Monday, November 7, 2016

RNG is a Dirty Word, part #1

RNG has become a dirty word in gaming, and I feel this is partially because of the glut of mobile and online games with RNG elements. For those of you outside the game-design lingo world, RNG stands for Random Number Generator, and the mechanic is often used for "% chance to complete a mission" or "% chance to get a purple gun in CS-Go" sort of thing.

In essence, something happens, you roll the dice, and your success is purely determined by the roll of the dice. There is no skill involved, no player input of chances, no ability to affect the outcome of the event, and whether you win or lose is purely resting on the roll of dice.

If the roll is good, great, no hard feelings towards RNG. If you fail, it is RNG's fault.

http://www.phonearena.com/news/Pathfinder-Adventures-review-rolling-the-dice-like-theres-no-tomorrow_id86346

Now the above is a review of the Pathfinder Adventures mobile game, and to be honest, I think the review is fair and a pretty interesting take on the game. But what strikes me as interesting in this review is the view of the RNG elements in a typical D&D style experience, and in this case a card game with d20 style "to hit" and other elements. The reviewer states that:
In order to successfully finish a scenario, you will probably need to pass all combat checks, otherwise your characters will die before killing the final boss.
So you play the game and if the RNG starts making you miss more than hit, it is probably better to restart the entire scenario for a perfect string of random numbers than it is to tough it out. Maybe your phone is having a bad day. Maybe the OS or developer API the game is using has a bug in the RNG generation software that will ruin the game. Maybe the universal laws of chance are against you today and that electronic d20 is going to roll a "1" for the next seventeen times and if you think that is impossible, you don't know statistics because however remote the chance, it is possible.

And maybe, and I would tend to agree with this feeling, you feel games with no player skill or input are less interesting to me.

Roleplaying games tend to be heavily RNG-based, and how you deal with the hated RNG is in character design. A d20 is a very harsh mistress, and you could roll low all night and have a horrible time. How you deal with that is character design. If you can find the 'magic build' that makes your character perform three or four levels in power ahead of the average character at this level, you are setting yourself up to have a better time at the RNG.

You are still subject to the RNG, it is just you are setting your character up (at this level) to do a little better than everyone else with the RNG. This is where "player input" comes into play with pen-and-paper games, and why we tend to feel games like D&D are not entirely RNG based. We have control over our chances, and even our characters' actions from turn-to-turn, so RNG is less of a factor. RNG can still be a factor, but it isn't a "roll the die every turn to see if you win" sort of thing.

But RNG is still a very strong force in pen-and-paper games, and it is easy to see why people sour on the influence of RNG, as compared to something like competitive card games. In a card game, the RNG element is the shuffle of the deck and what card you draw, but dice are not typically involved, and since everyone shuffles and draws, the deck order and randomization is equally good and bad for every player - given a certain deck composition. Card games typically have 'attack cards' or other fixed options that one side uses against another's defense card or other opposition, the numbers are compared, and the higher wins.

Player skill in this case is hand management. The way you deal with the shuffle of your deck is in how you choose to play your cards, how you read other players, and your strategies for dealing with dry runs of cards. There is a chance your shuffle put all your best cards on the bottom of the deck, and the game designer needs to account for this a little, but a lot of how a player deals with this is in player skill. This is where bluffing, reading others, and delaying tactics come into play. In short, the social element of player skill in card games.

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