Glass Cannon/Tabletop Games

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Examples of Glass Cannons in Tabletop Games include:

Board Games

• There is an old (board and miniatures) gaming expression called the fuzzy wuzzy fallacy (after the Rudyard Kipling poem). Basically it states that a unit's effectiveness goes up proportionate to the square root of any increase in firepower (provided the defense stays the same). For example, the above Mech has roughly 3.5 times the firepower of the old version. FW numbers say that it's about 1.87 (the root of 3.5) times as effective as the old one, given that both die just as easy (and will draw fire like no-one's business).
  • The model behind it.
• In the Flying Frog game Touch of Evil, the schoolteacher only has three hit points and no healing factor. However, loading her inventory up with books adds two additional fight dice per book. Collecting all the books on the board gives her three hit points...and up to twenty dice's worth of damage.

Roleplaying Games

• Warhammer 40,000
  • The Eldar and Dark Eldar straddle the blurred line between this and Fragile Speedster. On the tabletop, Eldar are fast and fragile, and Dark Eldar are even faster and more fragile. The Dark Eldar are more of Glass Cannons than the Eldar, given the amount of firepower that squads of Dark Eldar can pump out for a relatively low cost and the eschewing of even what little armor their cousins use.
    • Harlequins are even more of a glass hammer/cannon than other Eldar. Absolutely unparalleled in hand-to-hand combat, they can rip right through a unit of Assault Terminators like tissue paper; but one good round of shooting from a basic Marine squad and they're splattered all over the landscape.
    • The Eldar Fire Prism grav-tank is armed with a Wave Motion Gun that is literally a glass cannon (even called the "Prism Cannon"), but due to holofields and the like Craftworld Eldar vehicles are one of the few things in the army that doesn't qualify.
    • On the flip side, this is absolutely the case with Dark Eldar vehicles. Unlike the Imperium's variant-based vehicles, their strongest armoured vehicle has armor so bad that they are generally described as 'kites'. It's a rare DE vehicle that can't be taken down with small arms fire. If you get a chance to shoot them, that is.
  • Also in tabletop, the Space Marine Thunderfire cannon. As an artillery piece, anything shooting at it has a 50/50 chance of hitting either it or the Techmarine manning it. Hitting the Tech is not a huge issue, with a 2+ armour save, but if the cannon itself is hit, either a penetrating hit or glancing hit will completely destroy it. But it has a range of 60', and is heavy 4, with three types of ammo.
  • And Tau Fire Warriors, who are no tougher than Guard Stormtroopers and suck in close combat. However, they're armed with a gun that will punch through Stormtrooper armour, the Stormtrooper wearing the armour, and keep going out the back.
    • Speaking of Stormtroopers, their hellguns can punch right through Space Marine armor. Too bad for the shorter than normal range.
  • Oddly enough, this trope can sometimes apply to Super-Heavy vehicles... The biggest, baddest, toughest things in the game! The "Chain Reaction" entry on their damage tables represents the shot hitting a fuel tank or something and doing further damage to the machine, and it then lets you roll on the damage table again. If you roll another 6, you repeat it all over again! With a huge amount of luck and several consecutive sixes, a single damaging shot can obliterate a Titan or Stompa that normally requires you to effectively "kill" it several times in a row to actually score a kill!
    • Made all the more jarring by the fact that the humble Land Raider still boasts the highest armor rating value, at 3 points higher (in total) than the Imperator Titan (the biggest vehicle you can field in the game, even in Apocalypse).
  • Ork Boyz borderline this. They have low point-cost, a massive amount of attacks for a rank-and-file trooper (three attacks per Boy, four on the charge), and....paper thin armor. Kinda balanced out by their ridiculously low point cost and high toughness, but when they get showered by bolter fire, expect a lot of Boyz to drop.
  • Daemons also deserve a mention—most of them pack a punch, but die like flies against standard Imperial weaponry.
  • The Rogue Trader rulebook specifically describes Raider-class spacecraft as "glass cannons, able to throw out heavy fire but unable to take it in return".
• Eldar and Dark Eldar spacecraft in Battlefleet Gothic have wimpy armor, no shields, ridiculously powerful engines, and some of the nastiest guns possible.
• The Hunchback IIc BattleMech exemplifies this trope in the BattleTech universe. It mounts two Ultra autocannon-20s which, more or less, is apocalyptic firepower for any 'Mech (each can do 40 damage, which will destroy any mech its weight or less with a center hit), but sacrifices almost all of its armor in order to do so. Little wonder it's popular with Death Seeker Mechwarriors. In fact, a recent Sourcebook clarifies: It was made as pretty much the Clan's equivalent of a Death sentence. Any warrior assigned to a Hunchback IIc was explicitly not expected to come back from their next battle.
  • It also barely has any ammo for those boomsticks (5 shots each, or 2 "double" shots and one regular). Its predecessor, the Inner Sphere standard Hunchback (circa 3025), has one AC/20, 10 shots, and near-maximum armor for a 50 ton mech chassis. The "new and improved" model, from 3050, has only 5 shots.
  • In the same vein, the dinky UrbanMech mounts an AC/10, but has only 6 tons of armor—appreciable for its size of 30 tons, but still not very much—and moves like molasses on top of being absolutely tiny. However, any light mech will be cored if Urbie hits it, and more than one Urbie makes things get very dangerous in a hurry unless you outrange them. Plus they're such cute little things! (The UrbanMech isn't a deathtrap so much as it's designed to fight in a very specific environment. Gee, I wonder what that might be?)
    • There is, however, a variant of the UrbanMech that reduces its armor to put the AC/20 in the same, now less-well-protected frame.
  • A lot of "support" 'mechs, like the classic Catapult or the frankly ridonkulous-looking Yeoman, will mount a lot of long range weapons like LRMs, but have little armour or weapons for close-and-dirty combat.
  • The Hollander BZK-F3 light 'mech tonnage is mostly taken up by the gauss rifle on its shoulder. (The mech weighs 35 tons, where the Gauss Cannon takes up 15.)
  • One of the newest 'Mechs in 3067, the LDT-1 Brigand, used primarily by the pirates, is designed like this. Armor up front is comparable to a regular light 'Mech, the back has a total of 1/2 ton of armor.
  • There are a few vehicles like this, such as the Hetzer Wheeled Assault Gun (effectively) a BFG mounted inside an armored box on a heavy truck chassis) and the tiny 5-ton Savannah Master - the fact that it was designed to take on an opponent four times its tonnage has to count for something.
  • In the novels particularly, the old Inner Sphere Rifleman 'mech is notorious as a deathtrap, with rear armour somewhere between cardboard and tin can levels. You don't want to be standing in front of it, though - each arm mounts an autocannon and medium and large lasers.
    • This is true even in the regular game. Most of the low-tech Riflemen have at most two tons of armor across their entire back. One of the upgrades for it in the 3050 Tech Manual was to triple the armor on the back at a bit of cost to the legs.
  • The Hellbringer (Loki) Omni is another fine example of a machine that will slaughter most enemies in its weight class and down if they get too close, but will crumple and burn if anything with a decent gun looks at it funny. Its configurations focus on massed long range hitting power, with things like particle cannons, Gauss rifles, and autocannons coming into play. The primary variant is a highly accurate killing machine with enough firepower on it to literally slag four tons of armor in a single salvo and even includes various equipment upgrades like ECM or anti missile defenses. At 65 tons and with only 8 tons of armor, though, it'll have an extremely bad day if a sufficiently armed 'Mech draws a bead on it. It's so light on armor that it actually can't even absorb an AC/20 shot dead center—something that more than a few 15-tons-lighter 'Mechs can do.
  • The Adder/Puma is another high grade glass cannon. Its primary configuration carries dual ER-PPC weapons and includes a targeting computer to make them highly accurate. Any 'Mech who takes a Boom! Headshot! from one of those guns is down for the count, no matter the size of it. The Adder, however, is all of 35 tons, has about 6 tons of armor, and generally isn't going to stick around very long once an enemy sniffs it out.
• Dungeons & Dragons
  • Some 3.5 characters, using a number of different sourcebooks, can become this trope. As an example, take an ordinary fighter and give him Power Attack, a feat which subtracts attack accuracy in exchange for higher damage. Then take a feat called Shock Trooper, which shifts the accuracy penalty to armor class—i.e. it makes you easier to hit. This build, known as the 'Charger build' and often by the name Glass Cannon, results in a character able to do massive damage when he charges in and attacks ... but at the cost of an armor class that a small child throwing rocks could probably hit.
    • The problem with 3.5 is that due to balance problems, almost everyone is made out of glass. That includes that "ordinary fighter", regardless of whether he goes the charging route or not. Doing so does give him a cannon, but since he'll be smashed easily anyways, there's no drawback to this. After all, if you're going to be super squishy no matter what, you might as well try to take them out with you, or better yet, first.
    • Meanwhile, many of the classes you'd expect to be glass cannons are actually lightning bruisers.
  • 3.5 psionics has the wilder class. Less than a fourth of the powers of a Psion, but can up each powers output by your level, turning a single level 3 character into something capable of cutting down much higher level enemies on average rolls. Has little health and can daze/weaken themselves afterward. Unfortunately, the downsides add up to make it Awesome but Impractical.
  • 4E gives us the Striker set of classes (Ranger, Rogue, Warlock, Barbarian, though the Barbarian has pretty good HP, if lackluster starting armor): Insane damage output, but rely on the Defenders to hold down the thing they're attacking so that they don't get crushed.
    • The problem with this is semi related to the 3.5 problem, but still significantly different. No one can take focus fire. No one. Not even the tanks. So what you really want is 1-2 enemies on each person, because anyone they gang up on is going down, no matter who they are. The only reason this doesn't make everyone a glass cannon is because without that focus fire, neither side can do any real damage to the other.
• There are plenty of Magic: The Gathering cards that have high power but low toughness. However, the card Glass Golem seems to deliberately invoke this trope.
  • Not to mention cards like Rocket Launcher and its later cleaned-up cousin Goblin Cannon, which take the "cannon" part more literally.
  • Also, a number of Illusion creatures are designed to hit hard, but die as soon as targeted.
• Carefree Hedonist characters in Bliss Stage start out with 7 instead of 6 relationships, most of which have very high Intimacy and form very powerful psychic weapons. Only TWO of those relationships have enough Trust for the weapons they manifest as to survive a critical failure.
• In Chess, the Queen is strongest because she can move across the board and can move horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. Yet like with all chess pieces, she goes down in one.
• There are various Yu-Gi-Oh cards like: Goblin Attack Force, Indomitable Fighter Lei Lei, Spear Dragon, and Mad Archfiend that have incredibly high ATK, but zero DEF and move into defense position when it is time for your opponent to strike.
• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has a few.
  • Night Goblin Fanatics follow it the best—they deal the same damage as a stone thrower (read, giant catapult) but are even easier to kill then a normal goblin and have a chance of killing themselves. There are, however, many others.
  • Wood Elves are similar to 40K's Eldar, being both this and Fragile Speedsters. They have little to no armour but can give out a lot of hurt with possibly the best core units compared to their prices (although they only have one real rank and file unit, which forces the player to pick the unit they charge). And to top it off they have the Forest Walking rule, which allows all of their units to walk through woods without any restriction which in other armies was only allowed for scouts. However, this has probably given several players the feeling of They Changed It, Now It Sucks, since in the new edition of the rulebook every army can walk through woods (and a lot of people thinks that the new rules hurt Wood Elves the most of all the armies).
• Star Fleet Battles has the mauler ships, which both avert this trope and play it straight at different times. Before firing, maulers are very difficult to destroy (due to how shield reinforcement works), and are as fast (if not FASTER) than other ships of similar size. After firing, they become much more fragile and sluggish as they struggle to recharge their huge battery banks for another shot.
• Magic: The Gathering has a creature named Force of Savagery. It has a formidable power of 8, for a measly 3 mana. However its base toughness is so low it dies basically immediately on its own. Your supposed to have something that improves its toughness starting before or as it enters the battlefield.

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