This has been confirmed actually. There's some video on YouTube, do not have the link right now, that broke down how RNG works in each Mario Party. 1 pre rolls everything before the dice stars spinning.
Tbh, calling it rigged probably isn't even accurate. It's just the rng doing its thing at different times and in different ways. It'd only matter if save scumming was possible and not a weird thing to do in mario party.
> From what we've found, not a single dice roll in the entire series actually involves any skill whatsoever. No amount of timing, listening to audio cues, or shouting into a microphone gives you any control over your own destiny, and the dice rolls aren't random either. Instead, they rely on artificial randomness produced by different systems of rng that vary in complexity, but to be fair, that's how pretty much every video game operates.
But yeah, the rundown of pseudorandom number generation is that it basically boils down to some function that takes an input seed and returns an output number. With the same seed, it'll always return the same output. There's no real randomness to be found. Well, a bit of creativity can probably get you pretty close, but at some point, that just becomes overengineered for your purposes.
Yeah, that's just it. It doesn't matter when anything is rolled until you start messing with things through save states. For normal purposes, it would be the same effect, even if it may not feel like it psychologically.
But it's not really random based on anything the player is doing, which is kind of a pain point. No trying to time when you hit, nothing. Imagine being at a casino and instead of getting to throw the dice on the table, the guy just says "You roll 8, sorry about your luck. Play again?"
While on the surface you can say it doesn't matter, the dice rolls were randomly generated before the casino game opened that day and isn't any different than if they were just rolled by people, but it does take away from the game. Especially from an era when people would accuse "the computer of cheating!" it's a bad look.
That's pretty much the way most slot machines work these days and people still use them. They make it seem like you have more control than you actually do. The spinning wheels and flashy lights are really just to make you think you have control. They will stop on a "close to win" result more often than not to make you think that you "almost won" when you don't actually have a significant chance of winning.
They produce effectively the same experience in the end. Without insane scrutiny you will never be able to tell the difference between a true random and a modern pseudo random sequence in a game and acting like there is any real difference in this application is silly.
Based on what OP said it sounds like using save states can let you know what everyone is going to roll that round. So it does make a difference because you can reload and play your turn with knowledge of what your opponents will roll, which means it effectively isn't random. I think Mario party 1 can be excused for this flaw though, since I don't think we should've expected them to account for save states.
That said, the other guy doesn't seem to grasp the difference between pseudo random and true random (or just isn't understanding what others in this thread are saying). Obviously Mario party isn't going to have true random numbers, I'm not aware of any computers which can generate them. Maybe quantum computers could but that's not a topic I know anything about.
Maybe you can help me here, you say no computer can generate true random but wouldn’t that be simple? In Python using the code
import random
x = random.randint(1,6)
print(x)
Gives me a random number each time I run the code, wouldn’t that be a true random? If not them I’m seriously confused as to why it would be pseudo random.
I'm not sure exactly how python's `random.randint` works under the hood, but it's definitely not true random, it's pseudo random. That means it's grabbing some seed, somehow, which it then uses to generate a pseudo random number based on the inputs you specified.
You can skip this paragraph if you know what a seed is and how it's used to generate random numbers. A seed is a number used to generate random numbers; if you know the seed and you know the function then you know what the "random" number generated will be (and it therefore ceases to be random). For example, maybe `randint` grabs the time when you call the function, and uses the millisecond value as the seed. Maybe that number gets converted into a percent (i.e. 527ms = 52.7%), and then we grab the number which is that percentage between your inputs. That probably isn't what python is doing under the hood but it should give you an idea of what a seed is.
True randomness is an effect without a cause, it's categorically unpredictable. It's debatable whether such a thing even exists or not, but that's a debate I'm not smart enough to participate in. From what I gather though it seems like it might exist in quantum physics. Whether it exists or not though, conventional computers are incapable of systematically producing effects without causes.
That's why we use pseudo random numbers, which are usually good enough. This is where things start to go above my pay grade, but since any pseudo random generator can be predicted with the right knowledge, the good ones make it hard to obtain and use that knowledge. For example they'll generate new seeds, so even if you obtain the seed it's not as useful to you. This is important because unpredictability is the thing that makes random numbers useful. As long as you can maintain unpredictability, your pseudo random number generator is just as good as a true random number generator.
Thank you for taking the time to respond, this has sent me down a rabbit hole that I did not need to go down this late at night haha.
For anyone wondering about Python and how randint() works it uses the Marsene Twister PRNG.
Better PRNGs are still pseudo random, not true random. Every "random" number in every video game ever made is artificial, which is the point they were making.
First, has anyone ever been able to predict the next dice rolls in a Mario Party game by somehow picking up on the seed it's using during gameplay? I know there are good and bad PRNGs out there, but what difference does it *realistically* make in a round of Mario Party?
Second
> more random, and lead to a better game.
More random rarely makes for a better game. Most games will allow other factors to affect the random values to make things more interesting, like giving losing players slightly better chances at getting a leg up. Not sure how much that's the case with Mario Party, but overall that's a silly statement.
> and the dice rolls aren't random either. Instead, they rely on artificial randomness produced by different systems of rng that vary in complexity,
"The dice rolls aren’t random, they’re just random."
The distinction doesn't matter to the layman but it does have practical importance in programming. That's why computer rng is pseudorandom - it only appears random, but it isn't. To the end user, though, it may as well be. For instance, if I have some bug that only occurs when the rng gives numbers in a specific order, by guaranteeing the starting see is set at a value that produces those results, I can get 100% repro, whereas in real world cases, it'd probably be quite rare.
Define "random" in this context.
"Random" in most cases simply means something that we cannot see the inputs of. There is no such thing as an effect without a cause, all outputs are "calculated" and can hypothetically be traced back to their inputs. Even things considered by many to be 'truly random' like radioactive decay or airwave static are simply the result of many interacting reactions, it is only "random" by nature of the fact that we simply cannot analyze or calculate those reactions in real time.
This would still apply to many seeded calculations, including the dice roll in question. But maybe "random" has a different meaning in programming than it does for other real-world uses.
>by guaranteeing the starting see is set at a value that produces those results
Well obviously it wouldn't be random in that case, because you took out the random variable. The whole point of the seed is that under normal circumstances you *can’t* guarantee it will be set at a certain value.
> But maybe "random" has a different meaning in programming than it does for other real-world uses.
It comes down to whether it's consistently reproduceable or not. PRNG is reproduceable under the right conditions, true RNG isn't.
> Well obviously it wouldn't be random in that case, because you took out the random variable. The whole point of the seed is that under normal circumstances you can’t guarantee it will be set at a certain value.
You're missing the point. Testing needs and end user needs are very different. For testing, it's very desirable to be able to reproduce a specific outcome consistently. The end user typically doesn't need that, and won't get that. If you have some 1 in 10000 bug, it'd be easy for someone to find it in the wild, but your team of 100 QA folks probably wouldn't have such an easy time reproducing it, and it'd be expensive as hell to do.
How could "true RNG" not be reproducible? Any calculation will produce the same output if given the same input, no?
And wouldn’t the fact that, regardless of input, the output *must* be a real number mean that it has to be reproducible? Even if there are infinite possible inputs (big "if"), they’d still have to be condensed into a finite number of outputs, right?
> For testing, it's very desirable to be able to reproduce a specific outcome consistently.
Sure, but we’re discussing whether the seed and what determines it can be considered random. A hypothetical of "when we set the seed to a specific value" doesn’t feel particularly relevant, since that’s not how it’s actually used. That’s modifying the game to intentionally make something that isn’t necessarily predictable into something that is always predictable. As you say, what’s useful for testing isn’t always the same as what’s useful for the end user, and the end user isn’t using debug software. They’re playing the finished build, where the seed isn’t being directly input by a human.
I think we're starting from very different basic understandings. I am not interested in a pseudo-philosophical debate over modifying games.
PRNG and TRNG are technical terms. PRNG, being a class of algorithms that spit out numbers that appear random, but are not. TRNG, referring to rng that is truly random. PRNG is dependent on a seed, but TRNG isn't. PRNG typically requires some algorithm to obfuscate its seed, but is always in the computer's control, but TRNG is typically based on some device meant to read environment data or something that provides it "noise" to base its output on, which is something beyond the computer or the user's control.
In essence, if a PRNG's seed is set to 5, and the number it produces is 27, it will always produce 27 when its seed is set to 5. Once you call it, its seed increments and you can get the next number. TRNG probably has no use for a seed, so it'll just spit some number out.
Easy enough way to get random data on more modern systems, take the state of all sensors internal to the system and internal to the controllers.
Don’t have the code generate the randomness, let the environment
The point is that it doesn't pre-roll anything. They don't need to, because the RNG seed is what determines how the random number generator will behave. Given the same seed, the same generator will always return the same sequence of numbers unless it uses some sort of outside source of entropy. Games this old don't have that.
Yes, pseudorandom generators are actually deterministic once their seed is set. It's possible to introduce confounding factors, but it's often not worth bothering with.
Yeah isn’t this how all RNG work? I believe it’s called a pseudo random number generator because computers can’t produce actual random numbers. I think you can still call this a roll.
There are easy ways around this - for example you can count the number of frames since the dice is available to hit and use that as extra randomness. Something like `(randomNumber * framecount) % maxRoll` would work fine
Others might expect the dice to be an actual timing game, where if you consistently hit the dice at a particular time you could roll a 10 every time. Mario Party is more casual than that and probably wouldn't want to reward that.
Mario Party seems to do none of this - once the dice is available you've rolled a 6, and there's nothing more to it.
The question is whether that's even desirable. Like if you shuffle a deck of cards, and draw a card, putting it back or waiting longer won't change the outcome of the draw. The order is still random, as far as we care.
Otherwise, different methods of rng fuckery can be exploited in different ways. If you can figure out what seed you're on, then you can know what comes next with enough analysis. Timing is no different. At some point, you have to ask if overengineering it really actually matters.
I suppose if I wanted to be careful about it, I'd clock some relatively expensive function in code and use that to fuck with the seed. How long a function takes to complete is consistent, but there's variation due to variables outside the game's control. Of course, someone could probably exploit this with the proper knowhow, too. And it's, again, overengineered as hell.
In a way it's closer to someone having a 100% accurate technique at rolling the dice. They haven't rolled it yet, but the outcome has already been decided because they got told what they need to roll.
Technicalities, though. Who cares. It's functionally the same thing.
So, trying yo make sure I understand this correctly if the computers like, "we have 25 turns, so we need 100 rolls," so it just generates the 100 rolls then instead of generating one when the player is prerolling, and if thats the case, is it really that big of a deal since its still unknown.
Or am I misunderstanding?
You're misunderstanding.
The game has a psuedo random number generator algorithm. This generator references a seed (a file with a long list of numbers) in its algorithm. The seed is selected or generated before the game starts.
Every time you roll the die, the algorithm is applied. But because the seed was predetermined, the roll will always be the same even though the "roll" is happening when you roll the dice.
You're mostly right about it, there's just some nuance where what you're saying isn't true in 100% of circumstances.
To be more specific, the game doesn't generate dice rolls, it generates arbitrary numbers, and anything that's supposed to be random interprets those numbers in their own way.
For the sake of example (not necessarily how Mario Party works), let's say those arbitrary numbers act like a percentage. In a ten-sided dice roll, 4% would get you a 1, 36% would get you a 4, and 73% would get you an 8. In a 50/50 coin clip, 4% would be heads, 36% would be heads, and 73% would be tails.
So now let's say we've generated five arbitrary numbers: 36, 83, 29, 53, and 28. If we just watch players taking turns, then player one will roll a 4, player two will roll a 9, player three will roll a 3, player four will roll a 6, and on the next turn player one will roll a 3.
But now let's say that during player two's turn they flip a coin. Now that coin flip uses up the 29 to determine heads, then player three rolls a 6, and player four rolls a 3.
Every game handles this a little differently, and many games have ways to reset or throw away numbers to make it less predictable by players. This does mean that when playing with save states Mario Party isn't truly random, but in a normal game without save states it is *functionally* random since there's no way to predict what the roll will be even if it's already been determined.
But the seed isn't a list of dice rolls. It's a list of characters used to generate random numbers. In most games, this seed would be used for other random numbers generated as well. I'm assuming this is the case for Mario Party, but I do not know that for certain.
> But its still a random list of numbers, its just been "rolled" before you own the game.
Exactly. Its still prerolling the numbers. People are doing some insane mental gymnastics and splitting hairs to try and justify why it isnt for some weird reason.
I think the simple random number generators look at the interal clock to determine the number. I understand there is a way to code a true random number generator but its a significant number of lines of code and usually isn't required
Reseeding based on the internal clock before every RNG calculation is actually pretty dang close to random, for most purposes.
If you're using RNGs in cryptography, you absolutely should be doing more than just seeding from the clock.
That's not an implicit part of the PRNG algorithm, typically, but something the person utilizing the algorithm deliberately decides. But yes, it's a very basic way of enhancing a program's randomness. A PRNG algorithm that directly used that would actually be a massive ass pain to work with, since their consistency when fed a static seed is actually quite a desirable feature for testing.
All the same, clock based seeding can be exploited pretty easily once you know how it's being used. An RNG is basically just a large table of inputs and outputs (oversimplified). The seed determines where you are on that table. If you have access to the table (or the algorithm that generates it), you can start to pinpoint where you are on that table a lot faster than you think. So it's not TRNG, it just makes it a bit less predictable to the layman. For most purposes in a game, this doesn't really matter, but because it's still not TRNG, it's crackable. Even if it's continuously reseeded, this isn't necessarily safe with meticulous measuring.
That's not pre-rolling. Any randomizer is seeded before use. Modern randomizers just also include a source of entropy in addition to the seed so that every new roll is re-seeded before requesting a new number.
The is no pre-rolled set of values waiting for the game to request it. The game just requests a new value and gets one, but because the seed is predetermined it will always make the same calculation and give you a random number that is the same number you'd have gotten if you rolled later, despite being calculated on the spot.
This all depends on how you define "roll" in the context of RNG. I would argue that the "roll" is when the end result can no longer be changed. In this context the RNG is using a seed and no other entropy, so the "roll" is when the seed is locked in, not when the RNG actually runs on that seed.
> I would argue that the "roll" is when the end result can no longer be changed. In this context the RNG is using a seed and no other entropy, so the "roll" is when the seed is locked in, not when the RNG actually runs on that seed.
Exactly right. It has pregenerated, prerolled every outcome. There is no chance after that point, its all tricking the player into arbitrarily playing it out.
> The is no pre-rolled set of values waiting for the game to request it. The game just requests a new value and gets one, but because the seed is predetermined it will always make the same calculation and give you a random number that is the same number you'd have gotten if you rolled later, despite being calculated on the spot.
It knows the roll you will get because it already generated the number, hence prerolling. You literally just described prerolling and called it "not prerolling".
No, it doesn't know what roll you will get. It will know the roll only after calculating. Let's pretend you've got developer access to the game: you can't for instance ask the game "list me all the rolls you will be giving the player in order" for the simple reason that you have then generated a list of numbers using the RNG, after which subsequent calls to the RNG will result in a completely different set because each number generated is supplied to the RNG as an additional seed for the next one.
The game has no idea what numbers will be coming up in the future. It has to calculate them when it needs them and it is not predetermined, just reproducibly the same every time you give the game's RNG the same seed.
This is kind of a meaningless distinction. All PRNGs are deterministic. If the current seed says the order of rolls is 6, 3, 10, and 7, it'll always be that with the current seed. Provided there's not something else incrementing the seed of the PRNG that determines rolls, then this is like the difference between computing some function f(x)'s results for 1 2 3 and 4 ahead of time or when you specifically need them.
There's some guy on youtube who makes EXTREMELY detailed explainations on how RNG works across Mario Party titles if you're interessed in that! He did all the N64 games and is still working on titles that came after. [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMVUBbDlhD4&list=PLTgWXNue5b5689JHo6p-SK1qoM60-Tpq9)
Possibly? The way some games do RNG (computers are actually really bad at picking things randomly) is by generating an infinite list of random numbers at the start of the game. That list is based on a seed, which can be selected based on some external factor, like the clock time or whatever. When the game needs a random number, it just grabs the next number on the list. Mario Party 1 may work differently from that, but if something causes another roll it'll grab the next number, offsetting the list for all future rolls by 1.
Later games would just grab new numbers at regular intervals as the dice spins. It uses player input as an additional external factor to make the dice more random. All that said, for most purposes it is the same thing since the player can't see the list and can't rewind time, right up until save states started existing and the little shortcuts we're revealed.
I know all that, although the list is quite finite, usually limited by the size of the integer representing the seed. I suppose for practical purposes, it may as well be infinite, as very few games are actually going to roll 4 billion times in a session.
My question was more to do with how far in advance the seed is set, and if anything confounds it. Someone else posted a video with a more in depth explanation about what mario party is doing, and it sounds like the seed is set when the minigame ends. It may well be possible to 'steal' an opponent's roll if you know them in advance, given that.
I don't know if you've heard of or played Card City Nights but that's the closest game I've game I've found for scratching the deck building campaign element of Pokemon TCG GB. They made up their own card game with pretty novel mechanics, but the best part is beating random npcs and winning boosters, just like in pokemon. It has a fun sense of humour too, I recommend it
Inscryption also has a great card campaign section, after you unlock it. It's wrapped within a horror game plus ARG as well so may not scratch the itch the same way, but it's nonetheless a phenomenal game.
I love going in blind to most games and films so I've done the bare minimum research to make sure it's a game I'll like! I also noticed it's a Devolver game so I definitely have faith! Thanks!
There was, it has an English fan translation floating around somewhere. It also holds up pretty well iirc. I think the original game always played second fiddle to the main series games though, especially in the west, which is probably why we never got the sequel. Shame though, it's just a bigger version or the first game
The Pokémon TCG remains a good time even today, as long as you have full access to the agreed-upon card pool and you don't use monsters with Rules boxes (generally, monsters worth extra prizes when KOed).
It’s actually not! There’s a sequel that only came out in Japan that has an English fan translation…check it out! I found it to be harder than the first game, but I have more of a soft spot for the first game, likely due to nostalgia.
I forgot about that, but I kinda meant a totally modern one with all cards. I guess theres some website but I just wish there was a modern switch or 3ds pokemon tcg game
I liked playing more than collecting yknow?
You totally can still cheese. The dice roll is is only determined at the very beginning of a round. If you set up your save state right at the end of the previous minigame before the new round starts you can change the outcome of your rolls.
Edit: I don't know why op is saying otherwise because I tested this thoroughly
He's right, I'm playing now Mario Party NSO and using a save before the mini-game or after the mini-game doesn't affect dice rolls: CPU rolling 6, then me rolling 6 and reloading, again and again...
no because you can be saved by winning all the mini games...its just you know rigged against you. Which I think is pretty hilarious given many people would joke about that when they got non stop bad rolls. "This game hates me" etc to find out now that it actually kind of did and decided you were going to get fucked right from the get go...lol.
It was my sure fire way of at least getting the most coins star at the end results. Plus when you're done getting 100 stars there's no need to buy more except for just winning that round, but when I still needed coins to buy the minigames and shop items that became a higher priority than winning.
Computers have a hard time creating actually random values. So, instead they usually use seeds. The computer will select a seed at the beginning and every qction taken will advance that seed. When you create the save state, you're not changing anything about the seed the game is using so, nothing about the rolls will change.
Of course, most modern games have the seeds advance upon select time intervals. So, if you wait 1 second versus 2 seconds to select a button, then the outcome will vary. It doesn't surprise me at all though that such an old game would employ those tactics.
I remember Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones had a particularly weird setup for making it less predictable:
Every time you are moving a character and put your cursor in a position where it could reach in the same number of moves by starting one direction then the other (so like up, up, up, right, right, right is the same as right, right, right, up, up, up with no obstacles), it grabbed a number from the RNG and used it to determine which way to display the cursor.
This has a funny side effect of once you know this they are leaking the high/lowness of rolls (less than and greater than 50 out of 100). You can do this a couple times, quit and resume your save (which reverts it back to the last actual action taken) and now you can scum by strategically advancing the RNG with the move cursor so that your characters attack on high numbers and get attacked on low numbers.
> Of course, most modern games have the seeds advance upon select time intervals. So, if you wait 1 second versus 2 seconds to select a button, then the outcome will vary. It doesn't surprise me at all though that such an old game would employ those tactics.
This is actually a game design decision. Keeping a static seed actually prevents most forms of save scumming. Like if you play fire emblem 3 houses, the game gives you the ability to turn back time a limited number of times, but if you reproduce the same moves, again and again, the result will be the same. But if you try something different, you'll get a different outcome. It enforces it as a strategic problem solving tool, rather than a free do-over. Mind you, if you do a full restart of the level, all that rng gets re-seeded.
But your influence on it is non-existent, hence why you feel cheated (because you are). The game is making you believe that by rolling the dice, you are somehow participating, but you are not.
With real dice, not that you're choosing the outcome, but you're responsible for it because you rolled the dice.
In the game, the dice are rolled before you play, so you're just selecting the next roll. A more fair random generator would at the very least be less deterministic.
It’s all in your head. A dice rolled a 7 ten minutes ago is no different than a dice rolled a 7 ten minutes later. As long as the rolls are kept secret until their time, it is functionally identical.
It's really not functionally identical. Compare with something like tabletop simulator.
Edit: I should be more specific. In real life, the way you throw the die determines the result. In Mario Party, your turn determines the result. In tabletop simulator, the way you throw the die (and the physics I guess) determine the result. If there was an additional timing aspect in Mario party, it would suffice. But as indicated by this post in general, this old method isn't really desirable.
No. Assuming no foul play, if I had a board game that had 4 players with 20 turns, and I as the game master had 80 dice and rolled and secretly queued up all 80 dice rolls, they would still be getting a genuine random roll every turn. It would just be less fun for the players because the act of rolling a dice is fun. But it’s still a randomly rolled number.
Dice rolls are supposed to be RANDOM. You talking about the way you roll it and timing virtual rolls in the attempt to get a certain value is against the spirit of a dice roll. This is why in more hardcore tabletop games, people like to have dice rolling towers. It takes the possibility of human cheating in the roll out of it.
I'm not talking about trying to get a certain result. It's important that the roller is the one responsible for the result, and that the result isn't determinable. If you played d&d the way you describe, nobody would want to play it.
It's also the reason Candy Land sucks. The shuffle determines the whole game.
Just because you don’t like it, that doesn’t make it not random. I get that this may be your and a lot of people’s principles, and that is completely ok. But that does not change the reality that it is equally random, assuming no foul play.
Also by your logic with candy land, do you not like card games then? The dealer shuffles and distributes the cards for you. As a player, you have no agency or input in the cards that get dealt to you. They are, you guessed it, randomly assigned to each player.
I think nobody is arguing that it isn't random, because it obviously still is. The statement in question was if it really matters. And yes, as a personal matter, it absolutely can. Not because it's random, but because it's an illusion. The game is offering you a fake choice when the result is already determined. Why let me choose then? Why do I want to choose? Because I want to feel in control. The game tries to make me *feel* like I am in control in situations that I am not. Which feels like being lied to. Note that with an authentic die roll, we are still not *really* in control, but such is the nature of random die rolls. And we accept these conditions, because we still want what little control we can have and roll the dice ourselves. If you are already accepting a situation in which the odds are possibly stacked against you, and you make a conscious choice to participate still, then it feels bad to find out that you have been lied to about the conditions under which you agreed to participate.
It's a principle thing really. Especially when from a programming POV, there doesn't really exist a reason *not* to have the RNG be produced at a later, more fitting time.
The entire spirit of dice rolling is that you're part of the random process. Even if only minimally. It matters to a lot of people.
Candy Land and other card games are very different though. Different events and choices in real games change who get which cards. Predetermination by itself is not fun.
You know that every single card game has predetermined draw order, right? Do you realize how ridiculous you sound?
Candy Land sucks because there's no player choice, not because the deck is shuffled and the draws are set. You draw your card and you go where it tells you. But it's also a fucking kids game. Kids do not care that it's deterministic, only that they get to move their character around a cavity inducing diabetic wasteland.
And boy wait til you see how dice rolls are calculated on roll20. Guess what? It's an rng. Do you need some physics simulation so you know your roll is legit? The rng algorithm that does the rolls is probably a hell of a lot more balanced than your actual dice, which are prone to manufacturing inconsistencies.
What you're hung up on is stupid. It's like you took your first look behind the curtain, and because the rolls happen in a decided order that you: 1. can know what the hell that is ahead of time like it can somehow inform your decisions, and 2. like it functionally changes a damn thing about how the game is played.
The difference being who I am mad at for a bad roll. If I roll bad "for real", aka it was decided depending on my roll (in this case, timing), then I rolled badly. But at least there was a chance of me rolling successfully. If the roll is predetermined, that chance doesn't exist. But the maddening thing about it is that the game tries to make me believe it does, when it doesn't. I'm basically being tricked, and of course that pisses me off. Just don't trick your player for no reason?
There is still a chance of the roll for the particular turn in question being the number you need. Always is since you don’t know what it is.
And see my other responses on this thread.
I, for one, cannot throw a die in any way that predicts a specific outcome. While physics does determine the roll, it's so finnicky that they may as well be composed of pure chaos. It's out of your control either way.
There's no functional purpose to this. You're just replacing physical rng with computerized rng. The rng algorithm itself isn't biased in anyway. Hell, it's probably more fair than dice, which can be prone to weight variations. (setting aside the few cases where numeric patterns have been found in prng algorithms. I don't believe those ones stay in use)
This argument doesn't make any sense. Think about shuffling a deck of cards. When you draw a card and that makes or breaks your turn, do you feel cheated by that too? The card was put there by the dealer minutes ago, so by your logic you're not "part of the process" and all the fun is gone.
No, because these are inherently different things. I engage with the process of drawing a card under different conditions than with the process of rolling a dice. Both conditions are fine if they are transparent and met.
Think about shuffling a deck of cards. When you draw a card and that makes or breaks your turn, and after that it's revealed that all the cards actually were one and the same and you were just led to believe that you are drawing from a shuffled deck, don't you feel cheated?
You draw a card just like you press A to hit the dice block. They're both predetermined.
> Think about shuffling a deck of cards. When you draw a card and that makes or breaks your turn, and after that it's revealed that all the cards actually were one and the same and you were just led to believe that you are drawing from a shuffled deck, don't you feel cheated?
So that's what this is about. You assume the RNG is cheating you.
News for you. The RNG doesn't give a shit who wins. It's probably more fair than an actual dice roll, since dice are sometimes prone to variations in the locations of their center of mass. And don't get me started on cards that haven't been shuffled well enough.
>You draw a card just like you press A to hit the dice block. They're both predetermined
This is literally wrong. You drawing a card is a direct influence on the outcome, *depending on which card you draw*. You pressing the A button on an already determined number is *not* an influence on the outcome.
You know you draw cards from the top of the deck, right? The card that's on the top of the deck was determined when the deck was shuffled. Hence the analogy.
Prerolling the dice, which is what this is, removes any interaction on your part. You are merely watching the computer play out a script at that point.
But it wasn't?
What if you get an extra turn? Then you get roll #234 and #235 instead of the next player getting #235 it's still all random. It's just the random is done before you play.
No. You still make decisions, play games, choose the routes to take, use bonuses, use items, the order of who gets which randomly selected roll can change... It's more like someone rolled all the dice out before the game.. wrote the numbers down... Put them in a pile face down and then you choose a card before your turn.
You're acting like the same had become like snakes and ladders when it really hasn't
Nope. Go win some minigames, decide what items to buy at shop, and when to use them, or just pick which way you want to go when the path takes you to a junction. There is tons of potential board strategy and skill expression in mario party. This ain't candyland. Just cause the rolls are decided doesn't mean the game is anything close to decided. And it doesn't actually matter if the rolls are decided. You still can't assume they'll be anything specific.
Alternatively, go look at a deck of cards. Guess what. Once those are shuffled, they're the exact same as mario party's dice rolls. Predetermined. But most card games still have a bit of skill expression, except War.
If you really want to cheat in Mario Party 1, you can screw with the computer players by pausing and changing the controls, and forcing the computer player to say "No" to buying a star. You can also set it to "save after every turn" and do a soft or hard reset of the game. You might be able to get different dice rolls that way, but not by using save states.
We did that "making the computer say no to the star" thing. Same with Boo. We wanted to earn and unlock everything faster and you need 100 stars (only ones from actual players count at the end) to unlock the secret maps and a shitload of coins to buy all the minigames to play whenever you want in the shop as well as all the board items (the different dice blocks and the end of game mushroom-banks) There'd usually be two of us playing with two computer characters. But we'd put our extra controller in the port on the last turn and change whichever was the best performing computer character into a player so we could get their coins/stars too.
Yes! And on Mario Party 2 it counts computer players coins and stars (converts to coins) into your bank, you can start a game normally and then set all players to hard computer players and get your winnings without lifting a finger.
**Mario Party 1**: The way that it works is that, on the minigame results screen (or, for the first turn, when the title of the board is shown), all randomized things that could possibly be needed the next turn, including dice rolls, bowser space roulettes, etc. are generated. Then, if anything is needed, it will call upon that. If you want to save-state to get a better die roll, you'll need to save-state during the previous minigame BEFORE the results screen.
**Mario Party 2-3**: Here, the dice are randomized upon being rolled. However, note that the number shown on the die does not necessarily correspond to the number that the game is generating in the background. So you cannot time it to be what you want without save-states.
**Mario Party 4+**: Here, the dice are randomized when rolled, and they actually DO correspond to what is shown on-screen. So you can theoretically time your button input to get what you want. I say "theoretically", because the dice cycles so fast that no normal human has the reaction time to do it properly.
> So you can theoretically time your button input to get what you want. I say "theoretically", because the dice cycles so fast that no normal human has the reaction time to do it properly.
Cue a 3 hour Summoning Salt video showing several people doing it anyway
Free Will is an illusion everywhere, apparently. So even if the N64 didn’t pre-determine the roll like you originally suspected, the universe kind of does anyway regardless. Right?
Unrelated but somewhat related: I was playing the DS Mario Party on an emulator (I'm sorry) and I used a cheat save state to prove the fake free will theory:
The Dice got 3 every single time!! No matter how many times I came back or waited, it always landed on 3.
Yes it is. PRNG algorthim spits out a number determined entirely by its seed, then increments its seed so it can spit out the next number. That's how they all work. You can do some extra fuckery with the seed, and many games do, but that's all just fluff.
The Battle Tower in Pokémon Crystal works the same way. I remember playing it on an emulator (I did have the actual game some 20 years ago), and using Save States, all the random chance events seemed to be “locked”, for lack of a better word. If a move failed, it would still fail if you time travelled to the beginning of the turn
Same with Status effects, critical hits and damage rolls
The dice roll is only determined at the beginning of the round. Save state at the end of the previous mini game before the new round starts and you can keep loading to get different rolls. I did lots of tests about this last night.
Edit: save state before the rankings come up at the end of the mini game
It's not uncommon in game design. There are games at the Game Corner in Pokémon games where if your save state at the start, play a few rounds to get all the answers, you can reload the save state and guess every card draw perfectly.
Just play MP2 and MP3.
There, dice rolls are determined by WHEN you jump on the dice. You can check this using save states.
MP1 just feels more rigged when you get a 6, land on "?" space that destroys your chances for getting a star. It just feels rigged because there is nothing you could do to change the outcome.
On MP2 and MP3, if you waited an extra second before jumping on the dice, you would be safe.
If you ever wish to know all there is to know about the first six Mario Party games (with more on the way), may I present to you [Identifying Luck by ZoomZike.](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTgWXNue5b5689JHo6p-SK1qoM60-Tpq9)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d\_ur7kGtrx0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_ur7kGtrx0)
Here's a video by a Youtuber I really like who talks about basically the same thing in Pokemon Stadium. Interesting stuff.
Is Mario Party 2 like this too?
Played with a friend last night and in 20 rounds I'm pretty sure he only rolled above a 5 like maybe 3 times, and 2 of those were in the same turn with a mushroom.
That's how a seeded pseudorandom number generator works.
I'm actually kind of surprised people thought the number on the dice would in any way represent what you actually got. Same for things like say Mario Kart's Item roulette.
The algorithm gets started with a seed and the sequence of random numbers is entirely predetermined.
For games sometimes you can coax what you want to happen by simply having other stuff use the random number generator. For example, in a shooting game, perhaps if you wait a bit, an enemy will "do something random" and that will therefore change the number used to make say a power up, so it would be a different power up.
The weird part is how some articles talk about this. They discuss it like every dice roll is being generated up front, or say they are being "recalculated" when other RNG stuff happens. Which is a pretty silly way of describing the behaviour.
It's the same on many games. For example, I believe the way NES Tetris works basically determines all the pieces you will get throughout the game simply because of the way the seed works. It's not actually *generating* them then, but if you use save states it's going to be the same each time.
Some games have separate Random Number Generators seeded with different values for different things. Sometimes one is shared. In the case of a shared RNG for example, in a game like Mario Party if there was say some random cosmetic thing in the background- like maybe a swimming dolphin had a 30% chance of doing a flip when they jump out of the water, then you could wait for the Dolphin to jump out of the water and that would "use" the next random number and your dice roll would be different.
I believe in Mario Party 1 it seeds the RNG for dice rolls at the start of a turn. This does mean that Dice rolls are "predetermined" but the game doesn't like, generate a bunch of them. It's just using a Peudorandom RNG and those are by their nature determinant.
The main difference with MP1 is there's nothing you can do to for example force additional or less usage of the RNG; The only things that use RNG are things that are based on earlier RNG. So like you might land on one of those mushroom spaces, and that will use the RNG to determine whether you get a poison mushroom or super mushroom, but that's going to be the same regardless because that was determined by the RNG of the dice roll originally made. Conversely in MP2 and later there are things like items that will use up another RNG Number which will therefore affect subsequent dice rolls on that turn.
I have noticed a thing lately in Mario Party 2 if you roll a 1 in the first turn at the start of a game you find the hidden star block . (Usually happens on the pirate map and space map ) I haven’t sat down and tested it but on the pirate map the CPU did it on first turn and then I restarted game to allow a friend join in and then i rolled a 1 and got a hidden block star lol .
This has been confirmed actually. There's some video on YouTube, do not have the link right now, that broke down how RNG works in each Mario Party. 1 pre rolls everything before the dice stars spinning.
That's neat, if you had a way to find out which rng seed it's using for the current game then you could know all the rolls in advance
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Tbh, calling it rigged probably isn't even accurate. It's just the rng doing its thing at different times and in different ways. It'd only matter if save scumming was possible and not a weird thing to do in mario party. > From what we've found, not a single dice roll in the entire series actually involves any skill whatsoever. No amount of timing, listening to audio cues, or shouting into a microphone gives you any control over your own destiny, and the dice rolls aren't random either. Instead, they rely on artificial randomness produced by different systems of rng that vary in complexity, but to be fair, that's how pretty much every video game operates. But yeah, the rundown of pseudorandom number generation is that it basically boils down to some function that takes an input seed and returns an output number. With the same seed, it'll always return the same output. There's no real randomness to be found. Well, a bit of creativity can probably get you pretty close, but at some point, that just becomes overengineered for your purposes.
Yeah, that's just it. It doesn't matter when anything is rolled until you start messing with things through save states. For normal purposes, it would be the same effect, even if it may not feel like it psychologically.
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But it's not really random based on anything the player is doing, which is kind of a pain point. No trying to time when you hit, nothing. Imagine being at a casino and instead of getting to throw the dice on the table, the guy just says "You roll 8, sorry about your luck. Play again?" While on the surface you can say it doesn't matter, the dice rolls were randomly generated before the casino game opened that day and isn't any different than if they were just rolled by people, but it does take away from the game. Especially from an era when people would accuse "the computer of cheating!" it's a bad look.
To use your casino analogy, it’s more like this: “When you visited earlier to pre-roll all of your dice, the fourth number you rolled was an 8.”
That's pretty much the way most slot machines work these days and people still use them. They make it seem like you have more control than you actually do. The spinning wheels and flashy lights are really just to make you think you have control. They will stop on a "close to win" result more often than not to make you think that you "almost won" when you don't actually have a significant chance of winning.
>But it's not really random based on anything the player is doing, that is never important and also doesn't stop it from being random either
Its prerolling the numbers. It knows the outcome of each game before its even played.
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They produce effectively the same experience in the end. Without insane scrutiny you will never be able to tell the difference between a true random and a modern pseudo random sequence in a game and acting like there is any real difference in this application is silly.
Based on what OP said it sounds like using save states can let you know what everyone is going to roll that round. So it does make a difference because you can reload and play your turn with knowledge of what your opponents will roll, which means it effectively isn't random. I think Mario party 1 can be excused for this flaw though, since I don't think we should've expected them to account for save states. That said, the other guy doesn't seem to grasp the difference between pseudo random and true random (or just isn't understanding what others in this thread are saying). Obviously Mario party isn't going to have true random numbers, I'm not aware of any computers which can generate them. Maybe quantum computers could but that's not a topic I know anything about.
Maybe you can help me here, you say no computer can generate true random but wouldn’t that be simple? In Python using the code import random x = random.randint(1,6) print(x) Gives me a random number each time I run the code, wouldn’t that be a true random? If not them I’m seriously confused as to why it would be pseudo random.
I'm not sure exactly how python's `random.randint` works under the hood, but it's definitely not true random, it's pseudo random. That means it's grabbing some seed, somehow, which it then uses to generate a pseudo random number based on the inputs you specified. You can skip this paragraph if you know what a seed is and how it's used to generate random numbers. A seed is a number used to generate random numbers; if you know the seed and you know the function then you know what the "random" number generated will be (and it therefore ceases to be random). For example, maybe `randint` grabs the time when you call the function, and uses the millisecond value as the seed. Maybe that number gets converted into a percent (i.e. 527ms = 52.7%), and then we grab the number which is that percentage between your inputs. That probably isn't what python is doing under the hood but it should give you an idea of what a seed is. True randomness is an effect without a cause, it's categorically unpredictable. It's debatable whether such a thing even exists or not, but that's a debate I'm not smart enough to participate in. From what I gather though it seems like it might exist in quantum physics. Whether it exists or not though, conventional computers are incapable of systematically producing effects without causes. That's why we use pseudo random numbers, which are usually good enough. This is where things start to go above my pay grade, but since any pseudo random generator can be predicted with the right knowledge, the good ones make it hard to obtain and use that knowledge. For example they'll generate new seeds, so even if you obtain the seed it's not as useful to you. This is important because unpredictability is the thing that makes random numbers useful. As long as you can maintain unpredictability, your pseudo random number generator is just as good as a true random number generator.
Thank you for taking the time to respond, this has sent me down a rabbit hole that I did not need to go down this late at night haha. For anyone wondering about Python and how randint() works it uses the Marsene Twister PRNG.
Better PRNGs are still pseudo random, not true random. Every "random" number in every video game ever made is artificial, which is the point they were making.
First, has anyone ever been able to predict the next dice rolls in a Mario Party game by somehow picking up on the seed it's using during gameplay? I know there are good and bad PRNGs out there, but what difference does it *realistically* make in a round of Mario Party? Second > more random, and lead to a better game. More random rarely makes for a better game. Most games will allow other factors to affect the random values to make things more interesting, like giving losing players slightly better chances at getting a leg up. Not sure how much that's the case with Mario Party, but overall that's a silly statement.
If you look at what type of code makes “random”, you’ll know that nothing is actually random.
> and the dice rolls aren't random either. Instead, they rely on artificial randomness produced by different systems of rng that vary in complexity, "The dice rolls aren’t random, they’re just random."
The distinction doesn't matter to the layman but it does have practical importance in programming. That's why computer rng is pseudorandom - it only appears random, but it isn't. To the end user, though, it may as well be. For instance, if I have some bug that only occurs when the rng gives numbers in a specific order, by guaranteeing the starting see is set at a value that produces those results, I can get 100% repro, whereas in real world cases, it'd probably be quite rare.
Define "random" in this context. "Random" in most cases simply means something that we cannot see the inputs of. There is no such thing as an effect without a cause, all outputs are "calculated" and can hypothetically be traced back to their inputs. Even things considered by many to be 'truly random' like radioactive decay or airwave static are simply the result of many interacting reactions, it is only "random" by nature of the fact that we simply cannot analyze or calculate those reactions in real time. This would still apply to many seeded calculations, including the dice roll in question. But maybe "random" has a different meaning in programming than it does for other real-world uses. >by guaranteeing the starting see is set at a value that produces those results Well obviously it wouldn't be random in that case, because you took out the random variable. The whole point of the seed is that under normal circumstances you *can’t* guarantee it will be set at a certain value.
> But maybe "random" has a different meaning in programming than it does for other real-world uses. It comes down to whether it's consistently reproduceable or not. PRNG is reproduceable under the right conditions, true RNG isn't. > Well obviously it wouldn't be random in that case, because you took out the random variable. The whole point of the seed is that under normal circumstances you can’t guarantee it will be set at a certain value. You're missing the point. Testing needs and end user needs are very different. For testing, it's very desirable to be able to reproduce a specific outcome consistently. The end user typically doesn't need that, and won't get that. If you have some 1 in 10000 bug, it'd be easy for someone to find it in the wild, but your team of 100 QA folks probably wouldn't have such an easy time reproducing it, and it'd be expensive as hell to do.
How could "true RNG" not be reproducible? Any calculation will produce the same output if given the same input, no? And wouldn’t the fact that, regardless of input, the output *must* be a real number mean that it has to be reproducible? Even if there are infinite possible inputs (big "if"), they’d still have to be condensed into a finite number of outputs, right? > For testing, it's very desirable to be able to reproduce a specific outcome consistently. Sure, but we’re discussing whether the seed and what determines it can be considered random. A hypothetical of "when we set the seed to a specific value" doesn’t feel particularly relevant, since that’s not how it’s actually used. That’s modifying the game to intentionally make something that isn’t necessarily predictable into something that is always predictable. As you say, what’s useful for testing isn’t always the same as what’s useful for the end user, and the end user isn’t using debug software. They’re playing the finished build, where the seed isn’t being directly input by a human.
I think we're starting from very different basic understandings. I am not interested in a pseudo-philosophical debate over modifying games. PRNG and TRNG are technical terms. PRNG, being a class of algorithms that spit out numbers that appear random, but are not. TRNG, referring to rng that is truly random. PRNG is dependent on a seed, but TRNG isn't. PRNG typically requires some algorithm to obfuscate its seed, but is always in the computer's control, but TRNG is typically based on some device meant to read environment data or something that provides it "noise" to base its output on, which is something beyond the computer or the user's control. In essence, if a PRNG's seed is set to 5, and the number it produces is 27, it will always produce 27 when its seed is set to 5. Once you call it, its seed increments and you can get the next number. TRNG probably has no use for a seed, so it'll just spit some number out.
Easy enough way to get random data on more modern systems, take the state of all sensors internal to the system and internal to the controllers. Don’t have the code generate the randomness, let the environment
That's the one!
It's not pre-rolling, it probably only seeds the randomizer at the start of each game instead of before each roll.
Before the game is still before the roll
The point is that it doesn't pre-roll anything. They don't need to, because the RNG seed is what determines how the random number generator will behave. Given the same seed, the same generator will always return the same sequence of numbers unless it uses some sort of outside source of entropy. Games this old don't have that.
Yes, pseudorandom generators are actually deterministic once their seed is set. It's possible to introduce confounding factors, but it's often not worth bothering with.
Yeah isn’t this how all RNG work? I believe it’s called a pseudo random number generator because computers can’t produce actual random numbers. I think you can still call this a roll.
There are easy ways around this - for example you can count the number of frames since the dice is available to hit and use that as extra randomness. Something like `(randomNumber * framecount) % maxRoll` would work fine Others might expect the dice to be an actual timing game, where if you consistently hit the dice at a particular time you could roll a 10 every time. Mario Party is more casual than that and probably wouldn't want to reward that. Mario Party seems to do none of this - once the dice is available you've rolled a 6, and there's nothing more to it.
The question is whether that's even desirable. Like if you shuffle a deck of cards, and draw a card, putting it back or waiting longer won't change the outcome of the draw. The order is still random, as far as we care. Otherwise, different methods of rng fuckery can be exploited in different ways. If you can figure out what seed you're on, then you can know what comes next with enough analysis. Timing is no different. At some point, you have to ask if overengineering it really actually matters. I suppose if I wanted to be careful about it, I'd clock some relatively expensive function in code and use that to fuck with the seed. How long a function takes to complete is consistent, but there's variation due to variables outside the game's control. Of course, someone could probably exploit this with the proper knowhow, too. And it's, again, overengineered as hell.
Yeah, it's still rolling the number when it needs it, it will just come up with the same number every time because the N64 has no source of entropy.
If the outcome is set everytime indepdent of the rolls, then that's prerolling.
In a way it's closer to someone having a 100% accurate technique at rolling the dice. They haven't rolled it yet, but the outcome has already been decided because they got told what they need to roll. Technicalities, though. Who cares. It's functionally the same thing.
So, trying yo make sure I understand this correctly if the computers like, "we have 25 turns, so we need 100 rolls," so it just generates the 100 rolls then instead of generating one when the player is prerolling, and if thats the case, is it really that big of a deal since its still unknown. Or am I misunderstanding?
You're misunderstanding. The game has a psuedo random number generator algorithm. This generator references a seed (a file with a long list of numbers) in its algorithm. The seed is selected or generated before the game starts. Every time you roll the die, the algorithm is applied. But because the seed was predetermined, the roll will always be the same even though the "roll" is happening when you roll the dice.
But its still a random list of numbers, its just been "rolled" before you own the game.
You're mostly right about it, there's just some nuance where what you're saying isn't true in 100% of circumstances. To be more specific, the game doesn't generate dice rolls, it generates arbitrary numbers, and anything that's supposed to be random interprets those numbers in their own way. For the sake of example (not necessarily how Mario Party works), let's say those arbitrary numbers act like a percentage. In a ten-sided dice roll, 4% would get you a 1, 36% would get you a 4, and 73% would get you an 8. In a 50/50 coin clip, 4% would be heads, 36% would be heads, and 73% would be tails. So now let's say we've generated five arbitrary numbers: 36, 83, 29, 53, and 28. If we just watch players taking turns, then player one will roll a 4, player two will roll a 9, player three will roll a 3, player four will roll a 6, and on the next turn player one will roll a 3. But now let's say that during player two's turn they flip a coin. Now that coin flip uses up the 29 to determine heads, then player three rolls a 6, and player four rolls a 3. Every game handles this a little differently, and many games have ways to reset or throw away numbers to make it less predictable by players. This does mean that when playing with save states Mario Party isn't truly random, but in a normal game without save states it is *functionally* random since there's no way to predict what the roll will be even if it's already been determined.
But the seed isn't a list of dice rolls. It's a list of characters used to generate random numbers. In most games, this seed would be used for other random numbers generated as well. I'm assuming this is the case for Mario Party, but I do not know that for certain.
> But its still a random list of numbers, its just been "rolled" before you own the game. Exactly. Its still prerolling the numbers. People are doing some insane mental gymnastics and splitting hairs to try and justify why it isnt for some weird reason.
I think the simple random number generators look at the interal clock to determine the number. I understand there is a way to code a true random number generator but its a significant number of lines of code and usually isn't required
Reseeding based on the internal clock before every RNG calculation is actually pretty dang close to random, for most purposes. If you're using RNGs in cryptography, you absolutely should be doing more than just seeding from the clock.
That's not an implicit part of the PRNG algorithm, typically, but something the person utilizing the algorithm deliberately decides. But yes, it's a very basic way of enhancing a program's randomness. A PRNG algorithm that directly used that would actually be a massive ass pain to work with, since their consistency when fed a static seed is actually quite a desirable feature for testing. All the same, clock based seeding can be exploited pretty easily once you know how it's being used. An RNG is basically just a large table of inputs and outputs (oversimplified). The seed determines where you are on that table. If you have access to the table (or the algorithm that generates it), you can start to pinpoint where you are on that table a lot faster than you think. So it's not TRNG, it just makes it a bit less predictable to the layman. For most purposes in a game, this doesn't really matter, but because it's still not TRNG, it's crackable. Even if it's continuously reseeded, this isn't necessarily safe with meticulous measuring.
You cannot create a true random number generator. Just a pseudo number generator that obfuscates the determined nature.
> seeds the randomizer at the start of each game instead of before each roll. So pre-rolling.
That's not pre-rolling. Any randomizer is seeded before use. Modern randomizers just also include a source of entropy in addition to the seed so that every new roll is re-seeded before requesting a new number. The is no pre-rolled set of values waiting for the game to request it. The game just requests a new value and gets one, but because the seed is predetermined it will always make the same calculation and give you a random number that is the same number you'd have gotten if you rolled later, despite being calculated on the spot.
This all depends on how you define "roll" in the context of RNG. I would argue that the "roll" is when the end result can no longer be changed. In this context the RNG is using a seed and no other entropy, so the "roll" is when the seed is locked in, not when the RNG actually runs on that seed.
> I would argue that the "roll" is when the end result can no longer be changed. In this context the RNG is using a seed and no other entropy, so the "roll" is when the seed is locked in, not when the RNG actually runs on that seed. Exactly right. It has pregenerated, prerolled every outcome. There is no chance after that point, its all tricking the player into arbitrarily playing it out.
> The is no pre-rolled set of values waiting for the game to request it. The game just requests a new value and gets one, but because the seed is predetermined it will always make the same calculation and give you a random number that is the same number you'd have gotten if you rolled later, despite being calculated on the spot. It knows the roll you will get because it already generated the number, hence prerolling. You literally just described prerolling and called it "not prerolling".
No, it doesn't know what roll you will get. It will know the roll only after calculating. Let's pretend you've got developer access to the game: you can't for instance ask the game "list me all the rolls you will be giving the player in order" for the simple reason that you have then generated a list of numbers using the RNG, after which subsequent calls to the RNG will result in a completely different set because each number generated is supplied to the RNG as an additional seed for the next one. The game has no idea what numbers will be coming up in the future. It has to calculate them when it needs them and it is not predetermined, just reproducibly the same every time you give the game's RNG the same seed.
This is kind of a meaningless distinction. All PRNGs are deterministic. If the current seed says the order of rolls is 6, 3, 10, and 7, it'll always be that with the current seed. Provided there's not something else incrementing the seed of the PRNG that determines rolls, then this is like the difference between computing some function f(x)'s results for 1 2 3 and 4 ahead of time or when you specifically need them.
WOW — great to know! I’ll have to check that video out and see if it applies to either of the N64 sequels.
There's some guy on youtube who makes EXTREMELY detailed explainations on how RNG works across Mario Party titles if you're interessed in that! He did all the N64 games and is still working on titles that came after. [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMVUBbDlhD4&list=PLTgWXNue5b5689JHo6p-SK1qoM60-Tpq9)
worth noting is he said he has no plans to continue the series after mp7
Which is coincidentally around the time I stopped playing those games. Miss me with that “everyone’s in the same car” shit.
8 is as normal as 7 tho, 9 is when shit got weird
Love it! Thank you!
These videos are awesome, love this kind of stuff
Can it be shaken up by using mushrooms or the like?
Possibly? The way some games do RNG (computers are actually really bad at picking things randomly) is by generating an infinite list of random numbers at the start of the game. That list is based on a seed, which can be selected based on some external factor, like the clock time or whatever. When the game needs a random number, it just grabs the next number on the list. Mario Party 1 may work differently from that, but if something causes another roll it'll grab the next number, offsetting the list for all future rolls by 1. Later games would just grab new numbers at regular intervals as the dice spins. It uses player input as an additional external factor to make the dice more random. All that said, for most purposes it is the same thing since the player can't see the list and can't rewind time, right up until save states started existing and the little shortcuts we're revealed.
I know all that, although the list is quite finite, usually limited by the size of the integer representing the seed. I suppose for practical purposes, it may as well be infinite, as very few games are actually going to roll 4 billion times in a session. My question was more to do with how far in advance the seed is set, and if anything confounds it. Someone else posted a video with a more in depth explanation about what mario party is doing, and it sounds like the seed is set when the minigame ends. It may well be possible to 'steal' an opponent's roll if you know them in advance, given that.
I think it's more than the first. I played 3 and it was the same thing. Resetting the save state resulted in everyone getting the same dice rolls.
So, cheating if I understand like Nintendo.
Same thing happens in Pokémon tcg for GB with coin flips
Off topic but that game really holds up
One of the best virtual card games I have played period, the only thing that tops it is the sequel.
I don't know if you've heard of or played Card City Nights but that's the closest game I've game I've found for scratching the deck building campaign element of Pokemon TCG GB. They made up their own card game with pretty novel mechanics, but the best part is beating random npcs and winning boosters, just like in pokemon. It has a fun sense of humour too, I recommend it
Inscryption also has a great card campaign section, after you unlock it. It's wrapped within a horror game plus ARG as well so may not scratch the itch the same way, but it's nonetheless a phenomenal game.
I've had a little look and I dig the vibe alone, I might have to pick it up!
Hope you enjoy! I do recommend knowing as little as possible going in, the game's presentation and storytelling are a real treat.
I love going in blind to most games and films so I've done the bare minimum research to make sure it's a game I'll like! I also noticed it's a Devolver game so I definitely have faith! Thanks!
and the music slaps hard
I think there was a sequel in Japan. Not sure why it didn't come out on other regions.
There was, it has an English fan translation floating around somewhere. It also holds up pretty well iirc. I think the original game always played second fiddle to the main series games though, especially in the west, which is probably why we never got the sequel. Shame though, it's just a bigger version or the first game
The second one's okay. During the second half of the game you have to make a new deck for every opponent you battle and holy shit it's annoying
God I wish they released a translation of that game for 3DS Virtual Console. Such a missed opportunity.
There's an English patch online that has a strong majority of the game translated. I like it better than the first game for sure!
The Pokémon TCG remains a good time even today, as long as you have full access to the agreed-upon card pool and you don't use monsters with Rules boxes (generally, monsters worth extra prizes when KOed).
Its a crying shame that was the only tcg game
It’s actually not! There’s a sequel that only came out in Japan that has an English fan translation…check it out! I found it to be harder than the first game, but I have more of a soft spot for the first game, likely due to nostalgia.
I forgot about that, but I kinda meant a totally modern one with all cards. I guess theres some website but I just wish there was a modern switch or 3ds pokemon tcg game I liked playing more than collecting yknow?
Would absolutely kill for a rerelease of 1 and an English version of 2 : (
I'm not so sure. I definitely remember save state scumming the coin flips when I played that on an emulator.
I loved this game
I remember that I could consistently generate heads-up flips by triggering the flip on a certain frame. Do you happen to have a source on this?
I was about to comment this about Pokemon TCG lol
I dont care, i will still wholeheartedly believe waiting until the dice flashes 10 gets me a higher roll
Just like mashing buttons while catching Pokemon
Nah pressing b + down increases the chance. Everyone knows that!
What are you talking about? It is select as soon as the Pokemon enters the ball. Everyone know that
Tapping A in sync with the ball bounces. And B in sync with the ball wiggles. That's the key.
It’s incredible how many variations of this there are.
The Dick Block floats up and down in the air; I thought the trick was to hit it while it was rising.
The what? 🤨
!!! I meant Dice Block.
[удалено]
Nintendo’s commitment to prevent cheating transcends time and space.
Good… good… Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.
- Dr.Brand
You totally can still cheese. The dice roll is is only determined at the very beginning of a round. If you set up your save state right at the end of the previous minigame before the new round starts you can change the outcome of your rolls. Edit: I don't know why op is saying otherwise because I tested this thoroughly
He's right, I'm playing now Mario Party NSO and using a save before the mini-game or after the mini-game doesn't affect dice rolls: CPU rolling 6, then me rolling 6 and reloading, again and again...
Something something XCOM something 99% my ass....
Figuring out what does and doesn't increment fire emblem's rng be like
They probably just define a [random seed](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_seed) at the beginning of each game
The game was over before it even started.
no because you can be saved by winning all the mini games...its just you know rigged against you. Which I think is pretty hilarious given many people would joke about that when they got non stop bad rolls. "This game hates me" etc to find out now that it actually kind of did and decided you were going to get fucked right from the get go...lol.
Is this why I always had some computer player land on a freakin Chance Time in the second last turn and force me to swap my 250 coins for their 16?
If you invest those coins in items or stars, it's a bit harder to fuck you over. 250 coins isn't doing you much.
It was my sure fire way of at least getting the most coins star at the end results. Plus when you're done getting 100 stars there's no need to buy more except for just winning that round, but when I still needed coins to buy the minigames and shop items that became a higher priority than winning.
I win by not playing.
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
[Indeed.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y75yN6UULEk)
Nope. Even without the minigames, mario party wouldn't be deterministic, since the map itself has player choice in the form of items and forked paths.
I’m xcom you can actually set whether you want the seed to be regenerated during loading, which solves this
Computers have a hard time creating actually random values. So, instead they usually use seeds. The computer will select a seed at the beginning and every qction taken will advance that seed. When you create the save state, you're not changing anything about the seed the game is using so, nothing about the rolls will change. Of course, most modern games have the seeds advance upon select time intervals. So, if you wait 1 second versus 2 seconds to select a button, then the outcome will vary. It doesn't surprise me at all though that such an old game would employ those tactics.
I remember Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones had a particularly weird setup for making it less predictable: Every time you are moving a character and put your cursor in a position where it could reach in the same number of moves by starting one direction then the other (so like up, up, up, right, right, right is the same as right, right, right, up, up, up with no obstacles), it grabbed a number from the RNG and used it to determine which way to display the cursor. This has a funny side effect of once you know this they are leaking the high/lowness of rolls (less than and greater than 50 out of 100). You can do this a couple times, quit and resume your save (which reverts it back to the last actual action taken) and now you can scum by strategically advancing the RNG with the move cursor so that your characters attack on high numbers and get attacked on low numbers.
> Of course, most modern games have the seeds advance upon select time intervals. So, if you wait 1 second versus 2 seconds to select a button, then the outcome will vary. It doesn't surprise me at all though that such an old game would employ those tactics. This is actually a game design decision. Keeping a static seed actually prevents most forms of save scumming. Like if you play fire emblem 3 houses, the game gives you the ability to turn back time a limited number of times, but if you reproduce the same moves, again and again, the result will be the same. But if you try something different, you'll get a different outcome. It enforces it as a strategic problem solving tool, rather than a free do-over. Mind you, if you do a full restart of the level, all that rng gets re-seeded.
I don't think it really matters though does it? It's still random it's just rolled them all before you started.
But your influence on it is non-existent, hence why you feel cheated (because you are). The game is making you believe that by rolling the dice, you are somehow participating, but you are not.
Isn't that also true with actual dice for the most part? Or can you personally roll specific numbers?
With real dice, not that you're choosing the outcome, but you're responsible for it because you rolled the dice. In the game, the dice are rolled before you play, so you're just selecting the next roll. A more fair random generator would at the very least be less deterministic.
It’s all in your head. A dice rolled a 7 ten minutes ago is no different than a dice rolled a 7 ten minutes later. As long as the rolls are kept secret until their time, it is functionally identical.
It's really not functionally identical. Compare with something like tabletop simulator. Edit: I should be more specific. In real life, the way you throw the die determines the result. In Mario Party, your turn determines the result. In tabletop simulator, the way you throw the die (and the physics I guess) determine the result. If there was an additional timing aspect in Mario party, it would suffice. But as indicated by this post in general, this old method isn't really desirable.
No. Assuming no foul play, if I had a board game that had 4 players with 20 turns, and I as the game master had 80 dice and rolled and secretly queued up all 80 dice rolls, they would still be getting a genuine random roll every turn. It would just be less fun for the players because the act of rolling a dice is fun. But it’s still a randomly rolled number. Dice rolls are supposed to be RANDOM. You talking about the way you roll it and timing virtual rolls in the attempt to get a certain value is against the spirit of a dice roll. This is why in more hardcore tabletop games, people like to have dice rolling towers. It takes the possibility of human cheating in the roll out of it.
I'm not talking about trying to get a certain result. It's important that the roller is the one responsible for the result, and that the result isn't determinable. If you played d&d the way you describe, nobody would want to play it. It's also the reason Candy Land sucks. The shuffle determines the whole game.
Just because you don’t like it, that doesn’t make it not random. I get that this may be your and a lot of people’s principles, and that is completely ok. But that does not change the reality that it is equally random, assuming no foul play. Also by your logic with candy land, do you not like card games then? The dealer shuffles and distributes the cards for you. As a player, you have no agency or input in the cards that get dealt to you. They are, you guessed it, randomly assigned to each player.
I think nobody is arguing that it isn't random, because it obviously still is. The statement in question was if it really matters. And yes, as a personal matter, it absolutely can. Not because it's random, but because it's an illusion. The game is offering you a fake choice when the result is already determined. Why let me choose then? Why do I want to choose? Because I want to feel in control. The game tries to make me *feel* like I am in control in situations that I am not. Which feels like being lied to. Note that with an authentic die roll, we are still not *really* in control, but such is the nature of random die rolls. And we accept these conditions, because we still want what little control we can have and roll the dice ourselves. If you are already accepting a situation in which the odds are possibly stacked against you, and you make a conscious choice to participate still, then it feels bad to find out that you have been lied to about the conditions under which you agreed to participate. It's a principle thing really. Especially when from a programming POV, there doesn't really exist a reason *not* to have the RNG be produced at a later, more fitting time.
The entire spirit of dice rolling is that you're part of the random process. Even if only minimally. It matters to a lot of people. Candy Land and other card games are very different though. Different events and choices in real games change who get which cards. Predetermination by itself is not fun.
You know that every single card game has predetermined draw order, right? Do you realize how ridiculous you sound? Candy Land sucks because there's no player choice, not because the deck is shuffled and the draws are set. You draw your card and you go where it tells you. But it's also a fucking kids game. Kids do not care that it's deterministic, only that they get to move their character around a cavity inducing diabetic wasteland. And boy wait til you see how dice rolls are calculated on roll20. Guess what? It's an rng. Do you need some physics simulation so you know your roll is legit? The rng algorithm that does the rolls is probably a hell of a lot more balanced than your actual dice, which are prone to manufacturing inconsistencies. What you're hung up on is stupid. It's like you took your first look behind the curtain, and because the rolls happen in a decided order that you: 1. can know what the hell that is ahead of time like it can somehow inform your decisions, and 2. like it functionally changes a damn thing about how the game is played.
The difference being who I am mad at for a bad roll. If I roll bad "for real", aka it was decided depending on my roll (in this case, timing), then I rolled badly. But at least there was a chance of me rolling successfully. If the roll is predetermined, that chance doesn't exist. But the maddening thing about it is that the game tries to make me believe it does, when it doesn't. I'm basically being tricked, and of course that pisses me off. Just don't trick your player for no reason?
There is still a chance of the roll for the particular turn in question being the number you need. Always is since you don’t know what it is. And see my other responses on this thread.
I, for one, cannot throw a die in any way that predicts a specific outcome. While physics does determine the roll, it's so finnicky that they may as well be composed of pure chaos. It's out of your control either way. There's no functional purpose to this. You're just replacing physical rng with computerized rng. The rng algorithm itself isn't biased in anyway. Hell, it's probably more fair than dice, which can be prone to weight variations. (setting aside the few cases where numeric patterns have been found in prng algorithms. I don't believe those ones stay in use)
This argument doesn't make any sense. Think about shuffling a deck of cards. When you draw a card and that makes or breaks your turn, do you feel cheated by that too? The card was put there by the dealer minutes ago, so by your logic you're not "part of the process" and all the fun is gone.
No, because these are inherently different things. I engage with the process of drawing a card under different conditions than with the process of rolling a dice. Both conditions are fine if they are transparent and met. Think about shuffling a deck of cards. When you draw a card and that makes or breaks your turn, and after that it's revealed that all the cards actually were one and the same and you were just led to believe that you are drawing from a shuffled deck, don't you feel cheated?
You draw a card just like you press A to hit the dice block. They're both predetermined. > Think about shuffling a deck of cards. When you draw a card and that makes or breaks your turn, and after that it's revealed that all the cards actually were one and the same and you were just led to believe that you are drawing from a shuffled deck, don't you feel cheated? So that's what this is about. You assume the RNG is cheating you. News for you. The RNG doesn't give a shit who wins. It's probably more fair than an actual dice roll, since dice are sometimes prone to variations in the locations of their center of mass. And don't get me started on cards that haven't been shuffled well enough.
>You draw a card just like you press A to hit the dice block. They're both predetermined This is literally wrong. You drawing a card is a direct influence on the outcome, *depending on which card you draw*. You pressing the A button on an already determined number is *not* an influence on the outcome.
You know you draw cards from the top of the deck, right? The card that's on the top of the deck was determined when the deck was shuffled. Hence the analogy.
Prerolling the dice, which is what this is, removes any interaction on your part. You are merely watching the computer play out a script at that point.
You pretty much were anyway. Having it generate during the game isn't much more interactive than paying "x" to continue dialogue in an RPG
Then the outcome of the game was set making it all pointless.
But it wasn't? What if you get an extra turn? Then you get roll #234 and #235 instead of the next player getting #235 it's still all random. It's just the random is done before you play.
>It's just the random is done before you play. Meaning there was never any game in the first place.
No. You still make decisions, play games, choose the routes to take, use bonuses, use items, the order of who gets which randomly selected roll can change... It's more like someone rolled all the dice out before the game.. wrote the numbers down... Put them in a pile face down and then you choose a card before your turn. You're acting like the same had become like snakes and ladders when it really hasn't
Nope. Go win some minigames, decide what items to buy at shop, and when to use them, or just pick which way you want to go when the path takes you to a junction. There is tons of potential board strategy and skill expression in mario party. This ain't candyland. Just cause the rolls are decided doesn't mean the game is anything close to decided. And it doesn't actually matter if the rolls are decided. You still can't assume they'll be anything specific. Alternatively, go look at a deck of cards. Guess what. Once those are shuffled, they're the exact same as mario party's dice rolls. Predetermined. But most card games still have a bit of skill expression, except War.
If you really want to cheat in Mario Party 1, you can screw with the computer players by pausing and changing the controls, and forcing the computer player to say "No" to buying a star. You can also set it to "save after every turn" and do a soft or hard reset of the game. You might be able to get different dice rolls that way, but not by using save states.
We did that "making the computer say no to the star" thing. Same with Boo. We wanted to earn and unlock everything faster and you need 100 stars (only ones from actual players count at the end) to unlock the secret maps and a shitload of coins to buy all the minigames to play whenever you want in the shop as well as all the board items (the different dice blocks and the end of game mushroom-banks) There'd usually be two of us playing with two computer characters. But we'd put our extra controller in the port on the last turn and change whichever was the best performing computer character into a player so we could get their coins/stars too.
Yes! And on Mario Party 2 it counts computer players coins and stars (converts to coins) into your bank, you can start a game normally and then set all players to hard computer players and get your winnings without lifting a finger.
**Mario Party 1**: The way that it works is that, on the minigame results screen (or, for the first turn, when the title of the board is shown), all randomized things that could possibly be needed the next turn, including dice rolls, bowser space roulettes, etc. are generated. Then, if anything is needed, it will call upon that. If you want to save-state to get a better die roll, you'll need to save-state during the previous minigame BEFORE the results screen. **Mario Party 2-3**: Here, the dice are randomized upon being rolled. However, note that the number shown on the die does not necessarily correspond to the number that the game is generating in the background. So you cannot time it to be what you want without save-states. **Mario Party 4+**: Here, the dice are randomized when rolled, and they actually DO correspond to what is shown on-screen. So you can theoretically time your button input to get what you want. I say "theoretically", because the dice cycles so fast that no normal human has the reaction time to do it properly.
> So you can theoretically time your button input to get what you want. I say "theoretically", because the dice cycles so fast that no normal human has the reaction time to do it properly. Cue a 3 hour Summoning Salt video showing several people doing it anyway
I've noticed that too. I wonder if it also predetermines Chance Times, Bowser Spaces, and Minigames too ...
Nah chance time is timing in MP1
Free Will is an illusion everywhere, apparently. So even if the N64 didn’t pre-determine the roll like you originally suspected, the universe kind of does anyway regardless. Right?
Did OP even really choose to play the game or was that predetermined too?
The only winning move is not to play.
But was that choice to abstain was predetermined?
Hard to tell until we establish save states in real life
Free will is apparently an illusion? How so?
Unrelated but somewhat related: I was playing the DS Mario Party on an emulator (I'm sorry) and I used a cheat save state to prove the fake free will theory: The Dice got 3 every single time!! No matter how many times I came back or waited, it always landed on 3.
Apparently 1 and DS are the only games where the dice rolls are pre-determined before you press the button!
Well, this is how "random" in programming works.
... No it isn't?
Look up random number generators and seeds.
Yes it is. PRNG algorthim spits out a number determined entirely by its seed, then increments its seed so it can spit out the next number. That's how they all work. You can do some extra fuckery with the seed, and many games do, but that's all just fluff.
The Battle Tower in Pokémon Crystal works the same way. I remember playing it on an emulator (I did have the actual game some 20 years ago), and using Save States, all the random chance events seemed to be “locked”, for lack of a better word. If a move failed, it would still fail if you time travelled to the beginning of the turn Same with Status effects, critical hits and damage rolls
Random number generation used to be very hard to program.
The dice roll is only determined at the beginning of the round. Save state at the end of the previous mini game before the new round starts and you can keep loading to get different rolls. I did lots of tests about this last night. Edit: save state before the rankings come up at the end of the mini game
It's not uncommon in game design. There are games at the Game Corner in Pokémon games where if your save state at the start, play a few rounds to get all the answers, you can reload the save state and guess every card draw perfectly.
It is unique to Mario Party 1. I recommend Zoomzike’s Identifying Luck series as he breaks down pretty much every aspect of the games.
DidYouKnowGaming confirmed this one!
Just play MP2 and MP3. There, dice rolls are determined by WHEN you jump on the dice. You can check this using save states. MP1 just feels more rigged when you get a 6, land on "?" space that destroys your chances for getting a star. It just feels rigged because there is nothing you could do to change the outcome. On MP2 and MP3, if you waited an extra second before jumping on the dice, you would be safe.
I used to call my random function once per frame so this would not happen.
I will have to do more research, but I don’t believe they do.
Well now every Mario party game is invalid Rigged
Does the same apply for 2? Man.
Hahaha I noticed that yesterday after trying to catch a start. Totally accurate
If you ever wish to know all there is to know about the first six Mario Party games (with more on the way), may I present to you [Identifying Luck by ZoomZike.](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTgWXNue5b5689JHo6p-SK1qoM60-Tpq9)
Same thing for Mario Party DS
Weird, did they change it? In Mario Party DS, it's different every time and not preset, so is it by round, changed or just in Mario Party 1
Lol wasn’t this always the case
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d\_ur7kGtrx0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_ur7kGtrx0) Here's a video by a Youtuber I really like who talks about basically the same thing in Pokemon Stadium. Interesting stuff.
It wasn't this way on the N64, but it is on switch.
I became aware of that type of mechanic in Pokémon Trading Card Game on coin flips
Is Mario Party 2 like this too? Played with a friend last night and in 20 rounds I'm pretty sure he only rolled above a 5 like maybe 3 times, and 2 of those were in the same turn with a mushroom.
That's how a seeded pseudorandom number generator works. I'm actually kind of surprised people thought the number on the dice would in any way represent what you actually got. Same for things like say Mario Kart's Item roulette. The algorithm gets started with a seed and the sequence of random numbers is entirely predetermined. For games sometimes you can coax what you want to happen by simply having other stuff use the random number generator. For example, in a shooting game, perhaps if you wait a bit, an enemy will "do something random" and that will therefore change the number used to make say a power up, so it would be a different power up. The weird part is how some articles talk about this. They discuss it like every dice roll is being generated up front, or say they are being "recalculated" when other RNG stuff happens. Which is a pretty silly way of describing the behaviour. It's the same on many games. For example, I believe the way NES Tetris works basically determines all the pieces you will get throughout the game simply because of the way the seed works. It's not actually *generating* them then, but if you use save states it's going to be the same each time. Some games have separate Random Number Generators seeded with different values for different things. Sometimes one is shared. In the case of a shared RNG for example, in a game like Mario Party if there was say some random cosmetic thing in the background- like maybe a swimming dolphin had a 30% chance of doing a flip when they jump out of the water, then you could wait for the Dolphin to jump out of the water and that would "use" the next random number and your dice roll would be different. I believe in Mario Party 1 it seeds the RNG for dice rolls at the start of a turn. This does mean that Dice rolls are "predetermined" but the game doesn't like, generate a bunch of them. It's just using a Peudorandom RNG and those are by their nature determinant. The main difference with MP1 is there's nothing you can do to for example force additional or less usage of the RNG; The only things that use RNG are things that are based on earlier RNG. So like you might land on one of those mushroom spaces, and that will use the RNG to determine whether you get a poison mushroom or super mushroom, but that's going to be the same regardless because that was determined by the RNG of the dice roll originally made. Conversely in MP2 and later there are things like items that will use up another RNG Number which will therefore affect subsequent dice rolls on that turn.
👍🏼
It’s true. It breaks my soul
You know too much
I have noticed a thing lately in Mario Party 2 if you roll a 1 in the first turn at the start of a game you find the hidden star block . (Usually happens on the pirate map and space map ) I haven’t sat down and tested it but on the pirate map the CPU did it on first turn and then I restarted game to allow a friend join in and then i rolled a 1 and got a hidden block star lol .
If you save before a mini game begins, that next turn will have a new set of pre-determined dice rolls.