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I find it interesting how the "rock paper scissors" nature of most fighting games causes the players to introduce luck. In a good fighting game, every option has a counter... including the counters themselves. This forces players to be unpredictable in order to not get countered, which creates random-seeming situations. However, because people are terrible at being random, this opens up the opportunity for reads, where you exploit your opponent's patterns to correctly guess what move they'll do next and counter it. The goal of most fighting games is to send your opponent to the RNG shadow realm while you know exactly what you'll face.
Agreed. And it's also interesting how FG character archtypes, aside from innate mechanics, are also balanced around these RPS situations. To continue with the RPS analogy, rushdown mixup-heavy characters can put opponents in more unpredictable RPS situations more often, and in exchange have less RPS options than average compared to the rest of the cast. Zoners also have less RPS options, but can instead prevent/deny RPS situations from happening to them in the first place by minimizing direct confrontation. More defensive characters have more options than average or are allowed to lose more interactions, but in exchange have weaker RPS capability/reward. Meanwhile, grapplers, the madmen they are, increase the risk and inordinately increase the reward of RPS situations.
A tweet recently popped up talking about a player who chooses their option based on the round timer, and if it was currently odd or even. Odd, they would go high, Even they would go low. They never told anyone. I fear to face this opponent.
It’s one of the coolest parts of fighting games too me, and gives the potential for extremely satisfying reads sometimes. Then again I play Pokken, that’s one of the most rps games you can get
Stache from Mario&Luigi. Not really because it's a particularly interesting mechanic, I just think it's funny that they canonized mustaches being tied to luck in battle in the Mario universe.
Cannot express how important luck mitigation is in games. Hades' rerolls or Hard West's Luck mechanic to stop you from getting bad luck streaks are very impactful.
@@pn2294 Luck mitigation is very important to have in games where random chance is everything, most notably roguelikes. Getting completely screwed with nothing you can do to prevent it just isn't fun. Guarantees and second chances are great to have.
If you use standard deviation graph and say that left is bad luck and right is good luck, rerolls makes it that you can escape the leftmost situation, or improve your condition if your luck lands you in the middle.
9:44 I had the exact opposite issue with the Xcom remake. It was the very final mission and I only had 1 chance to win since I couldn't possibly train and gear enough guys to replace my elite troops if they died. I get onto the alien ship, when one of those disc enemies flies out of the shadows and grabs one of my guys. They're going to die next turn if I don't kill the disc, but luckily my mega-upgraded sniper has a 100% chance to hit her shot and will at minimum still overkill it. I breathe a sigh of relief. I let her fire her 100% chance to hit shot for the guaranteed kill..... AND SHE MISSES! I had to rush all of my guys out of cover and do a bunch of ultra risky and suboptimal things to kill the disc that turn, but I barely managed it. That almost entirely killed my will to continue playing, and had it not been the final mission I probably would've dropped the game out of sheer frustration. If it says 100%, it must hit. That's what 100% means. Missing a 99% chance is just extremely unlucky but understandable, missing a 100% chance is the game lying to you. How can I make decisions when I can't trust that the game will actually do what it promises?
that must have been some extreme rounding error or something because as far as I know modern xcom usually juices your hit chances invisibly (unless you use mods to see it) unless you're on Legendary where the hit chance is just the hit chance
Agreed completely. Continuing to overstate odds of success is a series 'tradition' by now, but one that really shouldn't stick around. Players will base their strategies around the odds you give them, and when those odds are secretly skewed in the enemy's favor frustration is inevitable.
@@edfreak9001 It's either a bug or terrible, terrible rounding. Nevertheless, since the game almost entirely relies on making judgements based on the presented chances, that has to work perfectly.
in a game I used to play, (mr mine) there is a basic RNG system but has issues with rounding so the system works like this random integer from 1 to 100 reduce it by a stat then it rounds then reduce again what this can lead to is it showing 0% death chance (but is instead just a number less than 0.99...) this means that in practice it's a 1% death chance which means on even if the game says 0% it can still fail because it's really is a 0.3% (and because of how the game does it, making it a 1% chance)
Ah, the classic Pokemon Gen 1 miss lol. In that case I think they accidentally typed a "less than" instead of a "less than or equal to" resulting in a 1/256 chance of a move with 100% accuracy failing to hit. I would be very surprised if something like that happened in a modern game and wasn't patched, so it's probably more complicated than that
Honestly, I do prefer it when random failure isn't necessarily an all-or-nothing situation. I like the notion of having a "fumble" state in-between success and proper failure, like if a bullet almost misses, but still grazes the target, or if you successfully unlock the door, but it's loud enough to attract undue attention, or you ARE able to pull off casting a complicated spell, but it took a lot more juice out of you than it would have normally.
This is one of the strengths of the Pathfinder 2e system. Many spells that are "save or suck" in D&D are much more nuanced with its Four Degrees of Success system. For example, PF2e's Dizzying Colors (an adaptation of D&D's Color Spray) has the following effect depending on your Will save result. * Critical Success: No effect. * Success: Dazzled for 1 round, which means that for the next round of combat, if the affected creature uses a single-target attack or effect, they have a 20% chance of missing outright on top of the usual miss chance. Even though this effect only lasts a single round, this can buy the caster's party a much-needed reprieve. * Failure: Stunned 1, blinded for 1 round, dazzled for 1 minute. Stunned 1 means that the affected creature can't react until their next turn, and can't do as much on their next turn (but it doesn't make them drop what they're holding, and doesn't carry on to future turns). Blinded effectively halves the creature's speed for 1 round and prevents them from attacking anyone, but it only takes them out of the fight for 1 round. Only dazzled is a major problem, and even at a duration of 1 minute it's not enough to completely defang creatures, especially ones with area attacks. * Critical Failure: Stunned for 1 round and blinded for 1 minute. This is every bit as crippling as you'd expect. For enemies, critical success is a rare outcome, as you need to either roll a Nat 20 or exceed the save DC by 10 or more to completely shrug off a spell's effects. More importantly, while player characters get class features that can make critical successes on saves drastically more likely, enemy creatures usually don't. On the flip side, many spells that would be devastating under a "save or suck" system are much more lenient. Critical failure only occurs if you roll a Nat 1 or fail the save DC by 10 or more. Additionally, Dizzying Colors is one of many spells with the Incapacitation trait, which prevents the more crippling spells from devastating strong targets; to put it simply, you will never critically fail against a low-level mook's Dizzying Colors, and a solo boss will never critically fail against your Dizzying Colors.
@@imveryangryitsnotbutter This is why people love Pathfinder, isn't it? The nuance of Four Degrees seems just right to me. I've heard Pathfinder described as "Protestant D&D" (you can probably guess who called it that), since IIRC D&D 4e was kinda fucky, and some mad-lad decided to devise a new system spun-off from 3.5e, the results of which speak for themselves.
Pillars of Eternity has a beautiful and eloquent solution to that IMO. Hits are divided into four camps; miss, graze, hit, and crit. And your attack falls into a range of those camps based on your hit and their evasion. I forget the numbers but you can get your accuracy high enough that you can literally never miss and have a high chance to crit, likewise you can never get crit and make most of your enemies' attacks "graze" (less damage). It's a good way to curve the array of attacks and damage while giving a lot of control to the player to manipulate with effort.
Terraria's luck mechanic is notable due to how... abnormal the triggers for it are. For example, touching a ladybug applies a long buff to luck, while killing one or using it as bait for fishing reduce your luck. Then there's the fact that Torches of all things affect luck - using the correct biome-dependent torches increases luck, and the "wrong" ones lower it. Originally torches could give you negative luck, but community outrage forced developers to only give positive luck or none at all. Otherwise the mechanic affects basically everything. Drop chances, damage rolls, chances for rare critters/enemies, how much money enemies drop, etc.
I don't know if this is particularly weird, but in the Animal Crossing series, there's a whole lot of luck involved, particularly in what items you get. This can have some funny interplay with the dialogue. For a couple of examples, in New Horizons, I once got a wheelchair from a Normal who told me, "I hope it's something you can use," and a Peppy has given me her photo before, telling me I'm her test market, and that she's considering having her face put on them.
One thing this vid didn't talk about was the contrast between pre-decision and post-decision randomness - having the random result before the action and forcing you to react to it, or having the random result after the action and have it affect your action result. Both are good to have, but the former is usually better for actions that carry more weight. As an example, I like how Invisible Inc. (an XCOM-like rougelike from Klei) deliberately makes ranged weapon accuracy _not_ random - both players and enemies are expert sharpshooters that will always hit their targets. On top of that, players always have faster reflexes than the guards. The guards, however, are placed randomly around the map, and you are heavily penalized for killing them.
I think Mark Brown (GMTK) covered "pre" and "post" decision luck in a video. In many situations, post-decision luck is tantamount to pre-decision luck for your next action, except where it restricts those options.
I was sure he will talk about it since footage of Citizen Sleeper and Dicey Dungeons was shown. Both games roll the dice in advance and have the player use them to take certain actions. It turns the randomness into tactics or strategy, where you know exactly what will happen but the question is how to use your current rolls to their fullest. Dicey Dungeons also has many items that can turn certain numbers into other numbers, allowing you to control the randomness.
My biggest pet peeve is unnecessary RNG. It's the difference between theory and application. For example in Final Fantasy 12, there are hunt targets that only appear 10% of the time. Theory: "This will give the game variety. Having uncertainty is gonna make it exciting" Application: The player enters and exits the map 10 times to make the monster appear, going through a long walk and a loading screen each and every time. Doesn't sound exciting does it? If the player has bad luck, they may have to enter and exit the map 20 times, getting more and more frustrated each time the attempts surpass the expected odds. Unnecessary RNG can feel like an artificial tactic to extend the game.
@@One.Zero.One101 How about an example from Pokemon (which I am working on getting) ? If you want to catch a wild Munchlax in Pokemon Diamond or Pearl (or Platinum), you need to apply Honey to distinct "honey trees" to attract one. However, Munchlax has only a 1% spawn rate, and of about 20 such trees on the map, only 4 specific trees (rolled when starting a new file) are allowed to spawn Munchlax _at all,_ and there's no way to deduce which trees they are (other than Munchlax actually spawning). It's worse than fishing for Feebas (which at least had a good encounter rate once you found one of the specific tiles it can appear on). Oh, and you also need to wait six hours on the game clock (aka. real time) between applying Honey and checking back on the tree.
One of my favorite uses of luck in a competitive game is Faust from Guilty Gear. As the OG item toss character, he's really the only one that has gotten it right. What makes Faust so special is that most of his items create a situation that both side have to deal with. There are items that only benefit Faust, but they are more rare and the minority. This creates a situation where both players have to adapt to what is happening in a very short amount of time, which can keep matches feeling fresh.
The luck mechanic introduced to Pokemon since gen 6/7. To those that don't know: You can pet your Pokemon and give them treats to make them like you more, what the game doesn't tell you is that it silently increases a "luck" stat on that Pokemon the more you play with it. This "luck" stat can manifest itself into something like critting when you shouldn't or survinvg a hit with 1 HP when you shouldn't, and the game will tell you that this is happening because of "the bond you share". It's pretty interesting at first, but it can almost feel like you're cheating when you're fighting battles with higher stakes. The bad part about it, you can't disable this, so the only way for you to not get this "luck" stat is to not pet your Pokemons at all, which is kinda bad for some people who still wants to pet their Pokemons without feeling like they're cheating, but who knows, maybe I'm just the minority.
Completely agreed. Something that always rubbed me the wrong way about the Amie/Refresh/Affection mechanics is the fact that none of the enemy Trainers get to use them against you. Which makes sense from a game design perspective; having a random effect make a fight much harder for you feels a LOT worse than one that makes the fight easier. But at the same time, isn't the game now implying that you're the only Trainer in the world who has a strong enough bond with their Pokemon to get those benefits? That kind of paints a negative picture of all the other characters, doesn't it? Pokemon already stacks the deck in players' favor enough as it is, between the ability to spam items, opponents having bad AI, opponents only using 2-4 Pokemon while EXP sharing in later gens lets you easily get a full team of 6 from the start, etc.. Having a random chance to basically ignore anything bad that might happen to you is definitely a step too far.
That kind of mechanic can also easily lead to players optimizing the fun out of the game. Since each pet increases luck, which increases your chances of success, the optimal thing to do is pet as much as possible to maximize luck. But now you are just grinding, taking all the fun out of petting in the first place and turning it into a chore you do in order to succeed. If it could only stack one or a few times, and especially if it didn't decay, then even though you might feel obligated to do it, you wouldn't be incentivized to do it to excess, which would otherwise ruin the fun.
@@ragcat3732It was seemingly toned town in scarlet and violet as in it doesnt seem to activate nearly as much in those games as it does in the previous gens
I'm surprised there was no mention of Pokemon, given how infamous it is for leaving you at the mercy of RNG. "Can I get a crit that bypasses the opponent's defense buffs?", "Oh no, I'm paralyzed! Will I be able to attack next turn, or will I be fully paralyzed?", "Is my will o wisp attack gonna land, or will I keep consecutively missing it, causing the game devs to buff its accuracy from the next generation onward?"
Not to mention the fun interaction between fissure and stomping tantrum with Ting-Lu Fissure lands? Instant KO on opponent Fissure missed? Stomping Tantrum get to deal double damage next turn
The fact that pokemon can still be played completely with all that will be endlessly funny to me. Despite all the absurd luck based elements you can still get good enough to consistently win
@@Bluebatstar I think that's just more because the AI isn’t good. In PVP luck can still play a deciding factor if the players are equally skilled, and some games you will just lose because rng decided that you should. Every attack has a 1/24 chance to deal 1.5x damage and many attacks having a 10% chance to status feels bad when it happens, especially if it's freeze. If most/all rng is against you in a PVP match I'd argue you just can't win if your opponent knows what they are doing.
I play Pokemon and I really thought the Fire Emblem section starting at 9:25 was funny. 76% is high? I treat everything below 90% as a fifty-fifty, you have to be mentally (and strategically) prepared to miss.
I've been playing Earthbound recently, and there's lot of luck situations (the 1/128 drop rates, for instance), but one that's showing BAD luck implementation is Paula's Pray command. In theory it can help you in battle, but the positive effects (slight HP or PP restoration, or a basic attack) are FAR outweighted by the negative and even some "positive" effects (inflict everyone with crying or confusion, or even revive EVERYONE, including enemies). I use it a lot, and even I feel like i'm playing Buckshot Roulette every time i use it.
Shout-out to New Vegas for giving Luck a use outside combat (namely in the game's many casinos; the higher your luck, the higher you are of "feeling lucky" and lining up the reels on the slot machines, getting the ball to hit the righs segment of a roulette wheel, or getting a good deal in blackjack.)
Hell all the Fallout games had fun with the Luck stat. In OG Fallout 1, my favorite playstyles was to max luck and take the Jinxed trait in a melee build, which increased critical failure chances across the board. With a high luck stat, the trait has a negligible effect on you, but an increased effect on all the enemies around you. So while you can punch everyone as much as you want (and maybe trip once in a blue moon), everyone else is dropping their ammo or having their guns explode in their faces.
One of my favorite cases of randomness and luck in games is with Baldi's Basics Plus. Nearly every part of the game has some form of randomness and luck to it all, like with the schoolhouse, the characters picked, and chaotic game-changing events that occur at random. All mixed together can create an absolutely unhinged and chaotic experience. But it's not totally out of your control, you can still fight chaos with strategy with the various items around the map, and every single character has at least one way to counteract them if you're smart. For example, The Principle will make a beeline towards you if you break a rule, but he can't hear like Baldi so if you lose him, he'll wander aimlessly until he directly spots you. It's that sort of chaos/strategy that's rather lovely with video games, keeping the player on their toes while still allowing them to wrestle the game into a situation that favors them.
My favorite instance of video game RNG is the playstyle of Patty Fleur from Vesperia. Almost every single art (move) she has has several ways of being either enhanced or weakened by RNG mechanics. For instance, she has a single spellcasting art that can cast any spell in the game at random, including ones that are extremely hard to unlock otherwise. She has a jack in the box attack that either attacks with a mallet, a spinning mascot, an uppercut glove, or nothing at all. Patty also has a stance system that determines her fighting style and exerts some more control over the odds of what her arts will do, sometimes doing things the moves wouldn't do otherwise. The stance you're in is, by default, up to RNG, so you have to adapt on the fly for every battle. I say by default because the game's skill system has a ton of unique skills for her that let you either enhance the volatility of the RNG or introduces ways of exerting more control over it. The reason I really like playing as her is because of the amount of adaptability there is in the character, making me think on my feet while also getting to gamble for the best possible variants of each art. The other thing I really like is that, because there are ways for most of her moves to go wrong, the rest of her character counterbalances this; aside from low HP, Patty has great stats and can do incredible damage on top of (RNG-based) support on the side. I would argue that Patty is one of the best party members in the game if you play her well enough to take advantage of the "high reward" aspect of her being high risk.
I was looking to see if anyone said her lol. She is easily one of my favorite tales of characters to play as. Your really rewarded for learning all of the quirks she has in her forms and the properties her attacks get.
D&D (and subsequently BG3) is a game built on infulencing the die rolls for both narrative value, and to highlight character strengths and weaknesses. A character with a good athletics will be able to get a large bonus to rolls. Making them inherently higher than other people’s on average. You can take feats such as sharpshooter that make you more likely to miss, in return for getting a large bonus to damage. A good DM will turn both success and failure into narrative value meaning that a player shouldn’t feel completely bad (missing 5 attacks still hurst lol). That last part I am still imrpoving on.
Expected the dice and using failure well mechanic to enter into a discussion about why this works in tabletop RPGs due to the ability of a DM toward interesting consequences but becomes difficult to manage when too much weight is put on success (Bethesda fallout games using skill checks v skill rolls which takes some of the fun v disco Elysium)
Frankly D&D is not very good at that compared to more modern systems, that actually instruct the game master how to interpret failure in interesting ways and have more than just binary success and failure. Also 5e's skill system is very unsatisfying (for me) in low levels because the majority of the weight of a skill check falls on the die roll. A character with high INT and proficiency in History only has around 25% higher chance to succeed in a skill roll compared to a character with average Int and no proficiency. The difference becomes larger in high levels, but it still feels like luck has a much bigger say than how you build your character.
Monster Hunter's affinity is one of my favorite critical hit systems. On the surface it's just a percentage chance to a hit to deal 1.25x damage I believe. However, at some point the player encounters weapons with negative affinity, meaning the weapon has a chance of dealing less damage. This gives more choices to make and has weapons feeling unique. Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate had a specific line of weapons that had both negative and positive affinities that would cancel out until the player recovered from frenzy in a hunt, adding the negative affinity as a positive number instead essentially making the weapons situational anti frenzied monster weapons. Favorite example is Generations Ultimate final deviant monster Bloodbath Diablos, who's exclusive armor skill made negative crits have a chance of dealing 2x damage instead. Suddenly that beefy sword with -70% crit rate went through unwieldy to an absolute menace in combat
iirc, this is kinda a false choice. As negative affinity weapons generally have higher average damage than high affinity weapons anyways, since they almost always do quite abit more raw damage. Atleast this was the case for 5th gn.
a game you would'nt expect to have luck, satisfactory, has it in the crafting recipes. Throughout the map, you can find crashed space ships, which contain hard drives. When the hard drives are researched, it allows you to pick one of three alternate recipes. A new recipe could be less resource heavy but need more niche resources, or be easier to craft but require more resources, or take longer. If you don't like any of the recipes the hard drive produced, you can wait to claim it, and research other hard drives you've found. This lets you wait and see what could prove usefull, and when unclaimed it takes those recipes out of the pool, making you more likely to the the recipe your looking for.
I still think my favorite luck based anything in games would be Faust from Guilty Gear. Luck in fighting games sounds like it would be absolutely awful but Faust makes it fun for both sides because it means the Faust player has to know how each item works and how to capitalize on all of their strengths and weaknesses.
that's part of why I loved Faust so much at least in Xrd, I enjoy the chaos and emergent strategy of everyone needing to suddenly respond to when he throws something weird rather than just chucking a hammer or something.
I find very interesting in Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 the Treasure Hunting stages, changing the pieces location every time to make sure every attempt you get on the stage is completely different. In replaying these stages you get better and better identifying every possible spot an emerald can spawn in Adventure 1 and insta catching the hints with only the first one in adventure 2. Also knowing how to navigate through the stage faster. Making going fast on these stages a decision making depending on your luck
I think the treasure hunting mechanic was a good idea on paper, but it struggled as soon as they tried introducing other mechanics into the mix. I remember struggling with Security Hall because the time limit leaves you absolutely zero room to figure out as much as which switches correspond to which vaults and the advice I got online was legit just "Don't bother with the vaults, just reset until all three Emeralds spawn in the open". With that advice, the first time I successfully finished that mission, I also finished it with an A-Rank. That was the method that got results and it was the least rewarding A-Rank I ever received in a Sonic game, just pure luck, no understanding of the level whatsoever.
I like it for encouraging you to learn the movement and stages more holistically, but I also feel being so at the mercy of RNG is a poor fit for a game so focused on speedrunning and achieving a perfect run. Maybe there's a way to get the best of both worlds, but I'm not sure what that'd be.
@rainpooper7088 Lol, I was literally getting A-Ranks in Security Hall for fun earlier this week. Got As in 3 out of 4 runs. Sure getting Emeralds that spawn in closed vaults is kind of annoying since you gotta go hit the switch at the top but it's not really a big deal, you have way more time to do it than most people think and can still get the A rank. You can still get an A-Rank like 3 minutes in. I get that some people REALLY don't like the time pressure but Security Hall is a fine treasure hunting stage. The REAL painful stages are Mad Space and Death Chamber because of how sectioned off and spacious everything is (on top of the janky anti-gravity in the former). Those stages specifically really could've used the SA1 style radar.
@DesignDoc I mean, sure, if you're *specifically going for A-Ranks* other stages are way worse, but I wasn't trying to A-Rank anything back then, it was my first playthrough and I was just trying to move on with the story. This was the stage I performed the worst on by a freaking landslide and yet the game still gave me an A-Rank (my very first A-Rank in the game btw) just because I got lucky *eventually.* The incredibly lame boss afterwards who can't even really hit you unless you actively walk into his way didn't help either. Even back then I knew there was no skill on my end here, it just didn't feel earned. That is imo definitely a way the element of luck can cheapen an experience, though I will agree that SA2's treasure hunting stages are mostly the opposite extreme not helped by the way the radar works. Man, I want a remake of this game so bad, I feel like nearly all of my issues with it would either be complete non-issues (wonky physics and camera) these days or be given better options (Emerald radars from both Adventure games being available) if a dedicated team put good work into it. Sigh.
I like when the game gives you chances to adjust your crit value and not when it's affecting the drop of an item which makes it more rng than actual luck wasting time to grind. Wish games could fix that by offing enough of one species you get the items to drop every time.
I think bad luck protection systems can fix the grind in a lot of cases. Meaning a player has a cap of how much bad luck they can really have. You can still be lucky or unlucky, but at least it has an end.
@@atsukana1704yea, sort of a guaranteed after a certain number of rolls type of failsafe to prevent the world’s worst luck from locking you out of something
God Hand is an entirely skill-oriented action game but it has this Wild West themeing in its aesthetics and a lot of that includes casino-style visuals which subtly translates to some of the luck elements. Your drops from chests or enemies are entirely random, if you beat someone you are able to get something like some money, a health power-up, a God Roulette refill, or a powerful elite enemy to spawn. You usually don't think much about the random drops because the rates are consistent enough and you still need to clear the game with your own skill but seeing a crate drop an orange or something early in a stage means you know you have more leeway in the mistakes you might make across that stage, if you see a magazine drop you can feel comfortable using your God Hand against a lower-level enemy, if you're doing really poorly and fate blesses you with a strawberry you do have that same "I love it!" reaction as Gene, and in most boss arenas if you're getting your ass kicked you can run around the stage and break/throw items at them with the hopes that they'll drop something good. And the RNG elements of the drops help encourage you to push on forward which is very important in a hard game. If a stage/boss is destroying you, even at Level 1, you can always think, "Okay, I can break six crates before the encounter I'm struggling with, if I get a good drop from them I'm confident I can take it on."
That’s an issue with random chances. Many games decide to alter the rates to make them favourable for the player. Because getting hit by a 5% crit or missing a 95% attack chance sucks. Like fire emblem which skews these in the players favour.
@@Just_Shaun yeah, missing feels more bad than hitting feels good, if that makes sense. as a game developer, to have a 50/50 balance, you shouldn't actually do 50% because of this skew; it's more like 80%. same thing in XCOM. high-pressure tactical games that require both player decisions (a factor they can control) and RNG (outside of their control) can lead to "interesting" gameplay, but don't confuse "interesting" with "fun", because your players surely won't.
I like it when the randomness is a bit manipulated to help ensure you get what you want. For example a lot of deck builder games will not make each draw random from the deck, it cycles the deck only once you have no more to draw which means you might not always get what you want when you want, but it will always be guaranteed to turn up. Dota does the same, Bash has an 8.6%(technically 22/256 which is slightly less than 8.6%) chance to stun that goes up by 8.6% on each failure and is reset on success. The end result is you can never fail 12 times in a row, that last one is guaranteed because you failed so often(odds become 264/256). Another good example is Rim World, the random events are dependent on how well you're doing. If you're doing great it'll up the difficulty, if you're doing terribly it might throw you a favour. It's still random, but weighted so the game feels like a consistent challenge and you're never quite given something you would have no chance to handle(at least as long as you don't wind up making high quality items before you are ready, that's one area I feel it needs to improve on).
This is actually really important in order to make randomness "feel" fair. Us humans are terrible judges of probabilities. What we think is random is actually more like a shuffle than a random draw. We underestimate the likelihood of long streaks of similar outcomes, such a rolling a 6 on a d6 5 times in a row (way more likely than you'd think). Our minds are quick to find patterns based on very few samples, so even 3 in a row of a 50/50 outcome can feel like the outcome is biased. We also naturally follow the "gambler's fallacy" that a streak of bad luck will be offset by a streak of good luck and vice versa. Truly random outcomes means that each new outcome is not at all influenced by past outcomes. The probability of every combination of possible outcomes is equally likely. Any person could be the lucky one to win 10 times in a row, or to be the unlucky one to lose 10 times in a row. You don't know which will happen to you until you observe. Even though the outcomes for all people over all time might tend towards a balanced average, that doesn't mean that any single person will see a balanced outcome in their experience. The most common example we think of that is tweaked in video games is our expectation of very high or low probabilities. We overestimate high probability events, thinking them to be (basically) guaranteed, while we underestimate low probability events, thinking them to be (basically) impossible. When extreme unlikely things occur, we feel as though that's not right, because we assume the very unlikely will never actually happen (at least to us). To make it feel fair, we typically want to implement probability in games to work the way people think it works, not the way it actually works. We want to avoid long streaks of wins or losses. We don't want any one item to show up too often or too infrequently. We want 1% to actually be impossible and 99% to be guaranteed. And sometimes we even want to shift the probabilities so that good things happen more often. When it comes to forming synergies, when there are a lot of possible options, the likelihood of the right pieces falling into place is actually extremely low, to the point that it may never turn out even once in thousands of attempts. (Given 52 possible items, where you've acquired 2 of 4 needed for a synergy, the expected likelihood of getting the remaining 2 in the next 10 attempts is about 1 in 800, though there's a still a significant probability that it may take more than a thousand attempts before it happens for you). In fact, the likelihood of making any 4 piece synergy is very low. It would feel bad if you were never able to produce an interesting synergy and it would completely defeat the appeal of any deckbuilder. So to make getting one or more synergies possible in every game, the probability of future draws are dramatically influenced by what things you have or haven't taken so far. Items you previously skipped are less likely to be drawn again. Items that would synergize with your current items are more likely to be drawn. The result is that some kind of synergy will form, although which synergy you end up with is highly variable, and it's still up to you to recognize and choose those synergistic pieces when they are presented to you. Games will only feel right to us if they meet our expectations of how the world should work, so we build mechanics that match those expectations, even if they don't match how the world really works.
There's nothing quite like the RNG hell of Blood Blowl. The game is a great working example of having an overly large punishment for failing dice rolls. In blood bowl, theoretically every single one of your players on the pitch gets an action. It's very much a turn-based tactics game with dice rolls determining the outcome of specific actions. The problem is that, for the majority of actions that call for a dice roll, failure results in a turnover: Your turn immediately ends, no other players on your team can act, that's it. It goes even further, too! Every time a player gets knocked down, some dice are rolled to determine if they are only knocked down, knocked out, injured, or permanently killed. It is one of the most frustrating games I've ever been addicted to. Of course, there's room for strategy here, starting your turn by only taking the actions that don't involve any dice rolls, then moving on to the low-risk yet critical parts of your play, slowly adding on more risk the deeper you get into your turn because the more players who have moved, the less painful a turnover is... but man, having a character fail an 80% chance to pick the ball up off of the ground for 3 turns in a row is a game ruiner. No amount of strategy will overcome bad luck of that magnitude.
I would’ve loved to see Peglin as part of the deck building section. Luck in this game can be viewed as the probability of achieving a damage outcome or avoiding a damage taken, but there are many different paths for you to get there. The luck factors into your dexterity shooting your orbs into chaotic system of the peg board; you may get a lucky run out, but you might not. Even as you improve your deck and gain really powerful relics, you’re always fighting luck, a point that I think could’ve maybe added more to the discussion. I think Peglin really masterfully shows how luck can be both your biggest friend and your biggest adversary in a game.
I don't think Peglin is that different from most games other than that it wears its randomness clearly on its sleeve. Even though it may have a ton of randomness, the mechanics - especially the balls and upgrades - heavily skew the probabilities so that most outcomes are fairly similar and particularly bad outcomes are very unlikely. For example, since hitting a peg causes a significant rebound, and the ball is likely to hit the peg from above while falling downwards, that rebound causes the ball to go back up, bouncing around much longer in the upper parts of the board than you would expect from a regular pachinko machine. The more pegs there are, the more opportunity for collisions and the longer it stays up. The refresh pegs help ensure that the number of pegs remains high. Combine the gaps made when the number of pegs dwindle with the random location of the refresh pegs on each shot, and there's an increasingly better chance of being able to hit a refresh peg as the number of pegs decreases, keeping you with a consistently full board with lots of opportunity to hit pegs and get points, so long as you have the skill to consistently aim at and hit pegs directly or at most one bounce.
I want to put forth Pillars of Eternity's RNG attack system. It's a luck based D100 system, but it works on four categories of damage across a range. 0-15 - miss (no damage), 16-50 - graze (-50% damage), 51-100 - hit (full damage), 101+ - crit (+50% damage). Then every point of difference between your accuracy or dodge shifts that roll, causing the buckets to shift. You have 50 more points of dodge than their accuracy? Your chance to make them miss becomes 0-65, graze 66-100, and they literally can never do full damage or crit. It's a great system to give the player more control over their attacks and mitigate the all-or-nothing system that is typical in RPGs, especially with the addition of the graze result. I also like how they rolled criticals into that instead of making it a separate roll.
Terraria has a lot of luck in item drops, damage values, crits, and more and has had it for its whole life. An interesting situation happened when a new luck stat was introduced that could influence this luck in your favour. I personally don't think it was a bad idea, but a lot of people hated its implementation: No way to know your luck stat, know how to influence it, or even know it exists. Especially hated was "torch luck" where your luck was increased by using the correct torches in a biome, but relevantly also decreased if you used the wrong torches. And the base torches used by almost everyone in everything other than buildings gave negative torch luck almost everywhere. There was also a secret mini-boss added to help with torch luck, but this didn't help with the outrage and negative torch luck was eventually removed (Though, you could still gain positive torch luck.). Personally, I think the biggest problem with the luck stat (and also many other parts) in Terraria, is that the game doesn't sufficiently explain itself. While it is good that new players aren't bombarded with information of a luck stat with only relatively minor effects, there should be ways for more experienced players to check the stat without relying on mods or wiki.
my issue with the luck stat is that its heavily skewed against you in design. theres so many things that can cause it to go into the negatives, and extensively at that. but for positive boosts there arent nearly as many and the boosts arent nearly as big. theres also fishing luck that just cant go into the positives unless its a certain moon phase, where most moon phases in fact give you worse fishing luck. also any body of water smaller than the ocean biome gives you negative fishing luck as well. thankfully the angler has specified drops at specified waymarks, at least. and treasure bags are genuinely a good design choice that incentivize doing expert- still really sucks if youre grinding for like a duke fishron weapon and you get 3 bags in a row that only drop 1 item outside of the guarantees, especially since theres no "luck safety net" so to speak. i love terraria but also i hate terraria.
People hated that random torches you would place that weren't part of the environments theme would give you negative luck. It wasn't mentioned also anywhere in the game that this would happen, it was a wiki-info only stat you could potentially stumble across.
This video has me fighting the urge to gush about one of my favorite games. Lost in Random stacks so many luck based systems on top of each other in addition to a little skill based 3rd person shooter action. You use a sling shot to hit weak spots on enemies for light crowd control and energy. Then you roll a dice (one that gets more and better options for rolls as the story progresses) to get points to play cards from it's deck builder aspect. The best part about this layered system to me is that even if your deck is terribly built, or your luck goes off a cliff, you can always shove a little "git gud" into the game to make it work. Luck decides how explosive the moment to moment is but the game does a good job of making sure you aren't a helpless gambler.
A big part of what makes Looter games and Luck so painful, is in games like Borderlands 2. Some viable builds when getting into the NG+ runs are absolutely awful to obtain. The Bee Shield (even after the extreme nerf) for example usually comes one specific enemy, in one specific location, with a non-insignificant amount of loading between attempts. It can come from any loot source, but Legendaries are pretty rare in general for the game. Random loot rolls are probably not going to get it for you. So of course when trying to build with it, you'd farm the 10% chance drop boss. Well, "boss." He's actually not even really a threat. So you spend multiple minutes between attempts, to fight a singular SINGULAR enemy that puts up no fight, and still you can spend a few hours just to find one. Only later did they give one of the DLCs an enemy with high Bee drop rates. So when games give you ways to circumvent luck, you should make that part fun too. Just because it's the only actually viable way of getting an item you need before the heat death of the universe, doesn't mean it should be boring. There's a balance to strike.
I've been playing a lot of codenames (the app) and I really love the role that luck plays in that game. You form teams of two and have to get your teammate to pick the correct words on a grid while having them avoid the assassin word (instant failure) and picking the other team's words. You're only allowed to give a single word as a clue and a number that refers to how many words match the clue. For example, you can give a really strong clue that your teammate is almost certain to guess, or a weaker clue that allows them to potentially score more points at the risk of failure. You can also give a "zero" clue, which means that none of the words match your clue, but then they are unaware when they should end their turn and stop guessing words. You can also basically lie to your teammate and give a zero clue when not all the words are unrelated to your clue, if you think the odds are in your favour and they will choose the correct words before the incorrect ones. So basically everything you do involves luck and you have to know when to push your luck and when to be careful. It's a game that's all about calculation and manipulating randomness to put you in the best situation to win, but you will surely lose a lot of games as well which makes having a high win-rate much more satisfying.
I remember in City of Heroes there was separate Defense (dodge an attack) and Resist Damage (reduce damage taken) stats, with one of the defensive power sets being Super Reflexes and revolving around bumping your defense so high you'd barely ever get hit. It was huge risk reward as you could avoid all damage or take the brunt of attacks with no way of reducing said damage, forcing you and any healers to be on your toes to heal as soon as possible.
I loved the items in Super Smash Bros. The luck wasn't solely good assist vs. bad assist. Sometimes it was about whether or not your particular opponent knows how to avoid that particular hazard, or if your particular fighters have the tools to handle it, like using Marth's Counter against a hammer. And they even had the item switch all the way back in the N64 game. Luck mechanics in this context force you to adapt your strategy.
Splatoon 3's Side Order dlc is a good example. When you do a run, you can get chips that modify your character stats for that run, like increasing your damage, speed, or utility. There is a randomness to what chips will be available to you on each floor, but random chance itself is a stat that you can manipulate. You can get chips that increase the chance that enemies will drop specific items, and depending on which weapon set you are using for that run, you may encounter a lot of them. You can easily make a build that relies entirely on raising the odds of enemy drops.
I enjoyed the luck chance in into the Breach. It have a small number percentage that any attack on the grid building (basically your universal health for the entire run) by enemy or your own attack have a chance to be deflected. It's a small chance and overcharging the grid (health) slightly rise it but you never will and never should rely on it in your gameplay. It's always a neat surprise to have your mistake forgiven and never a bummer when it fails
Cait Sith in Rebirth feels like a great example of luck mechanics done well. Even if your not as lucky with his abilities, all the potential outcomes of his luck abilities are good and there’s really no downside even if some are better than others
His final skill you can unlock is a literal slots machine… that’s actually not rigged, and can be timed. It is really satisfying watching someone skilled pull it out mid fight and hit the jackpot, though I can’t do it myself because I suck at timing and the battle continues in real-time lol.
Yes, I feel that is the simple and best way to do it. Bad luck is baseline, it is, at worst, functional, and good luck can get very powerful. This way you never "loses", the system is engaging and rewarding
I feel like that falls into the "no tension" side of things, although for Rebirth tension would be silly since you don't really have time to sit around watching the result anyway.
@@dylanhoward4978 Counterpoint to that: The more powerful abilities (his dice roll and lucky slots) can be manipulated by you in-game. The dice roll ability literally manifests a giant dice you can kick around the battlefield to try and get what you want, and as I mentioned the slots game plays in real time whilst there’s still threats around who can smack you out of your slots.
And conversely, a LACK of luck-based mechanics is one of the cornerstones of most Souls games. Other than item drop rates, absolutely NOTHING is left to chance. Damage values are fixed based on your Stats, Status Effects build up over time until they reach a predetermined threshold, even critical hits are not chance-based. It's an integral element to the genre because it's extremely important that Player's know when they die that they could have taken a different action to prevent it. If every boss fight basically boiled down to waiting for the RNG gods to smile on you X times in a row, the entire experience would suffer.
And League of Legends, EXCEPT when you have (1% < crit < 100%). I personally enjoy building less than 100% crit, because you can get the highest damage in a single attack, albeit reliant on RNG. 100% crit builds are balanced
In twitch action games, you generally don't need external random number generation because there is already lots of randomness inherent in your control of the game. Your timing, your movements, and your decisions under extreme time pressure will always be slightly different even if you try to repeat them exactly. Sometimes you might be unlucky and miss your target because of poor timing or precision in your movements. Other times you can string together a series of perfect movements to perform something otherwise unlikely. It's one of the main reasons why games like Souls or any FPS are often just a matter of practice to beat - whether through honing your mechanical skills or from the luck of the draw, so long as your strategy is sound, it's just a matter of time until you manage to hit everything just right. It's no different in professional sports - even the best players can have losing streaks and mediocre players can go on winning streaks. While it may have something to do with their mechanical and mental skills varying over time, the majority of it can be attributed simply to random chance inherent in every physical interaction. Turn-based games with discrete outcomes don't have that same inherent randomness. You have time to think about your moves, accuracy in targeting isn't a factor, and all of the information is available for you to peruse. Just by taking the time to look at the data and consider the outcomes, you can exactly predict what will happen if you take an action, and you can choose the optimal action to take, guaranteeing success. Any time you see a game with a "build", that works because the outcome can be entirely determined by individual choices you can make with perfect accuracy. That's why we have to introduce a bit of artificial randomness. Without randomness, the game degenerates into a puzzle, where there is always one optimal strategy that you can discover, communicate, and implement. Once you've solved the puzzle, there's nothing left to do, because the outcome will always be the same. Introducing some randomness means that every moment is different and requires a unique decision with a unique solution. This need to adjust to the circumstances happens naturally in twitch games because of the inherent randomness of timing and accuracy of making physical movements. In games without the inherent randomness, we need to introduce artificial randomness to create the same kinds of varied and interesting circumstances.
@@tyranmcgrathmnkklkl I think crit chance in League is an old remnant of DOTA. League used to have evasion chance and they remove it early in the beta. Crit chance is something really hard to reinvent. It exists abundantly in other video games and even tabletop game. If Riot managed a way to reinvent crit system, they would do it instantly. Just like how they rework how ability haste works.
If luck can be affected by skill, you must make sure the player does know how to affect your luck. If luck is some random roll, make sure the roll is random and the luck does work. Otherwise, why have it.
I don't think any discussion about luck in games is complete without talking about the difference between input luck (chance happens, then you make a decision; i.e.: you draw cards, and then choose one to play) vs. output luck (you make a decision, then chance happens, i. e.: you make an action and do a dice roll that decides whether you pass or fail). Input luck somehow seems fairer to many people, as even bad luck streaks can often lead to interesting decisions, rather than frustration, and I believe it's part of the reason why games like Balatro or Hades seem so well balanced. Of note, I find it very interesting that in Balatro, some examples of output luck, such as the wheel of fortune, are seen as the more unfair parts of the game.
From the world of tabletop RPGs, FATE allows the player characters to, on a failed roll, choose to either "fail" or "succeed with a major consequence". So, you can still succeed, but something else goes horribly wrong. With a good GM, usually failure is the less disastrous option, but it does give you an interesting way to mitigate the results of failing a "do or die" roll without removing the risk of failure
Luck was a double edged sword in One Step From Eden. On one hand it increased your likelihood of getting rarer cards to use, but on the flip side it would also increase the difficulty of the enemies you would battle, however the bosses were unaffected by your luck as their difficulty was purely based on which order you fought them. Your luck also increased anytime you won a battle without taking damage. Additionally, since you would get to pick 1 of 3 random cards after each fight, and each card belonged to a certain type/class, you could set card preferences that would lower your luck but also made it more likely to get cards of the chosen types.
I love how in Team Fortress 2 everyone defends random crits as a way to even the battlefield when the game devs themselves said that the more damage you do the more likely you can snowball into more crits, defeating the entire idea that crits even the battlefield.
@@RealityMasterRogue I'm in the minority of people who actually like random crits. It helps things being less competitive in my opinion, and though crits have a higher chance of happening to prolong a streak, it is still random enough that it does help noobs kill pros more often.
@@Draconzis I am pretty sure random crits is the most unbalanced, rage-inducing way to help new players and it's a uncounterable / overpowered mechanic unless you have immediate critical hit resistance like cover or friendly that's conviently beside you, battalion's backup's buff or überchage's invunerability. There is other way to make the game less competitive and new player friendly by just not making players have to grind 1000 elos or other Match Making Ratings like how most Community Servers & MvM and some classes litteraly doesn't need good aim like Pyro and Medic but good position to make them not annoying like random crits or making Meet You Match's Casual System *trying* to put team as balanced like having to take care new players in your team but the enemy team also have to take care their new players to compensate for that.
I've never heard it stated to even the battlefield, at least not when I played it daily for the first few years of its life. Quite the opposite: it was to break stalemates. If you get a bit lucky with some crits or otherwise doing well in the moment, the game reinforces that by making you even more lucky, creating a snowball, like you said. As a result, even when both teams are sitting even in a stalemate, a small amount of luck on one side can snowball into them making a break through the stalemate. Stalemates are boring; sudden swings add surprises and dramatic tension which make the game more interesting. Of course, it depends on what you think is fun. If all that matters is that the final score represents the relative skill of both sides, then adding this runaway mechanic interferes with that. But if what matters is that the game doesn't become stale, then snowballing effects breaks up the monotony, ensuring you always need to keep adapting to a changing circumstance. Having played games like the Battlefield series and Planetside 2 where stalemates were very common and difficult to overcome, I much prefer the regular swings that occurred in TF2.
I have a strategy tabletop game in development where the primary way players take actions is through gambling mechanics (either 1d6 or 2d6). I was able to keep the odds from feeling unfair by making them maipulable: the probabilities of rolls stay the same, but target values you want to hit are the result of choices you make. Part of the idea, that seems to work, is to widen the audience; some players will be number-crunchers, where others will just follow gut feelings and throw the dice. The most successful test player so far is in the latter category.
One mechanic I love it's the Ecaflip's cards in Wakfu. Every turn of combat you draw a random card that gives either a benefit or a hindrance, and you need to plan your turn to make the most of that card or avoid the penalties. You can also re-draw once per turn, but all unused cards are gonna end up on the draw once, so sometimes it's better to keep a bad card for a turn you're using mostly for positioning for the hopes of drawing a big action card for when you're gonna do your big combo.
For luck mechanics that affect the game in many ways, my favorite example is RimWorld with its emergent storytelling through most of the things that you don't control directly being 90% randomness based. In terms of gameplay mechanics, there are luck factors, but playing it "well" (by a mechanical standard) is mostly about preparing for your chances to be better and increasing them in the moment (in combat mostly with the various types of cover) preparing for bad outcomes and having fallbacks - or improvising when something is going to go terribly. Being saved by pausing the game and carefully looking at my options to save dying colonists or animals just in time were some of the most exciting moments after a combat for me.
Not sure about other examples in video games, but board games a just full of luck-driven mechanics. Here are some of my favorites: - Most trick-taking card games force you to deal with how to handle "bad hands" that you get dealt. Games that have contracts/predictions of the number of tricks you'll win often allow you to hedge your bets, and that can make any bad hand good in the right situation. - Root, a war game with dice-driven combat, manages the luck of the dice in two ways. First, you can only deal damage up to the number of warriors you have in a conflict (3 max). Second, the attacker gets the higher result and the defender gets the lower result from the 2 dice rolled, incentivizing the attacker. But the game also subverts this by making one faction always get the higher result (countered by having limited troops) and ambush cards that reduce the attacking force. - Dice placement games, such as The Voyages of Marco Polo and The White Castle, give different benefits for the number on the dice you put out (e.g., you get more goods in Marco Polo if played in the market), but if you play in an area that already has dice, you need to pay money equal to the number of your roll. It encourages people to play high rolls first to save money, but that may throw a wrench in your plans by nudging you out of order. You can also adjust die rolls by paying some resources, reroll the die outright, or even purchase dice to give you more actions with preferable outcomes. And if you just have a crappy roll at the start, you get compensated with those resources to adjust your roll.
Oh, wow! I *just* started playing Unicorn Overlord, I'm really enjoying it, and it's great to see it pop up here. (What a coincidence that it was featured in the latest designdoc video as soon as i got into it.) And yeah, guard rate is a new stat for me, but I welcome it with open arms.
I've been playing Tales of Vesperia lately and Patty's play style is about 75% luck oriented. Most of her abilities have a variety of possible effects that are chosen randomly, with some influence from the Luck stat. Her core ability, Form Change, randomly selects from 3 distinct stances with different movesets, and a slim chance of getting Critical Form which combines and amplifies the best aspects of each other form. She can cook meals in battle that might restore or reduce your party's HP and/or TP, charge your Over Limit gauge, or drastically reduce your party's stats for a time. She can cast ANY spell in the game, provided you roll it when you need it. She has abilities whose damage and effects are determined by the value of a randomly dealt Poker or Mahjong hand. You can exert some control over the luck with certain passive skills. Safe Bet makes mid-range outcomes more likely than very good or very bad ones, while Gambler's Soul does the opposite. Form Select lets you pick which form you get from Form Change (except Critical, that's still random, but virtually always better than anything else). Magic Select lets you choose whether your random spells are offensive or defensive, while in her "mage" form. And several skills provide alternative ways to obtain Critical Form and other bonuses when you get it. She's not likely to invalidate a boss or cause a game over by herself, but having Patty in the party just makes everything a little spicy. Hope that's weird enough for ya
I think an aspect of the topic you glossed over is the difference between input and output randomness, which I think is probably communicated most in depth across various episodes of the Ludology podcast back when Geoff Engelstein was one of the hosts of it.
Armello is cool because you can influence almost every luck aspect of the game. Increase your fight stat so you have more dice in battle, equip items that guarantee certain dice rolls (eg. lose 2 dice but gain 3 rolled sword symbols) or sacrificing drawn cards to guarantee a certain symbol in battle. The chance of getting a quest reward depends on the stat that quest boosts, which can be artificially boosted through consumables beforehand, and there's even one signet ring that improves the chances.
The gambler class Ecaflip in Wakfu is my consistent go-to in spite of how every random thing about it is generally worse than its non-random or less-random features. Turns out that getting the equivalent of two turns half the time and no turn the other half isn't better than getting one turn every turn, if you don't actually have control over when you get two turns. Much of the idea, but with control over the turns, was displayed in Bravely Default, and did a nice job of letting you control battle flow and deal with interesting puzzle fights. I wish it'd gone with a system where all the cards had to run out before a reshuffle; As you got later in the deck you'd be able to KNOW that you were about to have a hot turn because you didn't have the big negatives in you deck anymore. I believe there's a tabletop war game that did this; every contested roll was a card, and cards got used up. If you got a crit, you knew you weren't about to get another one unless you were right at the end of the deck.
I'm reminded of how City of Heroes, with its hit chances, uses the "Streakbreaker" mechanic to lessen the frustration and tweak the odds. Depending on the chance you had of hitting or missing, a streak of hits or misses for a given skill will be forced to hit or miss if a streak gets too long. For example, if you have a 95% chance to hit something, you do have an actual 95% chance, but if you do miss, the next hit from that skill is a guaranteed hit. You can't miss twice in a row if you have a high chance to hit. The streak is much longer for low chances to hit, and in most cases that's the enemy mobs trying to hit you, so they don't benefit from it nearly as much as the player does. It does mitigate that sense that your 95% chance to hit shouldn't miss often, though.
one luck mechanic ive been enjoying a lot lately is the relic system in warframe, which is like a lootbox you earn in game and then do specific missions to open, with a lot of different relics with different rewards. at the end of said mission, everyones relic offers one of its random rewards, and you can each pick whatever you want. so you can go in with randoms and get whatever or you can group up with people who have the same relic to target farm specific rare drops
Ecaflips in games from Ankama are a good representation of what a full on luck-based gameplay can offer. Its basically gambler cats that uses luck in every aspect of their gameplay. From boosting critical chances, to attacking with one of N elements and bonuses/debuffs for all or parts on a russian roulette. Very fun to play. Kind of like playing a lightning build in Diablo II.
There's nothing more infuriating than winning every mini game and having 4 stars to their 1, only for a random event on the board to steal a star and give it to the other player, making it 3-2, and then the bonus stars at the end randomly assigning enough stars that the other player wins. Usually there are enough random stars awarded that the number you actually collected makes up a small portion of the total, so that the final score is largely based on being lucky in those final random draws.
I absolutely love luck, it is one of my favourite aspects of game design. It's not a conventional method of luck but my favourite version of it is 'mind games', and I think the best game to use mind games is rock paper scissors. RPS is so simple yet so complex simply because it is entirely focused around mind games.
You showed some Master Duel, I like how they’ve implemented luck there. When you get packs, if you don’t get what you want, you can always dismantle those cards to get craft points to generate the cards you need. So even bad packs give you something that can help you in the long run. Probably the best system the game has.
I really like the "daily luck reading" of animal crossing new horizons, where once you get your fortune told by Katrina you'll see the effects of your good or bad luck, but if you don't want to take the gamble you can just skip the mechanic entirely by not getting your fortune read.
Limbus Company has really good luck mechanics integrated into its battle system. Every coin on a skill starts with a 50/50 chance, and typically you want to hit heads for higher clashes and more damage. Your Sinners' sanity level will change over the course of the battle, and that will change the coin chances, going up to a 95% chance to hit heads or as low as a 95% chance to hit tails. Even at either side of the spectrum, though, there's still a chance of winning or losing no matter what. Factor in team synergies, special strategies, E.G.O, and even just plain bullcrap from the enemies' front, and it ends up turning nearly every encounter into a series of highly-calculated gambles that feel incredibly satisfying to pull off.
I've been trying to design my game with an idea of good luck, bad luck, luck effecting decision-making, and agency. Say the player enters a dungeon: -Good luck can be things, like finding a useful item, or coming across a merchant shop. -Bad luck could be encountering an enemy, or walking into an trap. -luck effecting decision-making, could be giving the player an option which has a chance to be good or bad, but the choice is their if they wish to take it. -Players can have agency like, bringing items, and equip that tip things in their favor. maybe even something that can take away or minimize one bad luck element. I also think its worth mentioning the stakes for a player along side the luck. Say, a player loses all their items if they fall in a dungeon, versus losing some of their items for falling. These stakes can feel different depending on the levels of risk with them. Losing all you items to an unforeseeable insta-death trap, can be quite frustrating. If i made the stakes THAT high, i'd balance the bad luck to be more forgiving. Although there are some games that actually strive on high risk situations like fear and hunger for example. I can see that some people really like the thrill and rush of playing a high stakes game and getting as far as they can in it. But even a game like fear and hunger can give the player good luck, and a sense of agency, like finding good gear, and learning about how it's world works and the secrets you can find in it, which can help you out quite a bit. But still managed to keep the stakes high as alot of enemies can randomly choose to insta-kill you, although you could try to avoid the more freighting enemies, and even use traps against some of them to get your own advantage. In games like my favorite Pokemon mystery dungeon, the play can come across poke(money), items, rare items, recruit defeated foes, encounter shops, or even the stairs in the same room. But they can also encounter enemies, monster rooms, traps. Although this is one of my top favorite series of games to play, Personally I don't feel the late game rng is very fun, as its gravely tilted towards bad luck over any good luck, which results in you and your team dying in one-hit, or hitting trap after trap, of PP to 0 traps among other nasty traps, and encountering monster rooms quite frequently which make be at spawn or where the stairs are. And worst you loss all of your items after you lose. I watched a really good player solo purity forest here and there, and even with all the knowledge and skill sometimes i run could just end badly out of purely back luck. Which is very frustrating. But to be fair it is optional post-game content so you don't HAVE take on these high-risk dungeons, and you can choose to go in with less valuable items, and more suited pokės. But if you someone looking for that level of extreme dungeon crawling, i think PMD has a post-game that would provide that sense of adventure and danger some may be lookin' for. Cuz as stressful as some bad luck can be, it makes success despite it that much more satisfying. Personally though i perfect a good balance between the 4 elements of rng I made up at the top. xp Midgame to Late-game is probably where i enjoy PMD the most. And sometimes i'm willing to attempt post-game super-dungeons. Those are just ideas i can up with.
Very good, as always. There's one element missing, though: pity mechanics for repeated actions. For instance, let's say that something has 1/20 chance to happen. Then, if you get unlucky and it doesn't happen 19 times straight, it will will automaticallly happen on your 20th try. It's used a lot in gacha games but I wish that it would also be used in other games, especially in games with crafting systems where you need to harvest materials from luck-based sources. An even better way to do it would be to increase the success rate after each failed attempt and reset it when the intended result happens but I don't know of any game that does it.
i like how the binding of isaac: repentance added the Perfection trinket, which dramatically increases your luck stat if you play perfectly. it’s practically guaranteed for the Lost, too
In Pirate101 there are 3 main stats (aside from the standard accuracy, health and dodge): Strength, Agility and Will, with each of the 5 playable classes specializing in one (Strength=Buccaneer/Privateer, Agility=Swashbuckler/Musketeer, Will=Privateer/Witchdoctor). The higher your main stat compared to the target(s) the more likely you are to crit your hits. Another stat people sometimes focus on is spell power, which increases the strength of your damage, healing and minion summon powers. There are also the epic talents Relentless, Burst Fire and Mojo Echo that give you a 35% chance to make a bonus basic attack (up to 3 at rank 2+, with a better chance to crit at ranks 4 and 5). You can also make an extra attack if you land a critical hit while also having learned the epics Bladestorm, Double Tap and/or Mojo Rising (bonus attack if you crit or defeat an enemy), though in that case the target enemy is anyone in range, and yes the Relentless epics can proc here too. For WDs they have the ability to strike multiple foes at once with their basic attacks (5-9 in an X, + or square area depending on the staff weapon or Improved Mojo Blast talent they have), but the tradeoff is that if one dodges they all dodge, with the hit chance being 75% for each target, and the basic attack range is shorter compared to the single target wands. Because of this the accuracy stat isn't as important for those users. Also, the extra attack from Mojo Echo can only hit the initial target rather than all of them.
The way I see it, a 'good' luck mechanic is one that either doesn't cause a large amount of variation in potential outcomes (specifically in regards to how effective you are in the gameplay), or one that can be circumvented via strategical methods that are complex, interesting, and engaging. Edit: As an example of the latter, Sushi Go and Coral Reef are two extremely simple card games that are largely luck-based due to being card-drafting games. However, they're also quite strategic in that they challenge you to make decisions each turn based on what you think is most likely to get you a lot of points and/or deny a lot of points to your opponent(s). An example of the former is ZZZ because gacha mechanics don't affect the player's overall power very much, especially if each character controls very similarly and is well-balanced, or the gacha unlocks are purely cosmetic.
I know this is just for video games, but im a huge fan of Warhammer tabletop. In 8th edition, the magic system worked thusly: The player who's turn it was rolled 2d6. They added that many 'power dice' to a 'power pool'. Random, right? However, the larger of the two dice rolled was the number of 'dispel dice' added to their opponent's 'dispel pool'. This meant that the player now needed to manage their resources for casting spells and the luckier their dice rolls got, the more resources their opponent had with which to counter them. This led to incredible meta gameplay of mind games to try to get your opponent to save their dispel resources for spells that didn't matter as much to you, so you could secure the ones that really did matter. I miss that game dying and if I'm honest, it's in large part due to how fun that magic metagame was thanks to luck and randomness tying into a skill based resource management mini game, and keeping it fresh. Newer editions have magic much more deterministic and much less interactive which makes that whole section of the game extremely unsatisfying and unappealing for me now.
One of my favorite, but subtler uses of luck is how it factors into Doom. Each enemy has a different chance to flinch when hit with an attack, which means you might get a lucky opening to dodge. The trick is, even though they have lower damage, rapid fire weapons give you more rolls of the dice, with some enemies even having a high enough flinch chance to stunlock to death
I love how you talked about the 2rn system of Fire Emblem. As a fan of the series, I know about the biases the human mind has towards random chances, and it still gets me whenever I play one of the games that displays the real hitrates. Another aspect of luck that Fire Emblem perfectly showcases is how it can be used to add an element of depth to strategy-based games. One might think that randomness goes directly against the principles of strategy, but it actually adds to it if used correctly because it forces the player to always keep the consequences of a missed hit or a random crit in mind and plan around the possibility of it happening.
I absolutely agree that the hit chance plays into the strategy as being something to keep in mind while directing your units, but critical chances are definitely not high enough to play into that strategy in the same way (to depend on your own critical hit is to set yourself up for failure, and to try and set up with the expectation that the enemy will always get critical shots will make the battle an unnecessarily tedious slog). What critical hits do is throw in disruptions that force shifts in strategy at unexpected times.
@@SgtSupaman Agree about your own crit chances. As for enemy crit chances, they are typically 0 due to how the stats are usually distributed. But when an enemy has, say, a 7% chance to crit, and a crit of theirs would kill one of my units, I wouldn't attack that enemy with that unit.
Playing through SMTIII Nocturne for the first time and I have to say that the opening hours are entirely luck based… There is one mandatory encounter against a Preta early on and if he crits you on his turn (since he always goes first) you are basically dead and can’t do anything to stop it.
One of the wildest RNG-driven communities I've ever seen has to be 'competitive' Monster Rancher 2. For starters, this is a game where a 50% chance to hit is considered "Good odds", and often matches are decided by a single 10% hit chance move miraculously landing and instantly killing the enemy monster. Also, for reasons I won't get into here, optimal play by human players is incredibly un-fun in a "he who acts first loses" kind of way... so instead players hand the reins over to the built-in AI battle system, which is less of an artificial intelligence and more of just "Do random inputs until win or lose"... and one monster trait that is considered mandatory for competitive play is "your monster has a random chance to stand back up at 1 hp when knocked out"... And yet with all that they've found a way to squeak some consistency out of all that randomness. It's kind of wild.
Buildings having a percentage of chance to resist hits in Into the Breach is great. You don't count on it, but when it happens it feels awesome. It's also worth taking a look at the token system in Darkest Dungeon 2 compared to the RNG in the first game. Big improvemente in my opinion.
Magic the Gathering has inherent randomness, being a deck building game, but over the years many mechanics have pushed and pulled in both directions to reduce and increase variance. Since Lands are needed to cast spells, and both need to be drawn, a number of mechanics have been made to increase the odds that players get lands when they need them. On the flip side, there are a few mechanics that players enjoy that encourage randomness, whether they involve randomly casting a spell for free from your deck or spells that involve dice rolling or coin flipping to produce effects of varying effectiveness. There's also Magic Arena, which touches on the controlled randomness mentioned with Fire Emblem by influencing players' opening hands to make it more likely that an opening hand has a minimal number of lands so that games aren't immediately decided by bad opening hand luck.
One of my favorite luck mechanics are the instant kill moves in shin megami tensei. Most of the games’ versions of light and dark skills do no damage but have a chance to instant kill with that chance increasing with an enemy’s weakness or decreasing with resistance. While some people hate this, I like how it forces the player to strategize around certain enemies or bosses and bring new demons that resist or completely block light or dark. It allows for more variety in gameplay and certain strategies can revolve around luck.
Well its not a video game, but my all time favorite "luck" mechanic was from gaslands the board game. Rolled your car flipping over? Well choose where it lands hot shot. Spinning outta control? Well an ace driver just turned that into a slick nose to nose 180. I still remember the last time I played that game with a buddy. My car exploded after smashing into a wall, but the flip and burst sent it hurtling over the finish line.
I love Space Funeral's luck mechanic, where you can just press a button called "Mystery" for a bunch of random effects, like "you vomit everywhere and it's gross but it doesn't do anything" or "being so pathetic the enemy feels bad for you and leaves"
Library of ruina has cards roll dice to fight. The higher dice wins. Because of the randomness, you will never be certain your battle plan will go out well, nudging players into a “lose the battle win the war” mindset, where they will intentionally take bad clashes on minor hits to save cards for the stronger strikes. Players have to mitigate luck as much as possible, and even still some tense clashes will occur. You also have a random set of powerups at times of the fight. You get riskier powerups when you’re doing poorly, but more straightforward and consistent ones if you’re doing well. The former offers a gamble that if you’re lucky and know what you’re doing, you can turn a bad situation around. Gebura’s Mountain Of Corpses power up kills everyone but the selected party member, but massively buffs the survivor. Now you’re gambling on if the hypercharged teammate has enough power to go it alone
The luck stat in terraria affects a lot of luck-based events such as monster drops, fishing power or rare creatures spawning, but it doesnt affect fishing quest rewards, grab bags, or the chances of random events spawning like a goblin invasion. You can increase your luck by having torches of the right kind in a given biome, by touching ladybugs (though catching or killing them reduces your luck), having certain accessories with "lucky" in their name equipped, even though they dont tell you that, by throwing money into shimmer liquid, or by being nearby a garden gnome or on the night after a boss is defeated. And no, the game does not display your luck stat. The only way to see it is by talking to an NPC that doesnt appear in the first half of the game, and he only gives vague descriptions of your luck, like the fortune teller in Stardew Valley. It even used to be more janky, as having the "wrong" torch for a biome (including basic torches) used to *decrease* your luck.
I'd say a good luck system is one that forces you to adapt, prevent it from turning into a 'perfect game' situation. A bad one is one that you cannot interact with or must simply brute force.
Once Human's Memetic Specialization drops are luck-based, with very limited adjustments (5 rerolls & 3 drop grind). These are mostly passives that can be incredibly cost-effective to unlocking new unique formulas unlocked only through these
Craft your future in games at the GDC Showcase 2024, September 19-20! Get $5 off signup here: showcase.gdconf.com/?_mc=barter_gdcsc_3pvr_ve_x_x_dd_2024
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I'm curious, can I still watch recordings of conferences or would I be wasting my money if I can't be there live?
hey, just wanted to say that you should keep on making videos because most of your videos keeps me motivated on working on my game
I find it interesting how the "rock paper scissors" nature of most fighting games causes the players to introduce luck. In a good fighting game, every option has a counter... including the counters themselves. This forces players to be unpredictable in order to not get countered, which creates random-seeming situations. However, because people are terrible at being random, this opens up the opportunity for reads, where you exploit your opponent's patterns to correctly guess what move they'll do next and counter it. The goal of most fighting games is to send your opponent to the RNG shadow realm while you know exactly what you'll face.
Agreed. And it's also interesting how FG character archtypes, aside from innate mechanics, are also balanced around these RPS situations. To continue with the RPS analogy, rushdown mixup-heavy characters can put opponents in more unpredictable RPS situations more often, and in exchange have less RPS options than average compared to the rest of the cast. Zoners also have less RPS options, but can instead prevent/deny RPS situations from happening to them in the first place by minimizing direct confrontation. More defensive characters have more options than average or are allowed to lose more interactions, but in exchange have weaker RPS capability/reward. Meanwhile, grapplers, the madmen they are, increase the risk and inordinately increase the reward of RPS situations.
A tweet recently popped up talking about a player who chooses their option based on the round timer, and if it was currently odd or even. Odd, they would go high, Even they would go low. They never told anyone. I fear to face this opponent.
@@sauceinmyface9302 Reminds me of some tactics I heard people use in football (soccer) to take penalty kicks
@@jeffersonshaunreyyu Miss pot buster? You die.
Hit pot buster? Opponent dies.
Simple as.
It’s one of the coolest parts of fighting games too me, and gives the potential for extremely satisfying reads sometimes.
Then again I play Pokken, that’s one of the most rps games you can get
A good luck mechanic is when it benefits me, and a bad one is when it goes against me. It's as shrimple as that.
thank you, man in pervert hat (•‿•)
5% tails chance my ass...
@@Ariamaki Truly a Limbus Company
shrimple as
@@Ariamaki My Dieci Rodion getting half half on their 4 coin skill at 45 sp:
Stache from Mario&Luigi. Not really because it's a particularly interesting mechanic, I just think it's funny that they canonized mustaches being tied to luck in battle in the Mario universe.
Also, it gives you discounts cause shopkeepers have to respect the stache XD
It also makes it easier to hit Lucky Wins in the lottery that shops in Mario & Luigi Bowser's Inside Story has.
its really funny how baby luigi can have a better moustache than mario
Cannot express how important luck mitigation is in games. Hades' rerolls or Hard West's Luck mechanic to stop you from getting bad luck streaks are very impactful.
That sounds horrible.
@@pn2294 How?
@@pn2294 Luck mitigation is very important to have in games where random chance is everything, most notably roguelikes. Getting completely screwed with nothing you can do to prevent it just isn't fun. Guarantees and second chances are great to have.
@@percher4824 why even have luck then?
If you use standard deviation graph and say that left is bad luck and right is good luck, rerolls makes it that you can escape the leftmost situation, or improve your condition if your luck lands you in the middle.
9:44 I had the exact opposite issue with the Xcom remake. It was the very final mission and I only had 1 chance to win since I couldn't possibly train and gear enough guys to replace my elite troops if they died. I get onto the alien ship, when one of those disc enemies flies out of the shadows and grabs one of my guys. They're going to die next turn if I don't kill the disc, but luckily my mega-upgraded sniper has a 100% chance to hit her shot and will at minimum still overkill it. I breathe a sigh of relief. I let her fire her 100% chance to hit shot for the guaranteed kill.....
AND SHE MISSES!
I had to rush all of my guys out of cover and do a bunch of ultra risky and suboptimal things to kill the disc that turn, but I barely managed it. That almost entirely killed my will to continue playing, and had it not been the final mission I probably would've dropped the game out of sheer frustration. If it says 100%, it must hit. That's what 100% means. Missing a 99% chance is just extremely unlucky but understandable, missing a 100% chance is the game lying to you. How can I make decisions when I can't trust that the game will actually do what it promises?
that must have been some extreme rounding error or something because as far as I know modern xcom usually juices your hit chances invisibly (unless you use mods to see it) unless you're on Legendary where the hit chance is just the hit chance
Agreed completely. Continuing to overstate odds of success is a series 'tradition' by now, but one that really shouldn't stick around. Players will base their strategies around the odds you give them, and when those odds are secretly skewed in the enemy's favor frustration is inevitable.
@@edfreak9001 It's either a bug or terrible, terrible rounding. Nevertheless, since the game almost entirely relies on making judgements based on the presented chances, that has to work perfectly.
in a game I used to play, (mr mine) there is a basic RNG system but has issues with rounding
so the system works like this random integer from 1 to 100
reduce it by a stat then it rounds
then reduce again
what this can lead to is it showing 0% death chance (but is instead just a number less than 0.99...)
this means that in practice it's a 1% death chance
which means on even if the game says 0% it can still fail because it's really is a 0.3% (and because of how the game does it, making it a 1% chance)
Ah, the classic Pokemon Gen 1 miss lol. In that case I think they accidentally typed a "less than" instead of a "less than or equal to" resulting in a 1/256 chance of a move with 100% accuracy failing to hit.
I would be very surprised if something like that happened in a modern game and wasn't patched, so it's probably more complicated than that
Honestly, I do prefer it when random failure isn't necessarily an all-or-nothing situation. I like the notion of having a "fumble" state in-between success and proper failure, like if a bullet almost misses, but still grazes the target, or if you successfully unlock the door, but it's loud enough to attract undue attention, or you ARE able to pull off casting a complicated spell, but it took a lot more juice out of you than it would have normally.
Basically the rules of improv. "Yes, but", "Yes, and", "No, but", and "No, and"
This is one of the strengths of the Pathfinder 2e system. Many spells that are "save or suck" in D&D are much more nuanced with its Four Degrees of Success system. For example, PF2e's Dizzying Colors (an adaptation of D&D's Color Spray) has the following effect depending on your Will save result.
* Critical Success: No effect.
* Success: Dazzled for 1 round, which means that for the next round of combat, if the affected creature uses a single-target attack or effect, they have a 20% chance of missing outright on top of the usual miss chance. Even though this effect only lasts a single round, this can buy the caster's party a much-needed reprieve.
* Failure: Stunned 1, blinded for 1 round, dazzled for 1 minute. Stunned 1 means that the affected creature can't react until their next turn, and can't do as much on their next turn (but it doesn't make them drop what they're holding, and doesn't carry on to future turns). Blinded effectively halves the creature's speed for 1 round and prevents them from attacking anyone, but it only takes them out of the fight for 1 round. Only dazzled is a major problem, and even at a duration of 1 minute it's not enough to completely defang creatures, especially ones with area attacks.
* Critical Failure: Stunned for 1 round and blinded for 1 minute. This is every bit as crippling as you'd expect.
For enemies, critical success is a rare outcome, as you need to either roll a Nat 20 or exceed the save DC by 10 or more to completely shrug off a spell's effects. More importantly, while player characters get class features that can make critical successes on saves drastically more likely, enemy creatures usually don't.
On the flip side, many spells that would be devastating under a "save or suck" system are much more lenient. Critical failure only occurs if you roll a Nat 1 or fail the save DC by 10 or more. Additionally, Dizzying Colors is one of many spells with the Incapacitation trait, which prevents the more crippling spells from devastating strong targets; to put it simply, you will never critically fail against a low-level mook's Dizzying Colors, and a solo boss will never critically fail against your Dizzying Colors.
@@Knuckx117 Man, improv is beautiful. I gotta get into it for boosting creativity
@@imveryangryitsnotbutter This is why people love Pathfinder, isn't it? The nuance of Four Degrees seems just right to me.
I've heard Pathfinder described as "Protestant D&D" (you can probably guess who called it that), since IIRC D&D 4e was kinda fucky, and some mad-lad decided to devise a new system spun-off from 3.5e, the results of which speak for themselves.
Pillars of Eternity has a beautiful and eloquent solution to that IMO. Hits are divided into four camps; miss, graze, hit, and crit. And your attack falls into a range of those camps based on your hit and their evasion. I forget the numbers but you can get your accuracy high enough that you can literally never miss and have a high chance to crit, likewise you can never get crit and make most of your enemies' attacks "graze" (less damage).
It's a good way to curve the array of attacks and damage while giving a lot of control to the player to manipulate with effort.
Terraria's luck mechanic is notable due to how... abnormal the triggers for it are. For example, touching a ladybug applies a long buff to luck, while killing one or using it as bait for fishing reduce your luck. Then there's the fact that Torches of all things affect luck - using the correct biome-dependent torches increases luck, and the "wrong" ones lower it. Originally torches could give you negative luck, but community outrage forced developers to only give positive luck or none at all.
Otherwise the mechanic affects basically everything. Drop chances, damage rolls, chances for rare critters/enemies, how much money enemies drop, etc.
Gnome farms are a thing I build now, and it's because of luck.
"Wrong" torches decreasing luck has been patched out ages ago.
@A_Person_64 iirc one of the devs was annoyed people were using out-of-biome torches all the time. Hence why there was also the "torch god" boss
I don't know if this is particularly weird, but in the Animal Crossing series, there's a whole lot of luck involved, particularly in what items you get. This can have some funny interplay with the dialogue. For a couple of examples, in New Horizons, I once got a wheelchair from a Normal who told me, "I hope it's something you can use," and a Peppy has given me her photo before, telling me I'm her test market, and that she's considering having her face put on them.
One thing this vid didn't talk about was the contrast between pre-decision and post-decision randomness - having the random result before the action and forcing you to react to it, or having the random result after the action and have it affect your action result. Both are good to have, but the former is usually better for actions that carry more weight.
As an example, I like how Invisible Inc. (an XCOM-like rougelike from Klei) deliberately makes ranged weapon accuracy _not_ random - both players and enemies are expert sharpshooters that will always hit their targets. On top of that, players always have faster reflexes than the guards. The guards, however, are placed randomly around the map, and you are heavily penalized for killing them.
I think Mark Brown (GMTK) covered "pre" and "post" decision luck in a video. In many situations, post-decision luck is tantamount to pre-decision luck for your next action, except where it restricts those options.
I was sure he will talk about it since footage of Citizen Sleeper and Dicey Dungeons was shown. Both games roll the dice in advance and have the player use them to take certain actions. It turns the randomness into tactics or strategy, where you know exactly what will happen but the question is how to use your current rolls to their fullest.
Dicey Dungeons also has many items that can turn certain numbers into other numbers, allowing you to control the randomness.
My biggest pet peeve is unnecessary RNG. It's the difference between theory and application. For example in Final Fantasy 12, there are hunt targets that only appear 10% of the time.
Theory: "This will give the game variety. Having uncertainty is gonna make it exciting"
Application: The player enters and exits the map 10 times to make the monster appear, going through a long walk and a loading screen each and every time.
Doesn't sound exciting does it? If the player has bad luck, they may have to enter and exit the map 20 times, getting more and more frustrated each time the attempts surpass the expected odds. Unnecessary RNG can feel like an artificial tactic to extend the game.
@@One.Zero.One101 How about an example from Pokemon (which I am working on getting) ?
If you want to catch a wild Munchlax in Pokemon Diamond or Pearl (or Platinum), you need to apply Honey to distinct "honey trees" to attract one.
However, Munchlax has only a 1% spawn rate, and of about 20 such trees on the map, only 4 specific trees (rolled when starting a new file) are allowed to spawn Munchlax _at all,_ and there's no way to deduce which trees they are (other than Munchlax actually spawning). It's worse than fishing for Feebas (which at least had a good encounter rate once you found one of the specific tiles it can appear on).
Oh, and you also need to wait six hours on the game clock (aka. real time) between applying Honey and checking back on the tree.
One of my favorite uses of luck in a competitive game is Faust from Guilty Gear. As the OG item toss character, he's really the only one that has gotten it right. What makes Faust so special is that most of his items create a situation that both side have to deal with. There are items that only benefit Faust, but they are more rare and the minority. This creates a situation where both players have to adapt to what is happening in a very short amount of time, which can keep matches feeling fresh.
I was looking or this comment!
The luck mechanic introduced to Pokemon since gen 6/7. To those that don't know: You can pet your Pokemon and give them treats to make them like you more, what the game doesn't tell you is that it silently increases a "luck" stat on that Pokemon the more you play with it. This "luck" stat can manifest itself into something like critting when you shouldn't or survinvg a hit with 1 HP when you shouldn't, and the game will tell you that this is happening because of "the bond you share". It's pretty interesting at first, but it can almost feel like you're cheating when you're fighting battles with higher stakes. The bad part about it, you can't disable this, so the only way for you to not get this "luck" stat is to not pet your Pokemons at all, which is kinda bad for some people who still wants to pet their Pokemons without feeling like they're cheating, but who knows, maybe I'm just the minority.
Cool!
Completely agreed. Something that always rubbed me the wrong way about the Amie/Refresh/Affection mechanics is the fact that none of the enemy Trainers get to use them against you. Which makes sense from a game design perspective; having a random effect make a fight much harder for you feels a LOT worse than one that makes the fight easier. But at the same time, isn't the game now implying that you're the only Trainer in the world who has a strong enough bond with their Pokemon to get those benefits? That kind of paints a negative picture of all the other characters, doesn't it? Pokemon already stacks the deck in players' favor enough as it is, between the ability to spam items, opponents having bad AI, opponents only using 2-4 Pokemon while EXP sharing in later gens lets you easily get a full team of 6 from the start, etc.. Having a random chance to basically ignore anything bad that might happen to you is definitely a step too far.
I’ve heard a lot of people completely hate the friendship boost mechanics and I agree.
That kind of mechanic can also easily lead to players optimizing the fun out of the game. Since each pet increases luck, which increases your chances of success, the optimal thing to do is pet as much as possible to maximize luck. But now you are just grinding, taking all the fun out of petting in the first place and turning it into a chore you do in order to succeed. If it could only stack one or a few times, and especially if it didn't decay, then even though you might feel obligated to do it, you wouldn't be incentivized to do it to excess, which would otherwise ruin the fun.
@@ragcat3732It was seemingly toned town in scarlet and violet as in it doesnt seem to activate nearly as much in those games as it does in the previous gens
I'm surprised there was no mention of Pokemon, given how infamous it is for leaving you at the mercy of RNG. "Can I get a crit that bypasses the opponent's defense buffs?", "Oh no, I'm paralyzed! Will I be able to attack next turn, or will I be fully paralyzed?", "Is my will o wisp attack gonna land, or will I keep consecutively missing it, causing the game devs to buff its accuracy from the next generation onward?"
Not to mention the fun interaction between fissure and stomping tantrum with Ting-Lu
Fissure lands? Instant KO on opponent
Fissure missed? Stomping Tantrum get to deal double damage next turn
The fact that pokemon can still be played completely with all that will be endlessly funny to me. Despite all the absurd luck based elements you can still get good enough to consistently win
am I gonna get flinched by waterfall 7 times when I need one hit to kill the last pokemon?
@@Bluebatstar I think that's just more because the AI isn’t good. In PVP luck can still play a deciding factor if the players are equally skilled, and some games you will just lose because rng decided that you should. Every attack has a 1/24 chance to deal 1.5x damage and many attacks having a 10% chance to status feels bad when it happens, especially if it's freeze. If most/all rng is against you in a PVP match I'd argue you just can't win if your opponent knows what they are doing.
I play Pokemon and I really thought the Fire Emblem section starting at 9:25 was funny. 76% is high? I treat everything below 90% as a fifty-fifty, you have to be mentally (and strategically) prepared to miss.
ah yes, my favourite game mechanic
rng
rigged number generator
I've been playing Earthbound recently, and there's lot of luck situations (the 1/128 drop rates, for instance), but one that's showing BAD luck implementation is Paula's Pray command.
In theory it can help you in battle, but the positive effects (slight HP or PP restoration, or a basic attack) are FAR outweighted by the negative and even some "positive" effects (inflict everyone with crying or confusion, or even revive EVERYONE, including enemies).
I use it a lot, and even I feel like i'm playing Buckshot Roulette every time i use it.
The 1/128 drop rare for the king's sword for Poo singlehandedly provided my level grind for the endgame
So luck is nice when provides the need of strategy (like Hades) rather than removing it (FF Crisis Core)
Shout-out to New Vegas for giving Luck a use outside combat (namely in the game's many casinos; the higher your luck, the higher you are of "feeling lucky" and lining up the reels on the slot machines, getting the ball to hit the righs segment of a roulette wheel, or getting a good deal in blackjack.)
Hell all the Fallout games had fun with the Luck stat. In OG Fallout 1, my favorite playstyles was to max luck and take the Jinxed trait in a melee build, which increased critical failure chances across the board. With a high luck stat, the trait has a negligible effect on you, but an increased effect on all the enemies around you. So while you can punch everyone as much as you want (and maybe trip once in a blue moon), everyone else is dropping their ammo or having their guns explode in their faces.
The game also responded to your luck by having the casino ban you from playing games if you got too lucky. Just like real life
One of my favorite cases of randomness and luck in games is with Baldi's Basics Plus. Nearly every part of the game has some form of randomness and luck to it all, like with the schoolhouse, the characters picked, and chaotic game-changing events that occur at random. All mixed together can create an absolutely unhinged and chaotic experience.
But it's not totally out of your control, you can still fight chaos with strategy with the various items around the map, and every single character has at least one way to counteract them if you're smart. For example, The Principle will make a beeline towards you if you break a rule, but he can't hear like Baldi so if you lose him, he'll wander aimlessly until he directly spots you. It's that sort of chaos/strategy that's rather lovely with video games, keeping the player on their toes while still allowing them to wrestle the game into a situation that favors them.
My favorite instance of video game RNG is the playstyle of Patty Fleur from Vesperia. Almost every single art (move) she has has several ways of being either enhanced or weakened by RNG mechanics. For instance, she has a single spellcasting art that can cast any spell in the game at random, including ones that are extremely hard to unlock otherwise. She has a jack in the box attack that either attacks with a mallet, a spinning mascot, an uppercut glove, or nothing at all. Patty also has a stance system that determines her fighting style and exerts some more control over the odds of what her arts will do, sometimes doing things the moves wouldn't do otherwise. The stance you're in is, by default, up to RNG, so you have to adapt on the fly for every battle. I say by default because the game's skill system has a ton of unique skills for her that let you either enhance the volatility of the RNG or introduces ways of exerting more control over it.
The reason I really like playing as her is because of the amount of adaptability there is in the character, making me think on my feet while also getting to gamble for the best possible variants of each art. The other thing I really like is that, because there are ways for most of her moves to go wrong, the rest of her character counterbalances this; aside from low HP, Patty has great stats and can do incredible damage on top of (RNG-based) support on the side. I would argue that Patty is one of the best party members in the game if you play her well enough to take advantage of the "high reward" aspect of her being high risk.
I was looking to see if anyone said her lol. She is easily one of my favorite tales of characters to play as. Your really rewarded for learning all of the quirks she has in her forms and the properties her attacks get.
D&D (and subsequently BG3) is a game built on infulencing the die rolls for both narrative value, and to highlight character strengths and weaknesses.
A character with a good athletics will be able to get a large bonus to rolls. Making them inherently higher than other people’s on average. You can take feats such as sharpshooter that make you more likely to miss, in return for getting a large bonus to damage. A good DM will turn both success and failure into narrative value meaning that a player shouldn’t feel completely bad (missing 5 attacks still hurst lol). That last part I am still imrpoving on.
My dice luck is so incredibly abysmal that my next character was a block of armor that fired Sacred Flame from behind his shield. Nat 1? Never again
Expected the dice and using failure well mechanic to enter into a discussion about why this works in tabletop RPGs due to the ability of a DM toward interesting consequences but becomes difficult to manage when too much weight is put on success (Bethesda fallout games using skill checks v skill rolls which takes some of the fun v disco Elysium)
Frankly D&D is not very good at that compared to more modern systems, that actually instruct the game master how to interpret failure in interesting ways and have more than just binary success and failure.
Also 5e's skill system is very unsatisfying (for me) in low levels because the majority of the weight of a skill check falls on the die roll. A character with high INT and proficiency in History only has around 25% higher chance to succeed in a skill roll compared to a character with average Int and no proficiency. The difference becomes larger in high levels, but it still feels like luck has a much bigger say than how you build your character.
Monster Hunter's affinity is one of my favorite critical hit systems. On the surface it's just a percentage chance to a hit to deal 1.25x damage I believe. However, at some point the player encounters weapons with negative affinity, meaning the weapon has a chance of dealing less damage. This gives more choices to make and has weapons feeling unique. Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate had a specific line of weapons that had both negative and positive affinities that would cancel out until the player recovered from frenzy in a hunt, adding the negative affinity as a positive number instead essentially making the weapons situational anti frenzied monster weapons. Favorite example is Generations Ultimate final deviant monster Bloodbath Diablos, who's exclusive armor skill made negative crits have a chance of dealing 2x damage instead. Suddenly that beefy sword with -70% crit rate went through unwieldy to an absolute menace in combat
iirc, this is kinda a false choice. As negative affinity weapons generally have higher average damage than high affinity weapons anyways, since they almost always do quite abit more raw damage. Atleast this was the case for 5th gn.
a game you would'nt expect to have luck, satisfactory, has it in the crafting recipes. Throughout the map, you can find crashed space ships, which contain hard drives. When the hard drives are researched, it allows you to pick one of three alternate recipes. A new recipe could be less resource heavy but need more niche resources, or be easier to craft but require more resources, or take longer. If you don't like any of the recipes the hard drive produced, you can wait to claim it, and research other hard drives you've found. This lets you wait and see what could prove usefull, and when unclaimed it takes those recipes out of the pool, making you more likely to the the recipe your looking for.
I still think my favorite luck based anything in games would be Faust from Guilty Gear. Luck in fighting games sounds like it would be absolutely awful but Faust makes it fun for both sides because it means the Faust player has to know how each item works and how to capitalize on all of their strengths and weaknesses.
"fun"
nah bro fuck Faust 💀
that's part of why I loved Faust so much at least in Xrd, I enjoy the chaos and emergent strategy of everyone needing to suddenly respond to when he throws something weird rather than just chucking a hammer or something.
I find very interesting in Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 the Treasure Hunting stages, changing the pieces location every time to make sure every attempt you get on the stage is completely different. In replaying these stages you get better and better identifying every possible spot an emerald can spawn in Adventure 1 and insta catching the hints with only the first one in adventure 2. Also knowing how to navigate through the stage faster. Making going fast on these stages a decision making depending on your luck
I think the treasure hunting mechanic was a good idea on paper, but it struggled as soon as they tried introducing other mechanics into the mix. I remember struggling with Security Hall because the time limit leaves you absolutely zero room to figure out as much as which switches correspond to which vaults and the advice I got online was legit just "Don't bother with the vaults, just reset until all three Emeralds spawn in the open". With that advice, the first time I successfully finished that mission, I also finished it with an A-Rank. That was the method that got results and it was the least rewarding A-Rank I ever received in a Sonic game, just pure luck, no understanding of the level whatsoever.
I like it for encouraging you to learn the movement and stages more holistically, but I also feel being so at the mercy of RNG is a poor fit for a game so focused on speedrunning and achieving a perfect run. Maybe there's a way to get the best of both worlds, but I'm not sure what that'd be.
@rainpooper7088 Lol, I was literally getting A-Ranks in Security Hall for fun earlier this week. Got As in 3 out of 4 runs. Sure getting Emeralds that spawn in closed vaults is kind of annoying since you gotta go hit the switch at the top but it's not really a big deal, you have way more time to do it than most people think and can still get the A rank. You can still get an A-Rank like 3 minutes in. I get that some people REALLY don't like the time pressure but Security Hall is a fine treasure hunting stage. The REAL painful stages are Mad Space and Death Chamber because of how sectioned off and spacious everything is (on top of the janky anti-gravity in the former). Those stages specifically really could've used the SA1 style radar.
@DesignDoc
I mean, sure, if you're *specifically going for A-Ranks* other stages are way worse, but I wasn't trying to A-Rank anything back then, it was my first playthrough and I was just trying to move on with the story. This was the stage I performed the worst on by a freaking landslide and yet the game still gave me an A-Rank (my very first A-Rank in the game btw) just because I got lucky *eventually.* The incredibly lame boss afterwards who can't even really hit you unless you actively walk into his way didn't help either. Even back then I knew there was no skill on my end here, it just didn't feel earned. That is imo definitely a way the element of luck can cheapen an experience, though I will agree that SA2's treasure hunting stages are mostly the opposite extreme not helped by the way the radar works.
Man, I want a remake of this game so bad, I feel like nearly all of my issues with it would either be complete non-issues (wonky physics and camera) these days or be given better options (Emerald radars from both Adventure games being available) if a dedicated team put good work into it. Sigh.
I like when the game gives you chances to adjust your crit value and not when it's affecting the drop of an item which makes it more rng than actual luck wasting time to grind. Wish games could fix that by offing enough of one species you get the items to drop every time.
I think bad luck protection systems can fix the grind in a lot of cases. Meaning a player has a cap of how much bad luck they can really have. You can still be lucky or unlucky, but at least it has an end.
@@atsukana1704yea, sort of a guaranteed after a certain number of rolls type of failsafe to prevent the world’s worst luck from locking you out of something
coughcough Terraria coughcough
I knew I recognized your pfp. Cool to see you watch this too.
@@OtakuDaiKun i see a lot of fun content here and there. I just don't post much unless I have something interesting to add
God Hand is an entirely skill-oriented action game but it has this Wild West themeing in its aesthetics and a lot of that includes casino-style visuals which subtly translates to some of the luck elements. Your drops from chests or enemies are entirely random, if you beat someone you are able to get something like some money, a health power-up, a God Roulette refill, or a powerful elite enemy to spawn.
You usually don't think much about the random drops because the rates are consistent enough and you still need to clear the game with your own skill but seeing a crate drop an orange or something early in a stage means you know you have more leeway in the mistakes you might make across that stage, if you see a magazine drop you can feel comfortable using your God Hand against a lower-level enemy, if you're doing really poorly and fate blesses you with a strawberry you do have that same "I love it!" reaction as Gene, and in most boss arenas if you're getting your ass kicked you can run around the stage and break/throw items at them with the hopes that they'll drop something good.
And the RNG elements of the drops help encourage you to push on forward which is very important in a hard game. If a stage/boss is destroying you, even at Level 1, you can always think, "Okay, I can break six crates before the encounter I'm struggling with, if I get a good drop from them I'm confident I can take it on."
The Wheel of fortune in Balatro says it has a 1/4 chance, but it sure doesn’t feel like it.
That’s an issue with random chances. Many games decide to alter the rates to make them favourable for the player. Because getting hit by a 5% crit or missing a 95% attack chance sucks. Like fire emblem which skews these in the players favour.
@@Just_Shaun yeah, missing feels more bad than hitting feels good, if that makes sense. as a game developer, to have a 50/50 balance, you shouldn't actually do 50% because of this skew; it's more like 80%. same thing in XCOM. high-pressure tactical games that require both player decisions (a factor they can control) and RNG (outside of their control) can lead to "interesting" gameplay, but don't confuse "interesting" with "fun", because your players surely won't.
Nope!
I like it when the randomness is a bit manipulated to help ensure you get what you want.
For example a lot of deck builder games will not make each draw random from the deck, it cycles the deck only once you have no more to draw which means you might not always get what you want when you want, but it will always be guaranteed to turn up.
Dota does the same, Bash has an 8.6%(technically 22/256 which is slightly less than 8.6%) chance to stun that goes up by 8.6% on each failure and is reset on success. The end result is you can never fail 12 times in a row, that last one is guaranteed because you failed so often(odds become 264/256).
Another good example is Rim World, the random events are dependent on how well you're doing. If you're doing great it'll up the difficulty, if you're doing terribly it might throw you a favour. It's still random, but weighted so the game feels like a consistent challenge and you're never quite given something you would have no chance to handle(at least as long as you don't wind up making high quality items before you are ready, that's one area I feel it needs to improve on).
This is actually really important in order to make randomness "feel" fair. Us humans are terrible judges of probabilities. What we think is random is actually more like a shuffle than a random draw. We underestimate the likelihood of long streaks of similar outcomes, such a rolling a 6 on a d6 5 times in a row (way more likely than you'd think). Our minds are quick to find patterns based on very few samples, so even 3 in a row of a 50/50 outcome can feel like the outcome is biased.
We also naturally follow the "gambler's fallacy" that a streak of bad luck will be offset by a streak of good luck and vice versa. Truly random outcomes means that each new outcome is not at all influenced by past outcomes. The probability of every combination of possible outcomes is equally likely. Any person could be the lucky one to win 10 times in a row, or to be the unlucky one to lose 10 times in a row. You don't know which will happen to you until you observe. Even though the outcomes for all people over all time might tend towards a balanced average, that doesn't mean that any single person will see a balanced outcome in their experience.
The most common example we think of that is tweaked in video games is our expectation of very high or low probabilities. We overestimate high probability events, thinking them to be (basically) guaranteed, while we underestimate low probability events, thinking them to be (basically) impossible. When extreme unlikely things occur, we feel as though that's not right, because we assume the very unlikely will never actually happen (at least to us).
To make it feel fair, we typically want to implement probability in games to work the way people think it works, not the way it actually works. We want to avoid long streaks of wins or losses. We don't want any one item to show up too often or too infrequently. We want 1% to actually be impossible and 99% to be guaranteed.
And sometimes we even want to shift the probabilities so that good things happen more often. When it comes to forming synergies, when there are a lot of possible options, the likelihood of the right pieces falling into place is actually extremely low, to the point that it may never turn out even once in thousands of attempts. (Given 52 possible items, where you've acquired 2 of 4 needed for a synergy, the expected likelihood of getting the remaining 2 in the next 10 attempts is about 1 in 800, though there's a still a significant probability that it may take more than a thousand attempts before it happens for you). In fact, the likelihood of making any 4 piece synergy is very low. It would feel bad if you were never able to produce an interesting synergy and it would completely defeat the appeal of any deckbuilder. So to make getting one or more synergies possible in every game, the probability of future draws are dramatically influenced by what things you have or haven't taken so far. Items you previously skipped are less likely to be drawn again. Items that would synergize with your current items are more likely to be drawn. The result is that some kind of synergy will form, although which synergy you end up with is highly variable, and it's still up to you to recognize and choose those synergistic pieces when they are presented to you.
Games will only feel right to us if they meet our expectations of how the world should work, so we build mechanics that match those expectations, even if they don't match how the world really works.
There's nothing quite like the RNG hell of Blood Blowl. The game is a great working example of having an overly large punishment for failing dice rolls.
In blood bowl, theoretically every single one of your players on the pitch gets an action. It's very much a turn-based tactics game with dice rolls determining the outcome of specific actions. The problem is that, for the majority of actions that call for a dice roll, failure results in a turnover: Your turn immediately ends, no other players on your team can act, that's it. It goes even further, too! Every time a player gets knocked down, some dice are rolled to determine if they are only knocked down, knocked out, injured, or permanently killed. It is one of the most frustrating games I've ever been addicted to.
Of course, there's room for strategy here, starting your turn by only taking the actions that don't involve any dice rolls, then moving on to the low-risk yet critical parts of your play, slowly adding on more risk the deeper you get into your turn because the more players who have moved, the less painful a turnover is... but man, having a character fail an 80% chance to pick the ball up off of the ground for 3 turns in a row is a game ruiner. No amount of strategy will overcome bad luck of that magnitude.
“If it’s not 100% accurate, it’s 50% accurate.”
- Mikey
I would’ve loved to see Peglin as part of the deck building section. Luck in this game can be viewed as the probability of achieving a damage outcome or avoiding a damage taken, but there are many different paths for you to get there. The luck factors into your dexterity shooting your orbs into chaotic system of the peg board; you may get a lucky run out, but you might not. Even as you improve your deck and gain really powerful relics, you’re always fighting luck, a point that I think could’ve maybe added more to the discussion. I think Peglin really masterfully shows how luck can be both your biggest friend and your biggest adversary in a game.
I don't think Peglin is that different from most games other than that it wears its randomness clearly on its sleeve. Even though it may have a ton of randomness, the mechanics - especially the balls and upgrades - heavily skew the probabilities so that most outcomes are fairly similar and particularly bad outcomes are very unlikely. For example, since hitting a peg causes a significant rebound, and the ball is likely to hit the peg from above while falling downwards, that rebound causes the ball to go back up, bouncing around much longer in the upper parts of the board than you would expect from a regular pachinko machine. The more pegs there are, the more opportunity for collisions and the longer it stays up. The refresh pegs help ensure that the number of pegs remains high. Combine the gaps made when the number of pegs dwindle with the random location of the refresh pegs on each shot, and there's an increasingly better chance of being able to hit a refresh peg as the number of pegs decreases, keeping you with a consistently full board with lots of opportunity to hit pegs and get points, so long as you have the skill to consistently aim at and hit pegs directly or at most one bounce.
I want to put forth Pillars of Eternity's RNG attack system. It's a luck based D100 system, but it works on four categories of damage across a range. 0-15 - miss (no damage), 16-50 - graze (-50% damage), 51-100 - hit (full damage), 101+ - crit (+50% damage). Then every point of difference between your accuracy or dodge shifts that roll, causing the buckets to shift.
You have 50 more points of dodge than their accuracy? Your chance to make them miss becomes 0-65, graze 66-100, and they literally can never do full damage or crit. It's a great system to give the player more control over their attacks and mitigate the all-or-nothing system that is typical in RPGs, especially with the addition of the graze result. I also like how they rolled criticals into that instead of making it a separate roll.
So glad Disco came up at the end, that was the first thing I thought of when it came to luck that didn't just feel like luck.
Terraria has a lot of luck in item drops, damage values, crits, and more and has had it for its whole life. An interesting situation happened when a new luck stat was introduced that could influence this luck in your favour.
I personally don't think it was a bad idea, but a lot of people hated its implementation: No way to know your luck stat, know how to influence it, or even know it exists. Especially hated was "torch luck" where your luck was increased by using the correct torches in a biome, but relevantly also decreased if you used the wrong torches. And the base torches used by almost everyone in everything other than buildings gave negative torch luck almost everywhere.
There was also a secret mini-boss added to help with torch luck, but this didn't help with the outrage and negative torch luck was eventually removed (Though, you could still gain positive torch luck.).
Personally, I think the biggest problem with the luck stat (and also many other parts) in Terraria, is that the game doesn't sufficiently explain itself. While it is good that new players aren't bombarded with information of a luck stat with only relatively minor effects, there should be ways for more experienced players to check the stat without relying on mods or wiki.
my issue with the luck stat is that its heavily skewed against you in design. theres so many things that can cause it to go into the negatives, and extensively at that. but for positive boosts there arent nearly as many and the boosts arent nearly as big.
theres also fishing luck that just cant go into the positives unless its a certain moon phase, where most moon phases in fact give you worse fishing luck. also any body of water smaller than the ocean biome gives you negative fishing luck as well. thankfully the angler has specified drops at specified waymarks, at least.
and treasure bags are genuinely a good design choice that incentivize doing expert- still really sucks if youre grinding for like a duke fishron weapon and you get 3 bags in a row that only drop 1 item outside of the guarantees, especially since theres no "luck safety net" so to speak.
i love terraria but also i hate terraria.
People hated that random torches you would place that weren't part of the environments theme would give you negative luck. It wasn't mentioned also anywhere in the game that this would happen, it was a wiki-info only stat you could potentially stumble across.
0:59 I appreciate you use secrets of the world pizza tower ost here
This video has me fighting the urge to gush about one of my favorite games. Lost in Random stacks so many luck based systems on top of each other in addition to a little skill based 3rd person shooter action. You use a sling shot to hit weak spots on enemies for light crowd control and energy. Then you roll a dice (one that gets more and better options for rolls as the story progresses) to get points to play cards from it's deck builder aspect. The best part about this layered system to me is that even if your deck is terribly built, or your luck goes off a cliff, you can always shove a little "git gud" into the game to make it work. Luck decides how explosive the moment to moment is but the game does a good job of making sure you aren't a helpless gambler.
A big part of what makes Looter games and Luck so painful, is in games like Borderlands 2. Some viable builds when getting into the NG+ runs are absolutely awful to obtain. The Bee Shield (even after the extreme nerf) for example usually comes one specific enemy, in one specific location, with a non-insignificant amount of loading between attempts. It can come from any loot source, but Legendaries are pretty rare in general for the game. Random loot rolls are probably not going to get it for you. So of course when trying to build with it, you'd farm the 10% chance drop boss. Well, "boss." He's actually not even really a threat. So you spend multiple minutes between attempts, to fight a singular SINGULAR enemy that puts up no fight, and still you can spend a few hours just to find one. Only later did they give one of the DLCs an enemy with high Bee drop rates.
So when games give you ways to circumvent luck, you should make that part fun too. Just because it's the only actually viable way of getting an item you need before the heat death of the universe, doesn't mean it should be boring. There's a balance to strike.
grinding the warrior for the conference call comes to mind.
I've been playing a lot of codenames (the app) and I really love the role that luck plays in that game. You form teams of two and have to get your teammate to pick the correct words on a grid while having them avoid the assassin word (instant failure) and picking the other team's words. You're only allowed to give a single word as a clue and a number that refers to how many words match the clue.
For example, you can give a really strong clue that your teammate is almost certain to guess, or a weaker clue that allows them to potentially score more points at the risk of failure. You can also give a "zero" clue, which means that none of the words match your clue, but then they are unaware when they should end their turn and stop guessing words. You can also basically lie to your teammate and give a zero clue when not all the words are unrelated to your clue, if you think the odds are in your favour and they will choose the correct words before the incorrect ones.
So basically everything you do involves luck and you have to know when to push your luck and when to be careful. It's a game that's all about calculation and manipulating randomness to put you in the best situation to win, but you will surely lose a lot of games as well which makes having a high win-rate much more satisfying.
I remember in City of Heroes there was separate Defense (dodge an attack) and Resist Damage (reduce damage taken) stats, with one of the defensive power sets being Super Reflexes and revolving around bumping your defense so high you'd barely ever get hit. It was huge risk reward as you could avoid all damage or take the brunt of attacks with no way of reducing said damage, forcing you and any healers to be on your toes to heal as soon as possible.
I loved the items in Super Smash Bros. The luck wasn't solely good assist vs. bad assist. Sometimes it was about whether or not your particular opponent knows how to avoid that particular hazard, or if your particular fighters have the tools to handle it, like using Marth's Counter against a hammer. And they even had the item switch all the way back in the N64 game. Luck mechanics in this context force you to adapt your strategy.
In pokemon we have a rule. If it's not 100% accurate, it's 50% accurate.
W reference
Splatoon 3's Side Order dlc is a good example. When you do a run, you can get chips that modify your character stats for that run, like increasing your damage, speed, or utility. There is a randomness to what chips will be available to you on each floor, but random chance itself is a stat that you can manipulate. You can get chips that increase the chance that enemies will drop specific items, and depending on which weapon set you are using for that run, you may encounter a lot of them. You can easily make a build that relies entirely on raising the odds of enemy drops.
I enjoyed the luck chance in into the Breach. It have a small number percentage that any attack on the grid building (basically your universal health for the entire run) by enemy or your own attack have a chance to be deflected. It's a small chance and overcharging the grid (health) slightly rise it but you never will and never should rely on it in your gameplay. It's always a neat surprise to have your mistake forgiven and never a bummer when it fails
Cait Sith in Rebirth feels like a great example of luck mechanics done well. Even if your not as lucky with his abilities, all the potential outcomes of his luck abilities are good and there’s really no downside even if some are better than others
His final skill you can unlock is a literal slots machine… that’s actually not rigged, and can be timed. It is really satisfying watching someone skilled pull it out mid fight and hit the jackpot, though I can’t do it myself because I suck at timing and the battle continues in real-time lol.
Yes, I feel that is the simple and best way to do it.
Bad luck is baseline, it is, at worst, functional, and good luck can get very powerful.
This way you never "loses", the system is engaging and rewarding
I feel like that falls into the "no tension" side of things, although for Rebirth tension would be silly since you don't really have time to sit around watching the result anyway.
@@dylanhoward4978 Counterpoint to that: The more powerful abilities (his dice roll and lucky slots) can be manipulated by you in-game. The dice roll ability literally manifests a giant dice you can kick around the battlefield to try and get what you want, and as I mentioned the slots game plays in real time whilst there’s still threats around who can smack you out of your slots.
And conversely, a LACK of luck-based mechanics is one of the cornerstones of most Souls games. Other than item drop rates, absolutely NOTHING is left to chance. Damage values are fixed based on your Stats, Status Effects build up over time until they reach a predetermined threshold, even critical hits are not chance-based.
It's an integral element to the genre because it's extremely important that Player's know when they die that they could have taken a different action to prevent it. If every boss fight basically boiled down to waiting for the RNG gods to smile on you X times in a row, the entire experience would suffer.
And League of Legends, EXCEPT when you have (1% < crit < 100%). I personally enjoy building less than 100% crit, because you can get the highest damage in a single attack, albeit reliant on RNG. 100% crit builds are balanced
In twitch action games, you generally don't need external random number generation because there is already lots of randomness inherent in your control of the game. Your timing, your movements, and your decisions under extreme time pressure will always be slightly different even if you try to repeat them exactly. Sometimes you might be unlucky and miss your target because of poor timing or precision in your movements. Other times you can string together a series of perfect movements to perform something otherwise unlikely. It's one of the main reasons why games like Souls or any FPS are often just a matter of practice to beat - whether through honing your mechanical skills or from the luck of the draw, so long as your strategy is sound, it's just a matter of time until you manage to hit everything just right. It's no different in professional sports - even the best players can have losing streaks and mediocre players can go on winning streaks. While it may have something to do with their mechanical and mental skills varying over time, the majority of it can be attributed simply to random chance inherent in every physical interaction.
Turn-based games with discrete outcomes don't have that same inherent randomness. You have time to think about your moves, accuracy in targeting isn't a factor, and all of the information is available for you to peruse. Just by taking the time to look at the data and consider the outcomes, you can exactly predict what will happen if you take an action, and you can choose the optimal action to take, guaranteeing success. Any time you see a game with a "build", that works because the outcome can be entirely determined by individual choices you can make with perfect accuracy. That's why we have to introduce a bit of artificial randomness. Without randomness, the game degenerates into a puzzle, where there is always one optimal strategy that you can discover, communicate, and implement. Once you've solved the puzzle, there's nothing left to do, because the outcome will always be the same. Introducing some randomness means that every moment is different and requires a unique decision with a unique solution.
This need to adjust to the circumstances happens naturally in twitch games because of the inherent randomness of timing and accuracy of making physical movements. In games without the inherent randomness, we need to introduce artificial randomness to create the same kinds of varied and interesting circumstances.
@@tyranmcgrathmnkklkl I think crit chance in League is an old remnant of DOTA. League used to have evasion chance and they remove it early in the beta. Crit chance is something really hard to reinvent. It exists abundantly in other video games and even tabletop game. If Riot managed a way to reinvent crit system, they would do it instantly. Just like how they rework how ability haste works.
Let's get lucky!
Aw dangit
⚄ ⚃
ENCYCLOPEDIA [Easy: Success] - Aw dangit
If luck can be affected by skill, you must make sure the player does know how to affect your luck.
If luck is some random roll, make sure the roll is random and the luck does work. Otherwise, why have it.
I don't think any discussion about luck in games is complete without talking about the difference between input luck (chance happens, then you make a decision; i.e.: you draw cards, and then choose one to play) vs. output luck (you make a decision, then chance happens, i. e.: you make an action and do a dice roll that decides whether you pass or fail).
Input luck somehow seems fairer to many people, as even bad luck streaks can often lead to interesting decisions, rather than frustration, and I believe it's part of the reason why games like Balatro or Hades seem so well balanced. Of note, I find it very interesting that in Balatro, some examples of output luck, such as the wheel of fortune, are seen as the more unfair parts of the game.
From the world of tabletop RPGs, FATE allows the player characters to, on a failed roll, choose to either "fail" or "succeed with a major consequence". So, you can still succeed, but something else goes horribly wrong. With a good GM, usually failure is the less disastrous option, but it does give you an interesting way to mitigate the results of failing a "do or die" roll without removing the risk of failure
11:00 THRACIA 776 REFERENCE 😱😱😱😱😱
Luck was a double edged sword in One Step From Eden. On one hand it increased your likelihood of getting rarer cards to use, but on the flip side it would also increase the difficulty of the enemies you would battle, however the bosses were unaffected by your luck as their difficulty was purely based on which order you fought them. Your luck also increased anytime you won a battle without taking damage. Additionally, since you would get to pick 1 of 3 random cards after each fight, and each card belonged to a certain type/class, you could set card preferences that would lower your luck but also made it more likely to get cards of the chosen types.
I love how in Team Fortress 2 everyone defends random crits as a way to even the battlefield when the game devs themselves said that the more damage you do the more likely you can snowball into more crits, defeating the entire idea that crits even the battlefield.
who the hell's defending random crits? they're pretty widely despised
@@RealityMasterRogue I'm in the minority of people who actually like random crits. It helps things being less competitive in my opinion, and though crits have a higher chance of happening to prolong a streak, it is still random enough that it does help noobs kill pros more often.
that's a misunderstanding of what the devs said my mang
@@Draconzis I am pretty sure random crits is the most unbalanced, rage-inducing way to help new players and it's a uncounterable / overpowered mechanic unless you have immediate critical hit resistance like cover or friendly that's conviently beside you, battalion's backup's buff or überchage's invunerability. There is other way to make the game less competitive and new player friendly by just not making players have to grind 1000 elos or other Match Making Ratings like how most Community Servers & MvM and some classes litteraly doesn't need good aim like Pyro and Medic but good position to make them not annoying like random crits or making Meet You Match's Casual System *trying* to put team as balanced like having to take care new players in your team but the enemy team also have to take care their new players to compensate for that.
I've never heard it stated to even the battlefield, at least not when I played it daily for the first few years of its life. Quite the opposite: it was to break stalemates. If you get a bit lucky with some crits or otherwise doing well in the moment, the game reinforces that by making you even more lucky, creating a snowball, like you said. As a result, even when both teams are sitting even in a stalemate, a small amount of luck on one side can snowball into them making a break through the stalemate. Stalemates are boring; sudden swings add surprises and dramatic tension which make the game more interesting.
Of course, it depends on what you think is fun. If all that matters is that the final score represents the relative skill of both sides, then adding this runaway mechanic interferes with that. But if what matters is that the game doesn't become stale, then snowballing effects breaks up the monotony, ensuring you always need to keep adapting to a changing circumstance. Having played games like the Battlefield series and Planetside 2 where stalemates were very common and difficult to overcome, I much prefer the regular swings that occurred in TF2.
I have a strategy tabletop game in development where the primary way players take actions is through gambling mechanics (either 1d6 or 2d6). I was able to keep the odds from feeling unfair by making them maipulable: the probabilities of rolls stay the same, but target values you want to hit are the result of choices you make.
Part of the idea, that seems to work, is to widen the audience; some players will be number-crunchers, where others will just follow gut feelings and throw the dice. The most successful test player so far is in the latter category.
One mechanic I love it's the Ecaflip's cards in Wakfu. Every turn of combat you draw a random card that gives either a benefit or a hindrance, and you need to plan your turn to make the most of that card or avoid the penalties. You can also re-draw once per turn, but all unused cards are gonna end up on the draw once, so sometimes it's better to keep a bad card for a turn you're using mostly for positioning for the hopes of drawing a big action card for when you're gonna do your big combo.
Not me completely forgetting about Astro Bot's Casino level mechanic and actually getting the jackpots by correctly timing the button 💀
For luck mechanics that affect the game in many ways, my favorite example is RimWorld with its emergent storytelling through most of the things that you don't control directly being 90% randomness based. In terms of gameplay mechanics, there are luck factors, but playing it "well" (by a mechanical standard) is mostly about preparing for your chances to be better and increasing them in the moment (in combat mostly with the various types of cover) preparing for bad outcomes and having fallbacks - or improvising when something is going to go terribly.
Being saved by pausing the game and carefully looking at my options to save dying colonists or animals just in time were some of the most exciting moments after a combat for me.
Not sure about other examples in video games, but board games a just full of luck-driven mechanics. Here are some of my favorites:
- Most trick-taking card games force you to deal with how to handle "bad hands" that you get dealt. Games that have contracts/predictions of the number of tricks you'll win often allow you to hedge your bets, and that can make any bad hand good in the right situation.
- Root, a war game with dice-driven combat, manages the luck of the dice in two ways. First, you can only deal damage up to the number of warriors you have in a conflict (3 max). Second, the attacker gets the higher result and the defender gets the lower result from the 2 dice rolled, incentivizing the attacker. But the game also subverts this by making one faction always get the higher result (countered by having limited troops) and ambush cards that reduce the attacking force.
- Dice placement games, such as The Voyages of Marco Polo and The White Castle, give different benefits for the number on the dice you put out (e.g., you get more goods in Marco Polo if played in the market), but if you play in an area that already has dice, you need to pay money equal to the number of your roll. It encourages people to play high rolls first to save money, but that may throw a wrench in your plans by nudging you out of order. You can also adjust die rolls by paying some resources, reroll the die outright, or even purchase dice to give you more actions with preferable outcomes. And if you just have a crappy roll at the start, you get compensated with those resources to adjust your roll.
Oh, wow! I *just* started playing Unicorn Overlord, I'm really enjoying it, and it's great to see it pop up here. (What a coincidence that it was featured in the latest designdoc video as soon as i got into it.) And yeah, guard rate is a new stat for me, but I welcome it with open arms.
I've been playing Tales of Vesperia lately and Patty's play style is about 75% luck oriented. Most of her abilities have a variety of possible effects that are chosen randomly, with some influence from the Luck stat. Her core ability, Form Change, randomly selects from 3 distinct stances with different movesets, and a slim chance of getting Critical Form which combines and amplifies the best aspects of each other form. She can cook meals in battle that might restore or reduce your party's HP and/or TP, charge your Over Limit gauge, or drastically reduce your party's stats for a time. She can cast ANY spell in the game, provided you roll it when you need it. She has abilities whose damage and effects are determined by the value of a randomly dealt Poker or Mahjong hand.
You can exert some control over the luck with certain passive skills. Safe Bet makes mid-range outcomes more likely than very good or very bad ones, while Gambler's Soul does the opposite. Form Select lets you pick which form you get from Form Change (except Critical, that's still random, but virtually always better than anything else). Magic Select lets you choose whether your random spells are offensive or defensive, while in her "mage" form. And several skills provide alternative ways to obtain Critical Form and other bonuses when you get it.
She's not likely to invalidate a boss or cause a game over by herself, but having Patty in the party just makes everything a little spicy. Hope that's weird enough for ya
I think an aspect of the topic you glossed over is the difference between input and output randomness, which I think is probably communicated most in depth across various episodes of the Ludology podcast back when Geoff Engelstein was one of the hosts of it.
Armello is cool because you can influence almost every luck aspect of the game. Increase your fight stat so you have more dice in battle, equip items that guarantee certain dice rolls (eg. lose 2 dice but gain 3 rolled sword symbols) or sacrificing drawn cards to guarantee a certain symbol in battle. The chance of getting a quest reward depends on the stat that quest boosts, which can be artificially boosted through consumables beforehand, and there's even one signet ring that improves the chances.
0:02 OMG ITS MEEEEEE
The gambler class Ecaflip in Wakfu is my consistent go-to in spite of how every random thing about it is generally worse than its non-random or less-random features. Turns out that getting the equivalent of two turns half the time and no turn the other half isn't better than getting one turn every turn, if you don't actually have control over when you get two turns. Much of the idea, but with control over the turns, was displayed in Bravely Default, and did a nice job of letting you control battle flow and deal with interesting puzzle fights.
I wish it'd gone with a system where all the cards had to run out before a reshuffle; As you got later in the deck you'd be able to KNOW that you were about to have a hot turn because you didn't have the big negatives in you deck anymore. I believe there's a tabletop war game that did this; every contested roll was a card, and cards got used up. If you got a crit, you knew you weren't about to get another one unless you were right at the end of the deck.
When the disco Elysium music started playing I instantly perked up lmao
I'm reminded of how City of Heroes, with its hit chances, uses the "Streakbreaker" mechanic to lessen the frustration and tweak the odds. Depending on the chance you had of hitting or missing, a streak of hits or misses for a given skill will be forced to hit or miss if a streak gets too long. For example, if you have a 95% chance to hit something, you do have an actual 95% chance, but if you do miss, the next hit from that skill is a guaranteed hit. You can't miss twice in a row if you have a high chance to hit. The streak is much longer for low chances to hit, and in most cases that's the enemy mobs trying to hit you, so they don't benefit from it nearly as much as the player does. It does mitigate that sense that your 95% chance to hit shouldn't miss often, though.
HE FINALLY MENTOINED ARIA OF SORROW I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YEARS SEEING IT IN THE BACKGROUND YESSS
one luck mechanic ive been enjoying a lot lately is the relic system in warframe, which is like a lootbox you earn in game and then do specific missions to open, with a lot of different relics with different rewards. at the end of said mission, everyones relic offers one of its random rewards, and you can each pick whatever you want. so you can go in with randoms and get whatever or you can group up with people who have the same relic to target farm specific rare drops
Ecaflips in games from Ankama are a good representation of what a full on luck-based gameplay can offer.
Its basically gambler cats that uses luck in every aspect of their gameplay.
From boosting critical chances, to attacking with one of N elements and bonuses/debuffs for all or parts on a russian roulette.
Very fun to play. Kind of like playing a lightning build in Diablo II.
We were trying to work in Ecaflips into this ep, since they'd be perfect here, but getting footage was going to be a real pain.
Love the Mario Party callout. What an absolute joy of a brother vs brother chaos inducing game.
There's nothing more infuriating than winning every mini game and having 4 stars to their 1, only for a random event on the board to steal a star and give it to the other player, making it 3-2, and then the bonus stars at the end randomly assigning enough stars that the other player wins. Usually there are enough random stars awarded that the number you actually collected makes up a small portion of the total, so that the final score is largely based on being lucky in those final random draws.
My favorite good luck mechanic is the one in Star Fox 64 where they tell you "GOOD LUCK!" before every mission!
I absolutely love luck, it is one of my favourite aspects of game design. It's not a conventional method of luck but my favourite version of it is 'mind games', and I think the best game to use mind games is rock paper scissors. RPS is so simple yet so complex simply because it is entirely focused around mind games.
You showed some Master Duel, I like how they’ve implemented luck there. When you get packs, if you don’t get what you want, you can always dismantle those cards to get craft points to generate the cards you need. So even bad packs give you something that can help you in the long run. Probably the best system the game has.
I really like the "daily luck reading" of animal crossing new horizons, where once you get your fortune told by Katrina you'll see the effects of your good or bad luck, but if you don't want to take the gamble you can just skip the mechanic entirely by not getting your fortune read.
Limbus Company has really good luck mechanics integrated into its battle system. Every coin on a skill starts with a 50/50 chance, and typically you want to hit heads for higher clashes and more damage. Your Sinners' sanity level will change over the course of the battle, and that will change the coin chances, going up to a 95% chance to hit heads or as low as a 95% chance to hit tails. Even at either side of the spectrum, though, there's still a chance of winning or losing no matter what. Factor in team synergies, special strategies, E.G.O, and even just plain bullcrap from the enemies' front, and it ends up turning nearly every encounter into a series of highly-calculated gambles that feel incredibly satisfying to pull off.
I've been trying to design my game with an idea of good luck, bad luck, luck effecting decision-making, and agency.
Say the player enters a dungeon:
-Good luck can be things, like finding a useful item, or coming across a merchant shop.
-Bad luck could be encountering an enemy, or walking into an trap.
-luck effecting decision-making, could be giving the player an option which has a chance to be good or bad, but the choice is their if they wish to take it.
-Players can have agency like, bringing items, and equip that tip things in their favor. maybe even something that can take away or minimize one bad luck element.
I also think its worth mentioning the stakes for a player along side the luck.
Say, a player loses all their items if they fall in a dungeon, versus losing some of their items for falling.
These stakes can feel different depending on the levels of risk with them.
Losing all you items to an unforeseeable insta-death trap, can be quite frustrating. If i made the stakes THAT high, i'd balance the bad luck to be more forgiving.
Although there are some games that actually strive on high risk situations like fear and hunger for example. I can see that some people really like the thrill and rush of playing a high stakes game and getting as far as they can in it. But even a game like fear and hunger can give the player good luck, and a sense of agency, like finding good gear, and learning about how it's world works and the secrets you can find in it, which can help you out quite a bit. But still managed to keep the stakes high as alot of enemies can randomly choose to insta-kill you, although you could try to avoid the more freighting enemies, and even use traps against some of them to get your own advantage.
In games like my favorite Pokemon mystery dungeon, the play can come across poke(money), items, rare items, recruit defeated foes, encounter shops, or even the stairs in the same room. But they can also encounter enemies, monster rooms, traps.
Although this is one of my top favorite series of games to play, Personally I don't feel the late game rng is very fun, as its gravely tilted towards bad luck over any good luck, which results in you and your team dying in one-hit, or hitting trap after trap, of PP to 0 traps among other nasty traps, and encountering monster rooms quite frequently which make be at spawn or where the stairs are. And worst you loss all of your items after you lose.
I watched a really good player solo purity forest here and there, and even with all the knowledge and skill sometimes i run could just end badly out of purely back luck. Which is very frustrating. But to be fair it is optional post-game content so you don't HAVE take on these high-risk dungeons, and you can choose to go in with less valuable items, and more suited pokės.
But if you someone looking for that level of extreme dungeon crawling, i think PMD has a post-game that would provide that sense of adventure and danger some may be lookin' for. Cuz as stressful as some bad luck can be, it makes success despite it that much more satisfying.
Personally though i perfect a good balance between the 4 elements of rng I made up at the top. xp
Midgame to Late-game is probably where i enjoy PMD the most. And sometimes i'm willing to attempt post-game super-dungeons.
Those are just ideas i can up with.
Fire emblem crit is always fun to get in the critical moment. Same with a good dodge roll.
Very good, as always.
There's one element missing, though: pity mechanics for repeated actions. For instance, let's say that something has 1/20 chance to happen. Then, if you get unlucky and it doesn't happen 19 times straight, it will will automaticallly happen on your 20th try.
It's used a lot in gacha games but I wish that it would also be used in other games, especially in games with crafting systems where you need to harvest materials from luck-based sources.
An even better way to do it would be to increase the success rate after each failed attempt and reset it when the intended result happens but I don't know of any game that does it.
i like how the binding of isaac: repentance added the Perfection trinket, which dramatically increases your luck stat if you play perfectly. it’s practically guaranteed for the Lost, too
In Pirate101 there are 3 main stats (aside from the standard accuracy, health and dodge): Strength, Agility and Will, with each of the 5 playable classes specializing in one (Strength=Buccaneer/Privateer, Agility=Swashbuckler/Musketeer, Will=Privateer/Witchdoctor). The higher your main stat compared to the target(s) the more likely you are to crit your hits. Another stat people sometimes focus on is spell power, which increases the strength of your damage, healing and minion summon powers. There are also the epic talents Relentless, Burst Fire and Mojo Echo that give you a 35% chance to make a bonus basic attack (up to 3 at rank 2+, with a better chance to crit at ranks 4 and 5). You can also make an extra attack if you land a critical hit while also having learned the epics Bladestorm, Double Tap and/or Mojo Rising (bonus attack if you crit or defeat an enemy), though in that case the target enemy is anyone in range, and yes the Relentless epics can proc here too.
For WDs they have the ability to strike multiple foes at once with their basic attacks (5-9 in an X, + or square area depending on the staff weapon or Improved Mojo Blast talent they have), but the tradeoff is that if one dodges they all dodge, with the hit chance being 75% for each target, and the basic attack range is shorter compared to the single target wands. Because of this the accuracy stat isn't as important for those users. Also, the extra attack from Mojo Echo can only hit the initial target rather than all of them.
The way I see it, a 'good' luck mechanic is one that either doesn't cause a large amount of variation in potential outcomes (specifically in regards to how effective you are in the gameplay), or one that can be circumvented via strategical methods that are complex, interesting, and engaging.
Edit: As an example of the latter, Sushi Go and Coral Reef are two extremely simple card games that are largely luck-based due to being card-drafting games. However, they're also quite strategic in that they challenge you to make decisions each turn based on what you think is most likely to get you a lot of points and/or deny a lot of points to your opponent(s).
An example of the former is ZZZ because gacha mechanics don't affect the player's overall power very much, especially if each character controls very similarly and is well-balanced, or the gacha unlocks are purely cosmetic.
I know this is just for video games, but im a huge fan of Warhammer tabletop. In 8th edition, the magic system worked thusly:
The player who's turn it was rolled 2d6. They added that many 'power dice' to a 'power pool'. Random, right? However, the larger of the two dice rolled was the number of 'dispel dice' added to their opponent's 'dispel pool'.
This meant that the player now needed to manage their resources for casting spells and the luckier their dice rolls got, the more resources their opponent had with which to counter them.
This led to incredible meta gameplay of mind games to try to get your opponent to save their dispel resources for spells that didn't matter as much to you, so you could secure the ones that really did matter. I miss that game dying and if I'm honest, it's in large part due to how fun that magic metagame was thanks to luck and randomness tying into a skill based resource management mini game, and keeping it fresh.
Newer editions have magic much more deterministic and much less interactive which makes that whole section of the game extremely unsatisfying and unappealing for me now.
One of my favorite, but subtler uses of luck is how it factors into Doom. Each enemy has a different chance to flinch when hit with an attack, which means you might get a lucky opening to dodge. The trick is, even though they have lower damage, rapid fire weapons give you more rolls of the dice, with some enemies even having a high enough flinch chance to stunlock to death
I love how you talked about the 2rn system of Fire Emblem. As a fan of the series, I know about the biases the human mind has towards random chances, and it still gets me whenever I play one of the games that displays the real hitrates.
Another aspect of luck that Fire Emblem perfectly showcases is how it can be used to add an element of depth to strategy-based games. One might think that randomness goes directly against the principles of strategy, but it actually adds to it if used correctly because it forces the player to always keep the consequences of a missed hit or a random crit in mind and plan around the possibility of it happening.
I absolutely agree that the hit chance plays into the strategy as being something to keep in mind while directing your units, but critical chances are definitely not high enough to play into that strategy in the same way (to depend on your own critical hit is to set yourself up for failure, and to try and set up with the expectation that the enemy will always get critical shots will make the battle an unnecessarily tedious slog). What critical hits do is throw in disruptions that force shifts in strategy at unexpected times.
@@SgtSupaman Agree about your own crit chances.
As for enemy crit chances, they are typically 0 due to how the stats are usually distributed. But when an enemy has, say, a 7% chance to crit, and a crit of theirs would kill one of my units, I wouldn't attack that enemy with that unit.
seeing the card section, i would love a deeper look to card games in other docs!
Playing through SMTIII Nocturne for the first time and I have to say that the opening hours are entirely luck based… There is one mandatory encounter against a Preta early on and if he crits you on his turn (since he always goes first) you are basically dead and can’t do anything to stop it.
One of the wildest RNG-driven communities I've ever seen has to be 'competitive' Monster Rancher 2. For starters, this is a game where a 50% chance to hit is considered "Good odds", and often matches are decided by a single 10% hit chance move miraculously landing and instantly killing the enemy monster. Also, for reasons I won't get into here, optimal play by human players is incredibly un-fun in a "he who acts first loses" kind of way... so instead players hand the reins over to the built-in AI battle system, which is less of an artificial intelligence and more of just "Do random inputs until win or lose"... and one monster trait that is considered mandatory for competitive play is "your monster has a random chance to stand back up at 1 hp when knocked out"...
And yet with all that they've found a way to squeak some consistency out of all that randomness. It's kind of wild.
Buildings having a percentage of chance to resist hits in Into the Breach is great. You don't count on it, but when it happens it feels awesome.
It's also worth taking a look at the token system in Darkest Dungeon 2 compared to the RNG in the first game. Big improvemente in my opinion.
As soon as I saw this video, the first words that rang out in my mind were:
"C'MON, MIRACLE!"
Magic the Gathering has inherent randomness, being a deck building game, but over the years many mechanics have pushed and pulled in both directions to reduce and increase variance. Since Lands are needed to cast spells, and both need to be drawn, a number of mechanics have been made to increase the odds that players get lands when they need them. On the flip side, there are a few mechanics that players enjoy that encourage randomness, whether they involve randomly casting a spell for free from your deck or spells that involve dice rolling or coin flipping to produce effects of varying effectiveness. There's also Magic Arena, which touches on the controlled randomness mentioned with Fire Emblem by influencing players' opening hands to make it more likely that an opening hand has a minimal number of lands so that games aren't immediately decided by bad opening hand luck.
One of my favorite luck mechanics are the instant kill moves in shin megami tensei. Most of the games’ versions of light and dark skills do no damage but have a chance to instant kill with that chance increasing with an enemy’s weakness or decreasing with resistance. While some people hate this, I like how it forces the player to strategize around certain enemies or bosses and bring new demons that resist or completely block light or dark. It allows for more variety in gameplay and certain strategies can revolve around luck.
The fire emblem bit brought back ptsd flashbacks to X-Com 2, where you would constantly miss a 98% shot at point blank range
Well its not a video game, but my all time favorite "luck" mechanic was from gaslands the board game.
Rolled your car flipping over?
Well choose where it lands hot shot.
Spinning outta control?
Well an ace driver just turned that into a slick nose to nose 180.
I still remember the last time I played that game with a buddy. My car exploded after smashing into a wall, but the flip and burst sent it hurtling over the finish line.
I love Space Funeral's luck mechanic, where you can just press a button called "Mystery" for a bunch of random effects, like "you vomit everywhere and it's gross but it doesn't do anything" or "being so pathetic the enemy feels bad for you and leaves"
As soon as the "Psychology of Luck" chapter card came up, I *knew* that Fire Emblem was going to be right behind it.
Library of ruina has cards roll dice to fight. The higher dice wins. Because of the randomness, you will never be certain your battle plan will go out well, nudging players into a “lose the battle win the war” mindset, where they will intentionally take bad clashes on minor hits to save cards for the stronger strikes. Players have to mitigate luck as much as possible, and even still some tense clashes will occur.
You also have a random set of powerups at times of the fight. You get riskier powerups when you’re doing poorly, but more straightforward and consistent ones if you’re doing well. The former offers a gamble that if you’re lucky and know what you’re doing, you can turn a bad situation around. Gebura’s Mountain Of Corpses power up kills everyone but the selected party member, but massively buffs the survivor. Now you’re gambling on if the hypercharged teammate has enough power to go it alone
The luck stat in terraria affects a lot of luck-based events such as monster drops, fishing power or rare creatures spawning, but it doesnt affect fishing quest rewards, grab bags, or the chances of random events spawning like a goblin invasion.
You can increase your luck by having torches of the right kind in a given biome, by touching ladybugs (though catching or killing them reduces your luck), having certain accessories with "lucky" in their name equipped, even though they dont tell you that, by throwing money into shimmer liquid, or by being nearby a garden gnome or on the night after a boss is defeated.
And no, the game does not display your luck stat. The only way to see it is by talking to an NPC that doesnt appear in the first half of the game, and he only gives vague descriptions of your luck, like the fortune teller in Stardew Valley. It even used to be more janky, as having the "wrong" torch for a biome (including basic torches) used to *decrease* your luck.
Surprised you didn't touch on Darkest Dungeon and/or Fear and Hunger.
Where Luck is basically part of the horror experience.
I'd say a good luck system is one that forces you to adapt, prevent it from turning into a 'perfect game' situation. A bad one is one that you cannot interact with or must simply brute force.
Being able to clean out the casinos playing blackjack in Fallout: New Vegas is one of my favorite uses of luck in a game
Once Human's Memetic Specialization drops are luck-based, with very limited adjustments (5 rerolls & 3 drop grind). These are mostly passives that can be incredibly cost-effective to unlocking new unique formulas unlocked only through these