RNG in games

[Galuf]

Whats your thoughts on rng in games. I know that for games to be fun there has to be randomness in there somewhere.

for loot or rewards I have seen many a game do something where its rng if what you want appears.say you want the black knight sword from a dark knight in dark souls. Well if you want it you gotta pray that it drops in 1 or 2 enemies that drop it because they dont respawn ever. Effectively making that theres no other work around to getting it other than restart your game. Or get to the final boss by that time its pointless though. I think for loot. For the mospart every loot should have an alternate way of getting. Sort of like the bird mount in ffxiv it either drops in one of your runs and you get it. Or you wait a month or 2 and beat the fight you want 99 times and your guaranteed the bird mount. So. Theres RNG. But theres an escape route from it. Anyways whats your opinion. Bye. Hi.

[Vyk]

I don't know about 99 times doing something. That seems ridiculous. But I definitely agree there should be alternatives. I don't face much RNG but Dark Souls as a series definitely has some stand-out examples. In Dark Souls 2, enemies eventually despawn. So if you're grinding out items, and the RNG God hates you, it's possible to despawn all the enemies of a certain type and never get what you're aiming for. I think in that situation there should be guaranteed drops on the last run before a despawn. Make each enemy guaranteed to drop a piece of armor, and another one guaranteed to drop their weapon before they despawn

Dark Souls 3 has a similar issue with covenant items. Since Dark Souls covenants are usually pretty broken, certain covenants (Blue Sentinels before some more recent patches) had to grind out rare covenant drops from enemies. And it was obviously only a small percentile chance since people would have to spend hours just collecting a few. And in most cases you'd need 30 or more to get the final reward in a covenant

Another big one that stuck out in my mind was the item collection in Xenoblade Chronicles. Every time you load a zone, all the little items strewn around were random. But some of them were ridiculously rare. So you'd get 200 of one item, and none of another that you needed to complete a page in the collectopedia. Infuriating for completionists

[Del Murder]

Random drops from plentiful areas/enemies are fine with me, but I really hate when a rare enemy or quest has a rare drop. If the game wants you to go through a bunch of steps to get to this item then they should just give you the item rather than make it random.

Also, random loot from chests is a huge pet peeve of mine.

[Spuuky]

In Dark Souls 2, enemies eventually despawn. So if you're grinding out items, and the RNG God hates you, it's possible to despawn all the enemies of a certain type and never get what you're aiming for. I think in that situation there should be guaranteed drops on the last run before a despawn. Make each enemy guaranteed to drop a piece of armor, and another one guaranteed to drop their weapon before they despawnThere are multiple ways to respawn the enemies, though. At least three (Bonfire Ascetics, NG+, Covenant of Champions).

[Rocket Edge]

Just say you've a 50%, or 1% chance of obtaining an item, if you don't get it within 4 chances (50% item), or 200 tries (1% item) then I think you should obtain the the item by default. RNG can be cruel and off-putting.

[Karifean]

RNG can be a good way to shake up the game to make every new game feel unique and different from the rest. However that particular application of it is often ruined by the combination of information (you know that you can get X good item here) and save scumming (you can repeatedly try until you get it). It's rare to see it being done well.

I've been playing Persona 3 just now and it has some of the best and worst RNG I've seen recently. Best is the Monad equipment. You'll rarely get many of them and farming them is such a pain in the ass that you're probably just not gonna do it. But what you do get, you can use. It's fun to have, but not really a problem if you don't have it since the chance of getting what you want is so astronomically low anyways (it's too bad the equipment isn't actually the best in the game though). But worst is the insane reliance on hit/miss and crit chances. The fact that I have to have Homunculi or Null Light+Dark on my main character or be at risk of being instantly killed is goddamn silly. This wouldn't even be that bad if the enemies used, say, third tier instakill spells that had a 100% hit rate - that would make it so much less tempting to roll with pure offense to minimize enemy turns but leave yourself open to the occasional Mudoon/Hamaon with just Endure so you can survive one. Also, with how unbelievably powerful hitting weaknesses or getting crits is in this game, losing a fight to a series of lucky crit or unlucky miss rolls is just the worst. A lot of enemies also at times seemed built around giving them just a random assortment of mediocre to superpowerful abilities (Change Relic with Magarula, help) which made a lot of the fights feel like "better hope the enemy doesn't use this skill too much!" praying.

[Galuf]

Now im scared of persona. The miss and crit rng of pokemon mystery dungeon already pissed me off that sounds worse though lol

[Wolf Kanno]

It's not as bad as it sounds, it's just very memorable when it does happen because it always catches you off guard, and technically you can build units to deal with the game's cheap shots if you spend enough time with Fusion. At least Persona doesn't have back attacks and enemy reinforcements, like the mainline games have. You haven't lived until you get accidentally back attacked and watch the enemies murder your party or defeat a hard group of enemies only for a freaking Aeon/Deity class demon show up afterwards as reinforcements to pummel your weakened party.

For the question, I don't mind RNG within reason. Like Del, I'm not a fan of super rare drops from super rare enemy shenanigans and I don't like randomized chests either. With that said, I'm not against spending some time to grind enemies for a particular drop within reason, and this is also why I generally like having thief type characters in RPGs to help. If their is a way to boost drop rates, I'm usually for it unless it's a requirement to make a 0.001% drop go up to 1%. At that point the developers can go screw themselves.

Where RNG does get a bit weird for me is in action games where bosses can go from being absolute nightmares to something manageable. Especially annoying in fighting games, where bosses tend to fluctuate between precognitive levels of combat to simply letting you use their face as a punching bag.

[Fox]

I love using RNG in game systems. But only ever a little bit at a time, you know? As a general rule, the bigger the event you're rolling for, the worse an idea it becomes. Let's say you're fighting a dungeon boss in an RPG (maybe even an online one, you heathens); every attack there is probably a little bit of a dice roll to determine the damage you deal. Maybe the minimum will be 500 and the maximum 550. If you get a bad roll and only do 500 damage... no biggy. You'll be attacking again in a couple of seconds. Over the course of the fight those rolls will even themselves out to be virtually unnoticeable. Even if the odds of dealing the higher values are very small, because it has such a tiny impact moment to moment you're unlikely to care.

When you defeat the boss, however, he drops loot. If you miss it, you will be furious. It's just too big an event, and in my opinion having things like random loot drops is almost universally bad design. There are exceptions, as with all things, but I'm generally not a fan of it in those instances.

[Galuf]

I love using RNG in game systems. But only ever a little bit at a time, you know? As a general rule, the bigger the event you're rolling for, the worse an idea it becomes. Let's say you're fighting a dungeon boss in an RPG (maybe even an online one, you heathens); every attack there is probably a little bit of a dice roll to determine the damage you deal. Maybe the minimum will be 500 and the maximum 550. If you get a bad roll and only do 500 damage... no biggy. You'll be attacking again in a couple of seconds. Over the course of the fight those rolls will even themselves out to be virtually unnoticeable. Even if the odds of dealing the higher values are very small, because it has such a tiny impact moment to moment you're unlikely to care.

When you defeat the boss, however, he drops loot. If you miss it, you will be furious. It's just too big an event, and in my opinion having things like random loot drops is almost universally bad design. There are exceptions, as with all things, but I'm generally not a fan of it in those instances.

oh yes exactly. Damage range is fine (unless its like quina in ff9 where the gap is much much bigger) but loot like that is dumb. I remember there was an ff like.... oh yeah ffxii.only not bosses but one a time chests. Geez you could rant about those chests alll day

[Fox]

Yeah I love FFXII but smurf those chests.

"Where do I get this Zodiac Weapon?"
"Oh it didn't drop for you in the first dungeon"

"...I'm sorry what?"

[krissy]

from software can lick my arngus
ill still play the games but f drop rates seriously

[Vyk]

Now im scared of persona. The miss and crit rng of pokemon mystery dungeon already pissed me off that sounds worse though lol

Sadly this is why I quit Persona 5 a couple weeks ago. And I'm only just now starting to get tempted into picking it back up. They are nice enough to let you retry boss battles. And its not like i was a bad player. I didn't miss a guard against a weakness or even get hit for a weakness. That would have been my fault and I would have been fine with that. My thing was I got three game overs and lost an hour of progress each time because of a critical hit from a normal enemy. Which gives them a free turn. And of course they attack the same person again. The leader. Which is instant game over. Three times

Like Wolf said, there are ways to mitigate it, but grinding is a chore in persona games since you get 12 experience points and the team splits that. So everyone gets three experience. And I was only in the second area so its not like I've discovered a multitude of personas strong to physical attack

[Jinx]

two words:

coven weapon

two more words:

emergency mission

one more word:

diadem

[Galuf]

two words:

coven weapon

two more words:

emergency mission

one more word:

diadem

One word: Sophia.

One more word: EX.
(Naw but the EM in diadem is the worst rng ive sen in that game so far)

[Vyk]

In Dark Souls 2, enemies eventually despawn. So if you're grinding out items, and the RNG God hates you, it's possible to despawn all the enemies of a certain type and never get what you're aiming for. I think in that situation there should be guaranteed drops on the last run before a despawn. Make each enemy guaranteed to drop a piece of armor, and another one guaranteed to drop their weapon before they despawnThere are multiple ways to respawn the enemies, though. At least three (Bonfire Ascetics, NG+, Covenant of Champions).
I missed this one. I'm not an anti-spawn person, I get why they did it, and it doesn't really bother me when it happens. I guess my main problem, and why I bring it up is the fact that you can grind out enemies in an area 8 - 12 times (I've heard varying quotes on how many times they re-spawn before disappearing permanently) and never get what you're aiming for. That just means the drop rate is WAY too low. And I don't think people should have to New Game+ their entire game, or zone just to get another chance at stuff. The real problem shows in Dark Souls 3 when they "fixed" this issue and enemies don't despawn anymore. But when you need 30 of an item that only has a 0.1% drop rate, I've heard horror stories of people grinding out 3 enemies for 6 - 8 hours to get what they need. Which is just ridiculous. And New Game+ sadly doesn't even fix that issue. And that's usually using the best item find equipment. So 6 hour grind is the least you can hope for in some cases

Which means its entirely possible to have a similar issue in Dark Souls 2. Though I don't know covenant items as well in that game. I know there's one that takes 50 items to max out. And if you need that from enemy drops, God help you lol

Either way, my problem is more drop rate RNG rather than the de-spawn thingy

[Formalhaut]

Ugh, most of the time RNG can go die. FFXII probably had some of the worst examples with chests with low spawn rate and low content rates that compound upon each other to create like a 0.01% chance of getting something. It's pretty terrible.

Oh and FFIV has the worst monster drops. I just finished actually from getting a rainbow pudding from a flan creature to progress a sidequest. 0.4% chance. Like, it was so terrible. and apparently that's not even the only item with such horrendous rates either.

I mean, I don't mind something having a low-ish drop rate if the monster is common enough. A fairly common creature with even a 5% drop rate seems fair, especially if you can boost the chance somehow. But if it is a boss, or a super-rare enemy, then it just sucks the enjoyment out of a game for me.

It's one of the things I never understand with MMOs.

[Spuuky]

It's easy to understand with MMOs. They're games that, by their nature, must be designed to never end; RNG drops are one of the only ways to achieve that.