Penalties

The one-sentence "definition" that should be in italics.

This pattern is a still a stub.

Examples

Left 4 Dead series,

Using the pattern

Typical reasons for receiving Penalties include taking Damage, triggering Traps, or suffering from Death Consequences. More uncommon but still possible reasons include performing specific Actions Have Diegetically Social Consequences of a negative kind. Critical Hits can motivate additional Penalties compared to ordinary hits, but Critical Failures or Critical Misses can be used to inflict Penalties on those performing actions or attacks rather than any potential targets.

General categories of Penalties include Setback Penalties, Energy Penalties, Life Penalties, and Game Termination Penalties. Besides these, there are many, more specific, Penalties that can be used as well. Downtime, Helplessness, and forced No-Ops, remove Player Agency from players. Turnovers also do so by giving the turn in a Turn-Based Game to some other player. Ability Losses, Decreased Abilities, and Movement Limitations can make further challenges more difficult or impossible to complete but without removing all Player Agency. Lowering Resource Caps can serve the same purpose. Other common ways of creating Penalties is to negatively modify players' Resources or Scores.

There are several ways to modify how Penalties behave. First, a basic choice is whether the Penalties should be Individual Penalties or Shared Penalties. Second, the strength of Penalties can follow Arithmetic Progression or Geometric Progression based upon how bad a failure was, how good a success was, when in a gameplay arc players are, or some other measurable value. Finally, Extra-Game Consequences - often bad ones - can be tied to the Penalties.

The possibility of using Save-Load Cycles in Single-Player Games can make any Penalties avoidable even though in reality few players may be willing to engage in Save Scumming often enough to avoid all Penalties.

Can Be Instantiated By

Area Control, Eliminate, Enemies, Factions, New Abilities,

Committed Goals together with Quests

Game Time Manipulation together with Single-Player Games

Can Be Modulated By

Mutual Goals, Parallel Lives, Predictable Consequences, Privileged Abilities, Shared Resources, Randomness, Rewards

Characters together with Emotional Engrossment

Interface aspects

In Single-Player Games, Cutscenes can be used to high-light the effects of Penalties without disrupting gameplay for others.

Consequences

The possibility of receiving Penalties in games create Tension in them.

Experiencing them may break any Exaggerated Perception of Influence that players may have had, and can easily break Thematic Consistency if not following the diegesis or narration (e.g. killing a player's character but then letting them restart at earlier positions of a Level).