How to prevent situations like 1/216 (triple Parry/Laser Block miss)... partially.

So when I was streaming today (and for no reason it was a mute stream but w/e), I had a real great idea, about how to actually prevent us from being too lucky or too unlucky at times.

Dice rolls have Pseudo-random distribution.

That's it. The end. That solves the problem the best in my opinion.

To those of you who wonder what does it do: In dota (i like that example because I know it), a lot of things are on Pseudo-random distribution. Last update gave evasion such distribution and it basically means:
Say the target has 50% evasion. So when we attack the target, there's a 50% chance we'll miss in our first hit. If we do miss, then the chance falls by a certain percentage, and again and again. And it resets if we do hit the target.

 

And then we'll no longer be able to reassure people that our die rolls are random.

 

Pseudo-random is such nonsense. It has no place in any game that is based in any way upon luck (certainly not dice roll games). Either it is luck-based or it isn't.

 

Watch those Officer's Harnesses like a hawk so you know when to time your major erratic attacks. Or if there's a separate tracker for each card, move into melee once your armor's failed to reduce a couple self damage effects. Pseudo-random definitely has a place in some games, but not in this case.

 

I don't know DotA2 but it sounds really stupid. Couldn't they just rework it and change the wording of this 'Evasion' skill to something like: "Every second attack fails."?

 

Or maybe just less luck-based. It's not that luck is the reason there are some of the same faces constantly at top and some are circling between 1,2 and 1,5k. It's also skill-based, with probably the most important ability being adjusting yourself to the situation.

I dunno, that sounds actually interesting. Timing your stuff to get what you want.

That wouldn't work. You could just have a weaker hero attack that person, and then a strong carry come in with some absurd crit.

 

My first girlfriend introduced me to dota. When she explained to me how to capitalize on this one hero's X% critical passive--watch for the first crit you get, then you know the next is within the next Y hits--I was incredulous. "That's not how percentages work! That's not how probability works!" She was insistent that not only did the ability work this way (and she was right, this was the Warcraft 3 engine which is rife with pseudo random mechanics), but also that this is how probability functions in the real world.

I don't know about you all but the idea of Card Hunter teaching people bad math TERRIFIES me.

 

I dunno, maybe we just don't have to teach people bad math. I'd go for bigger pleasure in game. But that's just me, again.

 

The Dota thing doesn't bother me. People's expectation of a random distribution doesn't match reality, and reducing "the long tail" prevents the ultra-frustrating outliers. (And given that they've developed their false statistical expectation in the real world, they're not going to improve it by playing the right games.) Blizzard also uses this to guarantee a certain minimum frequency of legends in Hearthstone packs, and Kingdom of Loathing uses it to make sure you see quest encounters in a reasonable amount of time. But in Card Hunter it would add a notepad and calculator to optimal play — ugh.

 

I disagree with the suggestion to add pseudo-random anything.

To answer how to make the extremes harder to come by while remaining seriously random, use 2d4 instead of 1d6, changing all die outcomes from flat 1-6 to curved 2-8.

That said, I'm just fine with the flat 1-6. Seems simple and fair. Less to keep track of. Fewer rolls to watch, too -- even if they were simultaneous, you'd have to take the extra time to look at both dice (if you're the type who at least sometimes wants to see what gets rolled, e.g. myself heheh). Yay, flat 1-6.

 

And in your pseudo-random scenario it's not really much different. If it's how game works, then they will toss few phony attacks and follow with a real one. Either they make things really random or they should simply drop it.

For me such pseudo-randomness is less competetive than both randomness and no randomness, because how pissed you will be when you will toss those 10 phony attacks in front and follow with 11th real one that will also miss, even when mathematically you would have say - 99.9% chance to hit. In such scenario losing a game to somebody because of it would be really losing it to poor game mechanics.