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Comment by Pfhreak | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, and at first I was excited about the possibilities in something like D&D, where a series of bad rolls can have you feeling down. "I'm due for a critical hit any swing now..."

Players would love that! Make my hero feel more heroic! The inevitable comeback!

But then I thought about the inverse case -- you are doing really well, and now you are due for a failure. Or series of failures. That would feel awful.

We have a lot of emotions around dice rolling. I wonder if players really want from their dice. Would players prefer dice that are secretly unevenly weighted towards good rolls? Would they still want those dice if they knew they were weighted?

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I made this specifically for my online D&D sessions. I can tell you that nobody was suspicious when I replaced the standard Math.random() with this version, and all of the "I think your dice function is broken" statements all the sudden stopped happening.

As a D&D player I can see how this might be nice, but at the same time it would be frustrating to get a 20 for something stupid (passing a DC5 check) and know that it had a real effect on my chances for getting a 20 when I could actually use it (a critical attack roll).

There are times in a RPG for (a GM/DM) relying on dice for something and when not to. For some people driving appears to be like bumper cars but for most of us it isn't 8) Apply that to D&D and the player's approach to things should be used to bias or even dispense with dice.

In some competitive games like Dota and LoL, the random distribution for critical hits is weighted so that it ramps up over time, resetting after a successful crit. (http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Random_distribution) This both reduces the chance of two high rolls coming up twice in a row as well as long periods of low rolls.

It doesn't have the "you are doing really well, and now you are due for a failure" since "not a critical" isn't really that negative of an outcome.

For something like D&D, the same kind of "better-than-random" distribution just comes from adding dice. 4d6 is much more consistent than 1d21+3.

I've heard Blizzard does the same thing for valuable random drops (like legendary drops in Hearthstone and Diablo 3): instead of being random, there's a proc rate so you can't get screwed by chance.

They do it in Hearthstone for pack openings, the players call it the "pity timer" - you're guaranteed to get a legendary card after opening 40 packs or something like that.

There are even websites like https://pitytracker.com/ that keep track of where you are in your chances.

Fascinating! I wonder if the distribution is engineered like that to avoid specious cheating claims. E.g. Player:"Look at this video of Famous_Player getting 3 crits in a row! They're probably cheating!" So much potential for fallacies; Gambler's Fallacy, Silent Evidence Fallacy..

Nah, Icefrog doesn't make decisions like that. It's all about what makes the game more fun.

Ah yes, I meant to say "In addition to" the reasons you stated.

There isn't really a possibility to cheat game mechanics in those sort of games thankfully since things like critical hits are all handled server side.

Dota was my first thought when I read the article. Good Dota players pay attention to their crits, and if they haven't had one in a few hits they adjust strategy with the expectation of higher damage, something you would never do if it was truly random.

Yeah I've definitely seen Arteezy on PA hit neutrals until he gets a few non-crits in a row, then go gank.

Interesting, when I used to play League of Legends I was sure that the crit chance wasn't random at all. In my experience, at 25% crit precisely every 4th strike would crit, at 50% precisely half, and at 75% every 4th strike I'd do wouldn't be a crit. It seemed fully deterministic which I thought was an interesting way to make the mechanic more skillful as you could count in your head when you'll get a damage spike; you could fire some useless shots on minions then dive in for a trade on your enemy laner knowing that you'd win because of your guaranteed crit.

In hobby time I have been exploring the storytelling possibility space of RPGs using card decks. I love playing cards and I love custom playing card designs and I wish there was more impetus for players to bring decks with interesting designs to an RPG table in the same way that dice are so varied and fun to see what people bring to a table.

I think there are interesting stories to tell in an RPG where you know the "weight" of your rolls, approximately how many "success" cards you have left, some choice in what you play from your hand.

«But then I thought about the inverse case -- you are doing really well, and now you are due for a failure. Or series of failures. That would feel awful.»

It depends on how personal you take it in how awful it feels. If the goal is to create an interesting story, a grand sequence of failures can be a very interesting story. Look at Fiasco, for instance, where some of the fun can be very explicitly "how do I make my character more miserable?" In those cases where you know you are about to hit a lot of failures in die rolls/card draws you can lean in to it. Try to explain why your character is having such awful luck, for instance. Maybe try to set up an elaborate Rube Goldberg design of failures that eventually cascade into the weirdest, grandest success, like a "drunken master" kung fu ballet.

Time for an Annoying Nerdy Rant!

Randomness is what makes a game more realistic but true randomness will not make it more likable. True randomness dictates that in half of your games, your players will have a harder time achieving anything.

It is not uniformity of results that the players are looking for, it is uniformity of successes weighted by the importance of the rolls. Failing a perception check in an empty room is less important than failing a dodge roll in the final fight on your last health point.

Many games suggest that the gamemaster cheats on some crucial rolls. More games propose an alternate system that biases rolls based on points systems. Some others even replace totally the dices with a points system.

I really prefer those. A very simple biased rolls system I often use (Dk2) is that GM can emphasize the action of dangerous NPCs by adding special D6 dices to a D20 roll (they are special as they only give +3 or +6 on 3 and 6 and +0 on other results). Once used, these dices are added to a pool that the players can use for their actions.

Anyway, my favorite system is Amber Diceless RPG. It trades randomness for secrets. Every player is a bit of a backstabing asshole who does not show all their skills on any action. If someone has 30 in strength, they may just announce 10 if they think it is enough for the action.

The winner in a fight is the one with the bigger score. Add bonus if they use some kind of trick or ambushes (recommended). It is surprisingly interesting for such a simple system.

EVE Online has a really interesting approach to this balance as well.

In general, things are heavily weighted towards actual player skill and also character skills accrued over time for the important interactive elements.

For things like loot drops, it's strictly random from a chart per enemy type, but they monitor the overall economy and use that to set the weights for the various items. If one group of people has figured out some trick to farming an extremely valuable item, they will nerf it to keep the economy where they want it. For a number of years, the company actually kept a professional economist on full-time to keep track of these things. I think that got eliminated when CCP was having a rough financial time several years ago. And I think that game has gotten a bit worse as a result.

But in terms of stuff that counts RNGs are a fairly small part of the action, and in some cases not at all, so you can pick your poison: lower overall damage to a target but more consistent, allowing for one kind of play style. Or you can have more variable damage with higher potential if you're willing to take risks. And there are a couple of flavors along the spectrum.

It's a pretty interesting game design. And, of course, tons of people complain about it. Loot drops really are pretty damn random (with between 30-40 thousand people online at any given time, there's a lot of entropy to seed the PRNG). And you get the clusters you would expect from random data. But everyone really hates random outcomes. People want uniform outcomes. It's baked into our psychology.

But in terms of things that determine who lives and who dies in a fight. The random element is really downplayed, and it boils down to player skill more than anything.

There's a whole thing where people who have been playing for a long time will start brand new accounts with low skill levels and shitty equipment and still be able to blow people out of the water because they have a superior understanding of the game mechanics. In fact, there are entire "corporations" who really do nothing but this. Fine people who have been around for long enough to make some money and buy some expensive things and then lure them into fights and slaughter their bling-bling.

It's an interesting approach to game balance, and one I quite admire. It does keep me coming back, and paying that sweet, sweet monthly sub.

EVE is also one of the games that really capitalizes on the technology component. As much as I love Skyrim, for example, I don't think there's anything going on with the actual game interaction mechanics that couldn't be easily replicated on a table with some dice. I'm also willing to eat my words if I'm completely wrong about that.

EVE Online has the luxury of hammering out fairly complicated formulas based on the current state of things, and it does so very well. It does it for every ship in space (again, typically 30-40k), once each server tick (usually a tick is 1 second, but for really huge fights, they dilate time and slow the ticks down).

So they can make things like damage calculated for each gun or missile or drone on each ship based on every relevant ship's current speed and direction relative to every other ship, etc.

It's an impressive use of technology for an RPG, and I find it especially cool that you are your own gamemaster. The only story is the one you make for yourself.

But now I sound like a fucking fanboi, so I'll shut up.

I've never heard of Amber Diceless before. I'm curious and will check it out. Thanks for mentioning.

Maybe a hybrid mode, where too many bad rolls bias the dice towards a more "true uniform" - lol - distribution while a series of good rolls just keep it actually fair.

Anyway, nice work!

Better have games without dice rolls. Unexpected events could come from other non-random sources (like the combination of a lot of factors involving other players actions).

dice add real live suspense

Real live stupidity.

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