Mechanics: Tactical Combat – Part II – Progression

Progression is stuck onto RPG combat like some cancerous growth on its ass. For some reason, people at some point got it into their heads that the numbers must grow and have been making the numbers grow with ever increasing vigour since then.

Not that there’s anything wrong with growing some numbers. The problem has more to do with some fundamentally lousy design principles used for it.

So follow me for a moment here, you ever start out at level 1, dealing 3 damage to a rat that for some reason has at least 10 HP. But then at the end of the game, as a level 99, dealing 968453588432 damage against some omnigod and feeling like it’s barely scratching them. And for some reason, you feel no more powerful than you were 98 levels ago?

This kind of damage hyperinflation generally comes from horrible top-down design. The game being balanced around numbers instead of what those numbers represent. Whatever you do, try to avoid it.

Instead of dwelling on that I’m going to talk about the two types of growth a character can go through over the course of a game. Strictly mechanically speaking, none of that narrative nonsense this time.

1) Hight-growth

The more straightforward of the two, it is the progress by which the abilities of characters increase in potency, when taken to the illogical extreme this results in what I described above. However, when it is done correctly, it tends to be quite rewarding, especially if you throw a threat at the characters they struggled with before and are now capable of subduing it without much of an issue.

The central question is what should grow and how fast. The core thing to remember is that the numbers themselves do not matter, just the degree by which they increase. I.e. if the initial damage a character can deal with one attack is X, how does that change by the end? 2X, 5X, 10X, 1000000X? Too many combat systems overshoot this number. I strongly suggest something low in between the 2X and 5X range. For the most part, damage doesn’t matter that much. Even as far as making the player feel powerful. After all the enemy HP scales up as well. There are more effective targets for this type of progression. Purely in combat terms, the accuracy (chance the attach is successful) and frequency of attacks are often a much better choice, as is some form of evasion or mitigation (i.e. blocking, parrying or countering damage).

Try to think of it this way. If your combat progression focuses on the damage, you might start out dealing 10 damage to a 100 HP soldier and then later move on to deal 1000 damage to a 10000 HP giant. Comparatively, if you focus on the other option, you might start by struggling against one guard, but eventually be able to leverage your numeric advantage to dispatch a whole squad of them with ease. And do it without ever changing your damage. Ask yourself, which one of these options is going to make the player feel more like an accomplished badass when they finally get there?

That’s not to say there is no room for progressing damage. Just have it grow a little bit at a time.

The more reasonable the numbers are, the easier it is to balance a game. Lower numbers and a slower progression mean that there is a higher margin of error for combat design, making both being overpowered and underpowered harder.

2) Breadth-growth

The second avenue of progression is breadth. What is it? The number and diversity of options available to the character at any point in time. Many games significantly undervalue this type of advancement, either by entirely omitting it, or engineering a situation where new abilities phase out old ones (even if they remain in the character’s arsenal) that are objectively better options.

The primary goal here is giving the player more options instead of (or in addition to) making their existing choices progressively better. This hopefully opens up more tactical opportunities for the player, allowing them to exploit the systems to their advantage in many different ways.

At this point in my life, this is my preferred main avenue of character progression, and I don’t think it will ever change.

I’m not going to lie or butter it up though. It’s much harder to accomplish than even doing reasonable hight-growth. And the core issue is viability. If you expand a characters arsenal, you have to question if the options there are all viable. Any one that is not is a dud. The player might try it a few times, figure out it doesn’t work and give up. When a significant number of options lack usefulness, or one of the choices is just superior to the others you run into what is called a dominant strategy trap. A lot of designers seem to possess a very reckless disregard for this, but it’s pretty much a matter of fact that if presented with a dominant strategy, players will pursue it eventually. There’s not any way to get around it.

3) Exotic progression

There are also a few more exotic forms of progression. Especially reverse-progression and transformative progression.

The first happens when a character gets weaker over time. As strange as that may seem, there are many different narrative framing devices in which this works. Rare to see in the wild though and not very successful. The concept seems to drive people away on a fundamental level.

The second is weirder still. It’s the idea of a character neither progressing their abilities nor gaining new ones, but instead phasing one set of skills out for an entirely different one over time. While you rarely see this kind of progression as a stand-alone mechanic, transformative progression can often be tacked on (even successfully) to any other sort of advancement.

A slightly different aspect of the whole issue is customisation as progression, a concept in design whereas a character progresses they might not get notably stronger or gain more abilities, but the player can customise the skills to their liking. Shifting some numbers around, maybe adding some secondary effects, that sort of thing. This isn’t exactly what I’d call a progression scheme in the general sense that it is understood in (mostly because it allows the player to keep their initial skills utterly untouched through the whole game) but it is an option worth considering. Just like the previously mentioned transformative progression, it is more often just mixed in with some progression scheme.

Core thing to remember is that progression is not a goal in itself. Characters in games don’t actually need to get stronger. After all, you, as the designer, control the difficulty of everything. Progression, when appropriately used, accomplishes different things.

• It provides the player with fun, engaging or challenging mechanics (instead of tedium and grinding);
• It gives combat narrative weight (instead of being separate from the story);
• It offers customisation and engages the player with their character (instead of demeaning the player by robbing them of control);