Randomness in Games

(This is a reproduction of some old content I wrote back in 2009.  I'm still figuring out what I want for this whole blog thing for the year, but we'll start with a Monday release schedule and some slightly dated content.)

While playing Mario Party the other day, it really hit me that randomness can suck in video games. Mario Party is one of the very few games that when you say the game cheated, I will likely agree with you (see here for some first turn ridiculousness). All the games of that series have had a terrible tendency to favor one player up until the very end, then suddenly the underdog comes in and wins the day. This raises the question:

Is randomness good for games, and what can be done to improve upon existing randomness?

Now I am an avid DnD player, a game that revolves around dice so much so that I'd skip a planet analogy and go straight to galaxy. Dice are flying back and forth across the table for almost anything. The base rule of DnD: Roll a die, add some stuff, then see what happens. So how has this game survived and thrived over the last thirty years?

There's a massive human element to DnD. The DM controls the fates behind his screen, laptop, stack of folders, or charade that he has any plan at all. Ultimately, the dice don't decide what happens, the DM does. The true base rule of DnD is the DM makes the rules. This means that the DM cannot cheat, even if he smudges a few numbers for or against the players' favor. The players, though the DM is instructed to never let them in on that secret, know all along that they got help somewhere along the way. The trick is to keep them in the dark about when that was.

Another thing that helps these players out is that, as their characters get more powerful, the dice have less and less of an impact on the outcome of a roll. For instance, a certain ranger in my current campaign just about always succeeds at attack rolls, spot checks, and most of what she does. Meanwhile, the Dwarf in the party, while he has a bit of crummy luck when it comes to attacking, basically never gets hit (and when he does, he still has damage reduction... and about 120 hit points).

So when you really think of it, that galaxy is a fantastic analogy of DnD's randomness: There may be a lot of shiny, colorful, sparkly planets and stars, but good gravy that's nothing compared to the infinite blackness between it all. The dice can mean the difference between a party wipe and a tremendous victory, but the DM's human element and the bonuses and skills of the player characters make that extremely rare. More often, it's the DM's human error or the lacking of a particular skill that gets characters killed.

Then there's World of Warcraft. How many hours have those of you that play spent trying to get a super rare drop? How much did you enjoy the mind-numbing task of continuous, pointless slaughter? Oh, wait, that refers to the entire game... Anyway, you get the point. Certain things have a random drop chance that's bloody atrocious, that's all there is to it.

Granted such items do have a reward. I know there are certain weapon drops that are nearly game breaking (the type of item you then run around with for the next twenty levels), and there are some that just add a flair to your character (like a blue dragon pet or a phoenix mount), which you can also sell for ridiculous amounts of cash (could probably get away with real money too, not just in-game gold).

Along the same lines, we have King's Field. What do you mean you haven't played it!? Okay, I know, it's old and, well, old. This first person adventure game has a slight amount of randomness to it in that there's one monster that can drop a wicked sword that allows you to recharge mana. Why's this so important? If you make a certain choice earlier in the game, you cannot regain mana. Guess what choice I made. Anywho, this is a major part of the game I was missing out on here, so much so that I camped out this monster, killed him a billion times, and got the sword so I could start casting spells. While that made the game a lot more fun, it really was not fun for the three hours I was hacking away at the same monster.

This brings me to Left 4 Dead (L4D). Valve's zombie title here comes with a wonderful thing called commentary mode, which lifts the hood of the game so you can see inside. Valve realized they were having this randomness trouble during playtesting when weaker players would have a run of bad luck that would lead to their death at the hands of the zombie hordes. How did they solve this problem? Basically, they made a DM. Really! Okay, so they call it the AI director, which basically will push players to a certain stress level (i.e. to the point of near death, low ammo, and generally screwed) then ease up, give them a Molotov and a weapons cache to nurse them back to health, then bring in more zombies.

However, if you've played through commentary mode, you may point out where they added more randomness to add to the fun. A problem we've all had with FPS death-matches at some point is spawn-camping, where a jackass will just hang out at your spawn location and kill you, just so you respawn there and die again. That sucks. To battle this, developers have been adding to the number of spawn points, but still, a player with enough experience will remember every nook and cranny where something will appear and have the map completely memorized in a matter of minutes (if that).

Valve's solution is just a set of rules where the enemies can and can't spawn. The most basic of which is the classic "line of sight" rule. This means that enemies are not allowed to pop out of thin air directly in front of your eyes. That doesn't mean it won't spawn a horde around corner after you've thrown an explosive there to clear the way ahead of you (granted, they may have a rule about that).  (A friend pointed out a flaw in this logic, where a horde of zombies spawn inside the safe room he had just come from.  He felt cheated.)

Basically, Valve's hit the bull's eye on the randomness problem. Randomness can improve gameplay, but it can also detract from it. The trick is to keep a handle on the situation, a balancing factor of some sort to keep the players from feeling cheated that still allows for a wide array of results. It's all about helping the players have fun, even if they know they're getting a little help here and there. The trick is to keep them from knowing exactly when and where that help arrived.