Are some things that you would rather be governed by randomness and some things that you would not?
I'm struggling with how you're framing the question. Being "governed by randomness", and not having a 100% certain outcome are not equivalent in my mind. Help me understand what you mean - and this may bring our two perspectives closer together.
Is there anything, anything that you can do in the game that you would prefer to have a 100% certain outcome for? Mounting a horse, drinking a potion, opening a door, walking 10 yards forward on flat ground, using a /wave emote, whether or not your gear stays equipped, whether or not your meal is secretly rotten, etc. anything. Or, would you rather to have full uncertainty, like in real life?
Is there anything, anything that you can do in the game that you would prefer to have a 100% certain outcome for?
Sure - all the system functions (e.g. logging, chatting, etc.), person to person communications (e.g. emotes), guild functions, group functions, raid functions, etc
But interactions with the world? I think it would make the game more interesting and immersive if there was a small, even TINY chance that things you take for granted could be uncertain. Maybe 1 out of every 100,000 healing pots just slips from your hands. Or that Goldthorn took an extra attempt to pick. Or damn, that crafting attempt fizzled. Non-zero means non-zero, it doesn't mean statistically significant, and doesn't mean governs everything. But entropy as part of a living breathing world? Yeah, sign me up.
See, I don't think it's more immersive if sometimes when I take a few steps forward I fall. I think it's annoying. I think the game would be better if that just didn't happen. I want the movement to be crisp, not very-occasionally-clumsy. I'd hazard that a lot of people would agree with me. I'd hazard that if the devs started making people randomly fall for the immersion, people would be livid.
Once you buy into the idea of there being some things that make for a more fun game if they're deterministic, then we can talk about which things belong in which category. Currently, Ashes has deterministic movement and random abilities.
It sounds like you would prefer for all of the abilities to stay random, but also for the movement and whether or not you successfully get on your horse to become random too (allegedly). I would prefer for the movement to stay deterministic, and for someof the abilities to be moved to the deterministic column.
Sure it may be an over exaggerated example, but if we're focusing on the topic of RNG, especially applied to CC, then my over exaggerated example still has a CHANCE of happening BECAUSE of certain inherent RNG implementations. When introducing RNG to CC inherently to a game's mechanics the chance of my over exaggerated example happening in a game is never zero, even when countering with a build like how I said in my previous post.
Not in any meaningful way.
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DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Is there anything, anything that you can do in the game that you would prefer to have a 100% certain outcome for? Mounting a horse, drinking a potion, opening a door, walking 10 yards forward on flat ground, using a /wave emote, whether or not your gear stays equipped, whether or not your meal is secretly rotten, etc. anything. Or, would you rather to have full uncertainty, like in real life?
No. Shit happens.
Having a chance to slip off a horse while mounting or taking damage for a mishap while drinking a beer/potion, or stumbling over a pebble while running adds to immersion in the story.
Sure it may be an over exaggerated example, but if we're focusing on the topic of RNG, especially applied to CC, then my over exaggerated example still has a CHANCE of happening BECAUSE of certain inherent RNG implementations. When introducing RNG to CC inherently to a game's mechanics the chance of my over exaggerated example happening in a game is never zero, even when countering with a build like how I said in my previous post.
Not in any meaningful way.
I actually have a question as it pertains to this.
Do you believe in 'unlucky people'?
If you flip a coin 10 times, and need to get a Heads on this coin for some reason, but you flip all Tails, the odds of this happening were 1 in 10,000 or so.
In Statistics, this generally doesn't mean 'every 10,000 people who flip a coin 10 times will have a person for whom it lands on Tails every time', but the chances that there is at least one person who has this outcome are now nontrivial.
In certain design structures we label those people as 'unlucky' and 'check the odds of there being unlucky people'.
So, just to be clear, we can agree that in a game of 10,000 players, if you gave them all a 'puzzle' where they had 10 tries to flip a coin to get something, there's 'a player whose experience results in them not receiving what 99.999% of other players receive'?
This is just 'clarifying terms and beliefs', so feel free to ignore it.
Having a chance to slip off a horse while mounting or taking damage for a mishap while drinking a beer/potion, or stumbling over a pebble while running adds to immersion in the story.
Right, so the game does not currently support stumbling over pubbles while running (thank goodness). I think in the future before you try to sell people on CC's having a %chance to fail, you should try to sell them on having a %chance to trip over pebbles while running and see how that goes. Maybe it'll open your eyes! Maybe if you can agree that RNG is good in some cases but not others, the conversation will be a lot easier, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
edited August 2021
I would probably say I don't truly believe in luck in the real world.
I expect Luck and Fate to be factors in a High Fantasy RPG.
Might even be that you can min/max Luck/Fate in your character build.
I don't really know what "needs to get a Heads" means.
Again, sometimes shit happens and you won't get a Heads when you "need" it.
Even more likely you might not get that Heads in a world with Luck, Fate and gods roaming the planet.
That makes for great story-telling.
Total off-topic aside. Your choice of verbs made this a really unusual question. I know how intentional you are, so I'm assuming this was also just as intentional. It opens up a remarkable can of worms than asking something like 'Do unlucky people exist?'
Total off-topic aside. Your choice of verbs made this a really unusual question. I know how intentional you are, so I'm assuming this was also just as intentional. It opens up a remarkable can of worms than asking something like 'Do unlucky people exist?'
Actually that's a result of something else. I don't actually 'speak English' normally, nor do I normally 'think in English', at least not in the standard word structures you'd think of.
Most of my entertainment is in Japanese or Spanish, and many of my coworkers were Russian before, and the way they form their sentences is quite different.
So while I'm normally very intentional about it, in my own mind the construct was.
We can exempt basic movement too (including jumping).
So what is it about movement and jumping that you would prefer for it to not be random? I know for me, it's that the game would be less fun if I can sometimes trip or not-jump than if that stuff just worked all of the time. Is it the same for you?
RNG can be fun, but:
*imagines Mr GnW spamming side special in hopes of winning*
*imagines playing pokemon against someone spamming sheercold and horn drill and nothing else*
I feel like RNG on javelin is like RNg with death.
I wish I were deep and tragic
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DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Had to google this. Kadir beneath Mo Moteh means "failure or inability to communicate or understand; derisive in connotation." in Tamarian from Star Trek. Unless the failing to understand is on your end, I don't think I've done any failing myself, but I'm open to being wrong, of course.
From the top - you seem to want to play a faithful MMO port of a table-top RPG like D&D 2e or gurps. I wrote that here:
I don't think there's anything wrong with the game that I think Dygz is describing (which sounds like a faithful MMO version of AD&D or gurps)! it's not a game I'd be interesting in playing or discussing, personally.
Those games are less extreme about randomness than you seem to be. D&D doesn't force players to roll acrobatics checks for walking across the flat ground to see if they stumble on pebbles.
Even more abstractly, both ashes of creation and dungeons and dragons are still games. They can find structure in their gaming by attempting to simulate reality, but they don't have to. They only should when doing so is more fun. Is sometimes tripping over pebbles immersive? Yes! Will it get annoying? Also yes! Does the amount of total benefit from the immersion outweigh the amount of total cost from the annoyance across the target audience? Massively no!
When we talk about decisions like this "should we add tripping to forward movement" or "should we replace the %miss to high-impact cc with %reduced duration", there's this implicit goal that we're trying to optimize for that never gets defined called "making the game better". Everyone has different definitions of what that is, but sometimes one change will fit almost everyone's definition and you're golden. Other times, we have to be more specific. Do we mean "the game will be more appealing to the mass market", or "the game will be more immersive", or "the game will be more competitively viable", or "the game will be more fun", etc.
I would hazard that by most definitions, people would be psyched if random tripping was a bug in the game somehow and they patched it out. I think that %miss -> %duration would get mixed reviews and those reviews would be coorelated with player skill.
So, do you feel understood and that we just fundamentally disagree?
The skill that's favored in RPGs is character building; not player twitch skills.
This is an extremely trivializable skill. The most effective character builds will immediately get propagated through the internet and copied and the only thing differentiating players will be how well you can pilot it. This isn't like your home game of D&D where the rest of the world will never find out about your secretly optimal genius build. If your character is more effective than everyone else's, you will be inspected without your consent, the footage of your character performing will be studied, and copied, and then you'll lose to people with your build but better at pressing buttons.
Further, why do you get to decide this for the genre?
From the top - you seem to want to play a faithful MMO port of a table-top RPG like D&D 2e or gurps. I wrote that here:
Yeah, I think this is all about you learning that just because something seems some way to you, that does not make it objectively true.
I can imagine working to build resistance to poison. I have never heard of anyone being able to acclimate to poison in a way that it reduces the duration. If the poison causes paralysis, people can resist becoming fully paralyzed, but I've never heard of anyone building up a tolerance such that they always become fully paralyzed but the duration of the paralysis lessens due to acclimating to the poison.
I think eventually I'll be able to get Dygz to agree that some things probably shouldn't be random (really hoping that I can get them to agree that we shouldn't have a chance to trip when running forward, for my sanity's sake). Even if they would prefer it, that it wouldn't be good for the game.
I'm thinking that once I get buy in there, I can argue that they believe that some things should be random and some things shouldn't, just like I do, just that we disagree about which things should be which, and that's okay. We disagree so fundamentally (because we want such different things out of the game, and find different things fun) that it's not worth talking about.
A stretch goal with Dygz is to convince them that character building as the main differentiating skill isn't healthy for a MMO. I think it'll take some doing, but I think I can get there if they're willing to engage. I've got a lot of ammunition here.
I think CROW3's position is a softer version of Dygz's and we're most of the way there already!
I'm really happy with the way the conversation with @JamesSunderland went - it was a pleasure
From the top - you seem to want to play a faithful MMO port of a table-top RPG like D&D 2e or gurps. I wrote that here:
Yeah, I think this is all about you learning that just because something seems some way to you, that does not make it objectively true.
I can imagine working to build resistance to poison. I have never heard of anyone being able to acclimate to poison in a way that it reduces the duration. If the poison causes paralysis, people can resist becoming fully paralyzed, but I've never heard of anyone building up a tolerance such that they always become fully paralyzed but the duration of the paralysis lessens due to acclimating to the poison.
I disagree Dygz,
You can't use this argument because I've never seen someone conjur a fireball.
I think eventually I'll be able to get Dygz to agree that some things probably shouldn't be random (really hoping that I can get them to agree that we shouldn't have a chance to trip when running forward, for my sanity's sake). Even if they would prefer it, that it wouldn't be good for the game.
I'm thinking that once I get buy in there, I can argue that they believe that some things should be random and some things shouldn't, just like I do, just that we disagree about which things should be which, and that's okay. We disagree so fundamentally (because we want such different things out of the game, and find different things fun) that it's not worth talking about.
A stretch goal with Dygz is to convince them that character building as the main differentiating skill isn't healthy for a MMO. I think it'll take some doing, but I think I can get there if they're willing to engage. I've got a lot of ammunition here.
I think CROW3's position is a softer version of Dygz's and we're most of the way there already!
I'm really happy with the way the conversation with @JamesSunderland went - it was a pleasure
And I will be here, watching and learning from you.
I can imagine working to build resistance to poison. I have never heard of anyone being able to acclimate to poison in a way that it reduces the duration. If the poison causes paralysis, people can resist becoming fully paralyzed, but I've never heard of anyone building up a tolerance such that they always become fully paralyzed but the duration of the paralysis lessens due to building up tolerance.
Is this an appeal to how things work in real life? It's trivial to write the code that modifies the duration of a buff based on a stat. This is how the duration of stuns are modified by gear and racial abilities in world of warcraft.
Also, I notice that you ignored the rest of the post again
DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
edited August 2021
I understand what you mean. Fireball is different.
I'm going to try to parse the nuance for you in a subsequent edit.
I think what you're saying is that in a High Fantasy world it's possible that people would be able to build duration tolerance.
What I'm saying is that resistance tends to be an internal function and duration an outside of the body function (for something like a stun).
A boxer can build themselves up to resist getting stunned, but I don't know how a boxer builds themselves up to lessen the duration of being stunned.
I'm not saying it's impossible to do it and say "It works cause magic".
I'm just pointing out the difference between resistance and duration and why it's likely that designers would not make Duration the character stat instead of Resistance the character stat. More likely they would have both rather than have just Duration and not Resistance.
A boxer can build themselves up to resist getting stunned, but I don't know how a boxer builds themselves up to lessen the duration of being stunned.
When you get punched in the nose, it's not like you're "stunned for 4 seconds or not at all", tougher guys might only be staggered for 1 second, or 2 seconds or w/e. Have you ever gotten sick at the same time as a family member but gotten over than it more quickly than them? You have higher flu resistance! You still got the flu, but your duration was less!
Even in TTPRGs, champions in pathfinder 2e have selectable feats that reduce the duration that you're feared (once you fail a will save) by a flat 1 round.
But also, and more importantly, we don't have to model video games after real life. All we have to do is make fun games. If we want to make it so that a character build reduces cc duration, we can do that.
I'm really happy with the way the conversation with @JamesSunderland went - it was a pleasure
I'm also happy with the way the conversation went, as i believe my knowledge about CC skill balancing was improved, because through your opinion of what a "High Impact CC" is, i'm now able to understand that some types of variables(mainly its CD and Duration in reference to the game TTK) in a Hard CC skill, can by design make the skill application to be unreasonable under a RNG setting, and to make much more sense being always applied.
Aren't we all sinners?
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DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
When you get punched in the nose, it's not like you're "stunned for 4 seconds or not at all", tougher guys might only be staggered for 1 second, or 2 seconds or w/e. Have you ever gotten sick at the same time as a family member but gotten over than it more quickly than them? You have higher flu resistance! You still got the flu, but your duration was less!
Even in TTPRGs, champions in pathfinder 2e have selectable feats that reduce the duration that you're feared (once you fail a will save) by a flat 1 round.
But also, and more importantly, we don't have to model video games after real life. All we have to do is make fun games. If we want to make it so that a character build reduces cc duration, we can do that.
You can build up tolerance for getting punched in the nose such that you are either stunned or not.
Stagger is different than stunned.
I can probably do things to help me resist getting sick.
If I do this beforehand, I will resist catching the illness... and I can probably do that fairly consistently.
Or if I do get sick, it will not be so bad that I end up not being able to get out of bed.
I'm not aware of being able to shorten the duration of the time I spend in bed once I'm literally stuck in bed.
Someone else might be able to bring me medicine or whatever to shorten the length of the duration.
But, I don't think people can build up their tolerance such that once they are bed-ridden, they can shorten the duration that they are bed-ridden.
Comments
I'm struggling with how you're framing the question. Being "governed by randomness", and not having a 100% certain outcome are not equivalent in my mind. Help me understand what you mean - and this may bring our two perspectives closer together.
Sure - all the system functions (e.g. logging, chatting, etc.), person to person communications (e.g. emotes), guild functions, group functions, raid functions, etc
But interactions with the world? I think it would make the game more interesting and immersive if there was a small, even TINY chance that things you take for granted could be uncertain. Maybe 1 out of every 100,000 healing pots just slips from your hands. Or that Goldthorn took an extra attempt to pick. Or damn, that crafting attempt fizzled. Non-zero means non-zero, it doesn't mean statistically significant, and doesn't mean governs everything. But entropy as part of a living breathing world? Yeah, sign me up.
Once you buy into the idea of there being some things that make for a more fun game if they're deterministic, then we can talk about which things belong in which category. Currently, Ashes has deterministic movement and random abilities.
It sounds like you would prefer for all of the abilities to stay random, but also for the movement and whether or not you successfully get on your horse to become random too (allegedly). I would prefer for the movement to stay deterministic, and for someof the abilities to be moved to the deterministic column.
Having a chance to slip off a horse while mounting or taking damage for a mishap while drinking a beer/potion, or stumbling over a pebble while running adds to immersion in the story.
FULL uncertainty is, again, absurdly binary.
I'm done.
GG
I actually have a question as it pertains to this.
Do you believe in 'unlucky people'?
If you flip a coin 10 times, and need to get a Heads on this coin for some reason, but you flip all Tails, the odds of this happening were 1 in 10,000 or so.
In Statistics, this generally doesn't mean 'every 10,000 people who flip a coin 10 times will have a person for whom it lands on Tails every time', but the chances that there is at least one person who has this outcome are now nontrivial.
In certain design structures we label those people as 'unlucky' and 'check the odds of there being unlucky people'.
So, just to be clear, we can agree that in a game of 10,000 players, if you gave them all a 'puzzle' where they had 10 tries to flip a coin to get something, there's 'a player whose experience results in them not receiving what 99.999% of other players receive'?
This is just 'clarifying terms and beliefs', so feel free to ignore it.
Right, so the game does not currently support stumbling over pubbles while running (thank goodness). I think in the future before you try to sell people on CC's having a %chance to fail, you should try to sell them on having a %chance to trip over pebbles while running and see how that goes. Maybe it'll open your eyes! Maybe if you can agree that RNG is good in some cases but not others, the conversation will be a lot easier, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
Agreed!
I expect Luck and Fate to be factors in a High Fantasy RPG.
Might even be that you can min/max Luck/Fate in your character build.
I don't really know what "needs to get a Heads" means.
Again, sometimes shit happens and you won't get a Heads when you "need" it.
Even more likely you might not get that Heads in a world with Luck, Fate and gods roaming the planet.
That makes for great story-telling.
Total off-topic aside. Your choice of verbs made this a really unusual question. I know how intentional you are, so I'm assuming this was also just as intentional. It opens up a remarkable can of worms than asking something like 'Do unlucky people exist?'
Actually that's a result of something else. I don't actually 'speak English' normally, nor do I normally 'think in English', at least not in the standard word structures you'd think of.
Most of my entertainment is in Japanese or Spanish, and many of my coworkers were Russian before, and the way they form their sentences is quite different.
So while I'm normally very intentional about it, in my own mind the construct was.
"Unlucky", 'think your opinion': exist?
RNG can be fun, but:
*imagines Mr GnW spamming side special in hopes of winning*
*imagines playing pokemon against someone spamming sheercold and horn drill and nothing else*
I feel like RNG on javelin is like RNg with death.
From the top - you seem to want to play a faithful MMO port of a table-top RPG like D&D 2e or gurps. I wrote that here:
Those games use randomness for a number of reasons that I wrote about in http://beaushinkle.xyz/posts/randomness-is-lazy
Those games are less extreme about randomness than you seem to be. D&D doesn't force players to roll acrobatics checks for walking across the flat ground to see if they stumble on pebbles.
Even more abstractly, both ashes of creation and dungeons and dragons are still games. They can find structure in their gaming by attempting to simulate reality, but they don't have to. They only should when doing so is more fun. Is sometimes tripping over pebbles immersive? Yes! Will it get annoying? Also yes! Does the amount of total benefit from the immersion outweigh the amount of total cost from the annoyance across the target audience? Massively no!
When we talk about decisions like this "should we add tripping to forward movement" or "should we replace the %miss to high-impact cc with %reduced duration", there's this implicit goal that we're trying to optimize for that never gets defined called "making the game better". Everyone has different definitions of what that is, but sometimes one change will fit almost everyone's definition and you're golden. Other times, we have to be more specific. Do we mean "the game will be more appealing to the mass market", or "the game will be more immersive", or "the game will be more competitively viable", or "the game will be more fun", etc.
I would hazard that by most definitions, people would be psyched if random tripping was a bug in the game somehow and they patched it out. I think that %miss -> %duration would get mixed reviews and those reviews would be coorelated with player skill.
So, do you feel understood and that we just fundamentally disagree?
----
edit:
this is still a loose end for me:
This is an extremely trivializable skill. The most effective character builds will immediately get propagated through the internet and copied and the only thing differentiating players will be how well you can pilot it. This isn't like your home game of D&D where the rest of the world will never find out about your secretly optimal genius build. If your character is more effective than everyone else's, you will be inspected without your consent, the footage of your character performing will be studied, and copied, and then you'll lose to people with your build but better at pressing buttons.
Further, why do you get to decide this for the genre?
Why does 5% reduced stun duration not sound like a build but 5% stun resist chance does? Such a strange hill to die on.
Timer still running.
I can imagine working to build resistance to poison. I have never heard of anyone being able to acclimate to poison in a way that it reduces the duration. If the poison causes paralysis, people can resist becoming fully paralyzed, but I've never heard of anyone building up a tolerance such that they always become fully paralyzed but the duration of the paralysis lessens due to acclimating to the poison.
I'm thinking that once I get buy in there, I can argue that they believe that some things should be random and some things shouldn't, just like I do, just that we disagree about which things should be which, and that's okay. We disagree so fundamentally (because we want such different things out of the game, and find different things fun) that it's not worth talking about.
A stretch goal with Dygz is to convince them that character building as the main differentiating skill isn't healthy for a MMO. I think it'll take some doing, but I think I can get there if they're willing to engage. I've got a lot of ammunition here.
I think CROW3's position is a softer version of Dygz's and we're most of the way there already!
I'm really happy with the way the conversation with @JamesSunderland went - it was a pleasure
I disagree Dygz,
You can't use this argument because I've never seen someone conjur a fireball.
And I will be here, watching and learning from you.
Is this an appeal to how things work in real life? It's trivial to write the code that modifies the duration of a buff based on a stat. This is how the duration of stuns are modified by gear and racial abilities in world of warcraft.
Also, I notice that you ignored the rest of the post again
I'm going to try to parse the nuance for you in a subsequent edit.
I think what you're saying is that in a High Fantasy world it's possible that people would be able to build duration tolerance.
What I'm saying is that resistance tends to be an internal function and duration an outside of the body function (for something like a stun).
A boxer can build themselves up to resist getting stunned, but I don't know how a boxer builds themselves up to lessen the duration of being stunned.
I'm not saying it's impossible to do it and say "It works cause magic".
I'm just pointing out the difference between resistance and duration and why it's likely that designers would not make Duration the character stat instead of Resistance the character stat. More likely they would have both rather than have just Duration and not Resistance.
When you get punched in the nose, it's not like you're "stunned for 4 seconds or not at all", tougher guys might only be staggered for 1 second, or 2 seconds or w/e. Have you ever gotten sick at the same time as a family member but gotten over than it more quickly than them? You have higher flu resistance! You still got the flu, but your duration was less!
Even in TTPRGs, champions in pathfinder 2e have selectable feats that reduce the duration that you're feared (once you fail a will save) by a flat 1 round.
But also, and more importantly, we don't have to model video games after real life. All we have to do is make fun games. If we want to make it so that a character build reduces cc duration, we can do that.
I'm also happy with the way the conversation went, as i believe my knowledge about CC skill balancing was improved, because through your opinion of what a "High Impact CC" is, i'm now able to understand that some types of variables(mainly its CD and Duration in reference to the game TTK) in a Hard CC skill, can by design make the skill application to be unreasonable under a RNG setting, and to make much more sense being always applied.
Aren't we all sinners?
Stagger is different than stunned.
I can probably do things to help me resist getting sick.
If I do this beforehand, I will resist catching the illness... and I can probably do that fairly consistently.
Or if I do get sick, it will not be so bad that I end up not being able to get out of bed.
I'm not aware of being able to shorten the duration of the time I spend in bed once I'm literally stuck in bed.
Someone else might be able to bring me medicine or whatever to shorten the length of the duration.
But, I don't think people can build up their tolerance such that once they are bed-ridden, they can shorten the duration that they are bed-ridden.
How many medical papers on the subject would I need to provide for you to change your mind on this one?
I'm assessing if it is worth the effort relative to the conversation as a whole.