Tag randomness

Randomness & Mitigation

Subsurface Games 3 Comments

You might not think that from my Euro leanings, but I love randomness in games. Or, well, I love well-used randomness. I love dice drafting, I love card draw, I love modular setup, I love randomly seeded markets. Randomness can add a dynamic element to games which would otherwise get repetitive. It makes it so, even in a game I’ve played dozens of times, I still get surprised.

However, some games go too far with the randomness. Like an oversalted dish, the randomness takes over and breaks the nuances and subtleties of gameplay. Mostly, it robs players of their agency: where in a dice drafting game the dice give you a new puzzle to adapt to and enrich the decision making, in a “roll-to-succeed” game, it often supersedes your decision making entirely. In some games, magically trading in your ability to choose your actions to gain the ability to choose die results would increase your odds of winning. That’s pretty low agency, if you ask me.

Why follow that paragraph with a picture of Risk? Oh, no reason.

“Yeah Amy, isn’t that just input vs output randomness? It’s 2023, this is nothing new!”

Except no, it’s not just input vs output. King of Tokyo has an incredibly random output randomness: you don’t choose what you do, you roll and do what the dice command! That’s all of this roll-and-move stuff people complain about! However, you also get the ability to reroll any amount of dice twice. It is still random, but because you choose which dice to reroll, you still feel like you have agency. You decide whether or not to you reroll attacks because you don’t want to end in Tokyo; you choose whether or not to reroll Hearts because you feel threatened; you choose whether or not to try to get that third 3 for a risky but rewarding strategy. While the final result is still random, you have taken decisions throughout.

“Oh, so it’s about mitigating randomness?”

Yes, but not only that. Mitigating randomness is an important dial to consider when you include randomness in a game, but too much mitigation takes away the whole emotional impact, the whole tension of the randomness: if you have infinite rerolls, there’s no point in rolling the dice, you should just choose your results.

I think it is less about mitigating than about how you present the random result, and how you allow the luck to be mitigated.

Recently I had a discussion with a designer friend about a Push-Your-Luck mechanism in a card game she was working on. Players had 3 cards in hand, and every hand, following the players’ actions, 3 cards were added to the middle of the table. Amongst other things, each card is worth between 0 and 2 stars, and rather than straight up points, she was working on a push-your-luck mechanism for those stars.

The original mechanism was that if there were an even number of stars in the middle, each star in hand gave you a point; if there was an odd amount, stars in hand were negative points. It’s a 50-50 odd (with a bit of player control over which card went to the middle), and each player can decide how many stars to hold on to, whether they go big and risky, or small and safe. 

During the test, I didn’t like that mechanism. It’s technically a push-your-luck system with agency: I can decide whether to take a big swing by keeping high cards, or keep it safe, and I could even have a bit of impact on the final result. When mixed with the rest of the game system, it made for some really tough decisions. Yet, if I kept a big hand and busted, it was frustrating; if I scored it, it felt unearned. Truly, it was the worst of both worlds.

Then, they tried a Blackjack-like system: as long as you don’t have more stars than the center row, they’re worth points. However, if you do have more, you lose that many points. Suddenly, every 2 in the middle is permission to keep a 2. If you start with three high cards, you can try to replace one of them and add it to the center. If you start with only low cards, you can use them to make your opponents bust. Whatever happened was a strong moment: busting on a big hand was dramatic instead of just being hit in the face; busting with a small hand at least felt good because others lost more; and winning the points by staying close to the margin felt amazing. All in all, the reveal of the last card became a nailbiter.

Those emotional responses are why we mitigate randomness in game. Not because mitigating randomness makes the best people more likely to win, but because having a say over the random result gives you agency, it makes you feel involved, and when you’re involved… well that’s when a simple die roll can get you to jump out of your seat.

When to use randomness in your design?

Subsurface Games 4 Comments

I feel like randomness in game design is like salt: when you start cooking, it’s a quick, easy, cheap way to make anything taste good; then you realize how it overpowers everything it’s in, and kills any sort of deeper flavor, so you throw it out and stop using it; then, eventually, you realize that salt, when used in moderation, is a powerful tool that can help you bring out certain other elements of your dish.

What I mean by that very average metaphor is that I think a modern game should only have random elements if they fulfill a role in the design, but that these roles can make randomness a powerful tool. This post is about the 6 roles randomness can play in games. For each of these roles, I’ll briefly cover how to balance it to avoid overpowering any other part of your game.

Also, most of these examples use the language of dice rolling, but it’s as applicable to drawing a card, pulling a token, or pointing at something with your eyes closed. It’s just simpler to write “roll” than “roll/draw/pull/point”, and most gamers have a common understanding of the impacts and probable outcomes of a die roll.

Theme

I’m getting this one out of the way first, because I have a very strong, but very biased, opinion on this one. Theme is only a good reason to add randomness if you are designing a simulation. If the goal is for your players to be feel like they’ve played a baseball game, or that they’ve lived through a specific historical situation, then fine, add randomness to be true to real-life.

However, if you are making a game, trying to make players experience strong moments and a good time, theme is not a good enough reason. If it fits another role AND is thematic, awesome! But on its own, I don’t think it’s a good enough reason.

Surprise

One of the main draws of randomness is “stand up moments”, moments of tension in a game where players cannot help but stand up because of how much is on the line. Then, at the reveal, some curse, some laugh, some cheer, but those moments always end up memorable.

That being said, for that moment to work, you need the players to care about the result. “D’uh”, I hear you say, but so many games throw me randomness before I care about what happens. There are three factors you can use to make me care about a result:

  1. Clear and understandable result: if I roll 10 dice and need to add them up and know if I have rolled more than 24, that moment gets diluted. If I roll 10 dice and know I need 4 Fist-icons, that I can get right away. A great example of this being done perfectly is Las Vegas, which I’ve talked about in this post.
  2. An important and immediate impact: Imagine a combat game where my attacks deal 2d6 damage: I don’t care how well I roll against a Demon with 100 hit points, because the difference will not be felt for a long time. If that Demon has 10 hit points, then suddenly, it’s the difference between defeating them and them getting another turn. If I know their next attack will kill me, suddenly I’m standing up for that roll, because it literally is life-and-death.
  3. Clearly bad odds: If the odds are in my favor for a roll, two things can happen: either I roll well, which isn’t particularly satisfying, or I can roll poorly, and get very, very frustrated. On the other hand, if I need to roll a 10 on my d10 to dodge the robot’s attack, I can either fail and know the odds were against me, or pull it off and feel like the baddest of all badasses.

If you’re adding randomness to a game to cause those surging moments of surprise, you need to use it sparingly, and only when it matters. No big moment will come out of casual randomness.

Variety

My favorite way to use randomness is to seed the opportunities the players can use: in With A Smile & A Gun, the dice pool you can draft from is rolled every round, and that roll creates scarcities and abundances which change from round to round and can have quite an impact on how the round plays.

That being said, it’s easy for that randomness to either not have a significant impact on the game (which I talked about in this post about meaningful variable setups), or to unfairly punish some players and not others based on their previous choices.

If you’re going for variety, you want players to know their goals before they start building towards them: revealing on the last turn that Diamonds are worth 10 points instead of 5 this game is a really bad surprise to the player who just sold theirs. However, knowing at the beginning of a game, or right before the Diamond mine action comes out, that Diamonds are worth a lot in this specific game, is a good way to push your players in different directions.

Reducing the skill gap

Most critics of randomness in game say a lot of things that come down to “I can lose even if I played better than every one else”, and that’s definitely an impact of randomness, but it can be a good thing. Sure, “the best player should win” sounds right, but if you had to play a master of a game you’ve never tried, would you rather it be a small dice game, or a chess-like, perfect information abstract?

It’s not just having a shot at winning, it’s also about having a shot at making an impact on the game. I’ve played over 60 games of card game Hanamikoji, and still have meaningful games with brand new players, but in only half as many games of abstract Taluva, and it’s hard to get interested in a game with someone who doesn’t have a similar level of experience.

Some games can be satisfying even outside of the competitive aspect, making this skill gap less problematic, games where you can build something or pull off some cool combos. Still, randomness is what allows players of various skill levels to have the experience together without one ruining it for the other.

However, if you reduce the skill gap too much, then your game becomes meaningless, because my decisions feel like they’re less meaningful than how well I roll. Yes, FEEL, because it’s not about how often luck determines the winner, but how often it feels like it does.

Increasing the pace

Analysis paralysis is a common problem with gamers. Sometimes, it’s a player problem, and there’s a lot to unpack there, but sometimes, the game itself pushes players to plan for A LONG TIME. If you find that your testers’ planning slows the game down, you can limit their plans in two ways with randomness:

If the planning space is too wide, meaning they have too many options, limit their options. In Dominion, if you had your entire deck in hand, the combinations would be endless, but because you only draw 5 cards per turn, it limits your options.

If the planning space is too long, meaning they can plan too far in the future, you have to add some breaks in that plan, moments of uncertainty such that you can’t plan much after it. In Dominion, there’s no point in planning 3 turns ahead of time, because you don’t know what you’ll draw next turn.

That being said, limitting a players’ ability to plan doesn’t take away the planning time, it just breaks it down: if new information is revealed during their turn, they’ll have to start planning again while everyone is staring at them.

How eager are you to add randomness to your designs? Have you ever run into a problem that you solved by adding a random element?