Personally I prefer fudged dice (I forget the proper term) where expected damage is maintained, but low rolls and high rolls are dampened on repeats, to avoid low-chance sequences of misses/crits.
In fact, I’d go further to say it’s fundamentally correct — repeat bad/great swings of the sword is too rare to really account for, has no real basis in “reality” and is purely an artifact of the simplified simulation. Their occurrence adds no value to the strategy, by either arbitrarily trivializing or exploding risk as to be untenable.
It’s removal also eliminates the majority of the “unfairness” of the dice — 80% feels like 80%.
Most FE games roll two dice and average them together. Ex: its not a single-dice roll of 0 to 100%. So when it says 60% chance to hit in FE, they roll two dice and average it.
A 60% chance to hit (displayed) is instead 68% true-hit.
A 80% chance to hit (displayed) is instead 92% true-hit.
I was thinking more like LoL, which as I recall implements a dynamic crit system — as crits occur, your % chance of a crit drops (possibly below your stated %), and as crits fail, your % chance of a crit increases (possibly above).
Your effective value stays the same (by whatever algorithm deciding drop/raise rates), but the possibility of sequences reduces — because 1-1000 chance to kill near-instantly is fairly ridiculous, in a game where a single kill can decide a match.
Although the exact method must be more involved because what I’m describing could be trivially abused (you could actually execute on the gamblers fallacy — a miss-streak will likely be followed by a hit-streak)
Guidelines Tetris has a pretty fun one: the "Bag Randomizer" means that all 7 pieces come before they repeat. So all 7 Tetris pieces (named IJLSZTO) will always drop in equal proportions, but in random orders.
If you had say a 10% chance to crit, a "Bag randomizer" would have "0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, crit", or some permutation there-of (ex: "0, 0, 0, crit, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0).
This keeps the random property, but not "too random". Of course, throw more bags in as needed (ex: two bags would be two crit chances out of 20, leading to possibilities like "crit, crit, 0, 0, 0...", but then that'd create a drought of 18-non-crits afterwards).
Increasing the bag or decreasing the bags is the game designer's control over how random the process is. The more bags, the more it plays like true random.
Or really, two-bags would have the possibility of "0, 0, 0, ... crit, crit, (new bag), crit, crit, 0, 0, 0...", so a very rare chance of 4x crits in a row still. But that'd be far more rare than normal circumstances
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> Although the exact method must be more involved because what I’m describing could be trivially abused (you could actually execute on the gamblers fallacy — a miss-streak will likely be followed by a hit-streak)
Just call it a "game mechanic" and now the players think the abuse is skill. Advanced Tetris players abuse the bag-randomizer to create BT Cannon perfect clear loops (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmG0NcbrLTE). So yeah, its a skill.
That's why guidelines tetris players call themselves "Guideline Tetris" players, because we practice a very specific set of random-number generators to generate our tactics. These tactics don't work on "Grandmaster Tetris" (which has a different RNG algorithm), or "Classic Tetris" (for the Gameboy fans)
Is the "abuse" of the RNG fun? Is it a skill? Do the players respect the skill? Will the opponents say "that's cheap and unfair", or will the opponents say "Wow, he managed to keep track of the RNG bags and count things out during tight play. I should practice those skills more!".
This is basically the same mechanic as some card-draw / reshuffle board games. You draw until you hit the bottom of the deck, reshuffle, etc. It is definitely a valuable tool in a game designer's toolkit.
Also why DnD has different weps that roll 1d20 vs 2d10, 2d6 vs 3d4 etc. Some things are designed to be swingier with more crits but more critical failures, where others are designed for consistancy.
I think this is fine if you don't show an '80%' there. If you show it, it skews the player's perception of what 80% means. 80% is a 1-in-5 chance of failure. 80% chance of success should mean "I should have a solid backup plan here."
The problem is accounting for the 1-25, 1-125, 1-625 possibilities that are still legal, but you can’t meaningfully do anything about (and a 1-625 crit sequence trivializes any boss fight, and a 1-625 miss sequence makes a trivial enemy impossibly powerful). It really amounts to a 1-625 chance that combat just breaks down altogether.
Another alternative is you have so many rolls individual rolls don’t matter (e.g. mass combat), or you have such cheap restarts / difficulty that a 1-625 game breakage doesn’t matter (ADnD, roguelikes).
Tail risk is probably a the least interesting type of risk, unless the game is specifically designed for it (it runs long enough that encountering a tail risk is an expected proposition)
Hmm, IMO tail risks are the most interesting type of risk - just handling a certain amount of normal variance is uninteresting, it's the tails that are memorable and create stories.
Right, but the game needs to actually build with it in mind.
In a CRPG, death is basically an illegal operation — your only option is to save scum or reset the campaign (eg on TPK. On single death, you can probably resurrect), so the tail risk of instant-death is untenable.
In ADnD and roguelikes, death is a matter of course, so tail risk is a natural function of the game — and they offer various mitigation strategies (e.g. campaigns don’t require anything to actually be dealt with — ADnD just says you need to get gold, by any means necessary. Rogue says the same, but for the necklace. So tail risk is truly an opt-in). Boss fights are optional and rewarding, but not required, and often many exist, so trivializing one by a 1-625 crit sequence isn’t nearly as damaging as in, say, baldur’s gate.
In grand strategies, there’s enough rolls, and its not sufficiently damaging, that it’s just part of your day-to-day. The same is true of tail risk running a distributed cluster.
In risk, tail risk means a group of 5 can knock down your group of 30 — which voids any strategy whatsoever. There’s not mitigation path, and there’s not much alternative except to say “such is as the gods have deigned”, as they penetrate a key area with basically nothing. You could describe it like wesnoth “good strategy, bad luck”, or you could describe it as a bad mechanic (not to comment on wesnoth’s usage).
Ultimately, it depends on whether you actually have the tools to do something about it, or a design to convince the user accept it outright. But without either, you just have bullshit.
I believe most utilize a pseudo-random system to help smooth out the swinginess of true random.
Some even utilize a fixed long set of numbers so that it doesn't have to generate a random number every call.
I first encountered it in DotA. Similar to another comment about LoL, the longer you don't Crit the higher chance your next attack with Crit, and vice versa. Higher level players would intentionally "save" a Crit (look for a string of non-Crits while hitting mobs) to ensure high burst damage on heroes.
https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Pseudo_Random_Distribution
In fact, I’d go further to say it’s fundamentally correct — repeat bad/great swings of the sword is too rare to really account for, has no real basis in “reality” and is purely an artifact of the simplified simulation. Their occurrence adds no value to the strategy, by either arbitrarily trivializing or exploding risk as to be untenable.
It’s removal also eliminates the majority of the “unfairness” of the dice — 80% feels like 80%.