Luck. Randomness. It makes this game (and many others) tick. It provides the element of risk, in all sorts of blatant and subtle ways. Here's the problem though. Proper randomness can contain any pattern at all. Hence, me failing 14 rolls in a row on Barbed Plate, causing me to bin a whole build, is just as random as me succeeding exactly half the time, on alternate rolls. Any math guru will tell you that, given a sufficiently large sample, the results will even out. And therein lies the problem. The average game of cardhunter probably contains 20 or 30 rolls, nowhere near enough for an average to appear. We need a method for reducing the averaging to match game length, or at least to get a lot closer to it. Who hasn't despaired at seeing your team crumble to 4 missed parries in a row, turning certain victory into humiliating defeat? Now, I'm not saying that should never happen. But it should happen 1 time in 1296. I havent played that many matches in cardhunter yet, but its happened to me more than several times. Some people may never have experienced it. Im sure if we sampled everyones results it would average out. Thats not the point. The point is, the randomness versus game length. What is required is a Karma Engine. imagine that when we roll a d6, the game actually rolls a d60, and converts the result. Simple enough. Now imagine that it remembers whether you succeeded or failed your last roll, whatever it may be. If success, -1 to your next throw (on a d60, remember), If fail, +1 to next throw. Now, that means you would need to fail ten rolls in a row to guarantee success with a parry (and that's only without 'hard to block' attacks or other factors), and, despite many of our opinions that the RNG hates us, this is a pretty unusual event. (Even with my Barbed Plate horror show, I probably passed some other rolls in the same matches). It wouldn't unbalance any games, or allow people to engineer results. It would just put a soft cap on extreme runs of good or bad luck. And no-one would be able to complain in chat anymore! YAY!!! =)
Haha, nice idea, but if thats as abusable as it gets, then its pretty sturdy. Even double unreliable block before a decent block or armor would only add +0.2 to the third roll (if they both missed). Hardly a gamebreaker. Also, you'd be running unreliable blocks.
I think it offer very little improvement for bothering implementing, there are far better system that handle pseudo random distribution and are commonly used in various rng games, it's not rocket science. Card hunter aspire to feel as real life dice rolling though, and those are inherently true random, witch mean ridiculously rolls can and will eventually happen.
There are? Well I'm all ears. Please explain a couple. I disagree that Cardhunter aspires to real life though. As well as thirty years of tabletop RP, I have lost thousands of hours playing RISK and other very dice-heavy games, and you just do not see the crazy long chains as often as you do in this game. If a match took two days then maybe the rolls would average out. But they don't. Maybe if the RNG is time-seeded, they could speed it up? Ultimately the balance between luck and skill is the key to a great game, and no reasonable player can be too upset by failing a parry at a critical moment. But 4 times in a row? Seems like every twenty minutes someone is complaining about that occurence in chat... As I say, it's a fine-tuning that I'm talking about. It's not just fails that are noticeable. There is a definite 'wave' to dice rolls. You can see the average going up and down, up and down. When its up for you, you can play any old deck and triumph. When it's down, you can borrow BlackSabbath's and still get pounded into dust. Surely this isn't quite right?...
Don't like opponents Block Rolls? Get "Hard to Block", "Unblockable", or attack from behind Don't like opponents Armor Rolls? Get "Penetrating" or armor removal Don't like your Block Rolls? Get "Lifesaving Block" or equivalent Don't like your Armor Rolls? Get "Cushioning Armor" or equivalent i.e. There are ways to minimize the impact of RNG. However, keep in mind that RNG has likely also won you a lot of games as well, but people seem to not notice that for some reason.
I totally have to disagree. I had risk games where I was not able to win a single fight. And there are the settler of catan games, were 12s have been rolled more often than eights. And that with two dices.
From experience, a dice cup helps keep it fair. (I also used to throw 3 card monte, if that means anything to you.)
