Finding Agility in the Random
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"All RPGs are a little random," Thompson began, explaining, "You can't imagine a bunch of guys getting together to play D&D without using dice." As almost every RPG uses some basics, such as random damage ranges on items/spells/skills, or random selection of item drops, it's worth asking -- why do players like it?I'm not so sure myself. Sure, it works fine for action RPGs, but when you're talking cRPG, carefully plotted branching gameplay tends to work better than a bunch of random levels.
"First, it kind of fits into a gambling mentality," said Thompson. "Random combat is similar to craps or roulette, where you take your chance and see what happens. Randomness can create excitement -- a weak character could randomly manage to beat a much stronger character, and vice versa."
The downside? Said Thompson, "Too much randomness can be frustrating - if even the lowliest zombie could kill a level 50 character with a critical hit, that's not fun."
Random item drops, he explained, are more like a slot machine wherein every, say, 3 or 4 seconds, the player has a chance to get lucky. "This is a very important part of slot machines. I remember reading that somewhere, maybe Denmark, the government discussed for something like 10 hours if the gap between pulls should be three and a half seconds or six seconds," continued Thompson.
"Now, the drive in a slot machine is for '˜the big win' -- but a lot of things we do include the 'almost win,'" Thompson said. "If you see on a slot machine that the big win is 7777, and you get three sevens and half of a seven, you still get excited and it drives you to continue.)
He described how in Hellgate: London, players can find (legendary) items which contain multiple random (and good) attributes. Getting one could be a big win if it suits the player's character well, or an (almost win) -- it doesn't, but the player still got a legendary item.
He went on to argue that randomness gives a unique experience: (You can tell stories to your friends, because they won't have experienced things in exactly the same way, and if your items are random and unique, you will take a greater pride in them."
Another reason is replayability, not only allowing but encouraging the player to play the game over and over again, to gain a different perspective and experience each time.
