Artificial limitations
Video game concept
Any tags describing limitations or other restrictions that wouldn't apply if it was reality.
Alternate name: Artificial restrictions
Parent group
Child groups
| Ability cooldown | Player must contend with largely inexplicable artificial moderation on ability, skill or spell usage. | 2005 / 2020 | 86 games | |
| Active ability set | Player has access to only a small subset of their total skills, abilities, spells and so forth when adventuring, requiring the player to return to some safe haven or similar if they wish to use something else. | 2000 / 2021 | 46 games | |
| Attribute-based equipment | Items, even trivial ones, can't be used unless you meet certain basic and often quite arbitrary attribute limitations. | 1996 / 2021 | 60 games | |
| Class-based equipment | All or certain (specialist) items, tools and such can't be used at all unless the character is of certain class. | 1990 / 2024 | 150 games | |
| Invisible walls | Players' ability to fully explore and/or utilize their surroundings is thwarted by unexplainable invisible barriers. | 1989 / 2019 | 141 games | |
| Item cooldown | There's a timed limiter how fast player can re-use certain items. Commonly found in restorative items, such as medikits or healing potions. | 1983 / 2020 | 13 games | |
| Level-based equipment | Items, even trivial ones, can't be used unless the player character has reached a specific character level. | 1992 / 2016 | 79 games | |
| Projectile limit | There's a limit in how many projectiles can be "active" at any given time, especially when this limit is noticeable by the player. | 1980 / 2017 | 33 games | |
| Skill-based equipment | Items, even trivial ones, can't be used unless you meet certain basic and occasionally somewhat arbitrary skill limitations (e.g. need 15 points in electronics skill to use voltage meter). | 1999 / 2016 | 22 games | |
| Trivial obstacles | Player is prevented from moving into certain areas by trivial obstacles, especially the kind that they manoeuvre through with ease elsewhere. | 2005 / 2016 | 32 games | |
| Unit limit | There's an arbitrary limit on how many units you can control, usually exists to counter game engine's poor performance with larger numbers or to counter poor network code. | 1997 / 2022 | 71 games |