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.
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)