10-23-2012, 04:11 PM
Randomness is part of a fantasy roleplaying system. Your warrior doesn't always hit with his sword, so you roll dice to see if he hits (and for how much). He COULD always hit for "100 minus the armor of the target" but for a fantasy roleplaying game, that doesn't really capture the essence of the battle.
When developing a pure combat system without regard for roleplaying (or any simulation of reality), you can skip the randomness. Your sword always hits and it always does POWER minus ARMOR damage unless your opponent does a specific countermove, etc. No more randomness.
I think the argument is that randomness helps keep things "interesting". Even a pro player can have a bad string of luck. The pro player probably hates this but it might also actually help keep him interested -- an encounter he would normally always win suddenly becomes difficult and takes him outside of his comfort zone purely because of bad luck. Similarly, an encounter that may have been mathematically impossible may become possible thanks to randomness.
That is, without randomness, combat (especially RPG style) may become just a bit too...computational. Like tic-tac-toe, a computer can foresee all possible moves and knows all possible paths the game can take. The next move is obvious and therefore boring. Pro players, I think, can get like that with RPGs as well, and the game, like tic-tac-toe, simply stops being interesting. You either need to up the complexity beyond our ability to foresee all possibilities (like chess) or you need to add some randomness.
(Somewhat as an aside, this is why I hate "curse/cure" mechanics in RPGs. The goal is to increase complexity but, like tic-tac-toe, it's usually too obvious. You curse me and generally speaking my best move is to immediately cure it. I had a complex script for WOW that was better at the game than I was by virtue of "always do the obvious thing" -- always launch the best attack that wasn't on cooldown; always look for the biggest negative effect to cure; always land the best negative effect for the target's particular class. I was left with a handful of options that required intelligence and a whole lot of things that were better off automated in a simple script.)
I think randomness is less necessary in FPS games where the "randomness" is your ability to aim. It may also be unnecessary in strategy games where the "randomness" is how we buy, place and move troops. In a real-time RPG, though, where you control 1 character with a fairly narrow selection of abilities, randomness may be necessary to keep encounters from being too predictable (or too rock-paper-scissors).
When developing a pure combat system without regard for roleplaying (or any simulation of reality), you can skip the randomness. Your sword always hits and it always does POWER minus ARMOR damage unless your opponent does a specific countermove, etc. No more randomness.
I think the argument is that randomness helps keep things "interesting". Even a pro player can have a bad string of luck. The pro player probably hates this but it might also actually help keep him interested -- an encounter he would normally always win suddenly becomes difficult and takes him outside of his comfort zone purely because of bad luck. Similarly, an encounter that may have been mathematically impossible may become possible thanks to randomness.
That is, without randomness, combat (especially RPG style) may become just a bit too...computational. Like tic-tac-toe, a computer can foresee all possible moves and knows all possible paths the game can take. The next move is obvious and therefore boring. Pro players, I think, can get like that with RPGs as well, and the game, like tic-tac-toe, simply stops being interesting. You either need to up the complexity beyond our ability to foresee all possibilities (like chess) or you need to add some randomness.
(Somewhat as an aside, this is why I hate "curse/cure" mechanics in RPGs. The goal is to increase complexity but, like tic-tac-toe, it's usually too obvious. You curse me and generally speaking my best move is to immediately cure it. I had a complex script for WOW that was better at the game than I was by virtue of "always do the obvious thing" -- always launch the best attack that wasn't on cooldown; always look for the biggest negative effect to cure; always land the best negative effect for the target's particular class. I was left with a handful of options that required intelligence and a whole lot of things that were better off automated in a simple script.)
I think randomness is less necessary in FPS games where the "randomness" is your ability to aim. It may also be unnecessary in strategy games where the "randomness" is how we buy, place and move troops. In a real-time RPG, though, where you control 1 character with a fairly narrow selection of abilities, randomness may be necessary to keep encounters from being too predictable (or too rock-paper-scissors).