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.