Useful! From EC:
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Meh… okay, some of it is just because they keep talking about hearthstone, and part of it is probably because it’s way too short for the topic being covered. I get to the end of these RNG videos and wonder if I actually took something away from it.
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I feel like I took nothing from this video which seems fairly normal for me with this series. Either their explanations simply don’t click for me or they’re covering far too much at far too rapid a pace. This is why I generally don’t like video tutorials.
What is the goal of randomness? Simply to add variation to the game as yet another mechanic you need to learn to work with or around in order to be successful. It may even allow you to beat an opponent who is far better skilled than you.
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Yeah I don’t get into all of these videos and so forth trying to focus on every detail of game design. It just seems rather pointless to me. Randomization is just something you use when you need to use it. Plain and simple. It isn’t locked into any one use case. If you have a game with a character firing a gun you can jazz it up a bit by applying some slight randomness to the velocities of the bullets. Makes it look more interesting. If you have sound FX, and this could be anything from the footsteps of a character to most any sound it can get annoying hearing the exact same sound over and over again so you just apply a tiny range of randomization to the pitch and this can make a big difference for the better. Of course, obvious stuff like randomizing the time an enemy reacts to an event, the path it takes or better still providing multiple options for it choose in the current scenario and introducing a small random chance for it to choose one of the alternatives. It is all just basic common sense and people trying so hard to put this stuff “into a bottle” is just annoying really.
As you said the goal is just to add variation to some element of the game. Basically to keep it from becoming overly repetitive, overly predictable or quite simply stale.
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Yeah I’m with Gar. If I’m going to listen to someone, it will be someone I admire based on their existing body of work in game development. TOP men. And women. And all the bits in between I can’t be bothered to be PC about. Love you guys too, there’s just too many.
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Yea, deciding to call that a “spectrum” was a bad idea, because spectrums have an infinite series between any 2 points on it that you could pick. In the quest for finding an identity without enumerating the types, they’re only going to get more lost. If not 1 or 0, maybe 1.5. Maybe 1.51 or 1.52. Maybe 1.511 or 1.5112. The variables in place show it to be an uphill battle even if they are widely accepted 
The point - how can you be politically correct on something that is not a finite series? If everyone wants to be addressed uniquely, there are an infinite number of addresses to be made and we’ll still be offending some people 
as for the topic…
RNG by itself is no fun. Let’s look at diablo 3 as an example. Kill a boss, get nothing. Kill some underling, get several legendary quality items. Some players go minutes between finding new legendary items. Some players, years later, have yet to see certain items! RNG by itself for the whole mechanic just sucks the fun and purpose out of everything.
There should always be bounds in place to make things reasonable.
EXAMPLE
50% chance for something to happen suggests that over a long enough period of time, things happen 1 out of 2 times. But in a game you might not want that to happen so frequently. You know that in true randomness, something with a 99% chance to happen could not happen hundreds of times in a row. I think that blizzard did this to diablo. The attempt to appear to be truly random has added extra random on the random so your 50% chances for things to happen can fail indefinitely.
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Don’t forget about numbers greater than infinity!
Randomness is used for time reasons, like when you know you want 1/10 enemies to drop a certain item, because each enemy takes 6 seconds to find and kill and you want to make a quest to find 3 items take 3 minutes.
It is used when you are simulating something too complex and you just need a quick abstraction. Like above, why do only 1/10 enemies have the item? You could invent an entire trade economy to figure out enemy inventories… or you could just say, eh, 1/10 enemies have these.
But the best part is sometimes random numbers surprise you. Nothing wierder than something that happens 1/50 times happening 3 times in a row.
Random is your friend. Learn to use it well.
That’s just to fuel the skinner box and keep people coked up. For the most part it’s not even an aspect of gameplay.
Actually, so far no one has mentioned a real reason for random elements in gameplay, and it’s not not that complicated. Does the player have a plan? rolls dice Not anymore. There you go. It’s taking deterministic play, and forcing adaption to be a part of it.
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Unless your plan takes into account reasonable expectations of and the constraints of the random values. Remember… it’s not truly random.
It probably is time for them to move on from hearthstone. They’ve been on the game for a while. Still, it’s a nice change from dark souls. And it is one of the few games around with all of the numbers exposed so obviously.
I do enjoy the extra credits guys. But you’ve got to remember they are entertainers as much as serious game designers.
On range itself I always find the civ series interesting. Early play tests indicated that true random combat didn’t satisfy players. If a combat has 50% odds that means that there is a 25% chance of losing twice in a row. And a 12.5% chance of loosing three times in succession. That hardly seemed fair to players. So the game doesn’t use true random rolls at all. The rolls are weighted according to the historical rolls.
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I just had a great idea! But the joy in watching everyone fight over it is worth more to me than money, so I’ll post it publicly in the forums
A die or dice that have a little gyroscope and wireless transmitter and knows which direction was up, and it transmits the number it is to whatever application is listening. You can use it for anything, just write the application(s) to listen for that emit event. Maybe have it transmit to several applications at once. Maybe use it to build a digital board game with fair rolls not predetermined by [digital] rng.
I like the idea.
@Tomnnn : You should check out Golem Arcana. I believe it uses a similar concept.
Well I was more focused on dice that could broadcast their dice rolls over bluetooth / wifi than having a digitally enhanced board game - though that sounds nice too.
I wonder what it would cost to build a die with little tech in it to detect which direction is up, or the opposite of which direction is receiving the least amount of light.
You can use up to ten of these and they’re backlit. Talk about fancy. 
http://www.gizmag.com/scosche-smartroll-bluetooth-enabled-dice/27892/
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@Tomnnn - Remember how I am always carrying on about how anything you can think of already exists?
So why don’t Replicators exist? 
If your playing a board game like risk and its all about dice rolling, theres nothing better if you are beating the pants off the attacker (lets say you had like 20 men and you won with 3 defenders). If you are playing binding of issac, sometimes you are going to get some runs that are so overpowered or underpowered and thats part of the charm, if things are always “balanced” or too similar then the game will quickly become boring. Its probably games like Binding of issac people playing the game over 1000s of times and some games are like 1 and done.
I havent played hearthstone before, but I bet people arent playing just 1 time but hundredsif you are going to want keep people interested your going to want something that will shake up the gameplay (so you dont little delta changes but big ones).
It’s not future o’ clock yet.