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Random numbers - essential in RPGs or not? Discuss!

Bohrain

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My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
Not sure if any of this is relevant to RPGs but

- Firaxis XCOM's designers secretly manipulated the accuracy RNG in favor of the player, ironically to prevent players from perceiving the game as having cheated. They did this in XCOM 2 as well.
- Long War 2 made many changes reducing the overall role of RNG in XCOM 2. Removing powerful random effects from the game, making most misses do damage etc. In general, their approach was to give the player as much agency as possible over the RNG.
- NEO Scavenger has RNG but it adds a layer of uncertainty over it. You never get explicit damage ranges or hit chances. In this way, RNG is made irrelevant to the player's decision making process entirely even though mechanically it still exists.

Intuition works against people when it comes to understanding probabilities. In short, we have no trouble understanding fully certain and impossible events, but when it comes to less than around 55% likely events their likelihood is exaggerated and more likely ones are underestimated. Here is a fancy formula behavioral economists have worked out from the empirical findings.
jvrSf



Black line is the objective probability and blue one is subjective.

What this means in practice is that if you code a fair random number generator, people will systematically bitch about missing too many hits and enemies getting too many crits in a row when the chances work as intended. The people who actually do the math are the most oblivious about it happening and it just so happens that the developers tend to be better at math than the average consumer.
 

SCO

Arcane
In My Safe Space
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Shadorwun: Hong Kong
The only ubiquitous physics simulation in games currently is ragdoll physics, which treats objects as rigid bodies with constraints (pin joints, friction, collisions, etc). Developers are still working out the kinks there, because obtaining robust, realistic models that aren't numerically unstable and don't melt your processor is a difficult task. The second you start asking for flexible body dynamics, or realistic water physics (not just water surface animations that look pretty), let alone real-time simulations of biological tissue failure, you're basically asking for a totally new paradigm either in physics modeling or in CPU/GPU architecture.
There was actually a interesting game for this, hydrophobia, digital only. Of course, it was a corridor shooter, but hey, they tried.


Game was released in 2011 and since then, no spiritual successor :troll: i guess finding middleware is a bitch.
 

sser

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RNG should force the player to adapt, and in that regard any game that uses RNG should give players tools to adapt so that a single slice of RNG is never enough to torpedo their entire gameplay experience.
 

dag0net

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I guess you don't subscribe to the "it's not the winning but the taking part" pov then, huh.

the use of rng's is just one more method to import variation into gameplay, multiplayer is another, etc etc.
people buy new games precisely for a varied diet ergo rng's are good.
 

RoSoDude

Arcane
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Oct 1, 2016
Messages
727
The only ubiquitous physics simulation in games currently is ragdoll physics, which treats objects as rigid bodies with constraints (pin joints, friction, collisions, etc). Developers are still working out the kinks there, because obtaining robust, realistic models that aren't numerically unstable and don't melt your processor is a difficult task. The second you start asking for flexible body dynamics, or realistic water physics (not just water surface animations that look pretty), let alone real-time simulations of biological tissue failure, you're basically asking for a totally new paradigm either in physics modeling or in CPU/GPU architecture.
There was actually a interesting game for this, hydrophobia, digital only. Of course, it was a corridor shooter, but hey, they tried.


Game was released in 2011 and since then, no spiritual successor :troll: i guess finding middleware is a bitch.


Nice, thanks for bringing this to my attention. If I had to guess, I'd imagine they have a wave-front algorithm that only models the water's surface which can be triggered by other physics effects, which in turn can impact the player in various ways. Then the surface of the water has a dynamic texture to make the rippling look nice. Clever stuff, especially if it's as robust as it looks here. But notice how even here, they've selectively chosen only the crucial bits to model, with just enough detail and interaction to feel plausible.
 

SymbolicFrank

Magister
Joined
Mar 24, 2010
Messages
1,668
Believing in luck is the same as saying that God did it. Religion.

Believing is the opposite of the Scientific Method. Which boils down to: "Prove it!"

Believing is like: "I don't have time for this! I don't care! Fuck me in the ass!"
 

dag0net

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Messages
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Believing in luck is the same as saying that God did it. Religion.

Believing is the opposite of the Scientific Method. Which boils down to: "Prove it!"

Believing is like: "I don't have time for this! I don't care! Fuck me in the ass!"

I believe the scientific method has value.
I believe scientifically derived conclusions are worthwhile.
I believe this concept is worth testing scientifically.


Didn't we cover this 10,000,000,000,000 times already?
 

Cael

Arcane
Joined
Nov 1, 2017
Messages
20,287
Believing in luck is the same as saying that God did it. Religion.

Believing is the opposite of the Scientific Method. Which boils down to: "Prove it!"

Believing is like: "I don't have time for this! I don't care! Fuck me in the ass!"

I believe the scientific method has value.
I believe scientifically derived conclusions are worthwhile.
I believe this concept is worth testing scientifically.


Didn't we cover this 10,000,000,000,000 times already?
Sshhh! Let the autist-I mean atheist, spew his unnecessary, unsolicited, uncalled for steaming heap of crap. It gives them the only comfort they will know in their entire bitter benighted lives of "how dare OTHER people believe in something I don't! How DARE THEY!!!"
 

SCO

Arcane
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Messages
16,320
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Nice, thanks for bringing this to my attention. If I had to guess, I'd imagine they have a wave-front algorithm that only models the water's surface which can be triggered by other physics effects, which in turn can impact the player in various ways. Then the surface of the water has a dynamic texture to make the rippling look nice. Clever stuff, especially if it's as robust as it looks here. But notice how even here, they've selectively chosen only the crucial bits to model, with just enough detail and interaction to feel plausible.

Well, there is a reason this game is forgotten



I detect a slight libertard/anarchist butthurt on the review, but i also wouldn't want a flanderized Ayn Rand villain in a bad game. Ugh, bioshock.
 
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Elex

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 17, 2017
Messages
2,043
Oh, goody! Now, we are putting in "particle physicist" as a requirement for being a game developer.
why sound soo strange?
“game developer” is something extremely generic and require all the possible skill you can immagine.

you need people good at music for soundtrack

you need good artist for artwork



game designer need to be good at math and spreadsheet.

you need to have no selfesteen and selfpreservation for be a community manager.

Physics/software ignoramus spotted. There is a huge tradeoff between accuracy and computational expense for any physics model. This is both in terms of the numerical approximation to the model, as well as to the model's accuracy and robustness at various scales of analysis. Think about the flow of a water through a pipe. There are many models you can use to describe this phenomenon:
  • A low-resolution model which only considers the change in flow behavior along one direction, the axis of the pipe, and models the pressure drop as a function of averaged friction.
  • A macroscopic model of the fluid flow which assumes the flow to be a continuous media in 3D, but which makes simplifying assumptions (incompressible fluid, no slip boundary condition at the pipe walls, laminar flow, etc)
  • A more complete macroscopic model which includes more complex effects (compressibility, interaction at the solid-fluid interface, turbulence, etc)
  • A nanoscale model which treats the fluid as H20 particles with classical potentials
  • A quantum-level model which solves the Schrödinger equation to obtain more accurate molecular potentials
If it's not obvious, moving from one model resolution to the next incurs massive computational expense. It is virtually impossible to model a macroscopic phenomenon like this with the tools of molecular dynamics, unless you make clever simplifications, have access to a supercomputer, and are willing to wait weeks to obtain microsecond-length simulations. And you're expecting this shit to make it into games programming?

The only ubiquitous physics simulation in games currently is ragdoll physics, which treats objects as rigid bodies with constraints (pin joints, friction, collisions, etc). Developers are still working out the kinks there, because obtaining robust, realistic models that aren't numerically unstable and don't melt your processor is a difficult task. The second you start asking for flexible body dynamics, or realistic water physics (not just water surface animations that look pretty), let alone real-time simulations of biological tissue failure, you're basically asking for a totally new paradigm either in physics modeling or in CPU/GPU architecture.

EDIT: what I totally forgot to reiterate here is that most physics simulation isn't worth the effort. Clever animations, hacky math, and dice rolls are almost entirely sufficient to capture most of what you'd want out of elaborate simulations. This is as a person who cares deeply about physics simulation as a field and who loves to see it in games -- developers should get away with as many shortcuts as possible.
btw, i was not serius.
except the game designers spreadsheet obsession.
 

Elex

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 17, 2017
Messages
2,043
Not sure if any of this is relevant to RPGs but

- Firaxis XCOM's designers secretly manipulated the accuracy RNG in favor of the player, ironically to prevent players from perceiving the game as having cheated. They did this in XCOM 2 as well.
- Long War 2 made many changes reducing the overall role of RNG in XCOM 2. Removing powerful random effects from the game, making most misses do damage etc. In general, their approach was to give the player as much agency as possible over the RNG.
- NEO Scavenger has RNG but it adds a layer of uncertainty over it. You never get explicit damage ranges or hit chances. In this way, RNG is made irrelevant to the player's decision making process entirely even though mechanically it still exists.
you mean the seed based result?
it’s still tecnicallyRNG?(from a gameplay pov)

same move will always give the same result, so the % is basically “fake” because the result is predetermined.

and xcom is considered THE rng game by the mass market.
 

dag0net

Arcane
Joined
Aug 5, 2014
Messages
2,729
it's not fake tho is it. a sessions seed is no less valid than any externally sourced variable in a roller..rng's only r r in the sense that noone can reasonably know what the r is a priori.
 

Infinitum

Scholar
Joined
Apr 30, 2016
Messages
700
What, no one is about to mention Banner Saga? I rather enjoyed that system. Granted, there are a few instances of RNG like attempting to hit a high-armor opponent (usually a very bad idea), and there are a few random-ish abilities but on the whole the cores systems are deterministic.
 

SCO

Arcane
In My Safe Space
Joined
Feb 3, 2009
Messages
16,320
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
What, no one is about to mention Banner Saga? I rather enjoyed that system. Granted, there are a few instances of RNG like attempting to hit a high-armor opponent (usually a very bad idea), and there are a few random-ish abilities but on the whole the cores systems are deterministic.
I remember trying to convince people here they were wrong about banner saga initiative system being 'stupid' because they wanted for it to be the same as literally nearly every other game ever and wail on a enemy at a time with 3 others until dead... fucking gamers...

It's not very surprising that Banner Saga deterministic systems aren't the first thing you think of when you consider the game, and not surprising it's not popular for people that like deterministic systems because the overlap between those and people that like 'realistic simulations' and are quite arrogant about that is large, and the game does away with 'realism' for challenging gameplay in several critical places, like turn order.
 
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Raghar

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Jul 16, 2009
Messages
22,504
RNG is of course necessary in RPG games, because nobody would want identical outcome to identical situation. When an archer is shooting on someone, what can happen? Would he hit every time? Or would he experience a bird shit on his face, after which he would say fuck than and start murder bird? A while ago a meteor impact killed a person after marriage. A chance of being hit is extremelly low, aside of that situation 5 years after French academy of sciences declared that stones can't fall down from skies because there are no stone on sky, and saying otherwise is unscientific. Damage on property was massive, and even French academy of sciences was forced to abolish theirs declaration. But frankly it happened.

Without RNG, you'd be fighting an army of clone soldiers without any chance to lose.
 

Zerth

Arbiter
Joined
Feb 18, 2016
Messages
406
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Once playing Jagged Alliance 2, got my custom merc surrounded by Deidranna soldiers, they were at a moderate distance. All of 'em used their turn to shoot at him, all of 'em missed.

When It was finally my custom merc's turn, He said: "Yeah that could have been bad but I've got some kickass karma".

Now tell me, How are amusing situations like this one possible on a rpg with TB combat without the wonders of randomness magic?.
 

Elex

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 17, 2017
Messages
2,043
Once playing Jagged Alliance 2, got my custom merc surrounded by Deidranna soldiers, they were at a moderate distance. All of 'em used their turn to shoot at him, all of 'em missed.

When It was finally my custom merc's turn, He said: "Yeah that could have been bad but I've got some kickass karma".

Now tell me, How are amusing situations like this one possible on a rpg with TB combat without the wonders of randomness magic?.
 

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