RINE'S PROFILE

I think the key is that if you are using chance in your game to make sure that you are using it well and know what it is doing. It is a bit easier when you do a straight up percentage, but the confluence of percentages can cause some unexpected effects if you aren't careful. For example, you should know on average how many drops of a certain item players will get when going through your dungeon by the chance for encounter * chance for specific encounter * size of the dungeon * rate of drop.

I actually forgot to mention level ups as something that is terrible to randomize. That just encourages save scumming to ensure you get the best level ups.

Please don't do this >.>

This is a topic that has come up in a few games I reviewed recently, where random chance was used poorly and without much thought, causing actual problems in the game. So...might be best to discuss the best ways to use and when to use chance in games!

Perhaps I think about this more because I designed tabletop games before I started designing video games, but randomness shouldn't be 100% random. Even the best designed games can use chance very poorly. One example from tabletop was when I played the Mechwarrior tabletop game (not Battletech), the hit region roll was 2-12, rolling 2d6. We wondered why we kept hitting people in the right arm over and over...and it turned out the book had the hit region for the right arm be 6-7...which if you know the probability of a six-sided dice, are some of the most probable numbers (7 being -the- most probably when rolling two dice). A simple thing like that breaks immersion and the fun when you realize your highly trained team of commandos is constantly shooting people in the same arm over and over.

When you design video games, you obviously have a very finely tuned control over chance, since we deal with straight up percentages. I'll mention a few areas we tend to use it, and how it can be used well, and not so well.

The first and most obvious is encounters. Lots of old school RPGs use random encounters, which are obviously listed as a probability per step (or rising probability as you take more steps in more modern games). This helps the game if done well, as it provides a sense of danger, and not knowing when to be ready for the next fight...should you heal up now, or wait a bit and risk getting into a fight before the next recovery area? Poorly used, this can be an annoyance...too high of a random encounter set makes exploring a chore, and seriously hinders any decision to explore.

The second is numerical, meaning in combat. This can be hit/evade chances, damage randomness, and the like. Two recent games I played struggled with this, one game punished you for missing, and had characters whose job was noticeably hurt by having a high miss chance when it punished what they were supposed to do. Another had enemy damage be way, way too random. An enemy could do 20, or 200 damage, and you never had any idea when to heal. Obviously randomness is nice in combat, because it adds to the danger as well. If you know an enemy can't hurt you, or only does 10 damage a turn, the battle becomes just a math formula, not an engaging combat experience.

The third is drops, which not all RPGs use, but can be used to good effect if you like. An obvious use is randomly dropped items, the 1/256 best gear in Earthbound, etc. Too random makes getting the items an exercise in frustrating grinding, while properly used random drops can make finding healing items after a fight just when you need them all the more satisfying.

What do you guys think? How do you deal with randomness in your game?

Same, barring games I completed previously or on other platforms, I'm just searching by unrated/completed and knocking things out.

Edit: As a question, what is the etiquette for reviewing uncompleted games?

Of course, my view may be a bit skewed by the fact that lately I've been on a tear to finish my huge backlog of games >.>