When the game lets you make an extremely dumb decision that kills you/gets you a game over/makes it impossible to win

[u/Zeekay89]

Basically what it says. The extremely dumb decision that can only end in your death, game over, or make winning impossible is a valid option you can choose.

Mass Effect 2. Morinth is an Ardat-Yakshi, an Asari with a genetic condition that causes the Asari mind meld to burn out her partner’s nervous system and give her a euphoric feeling. If you choose her over her mother, Samara, she says that Shepard is special and can survive where everyone else has died. She’s lying and you die like everyone else if you sleep with her.

Nier: Automata. There are a lot of unique game overs in the game that usually involve dying during certain events. A few involve making truly idiotic decisions. Engaging your self destruct inside the pressurized space station blows it up. You can remove a component that is essentially your brain and instantly die. You can eat a fish that is said to be extremely delicious but destroys the insides of androids.

Lords of Aswick. One possible scenario in this choose your own adventure game is that you take in one of the king’s bastards as your squire. The king just had a legitimate heir and started killing his bastards to secure his heir’s claim. Later on, you have the option to declare in open court that your squire is the king’s bastard. The next scene is your execution with bastard having just been executed before you.

[u/ICLazeru]

Not a decision, but an interesting mechanic with a game over outcome. In Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the hardcore mode has a certain percentage chance that when you start the game, you get a message that your character died in childhood due to some cause or another, and you just have to start another new game. It has very little effect on the gameplay, since you literally have no progress to lose, but it is an interesting inclusion.

[u/NurseNerd → u/ICLazeru]

There were a number of tabletop roleplaying games where it was possible to die during character creation. Part of the reason for this was because you can use the same random generation tables for NPCs like family members. And a lot of times you're allowed to pick (Roll d10 or choose one, ect), which makes it into a game of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. But naturally this results in powergamers figuring out how to start the game with huge advantages.