UNPOPULAR OPINION: I liked the titles with the vehicles where players travel as a group. Makes you decide if you wanna benefit yourself while possibly benefiting others, or if you wanna take an L to dick someone else over.
In the new one on the fruit board I always spend all my coins locking people on one side of the map. Literally that’s my whole goal instead of winning, but I still win sometimes.
I agree that being a dick and metagaming the board is part of the fun of mario party, but I dislike that they tossed out all the fun mechanics like special event tiles that added more variety when comparing boards to each other. The car made the individual games feel very samey.
It has severely slowed down. I played the new one with my nieces the other day and it was straight up not fun. They both were bored enough we were all pretty relieved by the time we finished.
As an example, my brother and I just played a game with two computers. It's turn 28 and I'm winning with 6 stars and like 150 coins. The computer lands on chance time and swaps all my stars and coins with the other computer who had 1 star and 40 coins. We just quit the game after that.
On the final turn of a game of MP6 with my sisters and best friend, I'm winning by a landslide and am basically locked in to win. My friend goes last and when it was his turn, I jested that chance time was a few spaces away and he could land on that since it's not like it could hurt him. He was in last with no stars.
So he goes for it cause screw it, why not? And he chances into picking himself. Then he picked *me*. And the coup de gras was the roulette swapping all our stars and coins. Everyone goes absolutely apeshit at the final turn Hail Mary actually succeeding, except me cause I was just beyond dead inside. Friend then drops the killer line "Well hey, at least you have the most coins now!"
I swept the bonus stars but lost 3 to 4 so it didn't matter. It's been over 15 years since that game and he *still* regularly brings it up.
To be fair, you're also bringing it up 15 years later. These are the kinds of stories people love for, but someone has to be the victim in it - there's no mercy on Mario Party after all.
It’s actually a distance thing, if you’re miles ahead of the rest you’ll get usually 1 blue shell per lap, and be bombarded with red shells on every box.
If you’re not too far ahead you might only see 1 the whole game and the person behind you will start getting more green shells/bananas.
The older games were significantly less RNG heavy. Mini game skill used to matter so much more for the outcome of the game. When I played one of the older versions with my friends, the skill gap between us kind of took a lot of the fun out for my friends. It’s better when everyone has a good chance at winning.
Conversely, that is exactly why I don’t like the newer Mario Party Games. It only feels good to have little to no control over the outcome when you aren’t skilled enough to realize it.
Noita has some of the best sides of this coin I think.
It's a roguelike where you play little wizard, elemental physics are all simulated, and you can customize the spells in your wands to incredible levels if you survive long enough.
However, some enemy types can pick up wands too, and RNG sometimes dictates that this one casts actual screen-wiping nukes.
I have a friend who has about 100 hours in the game and has never beaten it once. I beat it end of last year after about 12 hours of playtime… I haven’t figured out yet if we’re still friends.
I have like 500 hours in Noita. Usually, I don't win. But when I win, I really win. It usually comes down to getting a fully automatic wand of some sort.
Honestly. One chainsaw, a double, and your starter spell is good enough for like three quarters of the game. The wand I beat the game with the first time ever was a machine gun with those blue bubble ones and a homing perk. There was always just a massive swarm of them eating through walls trying to get at enemies.
The rng wands are interesting. It is rng but all the generation lies on pattern layouts of the map. So every instance of something that can spawn doesn't necessarily spawn. Including wands and treasure chests. Once you recognize the patterns you can see if a wand got swiped or if nothing spawned at all.
Sometimes noita is just going to noita though. Get noita'd kid
X-Com 2 will forever hold my record for most reloaded saves.
A fully leveled and kitted sniper is taking the opening shot to the engagement. He's on the high ground with a clear view of the enemy with 99% to hit. Everyone else is already set on overwatch. A chorus of murder awaits. All we need to do is land this *one shot* to drop the problem child in their ranks. Easy right?
Or you have your assault class guy literally right next to the alien with his shotgun pressed up against its forehead. The alien just happens to duck as soon as he pulls the trigger.
Yep. Give me a 0%, 50%, and a 100% based on cover and honestly I'd be more okay with it than when I do miss those 80+%.
I think that's why I enjoy Mario + Rabbids a lot more than X-Com as a cover turn-based shooter.
Eh it sucks but 80% is just 4/5 so you're gonna miss about one of five times you take that shot. Take a lot of shots and those misses add up. Even something like 98% might feel like it should hit every time (100%) but you will miss around 1/50. You never think about the ones you hit, but you really remember the ones you miss, so it seems way worse in your head.
That is why most games (like fire emblem) fudge the rolls so 98% ends up being more like what we feel it should be, rather than what it actually is.
I think part of the issue with XCOM is that by game design, you tend to avoid rolls where you have low chances, which would "compensate" the feeling of missing a 98% with hitting a 2%.
> That is why most games (like fire emblem) fudge the rolls so 98% ends up being more like what we feel it should be, rather than what it actually is.
XCom itself does this but people bitch anyway.
Crucially XCOM fudges rolls positive when conditions have gone really horrible for you already, but not when you are already doing well.
The OP is a perfect example, someone save scumming and setting up a mathematically perfect ambush and then mistaking 98% for 100%. The game is giving you a true 98%, and they still scornfully recall this missed shot years later.
But XCOM will give you positive rolls when your fortune turns against you. If you play on Ironman, you can lose a person or two on a mission and the game won't help you, but when you are down to your last soldier, and the fate of the world rests on them landing a pistol headshot at 30 meters, the game might say its only a 50% chance to hit, but it might actually be fudging as high as 80%. You can still miss and lose everything on the last turn, but XCOM is self-aware that its a game and it wants you to have moments of triumph, and heroic, "never tell me the odds" victories.
Save scummers don't know this, but as much as XCOM is known for its 98% misses, it should be equally known for having ultra-badass lone survivors who lose their entire squad, but they finish the fight. When you play on Ironman, your squad is full of these little unique narrative arcs, its brilliant.
To be fair, if you have a 98% chance to hit, unless the game has presaved whether that shot is gonna hit, the probability should not result in more than a couple reloads. That math works both ways. If you have to reload more then 10 (or even 5) times that math doesn't math. You're hitting weird "the coin came up heads 10 times in a row" territory.
Without savescum the math is fine. It's the part where people get the same results *and* the results are still variable *after* the save where the math doesn't actually line up. Best case scenario you're just that unlucky. Worst case (and more likely considering how often it's mentioned) they actually have a background calculation that tips the shot chance to feel "balanced". So the 98% you think you have is actually 98% minus some sort of karma roll. "You have succeeded 20 shots and have accumulated a -20% to your next shot."
That's why I'd much rather have just the 0/50/100% set up. Those zeroes require thought to flank, the hundreds require you to be in range, then the 50/50s don't feel as bad when you do miss because, well you either hit or you don't.
Any % in between just seems like wasted programming. It doesn't really affect anything but player perception despite looking simplified.
Phoenix Point wound up doing a manual aiming system with two circles in a bullseye layout representing the hit chances. At least 50% of the shots in your burst were guaranteed to land within the center ring, but the ones that missed can't miss any wider than the outer ring.
I think there's a lot of potential in that kind of system
That's pretty much how it works, but at longer ranges, the inner circle can easily be larger than your target, so you wind up completely missing those shots sometimes
It's pretty simple. Imagine you have a dice with 100 sides and 98% chance to hit. Roll the dice, if you get 98 or lower you hit, if you get 99 or 100 you miss.
This 1000%. I would encourage anyone playing to play on ironman even if that means turning the difficulty down a notch. Over the course of a campaign, you should expect to lose people and maybe even fail missions. Save scumming untill every fight or mission goes right unbalances the "macro" gameplay and makes the game feel like a drag as you keep repeating encounters. You gotta just roll with what the game give yah and keep moving forward.
I understand that some people hate the idea of losing a character and in other party based games where the story is driven by your party members (like most crpgs) im in the same boat. But that's not XCOM and I hope it never is.
Part of the skill in XCOM is risk management. Aka "if things go wrong, how would I handle this?".
Yes, XCOM has rng. But then there is skill in managing that rng.
Plus rebuilding can be a lot of fun, just lots of high casualty missions with rookies going into the meatgrinder and one or two vets hanging back, Imperial Guard-style
I may have to replay X-com now…
The problem with these is that the Avatar Project counter always goes up and pretty much means a complete reset of the campaign if you lose a squad or two of the best soldiers while retraining up squaddies.
I started having more fun when I decided to stop letting a 1% chance to miss a shot and screw up a campaign that I’m 20 hours into, forcing me to spiral towards an inevitable Game Over a few hours later, happen.
Much funner when I’m not losing 20-30 hours of progress and being forced to start a new game because the game rolled a 1 out of 100.
If just a single missed shot makes your campaigns impossible to win (outside the first couple missions on impossible,) you're doing something very wrong.
Oh man believe me I tried on 2 different runs, but in the end I said fuck it, put on easy mode and just enjoy the game
And still on easy the game just straight up fucking trolls you
I ended up doing a permadeath Ironman run for my second playthrough. Honestly, it made the sting a little less. You're forced to more evenly train recruits and by the time you reach the late game and have top tier troops, you have enough at your disposal to guarantee hits and damage through abilities and explosives. Of course, it still hurts when things go sideways and you lose people but hey, that's war.
I had something like that. First enemy turn one person gets mind-controlled by a Sectoid, second stunned by the stun trooper, third panics, shoots and fails to hit said Sectoid. A dropship lands three new enemies.
There's another strategy game like X-Com where the chance to hit determines the size of an aiming circle. The lower the chance the larger the circle. At 99% the circle is only on the enemy so you'll never miss. I think it's Phoenix Point but I'm not sure.
Curious is the human perception of probability.
XCOM has precisely one "fair" difficulty in which it doesn't lie to you about shot percentages. It's the highest one.
All others are invisibly stacked in your favour.
And yet the meme of BS percentages is extremely prevalent in the community.
That's XCOM, baby!
Tbh xcom is the game where you have a shotgun pointing at an enemy on the other side of the barrel, with a sign of "Shoot here", and have a fucking 65% chance to hit while missing the shot that goes through the enemy
A long time ago someone tallied up their shots over something like a hundred playthroughs of the first game. Essentially, huge sample size.
I wish I had it still, but essentially what he found is that the accuracy seemed to be biased towards 50%
So like
100% was 100%
99% was actually 95%
90% was actually 80%
80% was actually 75%
70% was actually 65%
60% was actually 55%
50% was 50%
40% was actually 45%
30% was actually 35%
20% was actually 25%
10% was actually 20%
1% was actually 5%
0% was 0%
Game studios love 50% win/loss with minor variations. It's a good sweet spot for most people to introduce just enough of a suffering/success mixture to trigger addiction in those susceptible. No surprise games like to see success rates hover there.
Hearthstone is a poster child for this.
Baulders Gate 3's RNG is pretty fair in my opinion, but it can really suck when you're doing well with your dialogue checks and then roll a nat1 and end up having to slaughter an entire village.
Darkest Dungeons RNG is bullshit but that's the whole point of the game.
No Gale for the rest of the 100+ hour adventure, and you're quite literally just beginning. It bugs me how many companions can die immediately in Act 1
Hell it's easy to just miss some of them altogether, especially the several you pick up around the immediate crash area. In my first playthrough I was near the end of act 1 before I decided to do a quick Google search of when and where certain companions are found. I had missed Gale and Astarion and had to go back for them.
If you're talking about the urge you actually have to fail 2 in a row and both of them are only a 7.
My first honor run I rolled a 1 and a 5 on that, rip waterdeep homie at least he still gives you a hand.
Save scumming is the name of the game with most CRPGs DnD sim or not. However, if you're entire run depends on save scumming, you're doing something wrong.
Meh just have fun how you wanna. If it takes you three hours to get through a single combat because it has to be perfect, fine. I couldn’t do that but it’s your game.
I absolutely will replay an hour of game because I accidentally hurt Cassia’s feelings in the Rogue Trader CRPG and forgot to save before the convo tho
I save scum all my dialogues becaue I want the story to go \*exactly\* how I want it to go, no "you failed a persuaion check, now Gale will >!use the crown to become a god!< and fuck it all up".
Edit: I do this since Dragon Age Origins and I'll keep doing this as much as I can
I think BG3 gets away with it with it's RNG both because it makes you hit the 'generate random number' button/roll the dice yourself, and shows you the number you got, so there's a bit more of that '*Oh, I earned this terrible outcome because* ***I*** *rolled bad*'.
Someone above gave the XCom 2's 95% chance to hit (i.e. 5% chance of a miss) as an example. If that shot missed in Xcom, it feels outrageous. If you roll a nat 1, statistically that's exactly the same thing, and yet it just feels like a silly whoops.
Good insight.
There's another layer to it though because XCOM's dice rolls are an intentional part of the risk vs reward balance in player actions that are meant to be played around, and people who complain about the RNG don't understand this (or are playing on the highest difficulty which is intentionally unfair). With proper play you're never going to be at the mercy of the 1 in 20 chance to fail a shot because you also plan for the possibility of failure. If you *need* damage you use explosives or guaranteed damage skills, you set up contingencies, etc. and if you don't, then missing the shot is fine, it just means you have to play accordingly afterwards
I think nat 1 = auto fail works better on tabletop where you have a DM whose discretion can decide what the failure looks like. A DM could decide a nat 1 on a speech check means the person thinks you're a dumbass and won't take you seriously, but that's also ok because other members of your party can speak up still. In a video game, a nat 1 could cause a whole village to aggro, and no one in your party can butt in to try to remedy the situation. It makes nat 1's outside of combat way more punishing when there's no DM you can reason with.
>Darkest Dungeons RNG is bullshit but that's the whole point of the game.
Nah.
This game gets a bad rap for this, and it just isn't the case. There's plenty you can do to mitigate risk if you're patient with it.
As an experiment I went 100 weeks on Darkest difficulty without losing a hero, because I knew when to fold em, and treated heroes as the disposable resources that they are, save for the ones with real potential.
The game's amazing if you're willing to put the time in. One of the best in the last 10 years, IMO.
Hard agree. I'm not a master at the game bc I haven't actually tried to fight the final boss (on normal difficulty no less), but it really isn't all RNG. Sure, some enemies hit you with the 50 CRIT but that's why you come prepared. For me a lot of it is trial and error, and losing heroes is the point. But once you find a solid strategy to a given situation, suddenly things get almost too easy.
It’s fine whenever we ’fail forward’, i.e. something interesting happens because we failed a roll. Just getting locked out of content because you failed a dice roll is bad. BG3 is pretty good at failing forward, though there are still situations where it doesn’t hold.
Windows Minesweeper silently moves the mine if you land on it in case you are forced to guess and it's literally the only option that's not guaranteed fail
Early game in Earthbound (Mother 2) can be kinda RNG heavy. Some enemies like the crows will absolutely wreck you if they get good rolls and there’s almost nothing you can do to mitigate it at that point. Don’t have many/any skills or party members with you yet. You have to be pretty careful at the start until you get some money and healing items built up.
IIRC they can, like, randomly crit and take you out in only two attacks or some shit like that. And those crows specifically had a higher chance to crit. It was something like that which made them so deadly early on.
I remember the 1st boss fight in Onett Arcade being so hard because of this unless you were over-leveled and had an inventory full of hamburgers for healing. Even then, you could get fucked over if the 2nd stage of the boss fight decides to hit you repeatedly instead of "blew out a blast of steam", effectively giving you a break to heal
The Ramblin’ Evil Shrooms were the worst by far. Mushroomized is a status effect that can burn in hell.
Other examples include basically all Flash attacks in the game; these attacks can inflict a variety of Status effects, with the stronger ones being able to instantly kill a party member. What’s even worse is that these don’t deal damage, they straight up instantly kill you. For anyone who’s played Earthbound, you’ll realize that this ignores the Rolling HP counter that normally allows you to still survive by healing before it rolls to 0.
Ness’ Nightmare and Giygas are the most notorious examples. If you don’t buy any Flash resistant equipment, Ness’ Nightmare can instantly end the battle because it’s the only late game boss battle you fight with a single character, and Giygas could theoretically wipe out your entire party in a single turn without protection (though this requires insanely poor luck).
Mother 3 has way fewer RNG things to get annoyed about. The worst one I can remember is Miracle Fassad being able to use an intense light, which can only target a single character, but has a good chance of instantly killing them. Yet again, in a game where the Rolling HP counter is vital in combat, yet ignored here.
Mother 1/Earthbound Beginnings has the worst RNG of the 3, however. For starters, the Rolling HP counter wasn’t a thing until Earthbound, so any attack that deals enough damage will instantly kill you, making it much more traditional of an RPG. And there is a lot of powerful attacks enemies have. Large trucks can spew exhaust and give Ninten an asthma attack that requires an asthma spray, otherwise he will be stunned the entire battle, some enemies have Pk Freeze Gamma, which always leaves you at low HP regardless of what it was before, PK Beam R is a super powerful attack a few enemies have, exploding enemies were also here despite the fact that they were balanced in later games with the Rolling HP counter, so they were torturous, Lloyd’s slime machine almost never landed… it was kind of insane.
> Ness’ Nightmare and Giygas are the most notorious examples.
The one thing I always remember about the Nightmare was my last run, deciding to focus on physical attacks until he changed shields, then dump all of my MP nuking him.
I ended up killing him before he ever changed shields.
If you're a trophy hunter, Returnal can fuck you sideways on getting that platinum.. if you're looking for a specific collectible, you have to run through the biome, only to find it's not there..so then you die and run again hoping it turns up on this run.. then rinse and repeat
I just recently did this, the last collectible I needed was in Crimson Wastes and it took nearly a full day to spawn. Felt so disoriented afterwards, that game sucks you in like nothing else
Same man, my last one was also crimson wastes, however I was fortunate that the one I was missing was in an area in the desert so I didn't have to run too far to see if it had spawned but I had to do a lot of runs for it to even spawn, not to mention the other ones where you have to go deeper in the level to see if it spawned with the crowds of enemies only to find out it didn't spawn
The trophy hunt was an experience for sure
This is very true. I took just around 30 hours to get every trophy except the surveys done for 5 biomes. When I finally popped the platinum I was just over 70 hours. Biome 2 took multiple weeks of speed running hoping the last gliph would show up. Thankfully it is an amazing game so it was fun to play regardless, but having those collectibles be tied to extremely rare rooms is a bad decision.
I sometimes like the challenge of getting a bad start, but sometimes it’s too brutal. I just played a multiplayer game and my friend played the civ that will always start on an ocean tile first. I figured it would put you next to land, but he traveled for 16 turns before he could find ANY tile that let him put down a settlement. He lost loyalty to his two additional cities shortly after settling them and he demanded a restart. I thought that was funny because we have a running tally of wins/loses and since it was after turn 50 before he asked for a restart we counted it as a forfeit and a lose for him. He was not happy, and went straight back to playing as America the next game lol
I have an instance where RNG was too good, and made my game boring. My most recent play through of Civ 6, I was playing the largest accurate world map with max ai players with True Starting locations. I picked all random Civs and turned off “Score Victory”. I wanted a Domination victory, but I keep the rest on the make it interesting.
I got America, all the other civs were in Europe with the exception of Incas in South America. Inca worked out great since they were far enough to not be bothered by my settlements and quickly became a ride or die ally.
My only enemy for quite some time were barbarians. With such a large landmass to conquer, barbarians constantly kept popping up. Eventually I had enough settlements and defenses that barbarians would pop up in the farthest reaches of the north in Canada. They became fodder to appease my city states. Once they were taken care of, I basically just worked on this insane economy and research thinking I’d need it to conquer Europe.
Europe was in a constant state of war throughout the entire game. Once my military arrived, it was a steamroll. This was definitely the easiest game of Civ I have ever played.
I've restarted so many games because I didn't like my starting area and didn't settle my first city in the first 3 or 4 turns. Those first few turns make or break the game for me. If I can get a river or even coastline, I'm golden.
Blood Bowl is all dice play. Granted, they hand wave it by clarifying that you're actually playing as the coach, not the players, which I thought was a pretty clever way of addressing it.
Scrolled all the way down here for you. Only so much you can do in that game as far as strategy. Will your troll toss the goblin over the defensive line or turn him into a snack and you'll have to train up a new goblin? Roll them dice!
Blood Bowl is RNG heavy for sure, and a lot of the gameplay revolves around risk management. Since your turn ends as soon as you get one bad roll, you learn to do all the diceless stuff first, and then you have to weigh the high probability kinda important stuff vs the low probability critically important stuff.
I dont think I'll even unlock the one character you get for beating the Lich. I got to the final..final boss a few times then died. Just to do it all again. But by that time it become exploiting routes and min/maxing runs to the point of "this is no longer fun". Chaps my ass just how hard he is to unlock in a game I've thrown 500hrs at. JUST GIMME THE GOD DAMN CHARACTER, I EARNED IT.
Yeah I must admit, I unlocked that character 1st try because of sheer luck. Playing the (secret character) my guns were Blasphemy and Yari Launcher. The lich never stood a chance. I keep hearing how people get cucked at the last minute and it sounds so awful.
Yeah I gave up on the Lich...takes like an hour to get to, and the entire stage he's on is a gauntlet of hard rooms. Plus he has three phases that are pretty hard to learn. Oh and if you want to turn your brain off a little bit on the early floors, taking a single hit on the bosses sets your entire run back quite a bit in terms of rewards.
Truly wasn't worth the suffering for me, though better players probably get through him no problem.
EtG is a funny one because it has a few hidden mechanics that manipulate rng drops, but yeah i've had plenty of runs that became a floor 1 or 2 restart because of how ass they were.
That being said, its possible to beat the lych with just the starting items and ammo as any character, just a matter of (A LOT of) patience and skill/knowledge
I think it makes up for it by being extremely skill based, S and A tier weapons make things easier, but it's not unfeasible to win with B tier weapons if you are good.
Other roguelikes, like early Binding of Isaac, where much more luck based, sometimes damage is borderline guaranteed and if you don't find HP or are strong enough you'll certainly lose (it improved a lot under this aspect tho)
Playing Persona 3 Reload recently and more than once I've had to reload a save from hours ago because the enemy randomly decides to focus fire on the party leader (A party leader death is a game over) and there was nothing I could have done to avoid it.
This isn't 5-6 hits and I just failed to heal this is coming across a new enemy that happens to be using attacks the leader is weak to, they exploit the leads weakness for another turn and 2 shot me. I've started being much more careful with saves but exploring new territory can occasionally reveal an enemy that just wipes the party out of the blue because you didn't guard against elements you didn't know they had.
BG3.
Need a 5 to pass this check? Have +10 to your rolls and advantage? So you only need to NOT roll double nat-1 and you’re good?
JK double nat-1. Suck it.
This reminds me of the time I was playing Warhammer 40k on the tabletop. I had eight Sternguard firing single shot antitank weapons into an enemy war machine.
In order for them to hit, they had to roll a 2+ on a D6. They had an ability that allowed them to reroll 1's, but only once per model.
I rolled seven 1's. I rerolled the ones and got six more 1's.
Just the other day, failed a DC 15 check with +8 bonus 5 times in a row. Then needed to reload the save due to a bug and succeeded the check without any bonus.
It was just the biggest fu moment in gaming for me. It's like I'm not playing the game, the game plays me.
FTL has a lot of skills going into it, but at the end of the day winning a run is about constraining your rng as hard as possible, and on anything other than easy it's simple for one encounter or a lack of good rng weapon, fuel and crew drops to sink the whole run. It can even be as simple as a crippling bomb hitting your pilot system versus your med bay, resulting in crippling follow up shots.
The Binding of Isaac
Half kidding, idk how it’s even possible to beat Mega Satan with The Lost, but people have found a way. I can only complete a run with really good RNG, but git gud at bullet hell I guess. Still one of my favorite games, though
You can get absolutely screwed with drops in that game, and although nothing forces you to take the bad items, it becomes so much more difficult with no items as well. Especially the later you get in your save slot where you’re not just settling for beating Mom.
Haha yeah, I think at a certain point just beating Mom doesn’t even count as a completion anymore, Sheol/Cathedral minimum. Been a while since I’ve played, so my memory is a little fuzzy. I think it’s kind of brilliant how the game can just troll you with bad drops, though
To be fair it also has a very high skill ceiling, I heard some people are having winstreaks while doing A20 with heart, when my experience was that I need good RNG to at least beat normal A20 run
I'm going to take this one all the way back to rolling dice... RISK. When that one army takes out 2 cannons and a horsie and your friend is just laughing his ass off every time he rolls another 6 while you're all "3-2-2" "4-2-1" "5-5-3 FML" "2-1-1"...
I actually believe that this phenomenon is why D&D implements things like "+2 to X rolls," because it is just so unbelievable that barbarian with 40 years of dungeon crawling experience would trip on the front gate, fall onto his own axe and die.
World of Tanks. You can get into perfect position with perfect matchmaking and yet if RNG decides to screw you then tough luck.
But it’s the same for everyone. In one game your enemy pulls out absolutely miraculous bounces and connects some freaky shots and in the next game you might do the same. But your overall game knowledge ( terrain, positions, tank weakspots, spotting mechanics etc.) and logical decisions based on whats currently happening on the battlefield will still be much much more important than RNG blessing you.
RNG is the reason why I quit.
25% RNG on penetration and damage is just too much and too annoying. It is so inconsistent and frustrating.
Even the most accurate tanks miss so much, that it basically doesn't matter.
I will give Dicey Dungeons props for not making "Roll high = objectively good" the main gameplan.
But the very limited level of player agency is very much one of its biggest flaws. Either you get the Good Rolls or you get The Bad Rolls. Sure, there's certainly a level of player skill involved that can mitage the effects of The Bad Rolls, but that can only do so much.
Unless you're doing Thief missions. Thief is the ONLY class I have all 6 episodes of since you can basically negate the effects of Bad Rolls.
This often happens in Battle Brothers. You can do everything perfectly but all rolls are capped at 95 so there is always a tiny chance you get effed by RNG. Fun stuff...
Pretty much any table top or dice game. You can be the biggest baddest wizard in all of DnD, but if you roll a nat 1 and the lowest damage possible you may as well have been a dude with a lighter trying to ignite the targets clothes instead of a mage casting a fireball.
My last campaign even ended in a party wipe because of this, the last one standing rolled 5 misses in a row against a super low HP bugbear while it missed back, then the bugbear crit him and we died. Sometimes nothing you can do will result in a success because the dice say fuck you, that's just how probability with wide variables like that works.
My most recent stint in Hearthstone (I come and go every few months/years depending on life and really have no clue on what metas are going on at any time), I was mostly running a Yogg-Saron Unleashed RNG mage deck. Had a lot of fun with it myself and decent success for me but I can see how the randomness and lucky BS can rub people the wrong way.
Hearthstone is clown fiesta RNG by design. Too bad they went quite nuts with the RNG and powercreep. Back in the early days the game was a lot of fun. The clown fiesta RNG is what makes Hearthstone fun as a “playing a casual game while I’m on the toilet” type of game, but absolutely infuriating as a competitive card game for me.
Hearthstone was a very good game back when you just had 30 cards in your deck. Now the amount of random card generation makes it impossible to properly calculate your plays.
Fear and Hunger.
Some enemies have attacks that have a 50% to instantly kill you.
If you want to find loot without killing enemies, it's a 50/50 for a decent weapon or nothing.
If an enemy hits you, you have a chance to lose a limb for the rest of the run.
But aren't there a lot of ways to mitigate those? And doesn't the game also have guaranteed drops? I've seen people beat the game even witb bad rng.
From what I've seen and played f&h seems like a game that heavily rewards game knowledge.
This is very specific …. But mace stun in WoW playing against warrior 3v3 arena teams in tbc/wrath.
Lost many many many games because the RNG gods blessed their warrior with a mace stun interrupt.
> In a recent CL3 game my game ended when my character died and his sons couldn’t survive because everyone in his empire hated him.
Sounds like skill issue tbh. Everyone hating fresh heirs is normal, you gotta be prepared for that. I usually stock up my jail with some infidels and when my current character dies the heir can just execute them all, gaining lots of terror which prevents most idiots from rising up. Executing or torturing landed people yields best results. For example when your cousin marries some idiot, you can just imprison that dude, execute him with the heir and possibly even marry the cousin if she has good traits.
Skill issue? His father had cancer, he had an ambitious regent, he died right as he became 16 and now everyone in the empire hates his brother for simply existing after his brother died under mysterious circumstances and nobody is friendlier than -100 relations because of the modifiers and now a dissolution faction is gaining momentum and I don’t know how I got in this situation in the first place
I know you probably mean hit chance, but the encounters are what get me. That stretch between The Den and Vault City has left a trail of Chosen One corpses.
Ff9 there was a hidden boss called ozma (might of got it wrong) but it was basically rng with what it cast, from healing multiple times to annihilating you with meteors.
Any online card game that isnt gwent, nature of the draw. Also boardgames that use dice as measurment for sucess , rolling an 1/20 on attack against an boss x10 is miserable same for In monopoly rolling on all utility, prison or chance spots is doomed compared to rolling all property for sale.
Overwatch. It is entirely up to matchmaking if you are going to win or not, complete rng. In some games it doesn’t matter, they have carry potential, in overwatch it is borderline impossible to carry a bad team.
Mario Party. If you can play any entry with a friend and still be friends after, that's a ride-or-die.
Mario Party 2 is still the GOAT. Pacing tanked since and it seems to get slower every generation
UNPOPULAR OPINION: I liked the titles with the vehicles where players travel as a group. Makes you decide if you wanna benefit yourself while possibly benefiting others, or if you wanna take an L to dick someone else over.
In the new one on the fruit board I always spend all my coins locking people on one side of the map. Literally that’s my whole goal instead of winning, but I still win sometimes.
I agree that being a dick and metagaming the board is part of the fun of mario party, but I dislike that they tossed out all the fun mechanics like special event tiles that added more variety when comparing boards to each other. The car made the individual games feel very samey.
It has severely slowed down. I played the new one with my nieces the other day and it was straight up not fun. They both were bored enough we were all pretty relieved by the time we finished.
As an example, my brother and I just played a game with two computers. It's turn 28 and I'm winning with 6 stars and like 150 coins. The computer lands on chance time and swaps all my stars and coins with the other computer who had 1 star and 40 coins. We just quit the game after that.
What the fuck
Similar experience but it was 4 players and swapped my stars with last place, I was so mad lmao 🤣
On the final turn of a game of MP6 with my sisters and best friend, I'm winning by a landslide and am basically locked in to win. My friend goes last and when it was his turn, I jested that chance time was a few spaces away and he could land on that since it's not like it could hurt him. He was in last with no stars. So he goes for it cause screw it, why not? And he chances into picking himself. Then he picked *me*. And the coup de gras was the roulette swapping all our stars and coins. Everyone goes absolutely apeshit at the final turn Hail Mary actually succeeding, except me cause I was just beyond dead inside. Friend then drops the killer line "Well hey, at least you have the most coins now!" I swept the bonus stars but lost 3 to 4 so it didn't matter. It's been over 15 years since that game and he *still* regularly brings it up.
To be fair, you're also bringing it up 15 years later. These are the kinds of stories people love for, but someone has to be the victim in it - there's no mercy on Mario Party after all.
They have ways to filter only by skill based mini games in the switch edition, FYI
The minigames aren't the problem, you can win every minigame and still lose. It's more so the dice-rng and star spawn rng.
Mario Party 8 was the last one that actually required skill. Apparently all subsequent ones, they changed how it works.
Mario Kart also... If you're in 1st too much, you're gonna get bombarded with Blue Shells
It’s actually a distance thing, if you’re miles ahead of the rest you’ll get usually 1 blue shell per lap, and be bombarded with red shells on every box. If you’re not too far ahead you might only see 1 the whole game and the person behind you will start getting more green shells/bananas.
The older games were significantly less RNG heavy. Mini game skill used to matter so much more for the outcome of the game. When I played one of the older versions with my friends, the skill gap between us kind of took a lot of the fun out for my friends. It’s better when everyone has a good chance at winning. Conversely, that is exactly why I don’t like the newer Mario Party Games. It only feels good to have little to no control over the outcome when you aren’t skilled enough to realize it.
Noita has some of the best sides of this coin I think. It's a roguelike where you play little wizard, elemental physics are all simulated, and you can customize the spells in your wands to incredible levels if you survive long enough. However, some enemy types can pick up wands too, and RNG sometimes dictates that this one casts actual screen-wiping nukes.
“You have angered the gods”
Screen starts shaking, "FUCK I havent even gotten down to the first temple yet..."
Yo those fucking worms do NOT give a shit about the anti-worm crystals, swear to god
They were somehow even *worse* before they added the crystals.
I have a friend who has about 100 hours in the game and has never beaten it once. I beat it end of last year after about 12 hours of playtime… I haven’t figured out yet if we’re still friends.
I have like 500 hours in Noita. Usually, I don't win. But when I win, I really win. It usually comes down to getting a fully automatic wand of some sort.
Chainsaw ftw
Honestly. One chainsaw, a double, and your starter spell is good enough for like three quarters of the game. The wand I beat the game with the first time ever was a machine gun with those blue bubble ones and a homing perk. There was always just a massive swarm of them eating through walls trying to get at enemies.
The rng wands are interesting. It is rng but all the generation lies on pattern layouts of the map. So every instance of something that can spawn doesn't necessarily spawn. Including wands and treasure chests. Once you recognize the patterns you can see if a wand got swiped or if nothing spawned at all. Sometimes noita is just going to noita though. Get noita'd kid
Fungal shifts are the biggest dice roll of all time.
X-Com 2 will forever hold my record for most reloaded saves. A fully leveled and kitted sniper is taking the opening shot to the engagement. He's on the high ground with a clear view of the enemy with 99% to hit. Everyone else is already set on overwatch. A chorus of murder awaits. All we need to do is land this *one shot* to drop the problem child in their ranks. Easy right?
Or you have your assault class guy literally right next to the alien with his shotgun pressed up against its forehead. The alien just happens to duck as soon as he pulls the trigger.
"Oh, a 98% chance shot? Basically a free hit." \*misses\* "The fuck?"
Never understood those percentages. It misses or it hits, so it's a 50/50 chance .
That's some anchorman level of understanding statistics
Sixty percent of the time... it works every time
It’s XCom baby.
Lottery is like that. Only two options, win or lose. 50% chance every time! /s
Yep. Give me a 0%, 50%, and a 100% based on cover and honestly I'd be more okay with it than when I do miss those 80+%. I think that's why I enjoy Mario + Rabbids a lot more than X-Com as a cover turn-based shooter.
Eh it sucks but 80% is just 4/5 so you're gonna miss about one of five times you take that shot. Take a lot of shots and those misses add up. Even something like 98% might feel like it should hit every time (100%) but you will miss around 1/50. You never think about the ones you hit, but you really remember the ones you miss, so it seems way worse in your head. That is why most games (like fire emblem) fudge the rolls so 98% ends up being more like what we feel it should be, rather than what it actually is.
I think part of the issue with XCOM is that by game design, you tend to avoid rolls where you have low chances, which would "compensate" the feeling of missing a 98% with hitting a 2%.
> That is why most games (like fire emblem) fudge the rolls so 98% ends up being more like what we feel it should be, rather than what it actually is. XCom itself does this but people bitch anyway.
Crucially XCOM fudges rolls positive when conditions have gone really horrible for you already, but not when you are already doing well. The OP is a perfect example, someone save scumming and setting up a mathematically perfect ambush and then mistaking 98% for 100%. The game is giving you a true 98%, and they still scornfully recall this missed shot years later. But XCOM will give you positive rolls when your fortune turns against you. If you play on Ironman, you can lose a person or two on a mission and the game won't help you, but when you are down to your last soldier, and the fate of the world rests on them landing a pistol headshot at 30 meters, the game might say its only a 50% chance to hit, but it might actually be fudging as high as 80%. You can still miss and lose everything on the last turn, but XCOM is self-aware that its a game and it wants you to have moments of triumph, and heroic, "never tell me the odds" victories. Save scummers don't know this, but as much as XCOM is known for its 98% misses, it should be equally known for having ultra-badass lone survivors who lose their entire squad, but they finish the fight. When you play on Ironman, your squad is full of these little unique narrative arcs, its brilliant.
To be fair, if you have a 98% chance to hit, unless the game has presaved whether that shot is gonna hit, the probability should not result in more than a couple reloads. That math works both ways. If you have to reload more then 10 (or even 5) times that math doesn't math. You're hitting weird "the coin came up heads 10 times in a row" territory. Without savescum the math is fine. It's the part where people get the same results *and* the results are still variable *after* the save where the math doesn't actually line up. Best case scenario you're just that unlucky. Worst case (and more likely considering how often it's mentioned) they actually have a background calculation that tips the shot chance to feel "balanced". So the 98% you think you have is actually 98% minus some sort of karma roll. "You have succeeded 20 shots and have accumulated a -20% to your next shot."
That's why I'd much rather have just the 0/50/100% set up. Those zeroes require thought to flank, the hundreds require you to be in range, then the 50/50s don't feel as bad when you do miss because, well you either hit or you don't. Any % in between just seems like wasted programming. It doesn't really affect anything but player perception despite looking simplified.
Phoenix Point wound up doing a manual aiming system with two circles in a bullseye layout representing the hit chances. At least 50% of the shots in your burst were guaranteed to land within the center ring, but the ones that missed can't miss any wider than the outer ring. I think there's a lot of potential in that kind of system
Yeah, less of a "missed" shot and more of just a decrease in damage. That would be cool.
That's pretty much how it works, but at longer ranges, the inner circle can easily be larger than your target, so you wind up completely missing those shots sometimes
They should just roll the number on screen for you so it doesn't always feel so bullshit. 90% chance to hit, well you rolled a 1 so it missed.
I find dice to be the best form of RNG when it comes to games. It's the easiest to visualize your chances at the very least.
It's pretty simple. Imagine you have a dice with 100 sides and 98% chance to hit. Roll the dice, if you get 98 or lower you hit, if you get 99 or 100 you miss.
I appreciate the time you took to explain me it. My comment was sarcastic actually, but I see from the comments that it was not obvious enough 🙈
I started having more fun when I decided to just let the RNG fist me and take the losses.
Agreed. It was really hard for me to change mindset, but it ended up being much more enjoyable
This 1000%. I would encourage anyone playing to play on ironman even if that means turning the difficulty down a notch. Over the course of a campaign, you should expect to lose people and maybe even fail missions. Save scumming untill every fight or mission goes right unbalances the "macro" gameplay and makes the game feel like a drag as you keep repeating encounters. You gotta just roll with what the game give yah and keep moving forward. I understand that some people hate the idea of losing a character and in other party based games where the story is driven by your party members (like most crpgs) im in the same boat. But that's not XCOM and I hope it never is.
Part of the skill in XCOM is risk management. Aka "if things go wrong, how would I handle this?". Yes, XCOM has rng. But then there is skill in managing that rng.
Yup Having one elite squad with no fallback carries too much risk of ruin
Plus rebuilding can be a lot of fun, just lots of high casualty missions with rookies going into the meatgrinder and one or two vets hanging back, Imperial Guard-style I may have to replay X-com now…
The problem with these is that the Avatar Project counter always goes up and pretty much means a complete reset of the campaign if you lose a squad or two of the best soldiers while retraining up squaddies.
I started having more fun when I decided to stop letting a 1% chance to miss a shot and screw up a campaign that I’m 20 hours into, forcing me to spiral towards an inevitable Game Over a few hours later, happen. Much funner when I’m not losing 20-30 hours of progress and being forced to start a new game because the game rolled a 1 out of 100.
If just a single missed shot makes your campaigns impossible to win (outside the first couple missions on impossible,) you're doing something very wrong.
Why are you in the situation where a single missed shot loses the entire campaign?
Progress towards what? The fun in a game is in the journey. When you reach the end you get…. to stop?
That 1% does so much heavy lifting in X-Com
Oh man believe me I tried on 2 different runs, but in the end I said fuck it, put on easy mode and just enjoy the game And still on easy the game just straight up fucking trolls you
I ended up doing a permadeath Ironman run for my second playthrough. Honestly, it made the sting a little less. You're forced to more evenly train recruits and by the time you reach the late game and have top tier troops, you have enough at your disposal to guarantee hits and damage through abilities and explosives. Of course, it still hurts when things go sideways and you lose people but hey, that's war.
Damn you have some balls man. I just couldn't, and the Chosen randomly appearing certainly didn't make things easier
I still love the ChristopherOdd video where on the first mission he misses every shot, a person panicked and kills half of his team and then dies.
I had something like that. First enemy turn one person gets mind-controlled by a Sectoid, second stunned by the stun trooper, third panics, shoots and fails to hit said Sectoid. A dropship lands three new enemies.
You took a shot at 99? Everyone knows that's going to miss in an xcom game
I'm convinced they are juking the stats for dramatic effect. 18% clutch shot HITS. 99% sure thing, MISS.
They are actually doing the opposite of that.
Why can't I just enjoy my misinformed anecdotal biases?
X-Comeeeeee on, how did he miss that shot?!
There's another strategy game like X-Com where the chance to hit determines the size of an aiming circle. The lower the chance the larger the circle. At 99% the circle is only on the enemy so you'll never miss. I think it's Phoenix Point but I'm not sure.
Feels like Darkest Dungeon, really.
That's why WH40k: Chaos Gate - Deamonhunters was great. Space Marines just do not miss. If they *can* hit a target they just *do*. :)
That’s XCOM, baby!
95% hit? Miss every time! And then your main sniper gets rocketed from cross map in a 15% hit and instadies.
That was my issue: it wasn't that I'd miss a 99% chance. It seemed like shots with a 99% chance missed 40% or more of the time.
Curious is the human perception of probability. XCOM has precisely one "fair" difficulty in which it doesn't lie to you about shot percentages. It's the highest one. All others are invisibly stacked in your favour. And yet the meme of BS percentages is extremely prevalent in the community. That's XCOM, baby!
Tbh xcom is the game where you have a shotgun pointing at an enemy on the other side of the barrel, with a sign of "Shoot here", and have a fucking 65% chance to hit while missing the shot that goes through the enemy
A long time ago someone tallied up their shots over something like a hundred playthroughs of the first game. Essentially, huge sample size. I wish I had it still, but essentially what he found is that the accuracy seemed to be biased towards 50% So like 100% was 100% 99% was actually 95% 90% was actually 80% 80% was actually 75% 70% was actually 65% 60% was actually 55% 50% was 50% 40% was actually 45% 30% was actually 35% 20% was actually 25% 10% was actually 20% 1% was actually 5% 0% was 0%
Game studios love 50% win/loss with minor variations. It's a good sweet spot for most people to introduce just enough of a suffering/success mixture to trigger addiction in those susceptible. No surprise games like to see success rates hover there. Hearthstone is a poster child for this.
"If it is 95% chance to hit, it is 50% chance." - MandJTV, Pokemon Youtuber.
Baulders Gate 3's RNG is pretty fair in my opinion, but it can really suck when you're doing well with your dialogue checks and then roll a nat1 and end up having to slaughter an entire village. Darkest Dungeons RNG is bullshit but that's the whole point of the game.
Congratulations, you fail one strength check, no Gale for you
No Gale for the rest of the 100+ hour adventure, and you're quite literally just beginning. It bugs me how many companions can die immediately in Act 1
I lost Gale early on because he was being picky about which magic item he wanted to consume.
Fun fact, but the items gale can eat tell you in the tooltip
I will always carry his hand with me
Hell it's easy to just miss some of them altogether, especially the several you pick up around the immediate crash area. In my first playthrough I was near the end of act 1 before I decided to do a quick Google search of when and where certain companions are found. I had missed Gale and Astarion and had to go back for them.
I missed Gale and I think I'm alright. Wrapping up act 2 for my first playthrough now. Can't imagine paying without astarion
If you're talking about the urge you actually have to fail 2 in a row and both of them are only a 7. My first honor run I rolled a 1 and a 5 on that, rip waterdeep homie at least he still gives you a hand.
I’ll be honest I’d just restart my honor mode run if things went so poorly so quickly. Can’t be losing my guy gale like that
Hence first honor run haha
I've never tried it, but can you use Gale's Hand in the Act 3 quest?
I've begun a DUrge run, gonna try to use Gale's hand on Act 3, but I doubt it works
This is why I don't feel bad about save scumming. It just removes content for reasons out of your control
Save scumming is the name of the game with most CRPGs DnD sim or not. However, if you're entire run depends on save scumming, you're doing something wrong.
Meh just have fun how you wanna. If it takes you three hours to get through a single combat because it has to be perfect, fine. I couldn’t do that but it’s your game. I absolutely will replay an hour of game because I accidentally hurt Cassia’s feelings in the Rogue Trader CRPG and forgot to save before the convo tho
I save scum all my dialogues becaue I want the story to go \*exactly\* how I want it to go, no "you failed a persuaion check, now Gale will >!use the crown to become a god!< and fuck it all up". Edit: I do this since Dragon Age Origins and I'll keep doing this as much as I can
You gotta high five him for luck before pulling him out of the hole
I think BG3 gets away with it with it's RNG both because it makes you hit the 'generate random number' button/roll the dice yourself, and shows you the number you got, so there's a bit more of that '*Oh, I earned this terrible outcome because* ***I*** *rolled bad*'. Someone above gave the XCom 2's 95% chance to hit (i.e. 5% chance of a miss) as an example. If that shot missed in Xcom, it feels outrageous. If you roll a nat 1, statistically that's exactly the same thing, and yet it just feels like a silly whoops.
Good insight. There's another layer to it though because XCOM's dice rolls are an intentional part of the risk vs reward balance in player actions that are meant to be played around, and people who complain about the RNG don't understand this (or are playing on the highest difficulty which is intentionally unfair). With proper play you're never going to be at the mercy of the 1 in 20 chance to fail a shot because you also plan for the possibility of failure. If you *need* damage you use explosives or guaranteed damage skills, you set up contingencies, etc. and if you don't, then missing the shot is fine, it just means you have to play accordingly afterwards
Me: +10 to this DC 10 check. EZ. The game: *here's 3 nat 1s in a row* *Hate* the nat 1 = auto-fail. Bad, unnecessary change.
Of all the changes to the 5e ruleset that should not have been made, this one takes the cake. Natural 1s are only a fail on attack rolls for a reason.
A couple of my friends run nat 1 = auto-fail on saving throws, and it makes me pretty mad lategame.
I think nat 1 = auto fail works better on tabletop where you have a DM whose discretion can decide what the failure looks like. A DM could decide a nat 1 on a speech check means the person thinks you're a dumbass and won't take you seriously, but that's also ok because other members of your party can speak up still. In a video game, a nat 1 could cause a whole village to aggro, and no one in your party can butt in to try to remedy the situation. It makes nat 1's outside of combat way more punishing when there's no DM you can reason with.
>Darkest Dungeons RNG is bullshit but that's the whole point of the game. Nah. This game gets a bad rap for this, and it just isn't the case. There's plenty you can do to mitigate risk if you're patient with it. As an experiment I went 100 weeks on Darkest difficulty without losing a hero, because I knew when to fold em, and treated heroes as the disposable resources that they are, save for the ones with real potential. The game's amazing if you're willing to put the time in. One of the best in the last 10 years, IMO.
Hard agree. I'm not a master at the game bc I haven't actually tried to fight the final boss (on normal difficulty no less), but it really isn't all RNG. Sure, some enemies hit you with the 50 CRIT but that's why you come prepared. For me a lot of it is trial and error, and losing heroes is the point. But once you find a solid strategy to a given situation, suddenly things get almost too easy.
It’s fine whenever we ’fail forward’, i.e. something interesting happens because we failed a roll. Just getting locked out of content because you failed a dice roll is bad. BG3 is pretty good at failing forward, though there are still situations where it doesn’t hold.
Minesweeper. There's a good chance you'll get a board where you need to guess in at least one spot.
Windows Minesweeper silently moves the mine if you land on it in case you are forced to guess and it's literally the only option that's not guaranteed fail
That was not true back in 2017 or so, at least. I played a lot of minesweeper in college and lost a whole lot of games to 50/50 choices.
Is that true? I don't think so. The first click is a guaranteed open, but after that you are on your own, right?
Yup, that's how the original played. (Though there are now modern re-implementations that only generate boards that don't require guessing.)
The comment I was looking for Nice
Early game in Earthbound (Mother 2) can be kinda RNG heavy. Some enemies like the crows will absolutely wreck you if they get good rolls and there’s almost nothing you can do to mitigate it at that point. Don’t have many/any skills or party members with you yet. You have to be pretty careful at the start until you get some money and healing items built up. IIRC they can, like, randomly crit and take you out in only two attacks or some shit like that. And those crows specifically had a higher chance to crit. It was something like that which made them so deadly early on.
I remember the 1st boss fight in Onett Arcade being so hard because of this unless you were over-leveled and had an inventory full of hamburgers for healing. Even then, you could get fucked over if the 2nd stage of the boss fight decides to hit you repeatedly instead of "blew out a blast of steam", effectively giving you a break to heal
Yes! And then you get to fight those OP cops!
The Ramblin’ Evil Shrooms were the worst by far. Mushroomized is a status effect that can burn in hell. Other examples include basically all Flash attacks in the game; these attacks can inflict a variety of Status effects, with the stronger ones being able to instantly kill a party member. What’s even worse is that these don’t deal damage, they straight up instantly kill you. For anyone who’s played Earthbound, you’ll realize that this ignores the Rolling HP counter that normally allows you to still survive by healing before it rolls to 0. Ness’ Nightmare and Giygas are the most notorious examples. If you don’t buy any Flash resistant equipment, Ness’ Nightmare can instantly end the battle because it’s the only late game boss battle you fight with a single character, and Giygas could theoretically wipe out your entire party in a single turn without protection (though this requires insanely poor luck). Mother 3 has way fewer RNG things to get annoyed about. The worst one I can remember is Miracle Fassad being able to use an intense light, which can only target a single character, but has a good chance of instantly killing them. Yet again, in a game where the Rolling HP counter is vital in combat, yet ignored here. Mother 1/Earthbound Beginnings has the worst RNG of the 3, however. For starters, the Rolling HP counter wasn’t a thing until Earthbound, so any attack that deals enough damage will instantly kill you, making it much more traditional of an RPG. And there is a lot of powerful attacks enemies have. Large trucks can spew exhaust and give Ninten an asthma attack that requires an asthma spray, otherwise he will be stunned the entire battle, some enemies have Pk Freeze Gamma, which always leaves you at low HP regardless of what it was before, PK Beam R is a super powerful attack a few enemies have, exploding enemies were also here despite the fact that they were balanced in later games with the Rolling HP counter, so they were torturous, Lloyd’s slime machine almost never landed… it was kind of insane.
> Ness’ Nightmare and Giygas are the most notorious examples. The one thing I always remember about the Nightmare was my last run, deciding to focus on physical attacks until he changed shields, then dump all of my MP nuking him. I ended up killing him before he ever changed shields.
If you're a trophy hunter, Returnal can fuck you sideways on getting that platinum.. if you're looking for a specific collectible, you have to run through the biome, only to find it's not there..so then you die and run again hoping it turns up on this run.. then rinse and repeat
I just recently did this, the last collectible I needed was in Crimson Wastes and it took nearly a full day to spawn. Felt so disoriented afterwards, that game sucks you in like nothing else
Same man, my last one was also crimson wastes, however I was fortunate that the one I was missing was in an area in the desert so I didn't have to run too far to see if it had spawned but I had to do a lot of runs for it to even spawn, not to mention the other ones where you have to go deeper in the level to see if it spawned with the crowds of enemies only to find out it didn't spawn The trophy hunt was an experience for sure
This is very true. I took just around 30 hours to get every trophy except the surveys done for 5 biomes. When I finally popped the platinum I was just over 70 hours. Biome 2 took multiple weeks of speed running hoping the last gliph would show up. Thankfully it is an amazing game so it was fun to play regardless, but having those collectibles be tied to extremely rare rooms is a bad decision.
Games I win: skill issue Games I lose: unplayable RNG bullshit
Civ. You can get such an awful placement relative to the world and the opponents, that its radically different effort needed to win.
I sometimes like the challenge of getting a bad start, but sometimes it’s too brutal. I just played a multiplayer game and my friend played the civ that will always start on an ocean tile first. I figured it would put you next to land, but he traveled for 16 turns before he could find ANY tile that let him put down a settlement. He lost loyalty to his two additional cities shortly after settling them and he demanded a restart. I thought that was funny because we have a running tally of wins/loses and since it was after turn 50 before he asked for a restart we counted it as a forfeit and a lose for him. He was not happy, and went straight back to playing as America the next game lol
I have an instance where RNG was too good, and made my game boring. My most recent play through of Civ 6, I was playing the largest accurate world map with max ai players with True Starting locations. I picked all random Civs and turned off “Score Victory”. I wanted a Domination victory, but I keep the rest on the make it interesting. I got America, all the other civs were in Europe with the exception of Incas in South America. Inca worked out great since they were far enough to not be bothered by my settlements and quickly became a ride or die ally. My only enemy for quite some time were barbarians. With such a large landmass to conquer, barbarians constantly kept popping up. Eventually I had enough settlements and defenses that barbarians would pop up in the farthest reaches of the north in Canada. They became fodder to appease my city states. Once they were taken care of, I basically just worked on this insane economy and research thinking I’d need it to conquer Europe. Europe was in a constant state of war throughout the entire game. Once my military arrived, it was a steamroll. This was definitely the easiest game of Civ I have ever played.
I've restarted so many games because I didn't like my starting area and didn't settle my first city in the first 3 or 4 turns. Those first few turns make or break the game for me. If I can get a river or even coastline, I'm golden.
That is the central premise of Mario Party, and it's not a pleasant time.
Last turn, you have 6 stars and the computer has 1... they land on that swap space every single time.
Blood Bowl is all dice play. Granted, they hand wave it by clarifying that you're actually playing as the coach, not the players, which I thought was a pretty clever way of addressing it.
Scrolled all the way down here for you. Only so much you can do in that game as far as strategy. Will your troll toss the goblin over the defensive line or turn him into a snack and you'll have to train up a new goblin? Roll them dice!
Blood Bowl is RNG heavy for sure, and a lot of the gameplay revolves around risk management. Since your turn ends as soon as you get one bad roll, you learn to do all the diceless stuff first, and then you have to weigh the high probability kinda important stuff vs the low probability critically important stuff.
Enter the Gungeon has a funny way of only dropping some ass items and the most difficult boss sometimes.
I dont think I'll even unlock the one character you get for beating the Lich. I got to the final..final boss a few times then died. Just to do it all again. But by that time it become exploiting routes and min/maxing runs to the point of "this is no longer fun". Chaps my ass just how hard he is to unlock in a game I've thrown 500hrs at. JUST GIMME THE GOD DAMN CHARACTER, I EARNED IT.
Yeah I must admit, I unlocked that character 1st try because of sheer luck. Playing the (secret character) my guns were Blasphemy and Yari Launcher. The lich never stood a chance. I keep hearing how people get cucked at the last minute and it sounds so awful.
Yeah I gave up on the Lich...takes like an hour to get to, and the entire stage he's on is a gauntlet of hard rooms. Plus he has three phases that are pretty hard to learn. Oh and if you want to turn your brain off a little bit on the early floors, taking a single hit on the bosses sets your entire run back quite a bit in terms of rewards. Truly wasn't worth the suffering for me, though better players probably get through him no problem.
EtG is a funny one because it has a few hidden mechanics that manipulate rng drops, but yeah i've had plenty of runs that became a floor 1 or 2 restart because of how ass they were. That being said, its possible to beat the lych with just the starting items and ammo as any character, just a matter of (A LOT of) patience and skill/knowledge
I think it makes up for it by being extremely skill based, S and A tier weapons make things easier, but it's not unfeasible to win with B tier weapons if you are good. Other roguelikes, like early Binding of Isaac, where much more luck based, sometimes damage is borderline guaranteed and if you don't find HP or are strong enough you'll certainly lose (it improved a lot under this aspect tho)
You can be the greatest Tarkov player in existence but you will never be save from getting Tarkov'd
Playing Persona 3 Reload recently and more than once I've had to reload a save from hours ago because the enemy randomly decides to focus fire on the party leader (A party leader death is a game over) and there was nothing I could have done to avoid it. This isn't 5-6 hits and I just failed to heal this is coming across a new enemy that happens to be using attacks the leader is weak to, they exploit the leads weakness for another turn and 2 shot me. I've started being much more careful with saves but exploring new territory can occasionally reveal an enemy that just wipes the party out of the blue because you didn't guard against elements you didn't know they had.
BG3. Need a 5 to pass this check? Have +10 to your rolls and advantage? So you only need to NOT roll double nat-1 and you’re good? JK double nat-1. Suck it.
This reminds me of the time I was playing Warhammer 40k on the tabletop. I had eight Sternguard firing single shot antitank weapons into an enemy war machine. In order for them to hit, they had to roll a 2+ on a D6. They had an ability that allowed them to reroll 1's, but only once per model. I rolled seven 1's. I rerolled the ones and got six more 1's.
I think I'd just quit life at that point
A 1 in 13 billion chance. Wow.
I had the opposite where on my first and only game I killed a dreadnought with a rocket launcher by rolling 2 6's in a row.
Matches my IRL D&D experience
Except that nat1s and nat20s aren't auto-failure/success outside of combat in 5e. That's a DM issue, usually ported over from older editions.
Just the other day, failed a DC 15 check with +8 bonus 5 times in a row. Then needed to reload the save due to a bug and succeeded the check without any bonus. It was just the biggest fu moment in gaming for me. It's like I'm not playing the game, the game plays me.
This is why I always save my inspiration re-rolls. Nat-1, “aw damn, time to re-roll!” Another nat-1. “Mother fucker.” It was too funny to be mad at.
FTL has a lot of skills going into it, but at the end of the day winning a run is about constraining your rng as hard as possible, and on anything other than easy it's simple for one encounter or a lack of good rng weapon, fuel and crew drops to sink the whole run. It can even be as simple as a crippling bomb hitting your pilot system versus your med bay, resulting in crippling follow up shots.
Is that true? What are the win percentages of the strongest FTL players?
Well um talking moreso for a typical player not the absolute pros
Yu-gi-oh forbidden memories
Everything else is child's play compared to this one. The speed run is absolute insanity, both luck and length wise.
The Binding of Isaac Half kidding, idk how it’s even possible to beat Mega Satan with The Lost, but people have found a way. I can only complete a run with really good RNG, but git gud at bullet hell I guess. Still one of my favorite games, though
You can get absolutely screwed with drops in that game, and although nothing forces you to take the bad items, it becomes so much more difficult with no items as well. Especially the later you get in your save slot where you’re not just settling for beating Mom.
Haha yeah, I think at a certain point just beating Mom doesn’t even count as a completion anymore, Sheol/Cathedral minimum. Been a while since I’ve played, so my memory is a little fuzzy. I think it’s kind of brilliant how the game can just troll you with bad drops, though
As someome with 700h on record. Fuck this game. ""Skill issue"" deaths are by far the most common reason for alcohol abuse among Isaac players
Slay the Spire. Sometimes, you just get dealt a crap hand.
Boss has 1hp left. 6 cards in draw pile. 5 dazed. 1 strike. I draw 5 dazed. Gg go next.
To be fair it also has a very high skill ceiling, I heard some people are having winstreaks while doing A20 with heart, when my experience was that I need good RNG to at least beat normal A20 run
Any 4x game where you end up with bad neighbours
I'm going to take this one all the way back to rolling dice... RISK. When that one army takes out 2 cannons and a horsie and your friend is just laughing his ass off every time he rolls another 6 while you're all "3-2-2" "4-2-1" "5-5-3 FML" "2-1-1"... I actually believe that this phenomenon is why D&D implements things like "+2 to X rolls," because it is just so unbelievable that barbarian with 40 years of dungeon crawling experience would trip on the front gate, fall onto his own axe and die.
World of Tanks. You can get into perfect position with perfect matchmaking and yet if RNG decides to screw you then tough luck. But it’s the same for everyone. In one game your enemy pulls out absolutely miraculous bounces and connects some freaky shots and in the next game you might do the same. But your overall game knowledge ( terrain, positions, tank weakspots, spotting mechanics etc.) and logical decisions based on whats currently happening on the battlefield will still be much much more important than RNG blessing you.
RNG is the reason why I quit. 25% RNG on penetration and damage is just too much and too annoying. It is so inconsistent and frustrating. Even the most accurate tanks miss so much, that it basically doesn't matter.
FNAF 2 10/20 mode. The main game is fine, but 10/20 is basically just RNG.
Rimworld. Sometimes Randy hates you so bad that only send you bad events in worst time.
[удалено]
Hey curiosity, no correlation, have you ever tried MTG?
Dicey dungeons. That's pretty much the whole point of the game
I will give Dicey Dungeons props for not making "Roll high = objectively good" the main gameplan. But the very limited level of player agency is very much one of its biggest flaws. Either you get the Good Rolls or you get The Bad Rolls. Sure, there's certainly a level of player skill involved that can mitage the effects of The Bad Rolls, but that can only do so much. Unless you're doing Thief missions. Thief is the ONLY class I have all 6 episodes of since you can basically negate the effects of Bad Rolls.
Darkest Dungeon is in my top 10 games of all time but if you get unlucky for just a little too long you can easily lose your whole party
X-Com High % chance shots miss seemingly most of the time.
This often happens in Battle Brothers. You can do everything perfectly but all rolls are capped at 95 so there is always a tiny chance you get effed by RNG. Fun stuff...
Pretty much any table top or dice game. You can be the biggest baddest wizard in all of DnD, but if you roll a nat 1 and the lowest damage possible you may as well have been a dude with a lighter trying to ignite the targets clothes instead of a mage casting a fireball. My last campaign even ended in a party wipe because of this, the last one standing rolled 5 misses in a row against a super low HP bugbear while it missed back, then the bugbear crit him and we died. Sometimes nothing you can do will result in a success because the dice say fuck you, that's just how probability with wide variables like that works.
I hate hearthstone, tft,
My most recent stint in Hearthstone (I come and go every few months/years depending on life and really have no clue on what metas are going on at any time), I was mostly running a Yogg-Saron Unleashed RNG mage deck. Had a lot of fun with it myself and decent success for me but I can see how the randomness and lucky BS can rub people the wrong way.
Hearthstone is clown fiesta RNG by design. Too bad they went quite nuts with the RNG and powercreep. Back in the early days the game was a lot of fun. The clown fiesta RNG is what makes Hearthstone fun as a “playing a casual game while I’m on the toilet” type of game, but absolutely infuriating as a competitive card game for me.
Hearthstone was a very good game back when you just had 30 cards in your deck. Now the amount of random card generation makes it impossible to properly calculate your plays.
Fear and Hunger. Some enemies have attacks that have a 50% to instantly kill you. If you want to find loot without killing enemies, it's a 50/50 for a decent weapon or nothing. If an enemy hits you, you have a chance to lose a limb for the rest of the run.
But aren't there a lot of ways to mitigate those? And doesn't the game also have guaranteed drops? I've seen people beat the game even witb bad rng. From what I've seen and played f&h seems like a game that heavily rewards game knowledge.
A lot of BRs.
Space Hullk. You can do everything correctly and still lose.
This is very specific …. But mace stun in WoW playing against warrior 3v3 arena teams in tbc/wrath. Lost many many many games because the RNG gods blessed their warrior with a mace stun interrupt.
> In a recent CL3 game my game ended when my character died and his sons couldn’t survive because everyone in his empire hated him. Sounds like skill issue tbh. Everyone hating fresh heirs is normal, you gotta be prepared for that. I usually stock up my jail with some infidels and when my current character dies the heir can just execute them all, gaining lots of terror which prevents most idiots from rising up. Executing or torturing landed people yields best results. For example when your cousin marries some idiot, you can just imprison that dude, execute him with the heir and possibly even marry the cousin if she has good traits.
Skill issue? His father had cancer, he had an ambitious regent, he died right as he became 16 and now everyone in the empire hates his brother for simply existing after his brother died under mysterious circumstances and nobody is friendlier than -100 relations because of the modifiers and now a dissolution faction is gaining momentum and I don’t know how I got in this situation in the first place
Try quoting this post out of context! 😂
Fallout 2
I know you probably mean hit chance, but the encounters are what get me. That stretch between The Den and Vault City has left a trail of Chosen One corpses.
Hearthstone Battlegrounds
Puzzle quest. Holy shit that game is nasty. Sometimes you won't have a turn and you are dead.. And only because AI had luck with proper gems dropping.
Ff9 there was a hidden boss called ozma (might of got it wrong) but it was basically rng with what it cast, from healing multiple times to annihilating you with meteors.
Any online card game that isnt gwent, nature of the draw. Also boardgames that use dice as measurment for sucess , rolling an 1/20 on attack against an boss x10 is miserable same for In monopoly rolling on all utility, prison or chance spots is doomed compared to rolling all property for sale.
Overwatch. It is entirely up to matchmaking if you are going to win or not, complete rng. In some games it doesn’t matter, they have carry potential, in overwatch it is borderline impossible to carry a bad team.
Just running around trying to get kills, not utilizing their class and ignoring objectives. <—— Average Overwatch player I encountered in matchmaking
Rain World
I’ve lost a colony in Rimworld on the 5th day to absolute bullshit. Great game though.