CONDITIONAL TRIGGERS
Player-authored if-then rules that fire automatically when a condition is met — 'when health drops below 30%, drink a potion', 'when the hopper is full, start the smelter'.
- SOLO-DEV COST MEDIUM
- TIMING REAL-TIME / TURN
- COMMON IN RPG · AUTOMATION · STRATEGY
Final Fantasy XII's Gambit system turned party AI into a programming puzzle, Dragon Age: Origins offered similar tactics slots, and automation games like Factorio expose circuit conditions that enable or disable machines. Designers use conditional triggers to let players delegate repetitive decisions without losing authorship — the player's intelligence is encoded in the ruleset rather than exercised every frame. They also form a gentle on-ramp to programming thinking: priority ordering, edge cases, and rule conflicts emerge naturally. Key decisions: how many trigger slots to allow (scarcity makes rule choice strategic), what vocabulary of conditions and actions to expose, and whether rules execute in strict priority order the player can reason about. Pitfall: a trigger vocabulary that's too small makes the system feel like toggles rather than authorship, while one that's too rich can automate the game so completely the player becomes a spectator.