Why the Random Number God is not your friend.

[MechanicalPen]

Random chance is a mechanic in a lot of games. It exists to add some uncertainty to the players' strategy and force them to do some basic risk management. Risk management as a game mechanic is fun! Being 'unlucky' however, is very not fun.

When the player misses with his ultimate attack for the 5th turn in a row, they blame the Random Number God. When that loot they want just won't drop, the Random Number God is angry. Why players personify random chance in games is due to the difference in how we think probability works, and how it ACTUALLY works.

For example, if the player has a 50% chance to hit a target, any reasonable person would take that to mean "I will miss about every other turn." The reality is they will very likely have runs of 4 or even 5 turns where they do not score a hit (if this doesn't make sense to you, try it for yourself). The difference between the expected and actual outcome will cause the player to become frustrated.

"But Pen" you might say "even if random chance doesn't make sense, it's still fun because it effects everything equally!" To which I say, not true! If the player has an unlucky run, they might game over and lose progress. If enemies have an unlucky run, the player just gets one easy fight.


How can we, the game developers, make random chance more fair to the player?

[Ahzoh]

I knew this. And space programs follow this too, even a 99% success chance is bad.

[RosyPosy]

a games not supposed to be fair- only beatable.

In persona and SMt games the hard as hell enemies sometimes miss giving you an opening. earning you much needed EXP and a chance to win a new persona. The fights should simply be harder and worth more. and less often.
Id rather have 15 tough fights before Im read for a boss or to move on in the story then 40 somewhat weak ones who sometimes get lucky and kill me. the loss is as mucha drive to success as it is a justification to turn the game off.
The line is really based on popularity. if you wanna lot of people to play, make it easy but thought challenging (like minecraft, the enemies are not difficult but it takes time and patience to get anything done. and sometimes those nasty creepers get a hand over ya)

But alot of the more dedicated players who will always buy games from you, will prefer the harder fights. as long as the stories are interesting, the fights are rewarding, and the neemies are different enough that it keeps you on your toes. with the easier monsters you can get away with start all over from scratch approach, with the harder enemies you wanna have save points be somewhat frequent and withen reach. not to close but not far away. Persona 4 I believe whould be the RPG model for how to make Hardfights fun. they reward you kindly, the punish you harshly, but theres always a savepoint next to the boss stage, and the dungeons are filled with interesting enemies.

[Ahzoh]

I think I' will take that approach then.



by the way and unrelated to the topic, can anyone read the middle paragraph in my signature? or adr kadh nĕd?

[MechanicalPen]

A trick I have read some MMOs using for critical/misses is what I am going to call the 'card draw' technique.

Here is an example of how it works; say your RPG has a skill that crits 20% of the time. When the player uses the skill, they draw from a set of five cards; four normal attack cards, and one critical hit card. That card is then discarded and the process is repeated every time the skill is used. Once all five cards have been drawn, they are added back into the skill's deck and reshuffled.

This technique insures that one out of every 5 attacks will critical; there will be no 'unfair' chains of no crits or several crits in a row. The card draw technique can be implemented as a simple array in Ruby, and .pop can be used to draw them (XP is Ruby 1.8 so no built in shuffling, however XV and up can do this natively).

The drawbacks to this technique is you need to have an array of cards per skill per actor. A significant memory increase than the normal method.

[Steel Beast 6Beets]

What about those games where the Random Number God is surprisingly easy to please by following a specific ritual to the last detail?

For example the first Golden Sun game. There's a technique consisting of following a simple battle sequence to ensure that an enemy will drop a special and powerful armor that otherwise would be unavailable until later in the game. There are plenty of other games where the Random Number God can be manipulated to get what we want.

[MechanicalPen]

That is a very good point. The random number generator in Dragon Quest was constructed in such a way so that the hero would never remain asleep for more than 6 turns. Designers have to TRY to achieve this effect, which is the point of this thread; to educate developers on how randomness works so they can better utilize it. The default rand( ) in ruby cannot be manipulated in any meaningful way.

[Steel Beast 6Beets]

The problem of having a more lenient RNG is that players could take advantage and exploit it mercilessly to break the game in millions of tiny pieces.

The Megaman Battle Network series was particularly bad at letting the players do what they want without restraint. The second game in particular had the Gater Chip Folder that could be obtained like three hours into the game and that turned the rest of adventure into a joke.

To elaborate: The MMBN network games are a series of grid-based Action RPGs for GBA. In battle, you can use chips to provide power ups for your character, ranging from weapons, armors, abilities, etc. A feature within the games was the Advance Program combo, a combination of three chips used to unleash a mighty attack. The Gater Folder allowed the constant spam of an incredibly powerful advance program that dealt massive damage to all the enemies on the screen in every battle. With that, the player was able to steamroll the rest of the game without breaking a sweat.

[KasperKalamity]

i don't give random chance, i give the illusion of it. my random loot chests for recurrence had 3-5 sets of randomly selected loot, called by the rng. some of them only varied by a couple items, so it would appear more random than it was.