RANDOM NUMBER GENERATION: THE DEATH OF THE CRITICAL HIT

Critical are awesome because it's the equivalent to finding a hundred dollar bill in between your couch.

Everything doesn't have to be measured exactly. Variety, luck, and unexpected outcomes is the spice of life. What are you, a robot? Why does luck and skill have to be mutually exclusive?

well, I guess it depends.
As Feldschlacht pointed out, the luck factor is cool.

Personally, what made it even cooler for me about criticals in some games is the "flashy and spectacular" associated with them. I specifically remember Fire Emblem 4 for the SNES and how awesome the battle animations for the critical hits were just plain awesome (a trend that continues in the series).

Also, unless I'm mistaken, in that game there were skills and weapons that influenced the probability of critical strikes, so... there was some strategy to them, albeit limited.

So, in theory, there could be ways to tie critical hits and RNG-affected stuff with player actions to some degree.

EDIT: What I was thinking as I wrote this is: yeah, default RPG Maker "Critical Hits" in the DBS are probably boring... some sprucing them up certainly can't cause any harm.

Personally I look at random chances like this as warnings signs to check for undeveloped features or unnecessary clutter.

A 5 to 10% chance for random double-damage criticals? This is a cry for an interesting mechanic that can give players some real "choices" in your game.

Take those random calls and turn them into a player option - for example keep criticals, but only have them do 50% damage and make them an inherent and high chance on certain weapons or during certain conditions. Some examples:

1. Making Critical Hits ignore dodge/miss/evasion - instead of increased damage criticals introduce a new counter for player tactics to utilize, increasing depth and lowering unnecessary redundant mechanics.

2. Weapons: Daggers give a person a 50% crit rate + a bonus based on their DEX score - rolling your thief into a high DEX stat and using daggers versus swords or a bow makes them play differently and fill a different role.

3. Conditional Criticals - sleeping or stunned or other status effects allow critical hits instead of random chance. Maybe even an enemy going "off balance" if they miss a character, similar to the SMT series.

You can mix these together as well, making criticals always hit, but making only some weapons allow criticals, and make it easy for them to customize the character to hit crits almost every time but at the cost of of another advantage like high STR or HP.

Mix these theories with all the "random" elements - dodging might only be possible for some classes or special armors that are otherwise weak; or based on enemy condition or status.

Another example: Maybe everyone has "Stances" they use to decide if they try to dodge attacks or just lower the damage and take the hit - here you can pick which enemies should be tackled by which build, enemies using a dodge stance can be dealt with by the dagger user and the other who's just absorbing blows can be handled by the character based on normal damage.

Specialize some casters as a class that allow you to mess with enemies - instead of having a team prepared to specialize with each foe you can use that method to control them and your other characters can focus in more normal areas (and you get away from mages just being glass cannons and instead being tactical weapons.)


Staying consistent is important! One of my most annoyed moments ever was in Persona 3 - I had been playing heavily underleveled, using elemental strengths/weaknesses and defenses to handle bosses in Tartarus, then they introduced a new mechanic that became standard-fare afterwards - Almighty damage.

They built me up into using these elemental mechanics, and then took everything away by giving enemies an attack that hits all party members, does massive damage, and can't be reduced by elemental values.

I was left with only a couple options instead of the usual much more broad array - twice I nearly beat the boss with my underleveled party, each time by going completely offensive and getting those 'lucky rolls' - but to no avail, as it got close to death it'd just spam that attack for several turns and we'd all die.

Finally I was forced to level up enough to get the second level group healing spell and just spam-heal through the fight to win - was pathetically easy and boring like that and really left me disappointed.

I don't understand the RNG hate. Karsu and I's current battle system is heavily influenced on chaining attacks, which is influenced by your accuracy and the base stat that inherents crits for your move (Technique for physical, Focus for magical); the higher you chain, the more Burst Points you earn for your nukers to consume. Critical hits themselves deal more damage, are fairly common depending on your weapon and cause any ailments to be inflicted. Weaknesses cause you to gain +1 BP/hit, and resistances null BP generation (enhancing the power of empowering your RNG).

Complaining about RNG just makes you look like a nerd. It can be done poorly, like FF or DQ games. That said, anything can be done poorly and it is in no fault the result of RNG. Impressing girls can also be done poorly. BET YOU WISH YOU COULD HAVE ROLLED A CRITICAL SCORE ON THAT CHICK, HUH? Too bad the RNG was removed.

Critical! Dodge! Miss!

These are all words we associate with the common RPG battle. But do they create fun for the player, or do they reduce every boss battle to the player's prayers for a string of lucky crits? Numbers generated by the system are unpredictable and completely disassociated with the player's skill. Does this reduce the game's fun?

While RPGs probably rely more on RNG than any other game, randomness can be found in any genre. Anyone who's played Tetris knows the feeling of praying for the point-giving "I" tetronimo. If you've played Call of Duty, you may notice the rare instance when your bullets spread everywhere except for where you meant to hit.

Critical hits were created in tabletop RPGs to recreate an accidental lucky strike in combat (like hitting the weak spot in an opponent's armor). Rolling a 20 on the die rewarded the player with extra damage.

But how is that a reward? What did the player do to earn that 20? It's like putting a 20 dollar bill in one of several cupcakes and handing them out - it's fun and nice and exciting if you get it, but it's sure as hell not because of anything the player did. And what about the other 19 times you roll the die? Does that mean you are punished for not rolling a 20? God forbid we allow the enemies to get 20s too!

What if you take two friends and put them up against a typical RPG boss? One uses deductive reasoning to figure out that he's weak to Fire, and the other just dies over and over again until he gets a few critical hits on his special attacks and wins. The first friend's intelligent strategy was as successful as dumb luck was. While this is representative of real life (where the possibility that one friend earned his millions and the other friend won the lottery) do we really want to reproduce it in video games?

My point is that random elements like Critical Hits detract from a game as a whole. They are a cheap and easy way to give a player a good feeling based on good luck - but the feeling created by the success of hard work and intelligence is deeper and more satisfying.

How do people feel about RNG (Random Number Generation) in games?

Fuuuuuuucccckkkk thisssssss noissssssseeee son. Also Anaryu's post (sorry Anaryu).

Even the really weak sauce programming games class I took as an undergraduate imparted to me the important distinction between deterministic and probabilistic systems, and RPGs work best as a combination of both. As long as critical rate is TRANSPARENT (player can see it) and ADJUSTABLE (player can manipulate it through skills, equipment, etc.) then it ADDS TO, not subtracts from, gameplay. In fact, it adds a whole other strategic layer if you have to choose between a weapon with better damage and one with worse damage but a significantly better critical rate. It's choices like this that make D&D such a fun game: the same goes for all its endless string of derivatives, both electronic and paper.

That said, in the history of RPGs, the slider has been moving steadily from the probabilistic side of the spectrum to the deterministic side. For evidence of that, see: character creation in first edition D&D and compare to character creation in 4E D&D. And this is a change I am find with. But the removal of probabilistic elements entirely (for me) from tabletop/RM RPGs is a bridge too darn far, because at least in the medium I work with and the kinds of games I'm interested in playing, those probabilistic factors are nicely tied to extra layers of gameplay complexity.

Some RPG genres benefit from the absence of probabilistic factors. I know that. I wrote/have run for five years a live-combat LARP and it has pretty incredibly complex rules (esp. for that genre) without ever calling for a single die roll, RPS, playing cards, etc. All numbers are static or based on attributes, nothing is ever "rolled" at any point. Similarly, I'm not saying that there aren't video game RPGs I played that benefited from the wholesale removal of random elements. It's just that all of them were also first person shooters. : )

Afterthink:

All of these genres completely or almost completely ignore the "random" factor - they instead depend on better AIs and/or human input to make gameplay more interesting.

Yes, but all those genres include (at least for players who aren't uber-experienced) pseudo-random factors or factors that are indistinguishable from the random for most human players.

Mid-post I thought of an idea: The worst part of chance is the unlucky streak we all face once in a while. What if the game had a rigged number system, where it would never completely screw you over with chance? Example:
-It keeps crits fairly rare, but you'll get them once in a while on regular mobs, and if you ever get to a situation where you and a boss are extremely low, your crit chance doubles, or triples, or whatever. It wouldn't happen every time, but if you got a kill like that on occasion (maybe once a playthrough) it would feel pretty good.
-Or, maybe it just reduces the chance a boss will dodge seven attacks in a row and drop you easy.

This can be boiled down to faking chance in the eyes of the player, maintaining the good aspect (lucky crits to win fights) while downplaying the bad (unlucky dodge streaks less common). How do people feel about "cheating" the player's luck in this way? Keep in mind that this system would be completely hidden from the player - but people could possibly get together and figure out it existed.

As I am a tabletop GM, I do this shit all the time. As long as the player doesn't know and you use it sparingly, it's awesome. It would be tricky to simulate this in a videogame, since at the gaming table it relies on human judgement, but I think it could be done.

Just saying: Nothing is stopping the player from manipulating random chance. Pushing, say, your critical hit rate to 50% or better suddenly makes it more than random bullcrap hits. Likewise, having 1 HP and endless evasion can make mundane enemies require different tactics (such as unavoidable damage or ailments, assuming your player has access to this - and why wouldn't they, in the presence of such enemies).

Amen. My games love this crap although they don't always get far enough in development that a player can get this high up the skill chain.

I don't know if Civ is a real time strategy but that game has always had randomness. Also called the "Spear vs Tank" syndrome. Where a tank would fight against a spearman and lose even though the tank had about five times the attack power compared to the spearman's defense. (It has apparently been minimized in Civ5 and the reworking of the battles)

Compare this to Advance Wars where you always know exactly how much damage an attack will do (and there's never any deviation).

In Civ there's the risk management issue again. "Do I send this many troops there and save these hope I make it or do I send all my troops there?" A big part of strategy is risk management. Without risk or randomness it is no longer a strategy game it's a puzzle that needs to be solved.

Speaking of puzzles one genre that doesn't have any randomness whatsoever are puzzle games (and with them adventure games). I mean genuine puzzles. Games that rely on a random drop (Tetris etc) have certain randomness to them.

In that way you could say that First Person Shooters are moving away from that. With improved AI and "sandboxy" games the games try to move away from people trying to "solve" the games from experimenting. Advanced physics models add to this and though neither AI nor physics models are random they are often so unpredictable they could just as well be.


From boardgames there are three ways to do the "random". There's perfect information (Chess, Tic-tac-toe), where you know all the rules to all the pieces and your opponent does the same. These have no randomness in them whatsoever and completely rely on outsmarting an opponent. The other perfect information is the one with randomness. Which is most wargames. You know exactly what your opponents have and all the "stats" but there's a random mechanic to resolve things. Such as a die roll or a drawing of cards.

Then there's imperfect information where some part of it all is hidden to you. There are imperfect information games without randomness. (usually each player is dealt the same deck of cards or chits to use but these are then kept hidden from the other player. Or scoring markers are kept hidden from opponents so that unless they really kept track they don't know what your score it). And then there's imperfect information with randomness. This is often in card games where players draw cards but you don't know what they have. The card draw mechanic is random and you don't know what cards the opponent has so those are hidden from you.

There's of course varying degrees of everything.

Edit: Just realized this whole post was more or less irrelevant.

I think crits might be able to be kept out (or just be fairly insignificant), but misses are nearly crucial in balancing skills: I once played a german RPG called Mondschein (where no attack ever misses) and I stopped at a part where the enemies were insane: They had HP beyond the damage cap (not that I could do anywhere near that damage). They come in packs of three (your group size). And they have an instant-kill skill. Which is their only move. You could try multi-hit skills, but there are only two in the entire game, of which one is very weak and takes a turn to charge up (and it even cancels when you're hit while charging). And when these enemies ambush you...

Meh, I think people are pansies and should accept that axes miss more.

slashphoenix
How do people feel about "cheating" the player's luck in this way?Keep in mind that this system would be completely hidden from the player - but people could possibly get together and figure out it existed.

I made a topic about this once. I think this is a good use of the Luck stat - actual luck. In general, people thought that this was stupid and cheating and bad design and stupid and bad and stuff. Did not go over well.

If the player can control it, however (a passive you can purchase that raises evasion by 40% when HP is <50%, for instance), it's more acceptable. It's a choice instead of a fluke that cheats you out of a HARD-EARNED VICTORY.

mashing spacebar is serious business