If you have ever played a game with random numbers you have probably encountered situations of frustration where the glorious polyhedron in the sky did not favour you. It simply sucks to miss multiple 95% chance-to-hits in a row, or to get a rubbish seed in a procedurally generated map. At the same time, being pleasantly surprised in a clutch situation or rolling a natural 20 feels great. Let’s talk about randomness in games and how it can add to the gameplay experience.

An Anecdote About Two Mercenary Companies

But before we get into discussing randomness, I’d like to tell a short anecdote. A while ago I was playing Wartales with my close friend. After having finished Baldur’s Gate 3 we were browsing for something to fill the gap and eventually we settled on Wartales. For those of you that don’t know, Wartales is a medieval strategy game where you build a company of mercenaries and fulfill contracts to make money and find treasure to improve your company. After two play sessions and about nine hours into the game we sighed and said ‘Is this it? It doesn’t get better than this?’. Of course, it would be unfair to hope for AA-tier Wartales to match the experience that is Baldur’s Gate 3, but we weren’t expecting that. But we did not feel engaged in the gameplay, in particular when it came to the combat. It felt very dull and predictable.

A few days later my mind was still occupied with mercenary companies, so I downloaded Battle Brothers and immediately fell in love. It is a game where, exactly like in Wartales, you build a company of mercenaries and fulfill contracts to make money and find treasure to improve your company. The difference lies in execution, and the biggest difference is the two games relationship to randomness. While everything in Wartales is deterministic, Battle Brothers embraces randomness fully. You recruit mercenaries with random stats and backgrounds, and in combat you roll hit chances and get random injuries. It also ups the ante with permanent consequences - if a mercenary dies it is dead for good. Fortunately the game also equips you with tools to navigate the randomness such as clear information about hit chances and the options to preview mercenaries before hiring them to reduce some of the risk. The randomness is always present though.

Why I Like Randomness

I reflected on this and concluded how randomness simply makes for a more engaging game for me personally. It shifts the focus from planning and execution to preparing and adapting. You can’t with certainty know that your combat manouver will work out, so instead of trying to plan it out in minute detail, you are encouraged to prepare for different outcomes. “What if I miss?”, “What if I fail do dodge the fireball?”, “Should I use the potion of strength to improve my odds?”. If the hit chance was always 100% the player wouldn’t have to make these judgement calls, which in my opinion would detract from the experience.

I have lurked /r/roguelikedev for quite some time and seen a few posts with the sentiment ‘random hit chances are the worst, no one likes missing, it makes for a frustrating game!’, and I am empathetic to their viewpoint. However, while it is true that negative experiences tend to leave stronger impressions than positive ones I remain unconvinced that a game that strives to remove negative outcomes makes for a better game; rolling the dice and adapting to the outcomes is a fun gameplay challenge.

Furthermore, if a game gives you a deterministic system to play with it can also assume you make use of it and plan many turns ahead. This creates an ‘optimal solution’ to any given situation which the game designer can balance content around. If you were a computer you could run a simulation of all possible choices and find it, but we are not computers, so we can’t. So we get into a situation where either the problem is easy and you find the optimal solution and just have to click the correct buttons, or it’s too complicated to find and you wish you were a computer. None of which is a fun gameplay experience to me. Some people will disagree and say this kind of system makes for an enjoyable puzzle game, and that’s definitely a valid opinion (a lot of people enjoy Wartales after all!), it’s just not how my brain works. Of course, adding randomness willy-nilly does not automagically make for a good game either. There are good and less good ways to do it, so lets talk about that.

What Are My Odds?

There are many situations where randomness can play a meaningful part, and one that is particularly important is in player decisions. When the player is faced with a choice between a set of actions (which is basically the whole gameplay of roguelikes!), we can add randomness to the outcome of an action to prevent the player from fully knowing what will happen after they pick it. The most common example is probably accuracy, or hit chance. By introducing this a player is no longer able to know exactly what the state of the battlefield will be in the next turn when in combat. Combat could go better, or worse, than expected and they are encouraged to plan accordingly. This makes sure combat stays exciting and does not reduce to an optimal planning game. To make this work it is very important that they player is presented with the clear information about the risks associated with each action (often by displying probabilities). For instance, in the game I’m working on, Tombs of Telleran (and many many other games of course!), the player is presented with hit-chances when they consider using an ability on an enemy.

If the player is not provided this information, and the hit chance is kept secret, they are unable to correctly assess the risks and pick an action that suits them. This leads to a feeling of unfairness and frustration where ’things just happen’. Hence, it is important that the player feels in control of the situation and when they pick an action with a random outcome, they are doing so knowing the risks. That way, it’s like the player is rolling the dice, not the game, which leads us to the second important point.

Maintaining Player Autonomy

The player is the hero of every video game story and expects to have full autonomy over their avatar’s actions. Generally speaking, I think no decisions should be made for the player without them explicitly picking it, especially if randomness is involved. For example, in Tombs of Telleran you play as a skeleton who suddenly awakes back in the realm of the living who goes exploring their tomb in search of answers as to why they have been awoken. I wanted to give the player a random starting kit to encourage them to try different items (I think this will be useful in player testing), but simply deciding their starting items for them robs them of their autonomy.

Wrap Up

Randomness, when implemented thoughtfully, can create more interesting gameplay than simply executing a perfectly designed plan. When adding randomness to your game it is important to make sure the player maintains autonomy, and that they have clear information about the risks they are taking. I am building Tombs of Telleran with these principles in mind, and if you like to read more about the development or my thoughts on game design do subscribe to the mailing list below.

Do you like or dislike randomness in your games? If you like to discuss hit me up on mastodon or bluesky. Until the next one!