In many games and videogames, it’s the general strategy of winning by
doing many “attacks”, even though each might be of small magnitude.
These “attacks” might be unblockable, cost little to no resources, or
be a secondary effect of another action. Ideally, with enough damage,
even the largest pool of HP can be depleted.
Notable examples
(according to myself)
- In the Final Fantasy videogames, Cactuars are cactus-shaped
creatures whose signature move—called “One Thousand Needles” is
precisely that: 1,000 pricks launched at the target dealing exactly 1
damage each. Sometimes, there’s a larger variety—Jumbo Cactuar—that uses
“Ten Thousand Needles”.
- In Slay the Spire, one of the archetypes of the Hunter is to
generate lots and lots of Shivs, 0-cost cards that deal damage and
disappear upon use. The idea is to generate many cheap attacks that
don’t bloat the deck.
- In several Disgaea games, the joke-y monster class Prinny has
abilities that hit multiple times for pitiable damage. However, if
several characters attack a single foe one after the other, they get an
increasing bonus to damage, making the penguin-inspired Prinnies
potentially devastating.
Compare to
- Zerg Rush - a similar idea, though more focused on overwhelming an
opponent’s defenses by throwing a large number of small, expendable
critters (a combination of spam and a DDoS attack)
andy@Olivia:~/Documents/Ubuntu-textile/e2$ pandoc -L wordcount/wordcount.lua "Death of a thousand cuts.md"
214 words in body
1144 characters in body
1350 characters in body (including spaces)