Video: Video: The Two Types of Random | Game Maker's Toolkit
From critical hits to random encounters, and from loot boxes to procedural generation, video games are stuffed to bursting with randomness. In this episode, I look at the way randomness is used in games - and why some forms are more contentious than others. Support Game Maker's Toolkit on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/GameMakersToolkit Have Mark talk at your studio, university, or event - https://gamemakerstoolkit.tumblr.com Sources Uncapped Look-Ahead and the Information Horizon | Keith Burgun http://keithburgun.net/uncapped-look-ahead-and-the-information-horizon/ A Study in Transparency: How Board Games Matter | GDC Vault https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020408/A-Study-in-Transparency-How GameTek Classic 183 - Input Output Randomness | Ludology https://www.dicetower.com/game-podcast/ludology/gametek-classic-183-input-output-randomness Why revealing all is the secret of Slay The Spire's success | Rock Paper Shotgun https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/02/19/why-revealing-all-is-the-secret-of-slay-the-spires-success/ Crate | Spelunky Wiki https://spelunky.fandom.com/wiki/Crate Random Generator | Tetris Wiki https://tetris.fandom.com/wiki/Random_Generator Level Feeling | Spelunky Wiki https://spelunky.fandom.com/wiki/Level_Feeling/HD Plan Disruption | Etan Hoeppner https://ethanhoeppner.github.io/gamedesign/plan-disruption.html Fire Emblem True Hit | Serenes Forest https://serenesforest.net/general/true-hit/ The Psychology of Game Design (Everything You Know Is Wrong) | GDC Vault https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012186/The-Psychology-of-Game-Design How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games | Nautilus http://nautil.us/issue/70/variables/how-designers-engineer-luck-into-video-games-rp Roll for your life: Making randomness transparent in Tharsis | Gamasutra https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/263953/Roll_for_your_life_Making_randomness_transparent_in_Tharsis.php 12: Into the Breach with Justin Ma | The Spelunky Showlike http://thespelunkyshowlike.libsyn.com/12-into-the-breach-with-justin-ma Find out more Many faces of Procedural Generation: Determinism | Gamsutra https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/FranciscoRA/20160511/272419/Many_faces_of_Procedural_Generation_Determinism_classification_system_part_3.php Why Our Brains Do Not Intuitively Grasp Probabilities | Scientific American https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-our-brains-do-not-intuitively-grasp-probabilities/ How classic games make smart use of random number generation | Gamasutra https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/320213/How_classic_games_make_smart_use_of_random_number_generation.php Games shown in this episode (in order of appearance) Cuphead (2017) Enter the Gungeon (2016) Octopath Traveler (2018) Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle (2017) Griftlands (In Early Access) Dicey Dungeons (2019) Hearthstone (2014) The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (2014) Darkest Dungeon (2016) Dead Cells (2018) SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech (2019) Into the Breach (2018) Spelunky (2012) Armello (2015) Minecraft (2011) Chasm (2018) Downwell (2015) Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (2014) No Man's Sky (2016) Celeste (2018) Fortnite (2017) Mario Kart 8 (2014) Super Smash Bros. for Wii U (2014) Tekken 7 (2015) Super Mario Party (2018) Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (2019) Borderlands 3 (2019) Call of Duty: WWII (2017) Valkyria Chronicles 4 (2018) Civilization V (2010) Wargroove (2019) Plants vs. Zombies (2009) XCOM: Enemy Within (2013) Chess Ultra (2017) Mark of the Ninja (2012) StarCraft II (2010) Slay the Spire (2019) Apex Legends (2019) Civilization IV (2005) XCOM 2 (2016) Overwatch (2016) FTL: Faster Than Light (2012) Card of Darkness (2019) Diablo III (2012) Tetris 99 (2019) Puyo Puyo Tetris (2017) Phoenix Point (2019) Fire Emblem: Three Houses (2019) Tharsis (2016) Music used in this episode Cuphead soundtrack - Kristofer Maddigan (https://studiomdhr.bandcamp.com/releases) Tharsis soundtrack - Half Age EP by Weval (https://atomnation.bandcamp.com/album/half-age-ep) Other credits RNGesus original artwork by Dinsdale https://twitter.com/dinsdale1978 Super Mario Party - Luigi wins by doing absolutely nothing | Nintendo Unity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5IyYNI28gM Fire Emblem: Three Houses - New Game Plus Maddening Walkthrough Part 43! | MrSOAP999 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRZuFK3q9Q4 Deadpool 2 © 20th Century Fox Pandemic Card Art © Z-Man Games, Matt Leacock
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The Two Types of Random | Game Maker's Toolkit
The main problem is that people remember negative events more easily than positive ones. Yeah you'll sometimes miss in XCOM with a 99%, and you will distinctly remember just a couple rounds ago when you also missed with 99%. But you will forget the 100 shots you took in between that hit, they were exactly what you were expecting so you just move on and forget about them. This is also why no one complains about when they have strings of good luck, it's not just that the good luck makes them happy it's also that they are less likely to even realize that they are having a string of good luck at all.<br>Quoting someone from one podcast I listen to: "I get angry whenever I watch Mark Brown. You can be good at editing, good with words or being right, but not those three at the same time; yet he does all of them every time".<br>seriously why do you sound like the Tom Scott of video games<br>I think you should have mentionned the games where the player is in charge of the luck. In Armello, you can burn cards to choose the result of the dice, so the player decides how much luck they're willing to rely on, and what price they'd pay for it. That way, when the result isn't favorable, the payer blames themselves for not paying more, instead of the randomness. Danganronpa also has a similar system with the MonoMono Machine, where you can pay more tokens to decrease the chance of obtaining an item you already own.<br>As I think about this, I think for me it comes down to the following: Good luck-based gameplay says "X happened, now how will you deal with it?" and opens up options. Bad luck-based gameplay says "X happened, too bad, so sad" and destroys options or even ends your game. It's interesting to be provided a set of new options, whether those options are you thinking about how the game works or are explicitly provided. And while occasionally removing some options to encourage players to not get into the same pattern forever might work sometimes, it generally just means you go from like 3 possibilities to 2, or worse, being railroaded into having to do a single thing, in which case your input feels redundant.<br>I'm surprised there wasn't a bit more discussion of Fire Emblem. As you said, they famously use 2RN (i.e., they roll two random numbers and take the average) to make up for how bad our brains actually are at understanding what "75% odds" means. But the most recent entry in the series introduced the Divine Pulse mechanic, which gives you a limited number of chances to go back in time, but the RNG stays the same. It stops you from resetting the level entirely when something goes wrong, and the RNG being fixed means you don't just try the same thing repeatedly until it works in your favor. But my favorite part about it is that it transforms the output randomness into a matrix of input *and* output randomnesses. The entire level's RNG sequence is fixed from the beginning, sort of like a level in Spelunkey or Gungeon. And if you understand how the RN system works, you can incorporate this randomness into your strategy. I never felt better at FE3H than when I was crit by the Death Knight, but used Divine Pulse to roll back the clock and changed my actions just enough so his critical hit became my own, which required: 1) knowing that his crit was the result of a low RN, 2) knowing exactly how many RNs were used before it, 3) coming up with Plan B to use up that many RNs so that the Critical RN is in the right place for me to use it, and 4) making sure that burning those RNs in Plan B doesn't put any of my other units in jeopardy who were safe in Plan A. It's a bit like counting cards, I guess, but pulling it off really made me feel like I had mastery over the game, and its number of uses are so limited that it doesn't really make up for playing the game poorly.<br>I feel like this is one of the reasons Hades has felt so good to play. There's a lot of random elements for each run, but they usually consist of a choice of two or three (room rewards, boons, etc) from a random assortment you become familiar with. And because there's such a large assortment of different upgrades and boons, you can keep finding different ways to succeed no matter what your "luck" is (similar to what you mentioned with Slay the Spire) so that you'll keep sticking with that run to see how it goes.<br>Drinking game: take a shot every time Mark talks about Splunky<br>Mutant Year Zero: RtE is a good example of a game ruined by a bad "output luck" design : you have WAY too few % rolls per turn and each of these rolls has WAY too much consequences - worst of all, the kind of consequences you can't repair or at a very high cost which puts at risk the following of the player progression. Thus, perfect fights can be ENTIRELY ruined by only one bad roll, which leads to terrible frustration and having to reset all the time, instead of having to improvise to the situation.<br>As a Warframe player I pray to RNGesus at least 15 times a play session.<br>With both Ludology and Deck Building (edit: and Pandemic!) references in one video, it almost makes me wonder if GMTK should consider a video on "What can video games learn from board games?" Bonus points if you coordinate with Geoff Engelstein.<br>Incredible insight, it's reminding me of how screenwriting is often taught, i.e. something must be unexpected. Whether the unexpected elements come in at the front end of a story or at the back end, it's always a reliable way to give your story gravity. Additionally, the part about information flow is very reminiscient of dividing the narrative into scenes or acts. Making sure new information is drip-fed is a fundamental element of successful storytelling. Surprises are necessary to keep audiences engaged, and the same can be said of the randomness you discuss.<br>Output randomness: Everyday there's a tiny chance a new GMTK video is published. If there's no video, no matter, I can wait. If there *is* a video, YEAH!<br>May the odds be ever in your favour<br>It's weird to say Hearthstone "allegedly" has a pity timer, because it's been widely proven to exist for years now.<br>About randomness in role-playing games: tabletop RPGs inherently live and die on output randomness. The effectiveness of every action a player character takes--and most actions from the opposition--are determined primarily by the dice they roll and the numbers that come up. A 2d6 weapon in D&D is often considered better than a 1d12 weapon, because you're more likely than not to hit a seven. Players lean towards strategies that have consistent results, and many systems gain and lose fans based on the odds that an unlikely success or an unfair failure will come up during play. Why is this important? A good dungeon master can make or break a game, even in the most or least popular systems, and many of the best DMs have learned to preserve player engagement with a system often referred to as "failing forward." Failing Forward means that the player always has a chance to succeed, but the worse their roll the more severe the consequences of that success. A good example is trying to bypass a locked door: a perfect roll allows the party to slip by undetected, but a failure means that rather than failing to open the door entirely, the act of opening the door triggers an alarm. Like you mentioned in this video, the output randomness from a roll of the dice becomes input randomness for the following turns. I like to think this same principle can be applied to game design. By merely complicating the player's current plan rather than bringing it to a halt, we can retain player investment while still using chance to diversify the types of strategies our players have to use.<br>my least favorite form of input randomness is when you shuffle a deck of cards and end up with an impossible game of solitaire<br>We need more videos like this where you talk about a specific design concept and not just breaking down how a certain game was designed.<br>11:30 The funny thing is that Diablo 3's "smart loot system" was designed to be dumber at launch to ensure you'd sell things on the auction house.<br>Certainly a thing that helps when engaging output randomness is allowing reasonable ways to trade out a chance for a 100% surefire thing. I feel like Xcom would have been less frustrating if more hardflanks became 100% chances to hit more readily. The mario and rabbids figured this out by mostly doing round values and getting 100% chances vs enemies without cover against you. Also holycrap sorting out good success rates that then end up being foiled by ANOTHER chance on a chance you can't readily see, like snakemen in xcom2 dodging, turning a hit into a grazing hit, and throwing your plan out the window. Though Xcom generally is just an awkward case with all of this because it wants you to be so aggressive yet your ability to react to new threats feels generally too low with how fragile your soldiers are.<br>Sometimes, developers can make something seem random when it isn't, or only make it partially random but have clear trends and tendencies. In Freedom Planet, almost none of the enemies and bosses behave randomly - when it seems random, it's usually the enemy doing something based on your own movement. Spade, a miniboss in the Sky Battalion stage, appears random at first, but with practice, he can be completely controlled. The final boss, Brevon, has a final phase that is only random on Hard difficulty. He seems random on lower difficulties, and still kicks your butt, but you slowly pick up on his predictable pattern and learn to use it against him. Final Fantasy Tactics has plenty of randomness, including zodiac signs, hit chances, enemy secondary skills and equipment, and random encounters. However, the AI has some very clear tendencies that you can learn with experience, and a seasoned player can often exploit these tendencies, setting up situations to strongly motivate the enemy to walk into traps. Chrono Cross has your typical JRPG steal system, with a few key differences. You can only steal once per fight, and you aren't guaranteed to steal something, but every battle - even bosses, even the final boss - can be fled in order to start fresh from the beginning. This means you can start fights with a steal attempt, and flee until you get the item you want.<br>When playing RPGs, I like dice rollers generally, but when I'm making a roll I care about, I do find I can accept failure better from a dice than from an app. So, I use dice rollers when DMing, and dice when playing.<br>Wow, a mention of Geoff Englestein, here's your like. Sadly, Geoff is no longer on Ludology.<br>"The risk was calculated, but man am I bad at math."<br>6:06 Randomness has a "roll" in game design. Nice.<br>Man, i appreciate the fact that you talked about Keith Burgun. I really like his discussions on strategy and tactics.<br>15:18 To elaborate on that the Fire Emblem series has actually had many different RNG systems over the course of the series. +In the early games, mostly before they were released in the west and the creator Shouzou Kaga was still involved the games operated on a "single roll system". Meaning the game only calculates a percentage roll once and takes that as a result. The number the game gives you is the actual chance you have of missing, landing a critical, ect. +After Kaga had left and the games start moving to the west the games moved to a "double roll system", where instead of the game rolling the percentile dice once and taking that as the result it rolls the percentage dice twice and calculates the average of the two rolls as the result it uses to calculate. For example if the games says you have a 75% chance to hit it will roll two numbers between 1-100 and lets say they're 68, and 82, which added together and divided gives you a 70 which the game uses as the result for your attack. The result of this was the number the game told you was actually incorrect and was always more exaggerated than it looked. Chances that where closer to a 50% chance were more accurate while high chances were effectively higher than they were and the lower rolls were even lower. A 90% is more around 99% and a 10% chance is more around 1%. This was done to help create a sense of stability to the game so that if the player was told their chance to hit was high there would be less of a chance RNG would give them those random rolls that screw them over despite that they did everything right. This system is often heavily criticized as hiding information from the player and tilting the games systems even more in their favor. Edit: It's comes to my attention that the double roll system primarily applied to hit rates rather than secondary rolls such as crit rates which function off of single roll. +In "Fire Emblem: Fates" released in 2015 and "Fire Emblem: Shadows of Valentia" in 2017 tried to marry the two systems into a "hybrid roll system". Its formula is much more complicated than the past two systems but what it effectively did was for chances that were 50% or below the game functioned on the single roll system, this giving lower odds to have a greater chance of surprising you. Odds 51% or above functioned on less exaggerated version of double roll. The number the game would tell you wouldn't be your actual odds and would actually be higher than the listed number but less so than in the double roll system. Less 90% is actually 99% more 90% is 95%. This was done so more likely events were more consistent and could be accounted for and players knowing and engaging in the games systems would be rewarded but without as big of a player advantage as the double roll system game. The hybrid roll system would only stick around for "Fates" as the next main title in the series "Fire Emblem: Three Houses" released in 2019 would return to the double roll system. Edit: Grammar Edit #2: New information added<br>Huh, I've always heard them referred to as "reactable" and "non-reactable"<br>One counter to the dice argument I've seen: when watching a stream of Dicey Dungeons I noticed a lot of people putting extra stock in rolling a six and getting annoyed when the streamer didn't respect a six roll even though the function of the first two characters are to make you value high rolls and then tell you a six is just as rare as a one<br>Spelunky: Mark's favourite game ever.<br>The talk on probabilities in civilizations was really interesting, glad you mentioned it. It's funny how people think that with a 1/3 chance, if they lose the first two, then obviously they should win on the third try. Although, I remember thinking that way as a kid myself.<br>Side Note: Loving the use of Weval's music here.<br>"That's how we think numbers work." Absolute Savage.<br>I don't like Xcom. One time when I thought I was sure going to win, the enemy called in reinforcements. They arrived on the same turn. They got to move while I couldn't. I died.<br>TF2 Players be like: Random crits are fair and balanced.<br>You telling me that the games are lying about odds has changed me.<br>minecraft worlds are not infinitely large i'll have you know<br>XDDD "Is it common to miss a shot when you have a hit rate of 85% and up?"<br>Odd that you didn't talk about crits.<br>I've got to say, the game that taught me about randomness and risk mitigation was Blood Bowl. The core mechanic of the game being that you and your opponent alternate turns, but your turn ends abruptly if anything you do goes wrong. So you've got to perform actions in a sequence to maximize upside and minimize downside.<br>I like to play safe when a game have any kind of random thing on it.<br>I wish he would talk more about game design in Tabletop RPGs like D&D — they seem to use Output Randomness almost exclusively<br>I'm all for RNG to generate content (i.e. levels), but I hate when RNG affects your actions, to the point where intended action is not done at all (miss) or even harms you (critical miss). I'd rather have my 50% attack be weaker, but have it's effect, then be either completely nothing or instant kill. I really like puzzle-like approach to turn based combat in Into the Breach or Desktop Dungeons.<br>There is an old adage in military doctrine... All skill is vain when an angel pisses in the flint of your musket<br>Broke: Lady Luck Woke: RNGesus<br>I always though about randomness in games as possibly being either horizontal, vertical or a mix of the 2, where with horizontal I mean that the different outcomes only add variety and don't change the difficulty of the current challange (or the entire game) in any way, while vertical is the opposite, it directly affects your chances of winning while not giving any variety, most random events are a mix of the 2<br>Reminds me of a very old rule of thumb about stuff like hitboxes. While it seems like you'd want your hitboxes to be 'perfect', in practice (especially when computing power was limited) hitboxes always end up being vague approximations of the real situation. The rule of thumb then? Always bias hitbox inaccuracies in the player's favour. Enemy hitboxes should be larger than the enemy appears to be. Conversely player hitboxes should be smaller than the player. (obviously this line of reasoning breaks down in multiplayer contexts, but you get the idea). The thing is, you can make the same argument about 'randomness', and the same overall logic applies; Players are far less resentful of things that work in their favour than things which work against them.<br>lmao I was literally just about to make a comment about 2RN in fire emblem and then you mentioned developers lying about chances and show fire emblem footage. 10/10 (just to clarify on that tho, what the game actually does is it rolls twice and takes an average of the 2 and then compares that to the displayed hit rate. So the displayed hit rate isn't completely irrelevant in the equation but it's also not *accurate*)<br>An iconic form of Output Randomness: The dreaded/beloved Random Crits in many video games, such as the often hated on ones in Team Fortress 2. One Crocket can wipe a quarter of a 12 man team or more if placed well, but many players will get easily tilted or even enraged over this even if there's only a single kill made out of it. Now I'm gonna hide, cause speaking of said crits often sparks controversy borderlining a war.<br>Man The idea of luck only being satisfying when you expect a bad thing to happen, but a good thing happens makes me reevaluate all my rpg design choices Edit: thanks for this video I didn't know I needed<br>