R P G A M E R . C O M   -   E D I T O R I A L S

Stop the Random Insanity!

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Cidolfas
FAN EDITORIALIST

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

Not in RPGs, though.

Randomness. RPGs' inspiration, pen-and-paper games like Dungeons and Dragons, were full of it. Everything was determined by a roll of the die. For more than twenty years we RPGamers have been subjected to the cruel whimsies of Mistress Luck. But it's time for this to end. Let's break free from the shackles of the evil design flaw known as randomness.

Why is randomness so god-awful? Several reasons.

• It, far more than any other difficulty, gives the player a sense of being completely unfair. If a boss is strong - well, you're not ready to fight him yet, or you need to change your strategy. If the same boss has a chance of doing terrible things to you, it's worse; you're entirely capable of beating him, you could beat him if you tried again five times, but in the meantime you're just sadly unlucky.
• It causes different people to have different experiences in the same game. Picking up an item might take some people five minutes and others five hours. It's just so completely heartbreaking to see the ease with which others get through certain areas due to a lucky break earlier on, while you toil on, determinedly leveling up so those monsters who assumed you somehow got that random item don't slaughter you. Not to mention the fact that strategies are harder to share when they only work a bit of the time.
• Most importantly, it encourages dullness and repetition in a game. Waiting for anything random to happen requires you doing the same thing over and over and OVER again. This is not fun, people. It is not entertainment. It is a mind-numbing waste of time. Contrary to popular perception, statistically speaking the chances of you getting an item do not improve the more you try to do it. If an enemy has a 5% chance of dropping something, every single time you beat that enemy you have exactly a 5% chance of him dropping that item. Those are terrible odds.

So is it possible to completely break away from randomness? Probably not. There are some things which can and should be random, simply to add a little bit of spice to things. For example, the exact damage and effect of attacks and skills can be randomized, as can the chances of critical hits, status spells, or preemptive or back attacks. So far so good. If only developers would stop there! But lately there's been an enormous resurgence in attempts at randomizing everything about a game. Some examples:

• Star Ocean has always had randomness inherent in their invention systems - not only the chances of success, but which item was created. However, the number of items inventable for any given skill were always small, ensuring that if you had the correct skills you'd create the one you want relatively quickly. (Well, this wasn't really true for the first Star Ocean, where your chances of success were abysmal.) Star Ocean 3, however, went far and beyond this. Firstly, each skill has literally dozens of items it can create. You can't choose which item you want to create, but you can see the calculated cost, based on the inventors doing the inventing; choose "invent" enough and you might be able to find the item you want to invent by looking at its cost. Except for that fact that the cost is also randomized. Considering the difficulty inherent in creating some of the best items, no one wants to sit there forever making an item if it ends up being entirely the wrong one. This was the most frustrating aspect of the game, and completely killed my enjoyment of it.
• Valkyrie Profile 2 has hundreds of items dropped by enemies which are required to make good items at shops. However, it's difficult enough to break specific parts off enemies. After that, the chance of an item being dropped is, you guessed it, random. And not a high chance of random, either. I probably left three-quarters of the game's shops untapped due to not having the proper items. (Even worse, you couldn't even tell which enemies dropped which items without consulting an FAQ.)
• And then we have Final Fantasy XII. This could have been an excellent game. But even ignoring the unbelievably low enemy drop rate (which is hard to ignore), I felt that its most egregious crime was to randomize the game chests. That's right - practically every single chest in the game has a chance of not even being there, and then has a chance of holding garbage. Exploration is meant to give rewards - you find a chest, you open it, you get an item. Using chests as a sort of self-replenishing item resource is one of the worst game decisions I've ever seen; it means that the gamer has an excellent chance of never, ever getting the item the developer originally sort of thought he'd get. Even worse, I found no joy in exploration. Why would I? Most of the time all I'll get for my troubles are knots of rust.

So how do we do away with randomness? Some of the forthcoming ideas have been advanced in these pages before, but I felt they deserved a better airing.

• Think carefully about why you're making something random. Assuming it's not just laziness (coding specific values does take longer than coding a random function), what are you trying to achieve? Let's say you want to force the player to beat five enemies before getting an item. Then make a counter, have it increment, and after the player beats five enemies, the item drops. Even better, you can leave the random chance in there (allowing the user to get the item before he beats five enemies) but once the count reaches five, the item drops no matter what. You can code a global function which implements this behavior every time you call your "random" function.
• If a difficult task results in a prize, that prize should never be random in any way, shape or form. Reward the player for their skill. Don't taunt them.
• If you're ignoring my first tip, never ever make a random drop that has a chance of less than, say, 40%. This gives the player a fighting chance. Make the items less powerful and more plentiful (or require that we collect many of them to create one better item), but don't leave us hanging.

Note that I haven't talked about random battles, which is a different kettle of fish; the problem there is not the randomness - i.e. the variety in the time required to trigger a battle - but in the notion of battles constantly triggering in the first place. But video games are a huge enterprise now, with hundreds of staff members. Surely you guys can come up with ways of furthering the gameplay without resorting to, as Dr. Einstein put it, insanity.