Design Pattern: Progression Exhaustion

Overview

Progression Exhaustion is the inversion of the Progression Track; thus it employs the principle of Diminishing Returns instead of Thematic Capital. Improvement modeled with Progression Exhaustion grants more for less for sticking to a particular theme, you get less for more.

Purpose

The incentives are the opposite and the use is the opposite: encourage the player to branch out and not specialize their experience. Using both progression tracking and exhaustion together is an effective way to coax balance out of a player's development, especially in RPGs.

Example

• HERO System – HERO System uses 3d6 as the central gauge of success. The probabilities of rolling a number on the range [3,18] follow a pronounced bell curve. The modifier a Skills or Characteristic grants to a roll changes linearly with respect to the points spent, and the opposition value of rolls starts at 9-. The result is that each for additional point you spend on a skill you get less of an improvement to your rolls. At some point around a 85% success rate, it becomes better to start spending points elsewhere.
  
  In terms of gameplay, this means that players rarely improve a skill to 100% competency; they spend points more wisely and anything they do push to and beyond the max will be an essential, flavorful part of their character.

Design Pattern: Progression Track

Overview

The Progression Track rewards thematic player development. The player is offered a number of choices and some number of them continue or reinforce the theme of previously choices. A choice that continues the thrust of previous decisions is rewarded by a lower cost while thematically dissonant choices cost more. This cost is either nominal or is folded into the opportunity cost of not continuing a pattern of decisions.

The easiest examples to recognize are those that involve a flavor of upgrading: if you are presented with a choice between improving your ability to do an ollie and how far you can grind. Previously you may have improved your grinding; then the latter choice may be cheaper simply because it is more in line with your previously decisions. On the other hand, if you haven't even begun to explore ollies, then it may be more advantageous to improve a skill you already excel at than to invest in a brand new one.

Purpose

Progression tracks are a great way to encourage player specialization, and so often show up in RPG's. Naturally steering a character towards a certain style of play using progression tracks is also a good way to preserve elements of the game for a second play-through.

Usage

The much maligned and often shallow morality systems found in games often use this pattern, though usually in an uninteresting way. It is usually far easier and grants greater advantage to simply be more evil than to suddenly have a change of heart. These systems try to compartmentalize and categorize the real world of grey areas and moral ambiguity, digesting real questions and ethical complexity into an easy to process model that the player can make decisions about and the game itself can actually simulate.

Usually that process removes the very interest from the content that intrigued us in the first place; a contemporary computer is a cold calculating machine, and making it run a game while modeling human emotion and morality in enough detail to preserve sufficient nuance is ill-advised. This is why the best uses of morality are not contrived but probable and grey while having little to no actual mechanical consequences. There are quests in Skyrim, for instance, which end with a simple decision, ones which the player does not have complete or wholly reliable information about and which do not provide any answers when they conclude. The player is already involved in the story enough that the simple act of making the decision is all that is needed to interact with them and the fact that there are little to no mechanical consequences does not detract from the effect on the player.

Examples

• D&D – In D&D, the aforementioned Feats have a number of progression tracks in them: Power Attack to Cleave to Great Cleave. You have to have the previous Feat in order to acquire the next one in the set. Furthermore the Class system makes for an a progression track as well since Multiclassing is expensive.
• Monopoly – In this originally educational and satirical take on capitalism, improving a property you have already developed can be more lucrative than improving undeveloped property, provided that the property is placed well, as the rent will be greatly increased.

Design Pattern: Ability Slot

An ability slot is similar to an upgrade of choice, but the choices available do not represent a permanent change to a game entity's abilities.  Instead, the entity has a certain number of slots which abilities 'take up' when equipped.

I cannot think of a real example where this would be used and not be pigeon-holed, but that does not mean it can't and hasn't been done.  Certainly, one could have a game where the player's character has three slots and only three abilities to fill them with, but with the option of putting an ability in multiple slots, thus augmenting that particular ability at the cost of flexibility.

An important feature of ability slots is that shuffling abilities around is in some way a hassle.  For instance, you may not be able to do so during combat or outside of a certain location.

Examples

D&D

A magic-user in D&D has a certain number of spells they can cast per day, unless you're a heathen and play 4.0 where you have a certain number of spells per battle, because who wants to deal with all of that pesky role playing business anyway.*

You of course need to learn the spells first, but after that, you can prepare any spells you have for the day.

FPS's

FPS's basically always have ability slots in the form of weapon choice; while gaining access to the weapon is usually an upgrade of course, which weapons you have equipped is almost always an ability slot.  Many games have dual-wielding now, and Skyrim of course makes double-equipping a spell a whole lot of fun.

Raiden

I'll be honest and say I played a fan homage Flash version of Raiden on the internet, but the important thing here is the fact that you have one ability slot, your weapon type, and three types of weapon.  Raiden also exhibits the design pattern upgrade track.

*Seriously, do not play 4.0.  Having spells per battle instead of spells per day messes with the tenuous sense of scarcity in a game where magic users were already incredibly powerful after a certain level.  The skill Intimidate can't be used outside of combat; I suppose it is better to simply kill all your enemies than to save one to interrogate later.