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RANDOM NUMBER GENERATION: THE DEATH OF THE CRITICAL HIT
Posts
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
LockeZ
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Closeauthor=LightningLord2
Back to the topic, I highly value the existence of crits/misses because I then I often have a chance to win, making the outcome of the battle insecure. Fully non-random games (though exceptions such as chess exist) is for paranoid freaks.
You like it when you do every single thing 100% perfectly and could not possibly have done anything better in any imaginable way, and only have a chance to win? It seems to me that if you did everything 100% perfect in every single aspect of your choices and performance, you should not randomly lose. It's not fun to lose under those circumstances.
Don't say "it's not fun to lose under any circumstances" because that's false. That's a misconception. Having the chance to lose is what makes winning fun. But only because when you lose, you realize that you need to do better next time, and when you do win, it feels like an accomplishment. Either skill or strategy should factor into whether you win or lose, at least a little bit. When those things don't factor in at all, I don't see the point of playing.
I hate slot machines and other types of pure-chance-based gambling, and have never understood how anyone could see any appeal in them. Does it show?
LightningLord2
230
With the existence of random numbers, there is no such thing as a 100% perfect pattern - there's always the risk/reward thing. Also, sometimes, the random number generator won't give a certain loss with its influence - just making it harder.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
author=LightningLord2
Also, sometimes, the random number generator won't give a certain loss with its influence - just making it harder.
But sometimes it will.
Harder is fine! Randomly harder is fine! I really have no problem whatsoever with RNG being used to make the game sometimes harder than other times! I only have a problem when your RNG creates the cases where victory is literally impossible.
Obviously, the easier your RPG is to begin with, the less of an issue this is. If you have battles of normal commercial RPG difficulty, then it's practically irrelevant. But if you are making an RPG that actually presents a challenge to the player, then it's a serious issue.
Take, as an example, the game Soul Shepherd that a friend of mine made. The final boss of the demo has a set of elemental breath attacks. It picks one to use every other round, announcing which element beforehand. If you just let it hit you without any preparation, you're dead, period, no exceptions. To survive, you have to cast your defensive buffs at the beginning of the battle, cast an elemental wall of the proper element right beforehand, and if any of your party members are weak against the element being used, you have to defend with that character. If you do all that, it'll deal about 60-80% of your max health. Which is pretty much exactly how much you can heal in the next round if you have three of your four characters healing.
That example battle is very difficult and allows very little room for error. Due to the element of randomness, you may be allowed to make a handful of errors as you go, or you may be allowed to make none. It depends on how often the boss's other abilities crit or miss, and how often your own abilities do, and how often he uses breaths you're weak against. But if you follow the optimal strategy perfectly, you'll win.
But... if my friend made it so that the breath attacks had a chance to crit, and one of them crit against more than one of your party members in the same round - or even if it just crit your best healer - you would absolutely not be able to recover from that damage no matter what you did. An unlucky enemy crit would simply mean a guaranteed game over, no matter what choices you made. Fortunately, thought, he made it so the breaths can't crit, so the battle is "fair".
This is the sort of situation I'm thinking of when I say that RNG has a chance to ruin your game. I'm not thinking of any situation that could possibly happen in, say, a Final Fantasy game. In any game where you can grind until you overpower the boss, it's a non-issue. In any game where using all your status effects and tactics intelligently will make you overpower the boss, it's a non-issue. It's only an issue when there is a real chance that it could literally become impossible to win.
Killer Wolf
1235
As long as the gameplay is balanced, and by that I mean that the enemies are subject to the same rules as the player, I have no problem with losing a battle because the virtual dice decided against me. As long as enemies can critically fail, I don't mind it happening to my party now and again. It is one of those game mechanics that I've decided to accept, like turn based encounters.
When I first tried rpgs, I hated the idea of just having to wait around and let stuff hit me... especially when my character would miss, and get hit a few mores times before I could try again. That's not really what fighting is like. Then again, if I want to employ stop hits and broken rhythm, I could go play other types of games or shove some large person in a bar.
Game mechanics are subject to evolution and extinction just like anything else. The ones that work well tend to get perpetuated and the others, well, not so much. In most any rpg I've heard of in the last decade or so, you don't have to worry about "memorizing" spells. Your character doesn't have to sit at the campfire and memorize shocking grasp over and over again for each time he'd like to use it in a battle. All he has to do is snag it at a level up, and have the required amount of mana to use it.
Even the mana mechanic has begun to fade now, with the advent of the cooldown system.
There has to be some reason the d20 model has survived this long when other conventions have fallen by the wayside. To me, unless a game involves psychics, there is really no reason to remove random variation from its calculations. It is a good way of making things more 'realistic', because chance does factor into a great many things. It probably isn't good form to use a movie example to illustrate 'realism', but I've had Unforgiven on the brain lately.
The Duke of Death vs Two Gun Corcoran (the version as related by Little Bill - with some d20 interpretations that I kind of have to fake, having never actually sat down at a d&d table myself).
Duke of Death and Two Gun Corcoran roll for initiative. Duke's roll is higher so he acts first, taking a shot. He has a penalty to hit because of his drunk condition, so his roll + penalty comes out to something like 3, against Corcoran's reflex save of 9. The shot misses. Now it is Two Gun's turn. He draws his gun as a swift action and tries to fire, he was caught flat footed so he has a penalty as well, not that it matters, because he rolls a natural 1 and suffers a critical failure: shooting his own toe off. Duke's turn again, he's still drunk. He ends up with a 4, maybe. His shot goes wide. Two Gun's turn again. He's moved -1 on the condition track thanks to shooting his own toe off, so he's got extra penalties to his roll, not that it matters, because, guess what? He rolled another natural 1. This time his gun blows up in his hand as a result of the critical failure, and he takes another -1 step down the condition track. The Duke (or Duck, whatever you prefer) has it easy, because Two Gun's penalties are stacking up, and he's not capable of defending himself. The Duck moves as a swift action, negating any range penalties to make up for his drunkenness. He fires, rolls higher than Two Gun's reflex save, exceeds his damage threshold, and finishes him off.
When I first tried rpgs, I hated the idea of just having to wait around and let stuff hit me... especially when my character would miss, and get hit a few mores times before I could try again. That's not really what fighting is like. Then again, if I want to employ stop hits and broken rhythm, I could go play other types of games or shove some large person in a bar.
Game mechanics are subject to evolution and extinction just like anything else. The ones that work well tend to get perpetuated and the others, well, not so much. In most any rpg I've heard of in the last decade or so, you don't have to worry about "memorizing" spells. Your character doesn't have to sit at the campfire and memorize shocking grasp over and over again for each time he'd like to use it in a battle. All he has to do is snag it at a level up, and have the required amount of mana to use it.
Even the mana mechanic has begun to fade now, with the advent of the cooldown system.
There has to be some reason the d20 model has survived this long when other conventions have fallen by the wayside. To me, unless a game involves psychics, there is really no reason to remove random variation from its calculations. It is a good way of making things more 'realistic', because chance does factor into a great many things. It probably isn't good form to use a movie example to illustrate 'realism', but I've had Unforgiven on the brain lately.
The Duke of Death vs Two Gun Corcoran (the version as related by Little Bill - with some d20 interpretations that I kind of have to fake, having never actually sat down at a d&d table myself).
Duke of Death and Two Gun Corcoran roll for initiative. Duke's roll is higher so he acts first, taking a shot. He has a penalty to hit because of his drunk condition, so his roll + penalty comes out to something like 3, against Corcoran's reflex save of 9. The shot misses. Now it is Two Gun's turn. He draws his gun as a swift action and tries to fire, he was caught flat footed so he has a penalty as well, not that it matters, because he rolls a natural 1 and suffers a critical failure: shooting his own toe off. Duke's turn again, he's still drunk. He ends up with a 4, maybe. His shot goes wide. Two Gun's turn again. He's moved -1 on the condition track thanks to shooting his own toe off, so he's got extra penalties to his roll, not that it matters, because, guess what? He rolled another natural 1. This time his gun blows up in his hand as a result of the critical failure, and he takes another -1 step down the condition track. The Duke (or Duck, whatever you prefer) has it easy, because Two Gun's penalties are stacking up, and he's not capable of defending himself. The Duck moves as a swift action, negating any range penalties to make up for his drunkenness. He fires, rolls higher than Two Gun's reflex save, exceeds his damage threshold, and finishes him off.
author=ChaosProductions
I've often toyed with the idea of rates in the place of chances - having results that occur with a fixed distribution. For example, inflicting Burn every third use for a fire-damage spell.
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So basically the strategy involved there is "Cast fire spell twice, leave Burn queued up." A bit too predictable (your second paragraph is much better design). Like in FFX's abusable Grand Summon overdrive, all you had to do was get Yuna to fill her overdrive guage and BAM! Free megablast in your next battle. (Nevermind that this is ON TOP OF the summon's own overdrive guage...)
WolfCoder
3554
Remember that stats are so named for being statistics and the entire game is based off of statistics. It's kind of implied there will be some randomness involved.
Yoshio
774
i like randomness when it comes to misses and criticals cause this makes the battle more exciting and unpredictable, guess i just have nostalgic memories of getting crits at just the right moment to barely defeat a boss by the skin of my teeth. i don't think crits make much difference though if you don't make your bosses so hard that most of your players are praying for good luck, which is what i am aiming for, commercial game difficulty or close to it, though a couple of players have told me my battes are too hard ;-;
a good idea would be to have skills that increase or decrease the chance of a crit or have certain weapons that are more or less likely to crit. This allows the randomness of a crit to be yet another thing the player can consider strategically and gives him more options
as for "player A fights the boss intelligently with a cunning strat and prevails yet player B kept being an idiot and dying and only when dumb luck finally shined did he win." this is not a bad thing since both players have a good experience, just in different ways. Player A has the satisfaction of seeing his cleverness pay off, while player B gets the excitement of finally beating a boss that was "impossible" to him because of a string of insane good luck. The only problem is the game maker shaking his fist because someone beat his boss despite completely ignoring the way he intended the boss to be defeated. but who cares about that guy he sucks
a good idea would be to have skills that increase or decrease the chance of a crit or have certain weapons that are more or less likely to crit. This allows the randomness of a crit to be yet another thing the player can consider strategically and gives him more options
as for "player A fights the boss intelligently with a cunning strat and prevails yet player B kept being an idiot and dying and only when dumb luck finally shined did he win." this is not a bad thing since both players have a good experience, just in different ways. Player A has the satisfaction of seeing his cleverness pay off, while player B gets the excitement of finally beating a boss that was "impossible" to him because of a string of insane good luck. The only problem is the game maker shaking his fist because someone beat his boss despite completely ignoring the way he intended the boss to be defeated. but who cares about that guy he sucks
Crystalgate
694
I have mentioned when I don't like random variance, but perhaps I should mention what kind of random variance i do like.
I like random variance that changes what strategies I have to use. I'm not talking about situations like "these monsters can crit, so heal at 75% Max HP instead of the usual 50%" since that's just one change which will then apply to all battles against that monster. What I'm talking about is that the very same encounter group requires different strategies depending on the RNG. You fight against one ice shaman and two fros wolves. They do something and you use an appropriate strategy to deal with them. The next time you fight that group, they do something else and you will now need another strategy.
I like random variance that changes what strategies I have to use. I'm not talking about situations like "these monsters can crit, so heal at 75% Max HP instead of the usual 50%" since that's just one change which will then apply to all battles against that monster. What I'm talking about is that the very same encounter group requires different strategies depending on the RNG. You fight against one ice shaman and two fros wolves. They do something and you use an appropriate strategy to deal with them. The next time you fight that group, they do something else and you will now need another strategy.
WolfCoder
3554
To add to my post, it also helps to study statistics a little, even a little to become a better RPG system designer.
prexus
309
As what other people have said,
Random chance is annoying when you have no effect on it. If you have a base chance to miss, with no way of removing or modifying it, you get the sense that any of your attacks could just randomly be useless.
What I like is the D&D approach, where you build your character in a specific way. If you are building a combat oriented character, you get to decide how much +hit is enough +hit while still balancing your other stats.
Random chance is annoying when you have no effect on it. If you have a base chance to miss, with no way of removing or modifying it, you get the sense that any of your attacks could just randomly be useless.
What I like is the D&D approach, where you build your character in a specific way. If you are building a combat oriented character, you get to decide how much +hit is enough +hit while still balancing your other stats.
