Enemies that can ruin your character.
These aren't common in recent games, but _back in the day_, dude.
First, there were the Black Death zombies in Diablo 1. Every time they hit you, they decrease your max hp by 1... permanently. If you were new to the game and never looked it up, and/or weren't paying attention, you could ruin your playthrough before you've realized you have 75% the hp you had before. Christ, just remembering that feels scary.
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Another game was Baldur's Gate 2, where the vampires, illithids, beholders, and demi-liches could all do some permanent damage to your character and your party. I'm just going to write a whole fucking wall to reminisce about this game and talk about how scary these guys were, so here goes:
Vampires (and any enemy that deals negative plane energy, such as shadow dragons, for my fellow nurds out there) permanently decrease your character level by 1 every time they hit you. This will cripple anyone affected by this- luckily, you can haul your weak ass back to town and get a cleric to bring your levels back up, but it still meant that each time you fought a vampire, let alone a whole group at once, you were at risk of getting your whole party killed. The negative levels would stack until your character was completely impotent, and the vamps would have a field day. Every time I was walking around a dungeon and started seeing pools of blood or some vampire-themed memorabilia, I'd freak and start casting Negative Plane Protection like it was doomsday. Talk about ominous!
Illithids were walking humanoids with squid faces that loved to suck people's brains out. Every time they hit you, you permanently use 1 point of intelligence. This posed 2 dangers. First, if you ever got to 0 intelligence, you were dead. If you use magic, the number of spells you can cast and their effectiveness was gauged by your intelligence score, so you'd basically get nerfed with each hit. Wizards, though they could theoretically take the most beating, since they had more intelligence, wore low armor and were easy targets. Warriors, though they were armored and were harder to hit, had low intelligence, and so were faster to kill. Oh, and Illithids stun you. From range. They can just do that. When you're stunned you can't block hits, so you're dead. Soooo yeah, scary.
Beholders were floating mouths with one big eye and lots of eye stalks that shot lasers everywhere and could turn your whole party to stone. Fuck that. Moving on.
Demi-liches, which is like, man, aren't Liches tough enough already? These floating skulls can cast Wail of the Banshee and Imprisonment virtually infinitely. WotB has a chance of killing everyone in the room each time it's cast. Imprisonment permanently locks one of your characters in a hole deep in the earth. In order to free them, you have to go back and buy a scroll of Freedom and cast it on the spot where they were imprisoned. In order to do THAT, you have to survive the fight with the Demi-lich. The upside? It gave you a badass ring.
Speedy headcrabs give me the willies but not as much as their poison brothers. They squeak a sound that I'll never forget, crawl like spiders and jump into your face with a mouthful of venom.
