Randomly Speaking

Jay “Rampant Coyote” Barnson has penned a new entry to his oft game-design-focused blog, meant as a reply to Craig Stern’s recent editorial on “unpredictability and control” in turn-based combat.

Here’s a snip:

It’s Fun to Gamble

I forget the studies involved (it’s been a long time), but it’s been demonstrated that anticipation and excitement over an unpredictable result is much higher than for a predictable one. Putting coins in a slot machine is a lot more fun than buying something from a gumball machine even though your average return on investment from the gumball machine is higher. Our most memorable moments in our (dice & paper) RPGs often come from moments where we defied the odds either with a positive or negative result. One of our favorite stories involve a (boss) vampire going down at the beginning of round 1 with a combination of a good initiative roll on the part of the rogue, an Arrow of Undead Slaying, and a bad fortitude save on the part of the vampire. Yes, it ruined my big, high-level boss encounter. Yes, it turned a big climactic fight into almost a joke. But the players LOVED it. So what’s the problem?

Another negative result came from a monk in a bad melee who encouraged the spellcaster to launch a fireball on his position. (Don’t worry, I can take it,) he promised. But his enemies, he was sure, could not. After all, he was 80% sure of avoiding all damage from the fireball entirely (improved evasion), and even on failure, would take only half damage, and had a few more hit points than the spell would do *on the average*. Worst case, he could be healed and prevented from dying at -10 hit points once the fireball killed all of his opponents. You can probably guess what happened. The damage was extremely high, and the saving throw roll was extremely low. The monk was reduced to -11 hit points, killing him immediately. The player, fortunately, took it in great humor, rolling up a new character and laughing it off. We all do, now, too. It’s still a running joke. It was one of those great moments in gaming.

And randomized treasure? Seriously, sometimes I think that’s the only reason Diablo ever caught on. Randomness makes a game interesting.

Randomness Facilitates Friendly Competitive Gaming

It’s sort of a given in game design that randomness plays an important role in friendly competitive games. It allows players of unequal skill to play together, and gives all players a chance to write off losses as (bad luck.) On the extremes, you have games like Candyland that are pure luck, allowing children to play with their parents and have an equal chance of winning. By contrast, beating a more skilled player at chess may lead to the suspicion that they deliberately threw the game.