But Battle Brothers does seem to have some issues with its RNG, in the sense that it tends to clump together the same results far more than it should.
This is exactly what happens when people have a distorted view of probability.
It’s like this: You’re playing dice with your friends and on your shot you keep rolling 4’s.
Is the dice rigged? Doesn’t seem like it; no one else is rolling a disproportionate amount of 4’s.
Are you cursed? Nah, you just happened to roll clusters of 4’s; that’s what happens when something is random.
Randomness doesn’t mean a complete lack of order or pattern, but when you tell someone something is random, they will exaggerate any semblance of order or pattern.
Take a look at Ramsey numbers:
https://math.mit.edu/~apost/courses/18.204_2018/ramsey-numbers.pdf
The human mind can easily fit patterns onto random data because we are designed to see patterns in the world.
That said, backgrounds in battle brothers aren’t totally random; they are influenced by the location. I’ve never noticed a bunch of the same background with the same trait appearing in any town.
edit- the newer Fire Emblem games even misrepresent probability to the user because people are so bad at intuiting it.
https://serenesforest.net/general/true-hit/
Yeah it’s unlikely to miss an 80% hit chance 6 times in a row, but it’s not that unlikely. You have a ~99.994% (1 - 0.2^6) chance to hit at least one of them—a ~0.006% chance to miss all of them, but that’s still not even one in a million, napkin math says it’s one in sixteen thousand or so. Hardly so unlucky as to expect it to never happen or to think you should go out and buy some lottery tickets.
We should be teaching kids probability alongside geometry and arithmetic; not only would it help most people understand games, it would make them less easily manipulated by statistics and probabilities if they actually had some idea of what a probability is.