Power Progression

Players like to get more powerful. Increased power is a type of reward a game can grant the player. In RPGs the most common way to increase power is the experience-level loop; kill enemies, gain experience, gain levels and repeat. When a character gains a level their stats increase and this usually means they can kill enemies more easily and face enemies they were previously too weak to defeat. This loop is the core power progression of RPGs.

Why is Progression Important?

Players come to RPGs partly to live out a power fantasy. They experience this power fantasy through the progression system. The game constantly shows you that you are becoming more capable. This maps onto two fundamental psychological needs:

1. Competence - feeling capable and effective
2. Autonomy - feeling in control of your choices

The experience-level loop is so compelling because it’s a progression system that fulfils these two needs.

This may all seem obvious but these systems are so common and universal that they go unnoticed until pointed out. And when you do analyse them, you can start to ask questions about what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and what the possibilities might be if we get in there and start tinkering with them.

An Eternal Staircase

The feeling of power in game rarely progresses in a smooth upwards line, instead it takes the form of a staircase.

Let’s imagine a simple form of progression, you start the game as a level 0 warrior with 3 health 1 attack. In first level of the dungeon enemies have 1 attack and 1 health. This means you can generally defeat any enemy if you’re on full health but you’re in danger if your health drops to 1. After killing a few enemies, you gain a level and you feel powerful and rewarded.

kill enemies, gain experience, gain levels and repeat

After a little while however, you start to feel bored, the challenge of the game has declined. The game is easier now and that’s less satisfying. Therefore games have a trick, they let you feel powerful for a relatively short window, then you progress to the next step (i.e. new dungeon level or area) and you find new stronger enemies and the challenge is restored.

In this way the feeling of progression is endless and as the player you feel like you’re getting endlessly more powerful. And as a designer you get to have a type endless reward the player is always happy to receive. This is the core loop that most RPGs are built around.

Player vs Character Skill

The system we’ve described so far refers to character progression i.e. your digital avatar in the game world. It’s satisfying when your game attributes increase but it’s even more satisfying if you, the player, develop mastery over the game.

Take the first Mario game, a new player is likely to die on level one, probably many times, however a player who’s spent hours and hours playing Mario can probably sail through that first level without being touched. This power curve is the player’s experience of the game, they’ve gained mastery over the game space.

Both types of progression are satisfying but player mastery is the more satisfying of the two. Dark Souls is a good example of game that encourages player mastery, the gameplay is all about timing and clever use of game knowledge. The player repeats a boss fight until they learn the tells, timings and strategy required to defeat that enemy. When they do achieve this it feels very satisfying, it’s a demonstration of competence. But it doesn’t have to be a realtime action RPG, using tactics in a turn-based RPG or knowing when to retreat and rest in a dungeon crawler are both types of mastery at the player level.

The graph above tries to illustrate what I’m thinking about here.

• Character progression: drop a new player into a high-level character - do they die, or does the character carry them?
• Player mastery: drop a veteran into a level-1 character - do they need to grind, or can their skill carry them?

Thoughts about Designing Progression

The basic staircase progression system we’ve described is quite bland. Enemies, in this simple system are just ever more bloated bags-of-hitpoints. The treadmill becomes boring for the player. To recapture player interest the progression system needs to be made less smooth and less linear.

Make the Curve Less Smooth

A power curve that is less predictable is more exciting to travel. The player never knows what might pop up or which discoveries might combine into something powerful.

Smooth is boring. You don’t want an overtuned game that’s perfectly smooth in terms of challenge. It’s more interesting to have peaks and troughs - finding that powerful weapon that lets you advance more quickly, that’s fun. The same is true of finding an enemy you can’t immediately defeat, forcing you to return.

Layer Systems

The basic level system serves as a base to add on additional progression systems. Here are some common ones:

• Equipment - weapons, armor, rings, one-use items
• Magic - spells
• Abilities - active, passive

I’m sure you can come up with even more but the important point with all these systems is they should, where possible serve the power fantasy and also provide the opportunity for player mastery.

Additional systems give the player new choices and different rate of rewards. You might be far from the next level but that new spell or new piece of loot could be just around the corner.

Expand, Restrict and Tweak Systems

Once you understand how a progression system works, you can tweak it.

Allow players to make choices that shape the game space.

The rate of advancement itself can be played with. Maybe enemies don’t drop experience and instead you only get experience rewards from completing quests. Maybe experience is also used as currency in the game. Maybe levels only unlock at particular one-use shrines found in strewn about the world. Perhaps enemies that once gave you experience, no longer grant it after you gain a level, forcing you to find stronger foes. Maybe experience is an item that’s dropped as loot randomly or discovered in the gameworld.

In early RPGs a sword hits harder than a dagger, making the sword the obvious choice of weapon. Later games such as Elden Ring make the weapons different on more than one axis. The sword might still hit harder but now it also has greater reach, whereas the dagger is faster and has a move set that’s harder to parry, deflect or avoid. Now the weapon you choose is more about preferred play style or the enemy you’re fighting, it requires some mastery to make a good choice. The system was expanded by introducing new axis - reach, speed, attack set, attack types and enemy resistances to those attack types. In this way you can subvert the power curve with interesting choices instead.

The same tactical properties can be extended to the stats themselves. A high strength character might be able to knock an enemy back or throw them, kick down a door or knock-over a stone column. These interactions with the world expand the possibilities and tactics for player to employ.

Pitfalls of Progression

A progression system needs to balance between continually giving the player new challenges against increasing the player’s power to overcome those challenges. Make the challenges too hard and the player gets frustrated and can’t make progress, make it too easy and the game becomes boring and any reward feels undeserved.

Here are some common progression system pitfalls and ways to avoid them.

Losing Tension

Progression can rob a game of it’s tension. In the early game, you can die in a couple of hits. This vulnerability makes adventuring feel tense, it could be over at any moment! In the later game, enemies are more powerful but your character can soak up more damage making an immediate death less likely and the game feel less tense.

There are ways to bring this tension back, Dark Souls certainly manages it. In Dark Souls enemy attacks can hit so hard that death is likely regardless of level or equipment. This can be done by having attacks that deal percentage-based based damage - either based on maximum or current health. Enemy attack power can also be scaled according to the player level. There also a host of special attacks such as curses or death which bypass character health and provide an immediate threat.

But this is a balance. Part of the power fantasy is becoming less likely to die. One might want to combine “trash mobs”, that let the player enjoy the feeling of becoming more powerful, with more high-tension risky encounters.

The Complexity Problem

A level-up system - alone - is relatively easy to balance. You can bucket creatures by level. Slimes are level 1 creatures, if your party or character is level 1 too then it should be a balanced fight. Then goblins might be level 2 and so on. Using these buckets you can fill out the world with zones and assign an interesting mix of enemies.

The problem with a basic level system is there’s no space for the player to demonstrate their mastery of the game, it’s just whoever has the bigger number wins. To allow for player mastery and make combat more interesting we need to introduce more rules and these introduce increased complexity.

More complex systems are harder to reason about and therefore harder to balance. Let’s say we add loot to the game with many different types of armor and weapons. On top of that, we let the player pick some abilities and assign attributes on level-up now we have a complex progression system. It’s also harder to model; there’s an explosion of combinations that becomes impossible to reason about.

One fool-proof solution is play testing. Let people play the game give feedback and then tweak from there. This works but is an expensive way to tune a system. There’s also a hidden danger to be aware of. As people play your game they get better, they build that player-mastery and no longer represent a fresh player and that means if you listen to them to closely you’ll make the game too hard. In most cases you need to make the game easier than play testing would suggest.

A second solution is to make a simplified model of the game and balance roughly using that. You might use a point system, where points are a rough proxy for power. Then each area gets a limited pool of points to spend on loot. This limits the amount of loot per area and also the rate of access to more powerful items. This rough idea can be refined with different types of point, or buckets of point per area: obvious loot, less obvious loot, hidden loot etc. In the same way points can be applied to spells, abilities, ranges of attributes and so on.

Problems with Quick Use Items

I’m looking at you in particular healing potions. Healing potions break balance. If the game allows you to collect hundreds of healing potions you can brute force nearly any battle just by restoring any damage you take. I’m singling out health potions but this also applies to nearly all quick use items. Such items add strategic depth but unless restricted, unbalance the game, removing any challenge or satisfaction.

As you progress through the game you tend to gather more and more of these items.

Dark Souls tackles this well. You find Estus Flasks and these can be filled with a healing potion. There are a limited number of flasks in the game and they’re rare. You can drink from the flask to restore some health but then that flask is empty and cannot be refilled until you find a campfire to rest at. This strictly limits how much the player can heal. Elderscrolls tackled it less well, allowing you pause combat and eat twenty cheese wheels, restoring health mid-battle as much as you want and allowing you to literally cheese any fight.

Pinch Points

A good solution for complexity is to introduce a pinch point. A pinch point is a limit on how much of the game’s systems a character can use at one time. Take magic rings for instance, rings can introduce all sorts of powers and abilities. And while humans have ten fingers, the number of rings per character in RPGs is usually limited to just two. This is a pinch point, it reduces complexity and makes the game easier to balance. Another example of pinch points is magic spell slots and ability slots.

Pinch points allow you to shower the player with rewards but when it comes to using those rewards you get to restrict them. But that’s no bad thing, these restrictions make for interesting and rewarding choices. The player is encouraged to think more tactically and given license to use their mastery of the game.

Final Thoughts

This was a ramble but I hope it sparks some thoughts. Taking a look at power progression is worthwhile and prompts a lot of what-if type questions that may lead somewhere interesting. If you think there are games that do progression particularly well or have other thoughts to share then I’d love to hear them @howtomakenarpg.

---