wfmag.cc \ 35Because they’re truly random, dice can
heavily influence who wins – some players
can just be luckier than others – which can be
frustrating if you’re aiming more towards skill-
based gameplay.
One way to mitigate this effect is to use
multiple dice in each roll, because the more
you roll and add together, the more they
will average out (called a ‘bell curve’ – see
Figure 1). Alternatively, you can use dice with
more sides – like Dungeons
& Dragons’ d20 – so there’s
more granularity to the
possible results.
As opposed to the true
randomness of dice, a pack
of playing cards can be considered ‘balanced
randomness’, because each time you draw a
card, you remove it from the deck. As a result,
you’re increasing the chances of drawing each
of the other cards, meaning an unlucky draw
will sooner or later be balanced by a good
draw (because if you draw enough cards, you
eventually get through the entire deck).
You see balanced randomness in video games
when they increase the odds of something good
happening every time you get a bad result, until
eventually you’re guaranteed the good result.
For instance, games with loot packs can increase
the likelihood of you drawing a legendary prize
each time a pack fails to give you one.
In short, going for a pure random system can
lead to harsh results – if the game rolls virtual
dice to see if an attack hits, it could theoretically
miss every single time. Some players consider
balanced randomness to be cheating, but from
a creator’s perspective, it helps games play ‘fairly’
by increasing the chance of a hit for each miss
(the recent XCOM games do this, for example).
STATISTICS VERSUS
PROBABILITY
OK, we’ve covered luck, chance, risk, and both
forms of randomness, so let’s wrap up with the
differences between probability and statistics.
To the Maths Cave!
In an oversimplification that’ll cause a
mathematician to burst into indignant flames,
I class probability as looking into the future, and
statistics as looking at the past. You use them
in different circumstances,
but they’re both useful
in trying to work out the
numbers you should plug
into your game.
If statistics involve looking
at collected data to see what’s happened in the
past (either in your game – called analytics – or
in similar situations to yours), then probability is
using calculations to work out the likelihood of
something that hasn’t happened yet. Games with no elements of
chance at all, like Into the
Breach, feel like puzzle
games, with each setup
begging to be solved in the
optimum way. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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xxxxxxxTUMBLING DICE
Virtual ‘dice’ are an interesting problem for video
games, because while players will accept incredible
swings of chance from real, tangible dice, they’ll
always be suspicious of virtual ones. No matter
how much you reassure players that your game’s
dice-rolling is completely random, they’ll never
believe you. As a result, I tend to favour using
artificially balanced randomness, as it leads to
‘fairer’ gameplay, and players naturally assume
that’s what’s happening anyway.
“Going for a pure
random system can
lead to harsh results” Figure 1: Named after its shape,
a bell curve reflects that adding
multiple dice together means
there’s a higher chance of
getting an average result.Skill versus chance: using luck in gamesToolbox