Sure, but why specifically do high-impact crowd control abilities that can determine the outcome of a fight need to be left up to chance? I get that we don't want to kill off RNG all together, but what do we want to keep around stun resistance or low% chance that people randomly don't get pulled by a javelin?
We don't have a good way to differentiate between a critical melee swing and a regular one on a player skill level, but we can design around avoiding CC.
This has nothing to do with rng in combat. Whether you roll a miss on one attack won't matter or change the outcome. Rpg is a very wide genre and not defined by rng, but instead mostly by character stats and progression. Having no rng does not diminish the importance of character progression because attack damage can be calculated without rng.
I find this last bit of your response interesting, and I wonder if there’s a generational thing, or we’re just coming at this from way different angles. I’ll go back to the 70s when DnD arguably created the RPG genre. RPGs abstracted combat and all it’s lovely nuances using dice. I think I still have my bag of dice somewhere in my office, or maybe my attic. Everything, from encounters, to climbing a wall, to hitting a dude with a fireball was based on dice rolls - RNG.
Okay I did not grow up in the era of DnD or dice games, so my view of rpgs are much different. A lot of games are action combat now, and the mechanics of rpgs have probably changed a lot from when everything had to be abstracted at a high level.
I did grow up in the DnD era (in a matter of speaking <_<), and still play every Thursday and Saturday. I also recognize that the genre has broadened a ton since then, and that language constantly evolves out from under the feet of us grognards.
A lot of games are action combat now, and the mechanics of rpgs have probably changed a lot from when everything had to be abstracted at a high level.
I’m pretty sure the dice rolls are still happening behind action combat, it’s a flashier way of hiding them. 😉
I think a bunch of the modern systems are deterministic. Ie, if you're in range or the hitboxes overlap, you hit. You plug in your attack stat and their defense stat into a foruma to get damage.
Sure, but why specifically do high-impact crowd control abilities that can determine the outcome of a fight need to be left up to chance?
This might be an amplitude question. When I think RNG, I don’t think 25% chance to miss. Let’s say 1% - baseline, then as your character gains skill - directly through something like weapon skills, or indirectly by leveling (an abstraction of all-around skill growth) - you whittle that down to .1%. Specifically because you’re role-playing in a dangerous fantasy world where there is always a non-zero chance that not everything is going to go your way, the same way, every time. 😳
Sure, but why specifically do high-impact crowd control abilities that can determine the outcome of a fight need to be left up to chance? I get that we don't want to kill off RNG all together, but what do we want to keep around stun resistance or low% chance that people randomly don't get pulled by a javelin?
We don't have a good way to differentiate between a critical melee swing and a regular one on a player skill level, but we can design around avoiding CC.
Because RPGs are about the Hero's Journey and sometimes shit happens. You roll a one.
That's part of the story. It's not just about which player has the best twitch skills.
And because RNG also plays a factor in resolving character build v character build.
My high Dex character should not automatically fail against a high Dex player simply because I, as a player, have lower dex (player twitch skills) than my opponent.
It's not really all that random - character build affects RNG.
Expect significantly less RNG from action combat, but it's unlikely to be zero RNG.
The things that make Ashes interesting and unique are its player to player interaction centeric systems. It's nodes, caravans, economic systems, open world pvp. All emphasis is put on the player to player interaction in the things that aren't generic.
I find the concept of 'my ability just fails sonetimes because magic is dangerous and unpredictable' antithetical to this atmosphere. I want the danger in the game to come from these player to player struggle. Not the system giving me a random full fail.
Yeah there is skill in adapting to failure, but when the system decides I fail and not my skill I feel APATHY and disconnected from the world. Not thrill.
You want rng to matter? Loot drops are a great use of rng. Fizzle mechanics on abilities rather than duration/effect limiting? No thanks. It's ugly design.
Because RPGs are about the Hero's Journey and sometimes shit happens. You roll a one.
That's part of the story. It's not just about which player has the best twitch skills.
And because RNG also plays a factor in resolving character build v character build.
Why does the shit that happens to the Hero in their Journey need to be randomly generated and not player generated (political betrayal, drama, etc) or world generated (node events, plot, etc)? Why can't it just be about which player has the best overall skill?
If you turned 5% stun resistance into 5% reduced stun duration, you turned a rng stat into a deterministic stat, but you maintained character build vs character build and preserved player skill vs player skill.
This might be an amplitude question. When I think RNG, I don’t think 25% chance to miss. Let’s say 1% - baseline, then as your character gains skill - directly through something like weapon skills, or indirectly by leveling (an abstraction of all-around skill growth) - you whittle that down to .1%. Specifically because you’re role-playing in a dangerous fantasy world where there is always a non-zero chance that not everything is going to go your way, the same way, every time. 😳
That sounds potentially worse! Imagine that you're in grand finals of IntrepidCon 2028's 3v3 arena tournament with $100k on the line. Your opponent's healer is hanging on by a thread and they're throwing out a last ditch heal. You try to stun them to interrupt it. If it works, you'll go on to win the tournament. That 1-of-1000 chance rears it's ugly head and the healer resists the stun, goes on to live, and your team loses the match.
Maybe the crowd thinks that's sweet, or doesn't even notice that it happens, but I guarantee that all 6 competitors there hate that it just happened. Their lucky victory will feel empty, and the loss will feel pointless and maddening. I don't know why in the world we would design that into the game.
DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
edited August 2021
Because it's character generated and sometimes heroes are victims of unfortunate fates.
The skill that's favored in RPGs is character building; not player twitch skills.
5% reduced stun duration does not sound like a character build to me.
Action combat will have considerably less RNG than tab target, so character build v character build is already maintained while favoring player twitch skill.
You don't have to get the fascination with RNG in RPGs.
If you don't like it, try to create your own RPG without RNG and see how well it sells.
RPGs should not be esports. And especially should not be designed for esports.
Because it's character generated and sometimes heroes are victims of unfortunate fates.
The skill that's favored in RPGs is character building; not player twitch skills.
5% reduced stun duration does not sound like a character build to me.
Action combat will have considerably less RNG than tab target, so character build v character build is already maintained while favoring player twitch skill.
You don't have to get the fascination with RNG in RPGs.
If you don't like it, try to create your own RPG without RNG and see how well it sells.
RPGs should not be esports.
The ironic thing about this one is actually that people will accept 'removal of RNG' from a bunch of other things that should have equal or higher chances of happening, but I am not saying that it is necessarily any of the people here, so it'd be pointless to bring up.
@beaushinkle - If it wasn't clear yet, you are wasting your time. This is a philosophical discussion with posters who have argued against this for literally hundreds of posts in other threads, and their point is not wrong. As you noted yourself, they don't want to play the same type of game that you do.
The question is whether or not Intrepid wants to design the type of game that they want to play, or the type of game that you want to play, and they have correctly pointed out to you that based on what has been said so far and what we see in the game, it favors what they want to play.
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?
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 is probably my main problem with designing in this way, for this era.
Memetic propagation. A 'good build', a 'proper way of playing', these things are now 'a way content creators sell their character building ability/pattern matching ability for internet points'. I don't like doing it because I feel it ruins the games, but when the designer gives you an easy mark, a puzzle-obfuscation that isn't about 'building well' but 'figuring out which things they expected to be the most effective or naturally biased toward', then that's it.
Someone online gets famous by making guides, players follow the guides and that's it. This isn't new. It's been the way things worked since the first gaming magazine, except that YouTube now means 'everyone's a publisher' and they're all literally racing to get their guide/build out first.
It also means that 'character building skill' is in itself negated. An army of carbon-copied clones appears and it goes back to being about twitch skills. I've explained this (somewhat) to these same posters before as well. It does not seem relevant to them. They either assume it won't happen, assume it won't bother them, or assume 'it won't be that bad and won't really affect the game'.
I can't tell you what to do, but if you continue, expect to exhaust yourself for no benefit. Wait 5 hours, watch the Livestream, and depending on what's in it, decide if you want to 'fight on this hill' anymore yourself.
@beaushinkle - well, in your example I would expect that the players understood the game well enough by the time there’s an esports competition that only 3 people would be pissed. The other 3 would be drinking.
It’s very simple, in an RPG only your character’s skill matters, and their skill is different than your skills, and their skill is subject to RNG.
We had build cloning way before youtube in wow - back when Kalman was on the Elitist Jerks forums in 2006 doing spreadsheet optimization for rogues in WoW and showing people how they could be doing ~2.5x more dps than they were by doing exactly what his math told him to do.
As soon as there's a community of people who want to share information for any purpose, whether that's monetary (youtube), or just because they like doing it (competitive discords), or forums the "skill" of building a character disappears. People will eventually create stuff like https://www.simulationcraft.org/ and solve the game in an absolute sense. Every possible combination will be simulated billions of times and there won't be any possible "i didn't think of that combination" undiscovered genius build.
The question is whether or not Intrepid wants to design the type of game that they want to play, or the type of game that you want to play, and they have correctly pointed out to you that based on what has been said so far and what we see in the game, it favors what they want to play.
I actually don't think that their current stance is particularly hard-line on random CC's specifically, and even if it was, I think they're flexible enough to iterate if they don't like how the gameplay is working. Out of all of their systems, I think they have the least clarity of vision when it comes to how they want combat to work. Even if they did, I would expect that they'd revise as the years went on.
WoW, for instance, re-tooled all of it's resistances over the years from -% to hit to -% duration and -% damage for exactly the reasons I'm talking about, even though they launched with strong D&D vibes. While a lot of people think that the game went down hill, I don't think anyone points to those changes as being a culprit.
It’s very simple, in an RPG only your character’s skill matters, and their skill is different than your skills, and their skill is subject to RNG.
This is just blatantly false, right? You've surely played RPGs with novice players that didn't play as well as vets. The character matters, but so does the play.
I actually don't think that their current stance is particularly hard-line on random CC's specifically, and even if it was, I think they're flexible enough to iterate if they don't like how the gameplay is working. Out of all of their systems, I think they have the least clarity of vision when it comes to how they want combat to work. Even if they did, I would expect that they'd revise as the years went on.
Hence the suggestion. People are definitely waiting for clarity on Combat Iteration #2... (#1?).
I'll be surprised if there isn't some new information in 4 hours. Maybe they're just listening and running all the same simulations based on all the forum feedback and arguments. Maybe they're not. Maybe they'll let us know, maybe they won't.
No matter what happens, the chances that the current basis upon which discussion is happening is about to change is at least...
CypherMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
I’m so tired of people saying “we need RNG / boring tab combat because it’s not a twitch shooter”. That’s such a false argument. It is possible to have slower gameplay (which AoC is seemingly going to have, with its 60 second average time to kill) and still be an action based game rather than a dice roll game.
You can still simulate the hero’s journey by gaining more and more skill points to make you more and more powerful as your journey continues, and you find yourself having an easier time with enemies that used to totally destroy you.
Also @beaushinkle keep up the good work. Been checking on this thread a little bit here and there. Too busy to do a whole lot of the deep discussions like I was a couple weeks ago.
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DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
edited August 2021
Cool. Then make the MMORPG that does that.
That’s not Ashes of Creation.
Ashes of Creation wouldn't suddenly stop being Ashes of Creation if we specifically swap out %chance to resist CC for %reduce duration for CC. It wouldn't stop being a RPG. This conversation will way more smooth if we can avoid broad-strokes generalizations.
Steven states he was wants to put the RPG back into MMORPG, so you should expect that to come with RNG
Casinos are RPG? Obviously they are not though. RNG is not a main characteristic of RPG game. It's workaround of table top turn based games to simulate variance which cannot be expressed to game environment in any other convenient way due to it's platform limitations.
Early on video RPG games tried to simply copy with pride that model. But it didn't took long to realize that what may work on table tops do not translate to video games with real time inputs. Best known example would be Elder Scrolls franchise and how players dreaded hit chance mechanics. Ending up with it's removal in Oblivion. And the old - school morrowind fans seem to appreciate no hit change mod for the game.
The real time dice rolling feels like a bug or flaw of the system. As there is disruption in player feedback loop. You do something, you expect something happening. Cause and effect. Yet nothing happens even though entire game environment informs you that it should through real time inputs and your character doing something as you commit an input for them to do something.
No in depth explanation of what's a real "RPG" gets rid of that disruption which generally leads to frustration. Also, I'm not sure why you just picked RNG. Turn based combat seems to be as definitive for RPG's as RNG by that implied logic.
Larian now working on Baldur's Gate 3 talked at lengths about challenges adopting D n D 5e ruleset for their video game. Which is, mind you, uses turn based combat. And they kind of solve it by showing you big dices on each roll with glaring colorful animations and followed with sounds, equivalent to jack pot casino machines to get that dopamine thus keeping player on the feedback loop. Just to fortify that there is a real UX issue with dice rolling behind the curtains, especially in real time games.
Especially since Jeffrey stated: "RNG is always going to play a role in Ashes of Creation whether that be in PvP or PvE, but one way to mitigate that is through the action system. The action system is going to be far less sort of dependent on those you know dice rolls and there'll be far more in your own hands. They won't ever completely eliminate that but it's a way for us to sort of reward skilled play versus sort of tactical strategies type play."
I'm not suggesting to remove it completely. I think I compared it to salt. And I use salt in my food.
However, I have to seriously question what kind of tactics Jeffrey has in mind. As it seems like non squitur.
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DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
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?
The real time dice rolling feels like a bug or flaw of the system. As there is disruption in player feedback loop. You do something, you expect something happening. Cause and effect. Yet nothing happens even though entire game environment informs you that it should through real time inputs and your character doing something as you commit an input for them to do something.
Sometimes things don’t work as expected.
Sometimes things you expect to work don’t work at all.
That’s part of the story.
I'm not suggesting to remove it completely. I think I compared it to salt. And I use salt in my food.
However, I have to seriously question what kind of tactics Jeffrey has in mind. As it seems like non squitur.
I think we generally agree on the concepts we disagree on how far the slider should go.
Say RNG, while I still see it valuable, I also don't want it to take the wheel of the proverbial ship.
Hence offering reduction to the mean / standard distribution. RNG is still there, it's just not possible for system due to chance alone to distribute all the good rolls on one side while the bad rolls on the other.
These do not happen often, but then they do they seriously sour the experience.
And to use real "RPG" which would probably fit your definitions more accuretly, in DnD non sadistic DM's will generally normalize streaks through improvised narrative set ups.
Comments
We don't have a good way to differentiate between a critical melee swing and a regular one on a player skill level, but we can design around avoiding CC.
Okay I did not grow up in the era of DnD or dice games, so my view of rpgs are much different. A lot of games are action combat now, and the mechanics of rpgs have probably changed a lot from when everything had to be abstracted at a high level.
I’m pretty sure the dice rolls are still happening behind action combat, it’s a flashier way of hiding them. 😉
I think a bunch of the modern systems are deterministic. Ie, if you're in range or the hitboxes overlap, you hit. You plug in your attack stat and their defense stat into a foruma to get damage.
This might be an amplitude question. When I think RNG, I don’t think 25% chance to miss. Let’s say 1% - baseline, then as your character gains skill - directly through something like weapon skills, or indirectly by leveling (an abstraction of all-around skill growth) - you whittle that down to .1%. Specifically because you’re role-playing in a dangerous fantasy world where there is always a non-zero chance that not everything is going to go your way, the same way, every time. 😳
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yhr9WpjaDzw
That's part of the story. It's not just about which player has the best twitch skills.
And because RNG also plays a factor in resolving character build v character build.
My high Dex character should not automatically fail against a high Dex player simply because I, as a player, have lower dex (player twitch skills) than my opponent.
It's not really all that random - character build affects RNG.
Expect significantly less RNG from action combat, but it's unlikely to be zero RNG.
I find the concept of 'my ability just fails sonetimes because magic is dangerous and unpredictable' antithetical to this atmosphere. I want the danger in the game to come from these player to player struggle. Not the system giving me a random full fail.
Yeah there is skill in adapting to failure, but when the system decides I fail and not my skill I feel APATHY and disconnected from the world. Not thrill.
You want rng to matter? Loot drops are a great use of rng. Fizzle mechanics on abilities rather than duration/effect limiting? No thanks. It's ugly design.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yhr9WpjaDzw
Why does the shit that happens to the Hero in their Journey need to be randomly generated and not player generated (political betrayal, drama, etc) or world generated (node events, plot, etc)? Why can't it just be about which player has the best overall skill?
If you turned 5% stun resistance into 5% reduced stun duration, you turned a rng stat into a deterministic stat, but you maintained character build vs character build and preserved player skill vs player skill.
I don't get this fixation with RNG
That sounds potentially worse! Imagine that you're in grand finals of IntrepidCon 2028's 3v3 arena tournament with $100k on the line. Your opponent's healer is hanging on by a thread and they're throwing out a last ditch heal. You try to stun them to interrupt it. If it works, you'll go on to win the tournament. That 1-of-1000 chance rears it's ugly head and the healer resists the stun, goes on to live, and your team loses the match.
Maybe the crowd thinks that's sweet, or doesn't even notice that it happens, but I guarantee that all 6 competitors there hate that it just happened. Their lucky victory will feel empty, and the loss will feel pointless and maddening. I don't know why in the world we would design that into the game.
The skill that's favored in RPGs is character building; not player twitch skills.
5% reduced stun duration does not sound like a character build to me.
Action combat will have considerably less RNG than tab target, so character build v character build is already maintained while favoring player twitch skill.
You don't have to get the fascination with RNG in RPGs.
If you don't like it, try to create your own RPG without RNG and see how well it sells.
RPGs should not be esports. And especially should not be designed for esports.
The ironic thing about this one is actually that people will accept 'removal of RNG' from a bunch of other things that should have equal or higher chances of happening, but I am not saying that it is necessarily any of the people here, so it'd be pointless to bring up.
@beaushinkle - If it wasn't clear yet, you are wasting your time. This is a philosophical discussion with posters who have argued against this for literally hundreds of posts in other threads, and their point is not wrong. As you noted yourself, they don't want to play the same type of game that you do.
The question is whether or not Intrepid wants to design the type of game that they want to play, or the type of game that you want to play, and they have correctly pointed out to you that based on what has been said so far and what we see in the game, it favors what they want to play.
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.
This is probably my main problem with designing in this way, for this era.
Memetic propagation. A 'good build', a 'proper way of playing', these things are now 'a way content creators sell their character building ability/pattern matching ability for internet points'. I don't like doing it because I feel it ruins the games, but when the designer gives you an easy mark, a puzzle-obfuscation that isn't about 'building well' but 'figuring out which things they expected to be the most effective or naturally biased toward', then that's it.
Someone online gets famous by making guides, players follow the guides and that's it. This isn't new. It's been the way things worked since the first gaming magazine, except that YouTube now means 'everyone's a publisher' and they're all literally racing to get their guide/build out first.
It also means that 'character building skill' is in itself negated. An army of carbon-copied clones appears and it goes back to being about twitch skills. I've explained this (somewhat) to these same posters before as well. It does not seem relevant to them. They either assume it won't happen, assume it won't bother them, or assume 'it won't be that bad and won't really affect the game'.
I can't tell you what to do, but if you continue, expect to exhaust yourself for no benefit. Wait 5 hours, watch the Livestream, and depending on what's in it, decide if you want to 'fight on this hill' anymore yourself.
It’s very simple, in an RPG only your character’s skill matters, and their skill is different than your skills, and their skill is subject to RNG.
As soon as there's a community of people who want to share information for any purpose, whether that's monetary (youtube), or just because they like doing it (competitive discords), or forums the "skill" of building a character disappears. People will eventually create stuff like https://www.simulationcraft.org/ and solve the game in an absolute sense. Every possible combination will be simulated billions of times and there won't be any possible "i didn't think of that combination" undiscovered genius build.
I actually don't think that their current stance is particularly hard-line on random CC's specifically, and even if it was, I think they're flexible enough to iterate if they don't like how the gameplay is working. Out of all of their systems, I think they have the least clarity of vision when it comes to how they want combat to work. Even if they did, I would expect that they'd revise as the years went on.
WoW, for instance, re-tooled all of it's resistances over the years from -% to hit to -% duration and -% damage for exactly the reasons I'm talking about, even though they launched with strong D&D vibes. While a lot of people think that the game went down hill, I don't think anyone points to those changes as being a culprit.
This is just blatantly false, right? You've surely played RPGs with novice players that didn't play as well as vets. The character matters, but so does the play.
Hence the suggestion. People are definitely waiting for clarity on Combat Iteration #2... (#1?).
I'll be surprised if there isn't some new information in 4 hours. Maybe they're just listening and running all the same simulations based on all the forum feedback and arguments. Maybe they're not. Maybe they'll let us know, maybe they won't.
No matter what happens, the chances that the current basis upon which discussion is happening is about to change is at least...
A dice roll.
You can still simulate the hero’s journey by gaining more and more skill points to make you more and more powerful as your journey continues, and you find yourself having an easier time with enemies that used to totally destroy you.
Also @beaushinkle keep up the good work. Been checking on this thread a little bit here and there. Too busy to do a whole lot of the deep discussions like I was a couple weeks ago.
That’s not Ashes of Creation.
And if it is what the developers decide after hearing well reasoned arguements to shift their current design in that direction? What will you do?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yhr9WpjaDzw
Casinos are RPG? Obviously they are not though. RNG is not a main characteristic of RPG game. It's workaround of table top turn based games to simulate variance which cannot be expressed to game environment in any other convenient way due to it's platform limitations.
Early on video RPG games tried to simply copy with pride that model. But it didn't took long to realize that what may work on table tops do not translate to video games with real time inputs. Best known example would be Elder Scrolls franchise and how players dreaded hit chance mechanics. Ending up with it's removal in Oblivion. And the old - school morrowind fans seem to appreciate no hit change mod for the game.
The real time dice rolling feels like a bug or flaw of the system. As there is disruption in player feedback loop. You do something, you expect something happening. Cause and effect. Yet nothing happens even though entire game environment informs you that it should through real time inputs and your character doing something as you commit an input for them to do something.
No in depth explanation of what's a real "RPG" gets rid of that disruption which generally leads to frustration. Also, I'm not sure why you just picked RNG. Turn based combat seems to be as definitive for RPG's as RNG by that implied logic.
Larian now working on Baldur's Gate 3 talked at lengths about challenges adopting D n D 5e ruleset for their video game. Which is, mind you, uses turn based combat. And they kind of solve it by showing you big dices on each roll with glaring colorful animations and followed with sounds, equivalent to jack pot casino machines to get that dopamine thus keeping player on the feedback loop. Just to fortify that there is a real UX issue with dice rolling behind the curtains, especially in real time games.
I'm not suggesting to remove it completely. I think I compared it to salt. And I use salt in my food.
However, I have to seriously question what kind of tactics Jeffrey has in mind. As it seems like non squitur.
Re-raising this, because I think it got buried and I'd love to know what your thoughts are
Sometimes things you expect to work don’t work at all.
That’s part of the story.
Sounds like we agree.
I think we generally agree on the concepts we disagree on how far the slider should go.
Say RNG, while I still see it valuable, I also don't want it to take the wheel of the proverbial ship.
Hence offering reduction to the mean / standard distribution. RNG is still there, it's just not possible for system due to chance alone to distribute all the good rolls on one side while the bad rolls on the other.
These do not happen often, but then they do they seriously sour the experience.
And to use real "RPG" which would probably fit your definitions more accuretly, in DnD non sadistic DM's will generally normalize streaks through improvised narrative set ups.
Just to beat the dead drum, it's not the defender should build for stun resistance as much as the attacker should build for stun persistence.
I will take that response to the hypothetical as 'I will quit' then.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yhr9WpjaDzw