This has nothing to do with the presence or absence of randomness.They are a singular intellectual challenge, not an adaptive one. Here, the Player (or rather, the Participant) never reacts, never has to adapt, because it's a puzzle, not a challenge. Figure out the solution, implement it, win. The other side moves, but that's just fakery, not actual challenge. There is a given optimum solution, and you figure it out.
Quit talking like you know shit.This is disappointing. But it's my fault. I expected too much from the codex.
You haven't even read the article I posted.Why you arguing about something that you don't understand except through the lens of "that's how it's been"?
Have you ever read the history of any field whatsoever? It's all full of stupidity. Dice rolls are just another example.
You might not have realized. But that is what we have been doing here the whole time.Sorry, but you don't just ask people to read random articles or books in arguments. Either you can summarize it in a paragraph or you don't understand it and it's therefore irrelevant.
I think I've made a pretty good show of addressing the points raised here in a simple and self-contained way and I expect the same from others.
And like I said. It has been summarized many times here already.I'll repeat myself because it's very important that you understand this, not just for my sake, but for those you'll interact with in the future.
You can't ask people in an argument to read a longer text. You have to summarize it and say how it relates to what they're saying. If you can't do this then it means that you didn't understand it, and since there is always much more material that doesn't relate to the argument than material that does, it's probably irrelevant.
Now that I've gone out of my way to spell out an absolute basic rule of debate perhaps you can rise above name-calling and ad hominems, which is unfortunately all you've provided so far.
You talk but you don't listen, apparently.
Which is exactly what probability is.You talk but you don't listen, apparently.
You don't need randomness to have risk management. You can hide some information of the game state from the players, or design a system that's too complex to work out in real-time, which is pretty much anything more complex than tic-tac-toe.
The player or AI acting under uncertainty is very different in gameplay effects from dice rolls in chance-to-hit or damage.Which is exactly what probability is.
You don't even need to employ concrete examples. In your previous reply, you advocate for an actual black box (ie. "hide some information of the game state from the players"), while apparently suffering from the notion that randomness itself is a black box. If you know the probability of an action, basic counting techniques are sufficient to make predictions about gameplay. That some games are made with small chances for utter player failure is no indictment upon probability as a whole, but an indictment upon the failure of the designer to understand and systematically implement probabilities that would promote satisfying gameplay. That the designer and player both remain ignorant of relevant methods of prediction is of little consequence to the reality that probability is not just something that, as a rule, frustrates the player.The player or AI acting under uncertainty is very different in gameplay effects from dice rolls in chance-to-hit or damage.Which is exactly what probability is.
The latter is frustrating for players and makes it difficult for developers to design challenges.
I've deliberately avoided concrete examples because it's more fun for me to argue this way, but I'll point out one: Hammer & Sickle. They tried to design "puzzle" like encounters, but a lot of the maps start you out in close combat with several enemies, and you have to get the dice rolls to disable them or they'll almost certainly destroy you on their turn. The randomness destroys the otherwise pretty cool encounters and makes them stupid and frustrating reload fests.
It's a shame because the game is otherwise very good.
That is usually bad design but sometimes that is intended.If you have dice rolls then sometimes the player will fail through no fault of their own
Sigh. The dice do not know who should or shouldn't win. It's the job of the game designer or GM to responsibly dole out challenges. The satisfactory solution here is to actually understand probability and leverage that understanding in designing challenges as well as in tackling challenges as a player. If the probability is poorly implemented, don't play the game!I don't know what you're talking about. If you have dice rolls then sometimes the player will fail through no fault of their own and sometimes they'll succeed when they shouldn't have. There's no satisfactory solution to this. You can give the player more resources than they'll need on average to compensate for some bad rolls, but that reduces challenge for the average experience. Do I need to say that that's really bad?
The best thing you can do is optimize saving and loading times.
Exactly! Occasional failure creates an interesting emergent narrative. One that no one (perhaps even the designer) expected to play out. Not many great stories / films / etc. involved things always going smoothly. The best ones have a give-and-take between success and things going horribly wrong.The Role Playing part of RPGs implies some sort of narrative, and sometimes that is just how the story goes.If you have dice rolls then sometimes the player will fail through no fault of their own
To get the moment of clawing your way out of a desperate situation you must have a system that put you into that situation. The player not being fully in control is the way to do it.
That is usually bad design but sometimes that is intended.
The world doesn't always align with what you want.
The Role Playing part of RPGs implies some sort of narrative, and sometimes that is just how the story goes.
To get the moment of clawing your way out of a desperate situation you must have a system that put you into that situation. The player not being fully in control is the way to do it.
Go play FTL and get back to us.That is usually bad design but sometimes that is intended.
The world doesn't always align with what you want.
The Role Playing part of RPGs implies some sort of narrative, and sometimes that is just how the story goes.
To get the moment of clawing your way out of a desperate situation you must have a system that put you into that situation. The player not being fully in control is the way to do it.
Really? You honestly believe that losing a combat scenario in an RPG is a way to progress the narrative, when in almost every RPG losing combat is a failure state which requires the player to do the combat again? I suppose that if you're a level 60 LARP master you might find a modicum of enjoyment in pondering the consequences of your party/character losing a battle, but the actual narrative of the game you're playing does not change. You win or you lose, and only one of those results actually progresses the 'narrative'.