POWER-UP NOMENCLATURE PART 3:  SCARCITY/OMNIPRESENCE AND CONCLUSION
by François Dominic Laramée

(Missed Part 1? Click here Missed Part 2? Click here)

One more axis of analysis remains in our grid: the one describing the power-up's supply. Obviously, gameplay mechanics will be quite different if they are based on a common item (like slightly improved ammo) or a unique one that comes into play for only a few minutes out of the entire game. In this third and final part of the series, we will take a quick look at power-up supply as a gameplay device, and then examine a handful of classic power-ups to see how they fit into our grid.

Third Axis: Scarcity/Omnipresence
This axis describes how often the power-up is present in the player's current palette of options, i.e., how often the player can rely on its unique abilities. We will examine three alternatives: scarce, plentiful and unlimited supplies.

Scarce
Scarce power-ups can only be used on rare occasions, whether because there are few of them to be found in the game, or because they take a very long time to recharge between uses. Examples include the planet-killer cannon on board the Death Star, the wishes granted by the Genie of the Lamp, and high-level spells that can only be read from scrolls in some fantasy RPGs.

Historically, scarcity has been the cause of invention, natural selection, and many wars. In a game, it makes for highly strategic planning: if you only get three wishes, and you are told in advance that you won't be able to get any more no matter what, you will need to think long and hard before you expend one of them.

Since they don't come into play often, scarce power-ups tend to be very potent, and often serve as rewards for completing important tasks in the game, but they don't have to. Multiplayer games, in particular, stand to gain a great deal from rare devices than grant one player a small, temporary advantage. For example, a "get out of jail free" card in Monopoly is by no means a game-breaker; in fact, it only saves a few bucks or a handful of dice rolls. However, it does provide convenience, and its scarcity gives its owner an edge over the competition, which is all that is really needed to make it worthwhile. Conversely, a super-powerful and super-rare resource that allows one side in a real-time strategy scenario to build mechanized infantry while everyone else has to make do with sticks and stones may provide a highly meaningful focal point for the action, but as soon as one player achieves control over it, the game is effectively over – the original goal, for example a capture of the enemy's flags, has been displaced by the acquisition of the all-powerful power-up, and the latter stages of the game become a tedious mop-up session without any sort of suspense whatsoever.

One final note. Scarce power-ups often have a single in-game purpose: one key opens one door, one magical relic slays one monster, etc. That's fine, if a little predictable, inasmuch as an in-game problem should ever have a single solution. Certainly, if a problem only has one solution, then it shouldn't be possible to use up this solution for anything else, otherwise a curious player will eventually find himself forced to reload and backtrack for no good reason.

Plentiful
Plentiful power-ups are a regular, but not ubiquitous, part of the player's arsenal. They can be experimented with, used up, and replenished later when needed, but their occasional unavailability prevents over-reliance on the part of the player, who could otherwise become a one-trick pony and succumb to boredom. Examples include magic arrows in a fantasy RPG, exploding rockets in a first-person shooter, trump cards in Bridge, and all sorts of mined and harvested resources in strategy games.

Plentiful power-ups appeal to tinkerers. The supply is sufficient to allow experimentation and even the occasional mistake, but not so large that one can be dumb about it. They are also effective as a multiplayer gameplay device, because they support sudden reversals of fortune. For example, suppose that one player suddenly runs out of machine gun ammo in the middle of a firefight with an opponent whose own AK-47 has been empty for a while and who has been battling back with a mere hand pistol. Both players notice an ammo pack spawning on the floor, they run for it… And the enemy grabs it a split second before he can. Oops.

However, in most games, plentiful power-ups tend to pack relatively low potency, and as a result they provide limited intrinsic excitement. In a single-player adventure, they should be limited to "supporting cast" roles; the shrewd designer will include more emotion-inducing scarce power-ups for the high points of the action.

Unlimited
Unlimited, in our nomenclature, means that a power-up has no reload time, unlimited charges, and is always available for the entire duration of its life cycle, if only as a backup plan when nothing else works. That does not quite mean infinite: it is quite possible to have an unlimited power-up that can be used as often as you want for an hour, but then vanishes whether you have used it 500,000 times or not at all. An unlimited power-up can also disappear if the player loses a life or the magic item that bestows it is lost or damaged. Certainly, it should be possible to lose all but the weakest of unlimited power-ups somehow, otherwise it becomes part of the player's basic characteristics and not a power-up at all. Examples include the cannon added to the player's platform in Arkanoid, the production bonus granted by entering a Golden Age in Civilization III, and magic resistance that absorbs 50% of all incoming damage for an hour.

Unlimited power-ups are a natural fit for single-player adventures, because they support heroic feats. Drinking a potion of absolute invulnerability may allow our old friend Gorg the Unready to challenge an entire undead army and win (if he can beat them into submission before the potion wears out). However, the designer must make sure that the power-up doesn't become a one-tool toolbox that solves everything, or the challenge of the game breaks down completely. And in a competitive multiplayer scenario, even a single unlimited power-up can upset the balance to a point where every player except one has no other option besides running away until it wears out!

Some Examples
Before we conclude this series, let's look at a couple of power-ups and see how they fit into the grid:

Cloaks of Invisibility
The typical cloak of invisibility, as seen in the Harry Potter books and movies, is an equippable item (obviously), permanent, and unlimited, in the sense that one can wear it for as long as one desires.

As a gameplay device, however, invisibility is rather too powerful to remain unlimited. Thus, most designers will downgrade it to "plentiful" by making the player lose his invisibility for a while before and/or after an attack. Even the Romulans must turn off their cloaking devices before firing a plasma torpedo in Star Trek; otherwise, Captain Kirk would have been cleaning Jeffries tubes in a Warbird (or worse) by the middle of the first season.

The Long Hand Card
One of my current favorites is a French card and token game called L'Or des Dragons (published in English as Dragon's Gold, Eurogames). In this game, the goal is to slay dragons in collaboration with the other players, negotiate a split of the spoils, make a few trades along the way, collect especially valuable combinations of gems, and try to be the one with the highest net worth at the end. However, one of the cards a player can pick up during the game allows him to steal from the dragons' hoards at the center of the table before the dragons are killed, thereby breaking the rules, for as long as he doesn't get caught!

This "long hand" card is an active, temporary, rare power-up. There's only one of them, you don't have to use it if you don't want to, and it disappears if you get caught. But a player skilled at distracting the others' attention can use it to win a gain in most spectacular (and frustrating) fashion.

Hulking Up
As of this writing, the Hulk movie is on top of the charts and fiftysomething Hulk Hogan is still going strong in the WWE as "Mr. America". Both of them can, from time to time, suddenly go from normal to almost invulnerable, which is usually a disastrous sign for their enemies.

The ability to hulk up is a passive power-up, because it happens largely outside of the character's control, it is temporary, and plentiful – you will never see a Hulk Hogan wrestling match during which he doesn't use the "power-up".

Conclusion
As designers, power-ups are the essential tools we give to our players to give them a chance to beat us – or at least, our carefully crafted challenges. As usual, balance is key: give the players too little to work with, and they will be frustrated; give them too much, and they will get bored. Hopefully, the analysis grid I have suggested in this series will help you decide how to make your game optimal.