Up To Eleven / Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000 takes the amp, scrawls twelve and thirteen on the amp in gothic script and then plugs it into a Slaaneshi Noise Marine's Blastmaster, causing heads to explode all over the planet.
  • And the Orks would cheerfully turn it up to seventeen if any of them could count that high.
  • Tzeentch would then turn the knob backwards....to 999, then clasp his hands.
  • Examine a Warhound battle titan sometime◊. One of the largest and most expensive Forge World models in existence, armed with some of the most powerful guns in the game, and guess what it is? A SCOUT TITAN! The battle titans are so big they don't make models for them.
    • Forgeworld now make Reaver titans. These guys are bigger than Warhounds and mount an extra weapon on their top carapace. There can only be time before these gentleman crank out a Warlord titan...
    • There are official rules for Warlord Titans and some fans have made them. They are about four feet tall.
    • Look at this.
    • As of Horus Heresy Book 4 THIS
    • Those are not even close to what they had before the Age of Strife hit. During the Dark Age of Technology they had even BIGGER Titans. Why don't they have them now, you may ask? Well, many things were lost in-between the Dark Age and the 41st Millennium.
  • The standard sidearms go to ridiculous extremes already. Their numbers include laser guns that can blow limbs off people with a single beam, guns that spray razor-sharp shards of crystallized neurotoxins, guns that spray even sharper shards of crystal, guns that fire rocket-propelled armor-piercing grenades, and railguns that vaporize their iron slugs before firing them. And these are the sidearms.
  • You have to buy 11 or more Orks for all of them to get the Fearless rule.
  • 11 is also the minimum number of barrels on a Baneblade.
  • Don't forget that the spaceships the Imperium currently uses were freight ships back in the dark age of technology and titans were used as normal transport utilities. Turned Up to Eleven indeed.
  • The Tau play this in two ways with their battlesuits:
    • Their Ace Custom battlesuits are the XV9 battlesuits, used to lead their XV8 battlesuits in particularly tough battles. Tau count in base 8.
    • They've also developed extra-large XV10^note 8 + 1 = 10 in base 8 battlesuits as mobile ordinance platforms.
  • D-Strength Weapons are literally this, as the statistic system for Warhammer only goes up to 10. Meaning that D-Strength Weapons are literally going up to eleven.
  • Then there are Apocalypse games. Think 2000 points is high? How about 50,000 to 100,000 points or more? A single player's army can fill an ENTIRE GAME BOARD in this format, and multiple tables must be combined just to make the field. Stuff like Baneblades which are normally awesome but impracticable show up in SQUADRONS, and there's an entire range of models so strong they can only be used in this format. The D-Weapons mentioned above and other stuff capable of wiping whole units off the board are standard. The sheer size of a person's army makes it hard to manage moving let alone rolling all the attacks and a single game is known to take an entire day or more just to finish, with allotted breaks every few rounds being included in the rules.
  • Torpedoes bigger than small frigates, cargo shuttles barely shorter than the Starship Enterprise, frigates the size of Star Destroyers, cruisers that dwarf Wraith hive ships, thousands of battlecruisers bigger than anything in fiction beyond a Super Star Destroyer, battleships bigger than that... 40k Gaiden Game Battlefleet Gothic has it all.
• The card game Munchkin has a card named "Mine goes up to Eleven!" If you play it, people have to reach level 11 instead of 10 as usual.
• Magic: The Gathering has a mechanic called "protection" which made a card essentially immune to a certain source (A card with "protection from red" can not be blocked or damaged by red creatures, or targeted by red spells and abilities). Until recently, the mechanic was limited to phrases like "protection from black" or "protection from red" or "protection from artifacts", or occasionally "protection from creatures". Then along came this card.
  • Most MTG cards at the new "Mythic Rare" rarity level fall under this trope.
    • Progenitus is "protection up to eleven"
    • Kresh the Bloodbraided is "gets-stronger-when-something-else-dies (a common ability on Jund creatures) up to eleven"
    • Sedris the Traitor King is "unearth up to eleven,"
    • Rafiq of the Many is "exalted up to eleven"
    • Conflux is "card-search up to eleven"
    • Maelstrom Nexus is "cascade up to eleven"
    • Godsire is "token-producing up to eleven,"
    • ...et cetera. Although not all Mythic Rare cards make use of an existing mechanic, it's not worth making a card Mythic Rare UNLESS its potency is cranked up to eleven.
  • "Darksteel Colossus" has 11 power, 11 toughness, and costs 11 mana. Oh, and it's indestructible. Not only that, but if it is somehow sent to the graveyard, it's shuffled into its owner's library instead. This ability (which also appears on the aforementioned Progenitus) is actually meant as a drawback, as it prevents players from discarding or milling it and then reanimating it.
    • Blightsteel Colossus does all that, plus has infect. Infect deals poison damage, which can't be healed in standard and it only takes 10 points to kill you. Yes, Blightsteel Colossus can One-Hit Kill you without even trying.
  • Zendikar is Everything Trying to Kill You taken up to 11. Get some Rise of the Eldrazi cards and you can take it up to 15 (the linked monster nukes six of your cards simply by looking at you funny, and is almost impossible to kill).
• Rifts is Fantasy Kitchen Sink turned up to eleven with every RPG genre combined together...with Megadamage!!
• Scion goes up to eleven. See, it has a system known as Legend, and Scions, gods and other supernatural beings have a Legend score, and they're able to take Epic Attributes and Boons equal to their Legend score minus one. The maximum Legend score is 12. Therefore, the maximum you can take your powers to is 11. The 11-dot Boons and Epic Attributes are the Avatars and Ultimate Attributes, at which point you become a force of nature.
• The Dresden Files RPG takes Up To Eleven...Up To Eleven. The section on the Laws of Magic describes breaking the Fifth Law (Never reach beyond the borders of life) as giving an exaggerated arrogance over one's power over life and death, like a doctor's God complex turned Up To Eleven. In the hand-scribbled notes, Harry himself crosses out the eleven and adds "Thirteen", leading himself and Bob to do a brief parody of the Trope Namer ("...These go to THIRTEEN," Harry insists).
• Star Fleet Battles◊
• We'd be remiss without mentioning Dystopian Wars. Think the giant robots and tanks from Warhammer 40,000, then make them bigger. MUCH BIGGER. A pair of what would be a reasonably large tank in 40k make up a single tiny model here, the smallest of the five size classes available. And then there are models which go beyond even those size classifications and end up at massive+1 size. Throw in some truely bizarre exotic weapons like Robotic Squids, Colossal Robots capable of trampling city blocks and literal Flying Battleships and you get something close to the amount of steampunk insanity going on.
• Larloch had a level one above what was possible for his class, by Word of God (the intended implication was 'he'll always be more powerful than the player characters, no matter what'). Then the edition changed and rules were published that made it possible to reach that level.
  • Before the fall of the Netherese Empire, the spell levels literally went up to 11 (compared to the Mystran regiment of 9). Then some overly ambitious wizard decided to make a level 12 and... well, that's why they are limited to 9 since then.
• What made Pun-Pun such a Game-Breaker? Firstly, the fact that he could grant himself theoretically any ability. Secondly, the mechanic that allowed him to do so provided no limitation on how powerful those abilities could be: if he grants himself the ability to cast a spell, he can let himself cast the spell at a caster level of Graham's Number in a game where the most powerful statted monsters rarely break thirty. He can also grant himself any number of Divine Ranks, even hundreds or thousands, when the Powers That Be max out at 21.
• 1d4chan has created the Henderson Scale of Plot Derailment, named after the Call of Cthulhu character Old Man Henderson. One Henderson is the complete derailment of the plot. 1.25 forces the GM to pull a Rock Falls Everybody Dies. 1.5 is a Total Party Kill. 1.75: the entire cast is dead, and the GM is suffering a breakdown (or laughing his ass off). 2 whole Hendersons? The current universe cannot be played again, often because of Apocalypse How. That Guy Destroys Psionics managed to break the scale by derailing the plot to the point of Retcon multiple times, eliminating psionics from the entire multiverse, and having the GM just give up and expel him from the group.
• Fate Core, as a system, interestingly averts this trope. Superman in one game can have the same strength rating as Jack Bauer in a different one. Every skill in the game is a measure of the level of impact a character can have with that skill rather than an objective rating in and of itself.
• In the James Bond 007 roleplaying game published by Victory Games in the 1980s, the highest possible Strength characteristic that players could get when rolling up their characters was 12. Oddjob's strength was 15. Jaws' was 18.
• In Blades in the Dark, the tier system for groups works on a 0-5 scale, with 0 being "some just-started player characters in a crappy hideout somewhere" and 5 being "a major religion or other significant group". Except for the Imperial Military. That gets a 6.

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