Progression & capability
What a player or avatar is able to do and how that capability set changes within or across sessions, including asymmetric starting capability.
27 entries. Tie-break question: Does it make future turns stronger or different?
Achievements
A list of named goals, usually kept by a platform rather than by the game's own rules, records each one when its condition is met in play and adds it, often with a point value, to a persistent profile shown to others.
Aspects and Tags
Short free-text phrases written on a character, item, or scene, such as Ex-Cop or On Fire, carry mechanical weight: invoking one that fits the situation adds dice or a bonus, and some can be turned against their holder.
Base Building
Players spend gathered resources to place persistent structures at a home site, each of which unlocks units, production, storage, or defence, so the layout and growth of the base is the player's capability over the session.
Damage Types and Resistances
Each source of damage carries a type such as fire, piercing, or magic, and each target has fixed resistances, weaknesses, or immunities per type that scale the damage it takes, so the kind of attack matters as well as its size.
Death Penalty
On defeat a character returns to play instead of being deleted but pays a recoverable cost, such as lost experience, damaged gear, a timed weakness, or belongings left at the body to be fetched back
Deck-Building
Players start with identical weak decks and improve them during play by acquiring cards into their own draw pile, so each purchase changes the distribution of future hands.
Difficulty Settings
A rule-level parameter, chosen before play or adjusted by the system during it, scales enemy strength, resources, or margins for error so that the same content can be played at several levels of challenge.
Engine Building
Players assemble interlocking capabilities over the course of play so that each unit of input yields increasing output, converting early investment into late-game acceleration.
Equipment and Loadouts
Before or between engagements the player selects a limited set of items, weapons, or abilities from a larger pool into fixed slots or under a budget, and that selection defines what the character can do until it is changed.
Experience Levels
Characters accumulate experience points from play and, on crossing fixed thresholds, gain a discrete level that grants a bundle of improvements such as more hit points, better odds, and new abilities.
Full-Loot Loss
A defeated character survives, but the equipment it carried is destroyed or left, in whole or part, where the victor or anyone else can take it, often with insurance or protected storage softening the loss
Handicapping
A rule-sanctioned adjustment gives the weaker player a stated advantage, such as extra pieces, a head start, or an adjusted score, so that players of unequal skill can contest the same game on roughly even terms.
Item Modification
The player changes the properties of an item already held, rerolling, adding, removing or upgrading them by spending consumables or materials on it, often with a random result, so an owned item is improved in place
Kill Streaks and Bounties
Consecutive defeats of opponents without being defeated are counted, and set counts grant the streaking player rewards such as new capabilities; many games also pay a bounty to whoever ends the streak
Multiclassing
One character combines the kits of two or more classes, by taking levels in each class or by pairing two masteries, so that its capabilities are the sum of what each class grants at the level reached in it
Permadeath
When a character dies, all progress bound to that character is lost and cannot be restored by reloading, so each life is a single irreversible attempt.
Point-Buy
Players build a character, unit, or army by spending a fixed budget of points on capabilities priced in a published cost table, so every ability is bought at a stated price and builds of equal total are presumed comparable.
Power-Ups
A pickup placed in the play space, or spawned there on a schedule, grants a temporary capability to whoever touches it first, lasting for a timer or until a hit removes it, after which normal play resumes
Prestige Resets
The player voluntarily discards accumulated progress to restart from the beginning with a permanent multiplier or bonus, so each cycle runs faster than the last and the reset itself is the progression.
Promotion
A piece that reaches a designated zone, usually the far edge of the board, is replaced by or upgraded to a more capable piece, so advancing position is converted into a permanent gain in capability.
Random Upgrade Offers
At set points in a run the game draws a small random selection of upgrades, usually two to four, and the player keeps one, so a build is assembled from choices among offers the player did not set
Roguelike Meta-Progression
Currency or unlocks earned during a run survive the run's end and permanently expand what later runs start with or can contain, layering persistent progression over permadeath.
Skill Trees
Players spend points earned through progression to unlock abilities from a branching graph in which each node requires its prerequisites, so build choices accumulate into a distinct specialisation.
Socketing
Items or abilities carry a fixed number of slots into which the player inserts separate modules, such as gems, runes or materia, that grant or modify capabilities; linked slots let one module alter another
Status Effects
A named temporary state such as poisoned, stunned, or hasted is attached to a character and alters its capabilities by a fixed rule until it expires, is cured, or is otherwise removed.
Subclasses
Within one class, a character takes one of a short fixed list of branches at a set level or on completing set content, and the branch grants its own package of features at later levels of that class
Variable Player Powers
Each player begins with a different rule exception, capability set, or faction that breaks the symmetry of the shared rules, so the same situation offers different options to different players.