A game like dungeon crawl is full of probability based success. For most things you attempt to do there is a chance to succeed and a chance to fail. Handling the game where any action has a chance to fail is at the core of the game experience.
However pure chance is often a source of player frustration. If you get unlucky too many times in a row it feels like your general strategy is fine but the game just fails you anyway. If you do something that has an 80% chance to succeed and you fail you should have anticipated the possibility. But if you do the same 80% success chance thing 5 times in a row and fail 5 times it doesnât feel like you did anything wrong gameplay wise, the game just screwed you over.
This is were the technique of shuffle bags can come in. Through some clever math trickery (explained on request) the success chance for any individual action is unchanged but if you do the same thing multiple times in a row, getting approximately the expected number of successes and fails gets a lot more likely and extreme outcomes become less likely than they would be in successive independent trials. How much reduction of variance you get can be fine tuned.
So, question has implementation of this been discussed for dungeon crawl?
Crawl doesnât generally use shuffle bags, and I think it shouldnât. Shuffle bags make the statistics lie. Yes there is a chance to miss 3 90% chance-to-hit attacks in a row, and that chance is 0.001. Thatâs where a lot of the danger in DCSS comes from.
There are some slight âshuffle-bag-liteâ mechanics, such as a guarantee that most gods will spawn an altar before D:11 or something. This specific example is extremely helpful for people who go into a game with a specific plan in mind, and I do like it (and I wish weâd extend it so that a plan like âIâm going DragonFormâ can also be forced to succeed).
But there is deliberately no attempt to guarantee every game has âaverageâ luck.
I feel this can lead to situations where players feel they lose merely due to bad luck. You are in a sticky situation, there is no guaranteed way out but you have something that has a 90% chance to succeed. If you die on failure that usually means bad planning beforehand. But what is your backup plan? You try again or maybe use some other method but that also works only 90% of the time. A sufficiently long and hence unlikely string of bad luck will kill any character.
I like the ever present possibility of getting stupid back luck and dying out of nowhere, it means that characters rarely can ever be truly invincible and thatâs great, you have to be more aware and careful even in situations where you ânormallyâ are completely fine. it already feels like at least 3 in 4 combats in this game are just chores, but if you really could become invincible it would feel that way even more for me. it may sound somewhat paradoxical but unrestrained randomness leads to a bit more skill expression too, if the game was more consistent there would be less difference between a character that is just good-enough and a strong one, and less difference between a player that is just good-enough to win the average run and a skilled one who will do everything in their power to make the odds of their dying so slim that they can then win 100 runs in a row. always being at some risk but having some power to influence how big or small it isâs part of the fun imo!
Well, it sounds like people enjoy being killed for bad luck. Just lost another very new character like that. On D2, merfolk gladiator against a single hound. My hit chance is only 50%, but I have 11 damage rating against one star AC, so if I hit it comes to 1d11-1d5 = 3 damage on average. 10 attacks made, 4 hit but 3 do zero damage, only does damage which the hound already regenerated after the 10 attacks are done.
I reassess my options, the only useful item I have is a throwing net, it actually works on the second attempt and buys me a total of 3 more attacks. Two misses and one zero damage. Game over.
This is well below the expected damage, one could compute how unlucky I was but that is somewhat besides the point. What I donât understand is why people find these kind of situations desirable. Why is it considered good if stuff like this (occasionally) happens?
I look at Sergey with 107 consecutive wins (and counting!) with a variety of characters and I know that the swingy-ness of combat rng is manageable most of the time. I know that if I am playing reasonable combos, the truly unavoidable deaths are rare enough that I my mindset should be âhow can I improveâ rather than âthat was just dumb luckâ.
I donât want this to happen to me, but I like that it can happen because it gives me a reason to play more carefully and maximize my survival as much as my ability and patience allow, just to avoid the mere possibility. a cool effect that unrestrained randomness has on the game is the way it turns expected outcome of combats âgreyâ. If fights were completely consistent then a fight would either be âyou always win hereâ or âyou always lose hereâ, but if they arenât consistent then youâre going to have an entire scale with those 2 extremes on the opposite ends, and your chance of winning a fight lands somewhere between those ends. Instead of having 2 absolutes you get something more ambiguous that makes threat evaluation much more difficult and interesting and always leaves room for improvements, especially from having a stronger character and tighter decision making (both macro making your character stronger and micro) on the playerâs part. the potential threat of randomly dying to a series of bad rolls is good because it changes the way the game is approached to make it a lot more nuanced and interesting, so I like it!
yes I like citing a top playerâs achievement in consistency to prove thereâs something someone (especially me) must have done wrong with no refutation xD even though this game is very random and âunfairâ players can still play in such a way that they almost never die and can get huge win streaks. think about how thereâs people out there who play the same game as you do and can somehow win 100 run in a row as if there never was any randomness in it, let that sink in, get humbled (Iâm not talking down here Iâm a pretty weak player too). thereâs some peace of mind you get from knowing this - when you die you very likely wouldnât find yourself thinking âis this game bad??â, instead you probably think âthereâs no way this run would be a streak breaker to Xecnar Sergey, so what did I do wrong?â which is both a much more productive and much more fun line of thinking to go down on!
I think this turned into an absolute discussion where I mostly intended a discussion about gray scales. First, it is certainly mathematically possible that any attack a char makes that has a chance to fail will fail and if that happens any char will die eventually (actually pretty soon) but of course fail every single time is astronomically unlikely. On the other hand there are players who play well/ careful enough that a streak of bad luck long/ severe enough to actually kill their character happens in less than 1% of their games. There is no contradiction here, it is just a matter of degree.
And my suggestion was to tune the randomness down somewhat (reduce not eliminate) so that good gameplay is more about knowing what tactic in the current situation has the highest chance to succeed and less about playing in a way so that if the 90% success chance tactic fails 3 times in a row you still survive (although if it fails 5 times you do not).
I know you never said it had the fights had to be no randomness fully consistent, it was just for the sake of the argument that a wide variety of outcomes to play around makes the game more interesting. you could do some middle ground where combat is still random with safe guards against extreme bad rolls, but I think even that would diminish the fun things about the unrestrained randomness we have a little