shepard, who will stick his arm into a random hole in the wall, often leading to it being ripped off resulting in death.
• In SimAnt, when the ants are in the house, they can walk into electrical sockets and die.
• The Sims:
  • The Sims from The Sims and The Sims 2 are notorious for their less-than-intelligent behavior. The best known example is an accidental kitchen fire. Rather than flee the house, the Sims will scream and yell around the fire, occasionally then burning themselves to death.
  • The player-controlled Sims typically won't mess with it unless directed to do so, but guests tend to find the Sim-eating Cow Plant and its cake-shaped growth in the middle of its enormous tooth-filled mouth to be way more enticing than they should. Suffice to say: The Cake Is a Lie.
• Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions:
  • Electro for continuing the fight with Spider-Man on the dam after seeing that the rain reacted negatively with his powers.
  • A S.H.I.E.L.D. scientist giving a tablet fragment to Carnage.
  • Mysterio for making a last ditch attempt to regain the ToOaC in the face of four different iterations of Spider-Man. Lampshaded by Amazing Spider-Man.
  • Silver Sable follows the tracking device she'd placed on Juggernaut to the other side of New York after Spider-Man threw it away to get rid of her. At no point does she question Juggernaut's sudden departure from the construction yard without leaving a trail of destruction right in front of her, or the speed he's moving.
  • Very few of the villains in the DS version use their fragment pieces to boost their powers.
• Splatoon has its examples:
  • The Salmonid enemies in Salmon Run always approach the player's location, with the smaller enemies doing so with the intent of bashing their target into submission. Not necessarily bad on its own, but it goes from questionably intelligent to this should one of the players have a Roller, which can pave over dozens of Smallfries and Chum faster than you can say "Wryyyyyyy!" Smallfries have it worse, since even a Brush can sweep them aside, but the fact that they're small enough to go under arms fire does help them a bit...
  • Pearl, which is probably why she's a pop star and not a battler. During the news in Splatoon 2, there's mention of things she does that cause her to lose, such as counting handholds in Mussleforge Fitness, or going to the stage and performing in Starfish Mainstage.
• Star Control 2:
  • The race Thraddash is so warlike that they bombed their own civilization into the Stone Age. Nineteen times.
  • There's a sort of meta example with the Thraddash. You can make them your allies and have their ships built for you to use. At one point, you need to steal an artifact that's sacred to them. If you talk to them after that, they'll instantly know it was you who stole it (because it vanished after you asked to see it) and declare war on you permanently. However, if you leave their space and never talk to them ever again, they'll remain your ally and you can still build their ships, perhaps because they're just too stupid/lazy to come and accuse you outside of their space.
• The Artificial Stupidity in Star Ruler can become this if you game the system hard enough to get a massive lead on your enemies. This empire has ships that are orders of magnitude more durable, shooty, and quick-accelerating than ours! Let's declare war on him! What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
• Star Wars: Battlefront: Occasionally you'll get an AI ally who has himself as both Nemesis and Bait. Meaning that not only has he managed to grenade himself, he's managed to grenade himself more often than any given enemy has managed to shoot him.
• Oddly averted in Street Fighter V with rich girl Karin Kanzuki. She allows a ninja from another clan into her estate, and even worse, lets a known criminal who is known for physically restraining opponents with his chain and wouldn't have any problem doing it to her live in her estate. Both end well, surprisingly enough.
• Bowser of Super Mario Bros.. Numerous times, his defeats are literally due to his own stupidity. As a character, he displays even more idiocy, once setting a bomb that was a few feet away from him on fire to show how to set it off in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, and not realizing that he couldn't take over the world if it was destroyed in Super Paper Mario.
  • Wart of Super Mario Bros. 2 somehow thought it was a good idea to fight the Player Character while the Dream Machine is in the room tossing out vegetables everywhere, Wart's major weakness, when his primary method of attack is to open his mouth to shoot bubbles. Why he didn't order the Dream Machine's relocation/destruction, or how he thought the impending battle would go well for him, is anybody's guess.
• After you shoot down one of the Arzenal pilots that turned to Embryo in the endgame of Super Robot Wars V, the latter leaves her to die and flat-out admits in front of everyone that he considers her nothing more than a disposable tool. The other pilot keeps fighting for him anyway and meets the exact same end.
• In Supreme Commander, an ally of your character touches an ancient alien device that is emitting a strange energy signature, in violation of a direct order from the commander in chief of the entire cybran nation. He survives, but you have to kill him and his robotic battle suit after the artifact takes over. You know it's a bad sign when the other AI characters start yelling at him, but the funny energy signature mentioned should have given it away.
• Surviving Mars: One random event is to find a tourist-type colonist has stowed away on a supply rocket. This can happen with your very first rocket. The one loaded with RC rovers, autonomous drones, and a bunch of raw materials. Because there's no infrastructure where it's going, let alone food and water. Or, y'know, an atmosphere. The results are predictable. (Annoyingly, this counts as the last founder on the planet dying, resulting in your colony being canned minutes after starting the game through no fault of your own.)
• Survivor: Fire: The gran accidentally starts a fire and doesn't move out of the way, so she can only survive if you save her.
• Tales Series:
  • The people of the planet depicted in Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Phantasia suffer from this collectively. Periodically, somebody builds a massive Mana cannon that devastates the environment and frequently causes The End of the World as We Know It. As soon as the dark ages caused by its previous use are over, they get started on the next Mana Cannon, and are then astonished when it makes things worse instead of better. You'd think they'd notice the pattern after the third time or so, but no.
  • Symphonia and Abyss's characters have a common habit of keeping secrets and vital information from their fellow comrades and the player, which sometimes leads to needless injuries, deaths, and plot complications that could have been avoided.
  • This has the potential to (and often does) happen in Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. Whenever Raine or Marta run out of TP, which they need to be useful, they'll just charge the enemy unless you tell them to stay away. And even if Marta's not functioning as a healer, she will spam her combat skills and waste her TP. This is lampshaded in one of the Party Chats where Emil and Marta argue about what role she even fills in the party, since she can't decide if she's going to be a bruiser or a support.
  • Tales of the Tempest: Rubia's mother learns that her husband has been killed by Rommy. She's an even less competent fighter than her husband, yet proceeds to rush inside the building (after The Hero specifically says not to) and gets mowed down instantly. This is so bad that it looks like she's committing Suicide by Cop.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • The Demoman in the fluff makes some very terrible choices. Opening an obviously possessed book after a wizard told him not to. Working with explosives while drunk. Going to battle while drunk. Attempting to blow up the Loch Ness monster as a child. It is a miracle that he has only lost one eye. He also wields the Ullapool Caber, a potato masher grenade which he uses by clubbing his enemies with it. The item description reads, "a sober man would throw it..."
  • The Soldier is not much better, deciding to fight the Nazis until 1949, making a bazooka out of random garbage he found, and antagonizing his roommate that also happens to be a wizard. Two Halloween events were entirely his fault. When a time-traveling Engineer tells the team to not open the robots' crates, the Soldier instantly does the opposite.
  • Merasmus put many "horrors" on his wheel of fate, including taking away gravity and changing the size of characters' heads. This includes making his enemies indestructible.
    Merasmus: You. Are. GODS! I… meant to do that. It will go badly for you. You watch.
• In Total War: Shogun 2, the AI-controlled enemy general will routinely charge out in front of his army and ride directly into your spear formations, often going so fast he gets killed before the rest of his army is in combat. In castle battles, the AI generals will routinely dismount and scale the walls in a section completely different from where the rest of their army is. Many times they will stay back during the battle, but then dismount and climb the walls when the rest of their army is routing, essentially attempting to win the battle single-handedly.
• Touhou Project:
  • Fairies are an entire species of this trope, pathetically weak beings that throw themselves at individuals magnitudes more powerful than them and are swiftly obliterated as a result (fortunately for them, they instantly resurrect after death, but they never learn their lesson). Word of God states that fairies are agitated by the powerful youkai in the vicinity (that you will soon be fighting). They either try to run away, i.e., run towards you, or are just scrambling at random and fire at whatever startles them, i.e., you.
  • One fairy in particular, Cirno, is a stellar example, declaring herself to be "the strongest!" and acting as such, which rarely ends well for her. In Great Fairy Wars, she even picks a fight with Marisa, a girl with enough firepower to level continents (that Cirno manages to actually win, but this doesn't make her actions any less stupid). She's only saved by the fact that all the danmaku battles she partakes in are non-lethal, something she didn't even know when she picked her first fight.
  • Most humans coming from the Outside World do not last long in Gensokyo either, asking the local man-eating Cute Monster Girl for directions and brushing off the natives as backwards and superstitious.
• The Turing Test: At the end, Ava and Sarah decide to walk into TOM's control room to disconnect it without any kind of protection, despite knowing that TOM is able and willing to use lethal force.
• The setpiece-heavy design of Uncharted often means that mooks will keep attacking you in absurdly dangerous situations rather than running for their lives. Uncharted 3 is especially bad about this, with firefights happening while your enemies are in a burning mansion, aboard a sinking ship, or hanging out the back of a plane in flight and clinging for dear life by one hand.
• Until Dawn:
  • Even though she isn't in the right state of mind due to the prank, Hannah's decision to run out of the lodge on her own in the middle of a cold winter night isn't the brightest. This has dire consequences for her and her sister Beth who chases after her.
  • After her phone gets thrown into the guest cabin, Jessica assumes that her friends are playing a prank on her and makes the mistake of opening the door to yell at them, despite seeing a deer being dragged away by something and being chased by what she and Mike assumed was a bear.
• Vagrant Story has Rosencrantz, an ex-Riskbreaker with magic immunity. Thing is, there's a reason he's an ex-Riskbreaker, and it's because he's only decent as a melee combatant, and the only reason he gets as far as he does is because he focuses most of his attention on fighting magicians who can't hurt him. Rather than keep the fact that he can't be affected by magic a secret advantage, he flaunts it to everyone who'll listen, and by the time he finally confronts Sydney, Sydney has had plenty of time to come up with a counter-strategy... in the form of giant, animated statue that promptly crushes Rosencrantz into Snob Paste.
• Valkyria Chronicles:
  • Imagine for a moment that you are an officer of an Evil Empire's army, and you are in the process of invading enemy woodland territory with the intent to conquer the country. While looking for one of your wounded soldiers who has gotten separated from your group, you find that he has died of his wounds — in the company of that plucky young maverick lieutenant from the enemy side who is the only reason you haven't been sent home to your family yet, with no back-up beyond his equally plucky pigtailed girlfriend/sergeant, who currently has a busted ankle. You have your entire unit with you, ready to gun them down at any moment, and could rid yourself of the only serious obstacles in the way of your success in one fell stroke. Now imagine that you're a moron because the game has An Aesop to preach, and you let them go because now is not the designated killing time and they're obviously no threat to you at the moment.
  • Selvaria's death is framed as being a sad testament to her unrequited love for a man sending her to her demise... except the only people capable of stopping her were gone. She could have just wiped out everyone in Ghirlandaio the normal way and gone home, or, better yet, anywhere else; by that point, she could have defected and Squad 7 would have taken her in without question (mainly because nobody gives a shit about all the people she killed once Alicia becomes a Valkyria herself). She even waits for Squad 7 to get far enough away for them to escape her Final Flame, thus completely negating the worth of her sacrifice.
• One of the endings in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines involves siding with the local Kuei-Jin — outright alien Asian vampires that despise the Kindred as barbaric monsters and normally kill them on sight. It ends about as well as you expect. You also get to side with La Croix, who has been sending you off on suicide missions all game, knowing that he will probably open the sarcophagus you have been warned all game not to open up.
• In The Walking Dead (Telltale), this trope occurs in such a way that it is at first infuriating, and then possibly satisfying depending on what the player chooses to do. A woman will come screaming out of a building. In the middle of a zombie apocalypse, of course. She will make so much noise that she attracts a crowd of zombies. Kenny lampshades and exploits this trope by suggesting that Lee should let her serve as a distraction for them. Lee can either let her ass be eaten, or shoot her in the head to put her out of her misery. Either way, Darwin wins again.
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt:
  • Ronvid of the Small Marsh is an incompetent knight seemingly stalking Geralt, challenging him to a duel to the death on three separate occasions despite being severely outclassed. He surrenders after a few hits the first two times Geralt fights him, and the third time he ambushes Geralt with a couple of hired thugs not much more skilled than him despite having his ass handed to him twice already. At this point you can simply put him down or use Axii to convince him to finally go home.
  • During the Witcher Contract to hunt down the noonwraith known as The White Lady, you're told of a band of drunkards who try to get rid of the ghost by fucking it. Their attempt went about as well as you'd expect, and you come across their torn-apart corpses during your hunt.
  • Duchess Anna Henrietta at the end of the Blood and Wine expansion. Geralt and Regis discover that her sister, Syanna, was involved with a Higher Vampire and manipulated him into committing the serial killings terrorizing Toussaint while at the same time plotting Anna's assassination. When her vampire lover realizes he was tricked, he threatens to destroy Beauclair unless Syanna is brought to him, which the Duchess then proceeds to ignore until a vampire invasion kills thousands within her capital city. If Syanna survives all this, then the Duchess goes to hug her sister, who she knew wanted her dead, at her trial without so much as putting her in handcuffs first, which ends in both of their deaths unless Geralt managed to convince Syanna to let it go.
• Ships in the X-Universe piloted by NPCs or Player Mooks will always take the most direct route to their destination. Even if that route goes straight through Xenon territory and they don't have a jumpdrive to hop over it with.
• In Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Moebius O and P prove to be a case of Not-So-Harmless Villain by contributing to the death of two of the heroes' allies before even starting a fight. Unfortunately, this results in the party being too pissed off to be scared of them once they reveal their monstrous Interlink form, so in trying to get the upper hand, O and P decide to ignore the Interlink overheat warning in favor of continuing to fight. Turns out, doing that long enough triggers an Annihilation event on top of you.
  Moebius J: Good riddance, I say. Idiots. I mean, going past the time limit while Interlinking? Who does that?

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