Many games have elements of randomness in order to create variance between play sessions, but different games handle their random elements differently. Games such as Dungeons & Dragons, Fire Emblem, and Warhammer Fantasy Battle ask the player to declare their course of action, and then the efficacy of the action is determined by random chance. In contrast, games such as Magic: The Gathering, Into the Breach, and Warhammer Underworlds instead give the player a random game state and ask them to make a decision from there. The former is called output randomness, as the random element is shown after the player has made their decision, while the latter is called input randomness, as the random element is shown before the player's decision. The two types allow games to choose which skills they would like to test, what feelings they would like to instill in the player, and what other elements they would like to introduce. Here, I'll be taking a broad look at clear applications of each type as well as case studies between similar games with differing types of randomness. Subtler applications of randomness certainly exist with elements like enemy AI behavior, but that's a topic for another time.
Output Randomness Overview
Strengths:
Output randomness thrives on generating unexpected outcomes to create organic narratives and challenges. When events fail to go according to plan, the player has to pull themselves up and succeed anyways. This rewards players who think ahead and make contingency plans. In addition, when output randomness is applied in the player's favor, it can create powerful feelings of tension.
Weaknesses:
It is easy for output randomness to result in players feeling as if their actions do not actually matter. This is especially problematic in games where player actions occur infrequently. In addition, this can discourage complex plans of action and result in players always opting for simple but effective answers.
Making It Better:
Subtly cheating in the favor of the player can go a long way in making output randomness feel less punishing. In addition, allowing players to sidestep the random elements on occasion can also make them feel more empowered. To accomplish this, some games give the players a resource they can spend to improve their odds, revert their actions, or bypass the random element entirely.
Input Randomness Overview
Strengths:
Input randomness, in general, offers players a strong sense of control provided each random game state gives them a variety of meaningful choices. Players are generally less likely to get frustrated with the random element and instead focus on what they could have done better as players. The consistent nature of actions also allows players to more easily craft complex plans that require many individual elements to succeed.
Weaknesses:
If players are not given enough options in a given game state, they may feel hopeless and frustrated from the outset. This can be particularly frustrating in a competitive environment without other means to smooth out randomness (such as Best of Three matches). In addition, having a clear unbalance of options to choose from can result in players defaulting to similar choices regardless of game state, invalidating the random element altogether.
Making It Better:
Many games with input randomness also offer the players ways to alter the odds before the game state is determined such as building your deck in a card game or assembling your team in a strategy game. This allows players to tweak the possibility that they can enact a given gameplan ahead of time so they can optimize their enjoyment. If the designers wishes to curb the random element without eliminating it entirely, they can allow the player to choose from multiple random game states as well.
Case Study: Fire Emblem vs Into the Breach
Both of these games are turn-based strategy games where the player controls units on a grid to combat foes, but Into the Breach focuses on input randomness while Fire Emblem utilizes output randomness. Importantly, neither game randomly limits what options the player is allowed to choose from, influencing the ways they utilize randomness.
Fire Emblem is built around intentionally designed maps and enemy placements. This allows for the gameplay environment to match the linear, hand-crafted narrative of each game. In order to create variance without limiting the choices available to the player or damaging the aforementioned gameplay environment, the game adds output randomness in the form of miss chance, critical hit chance, and ability activation chance. In addition, the random element allows for the creation of organic narratives when combined with the permanent character deaths in Fire Emblem, though the effectiveness of these narratives is the source of some debate.
Because Into the Breach doesn't opt for limiting the choices available to the player based on chance, it randomizes map layouts and enemy placements to change what strategies are effective. Uniquely, the game also tells the player what actions enemies will take during the player's turn. The combination of these two elements creates a game which emphasizes player skill above all else, ensuring players are never blindsided by a random element they had no knowledge of.
Case Study: Guilty Gear vs BlazBlue
As competitive fighting games, neither Guilty Gear nor BlazBlue have a high degree of randomness, as most variance comes from the human opponents you fight. However, both have characters with random moves as a core part of their identity: Faust in Guilty Gear and Platinum the Trinity in BlazBlue. The ways their random elements differ emphasize different skills for both the player using the character as well as the opponent.
Faust's random element is his "What Could This Be?" special move, informally called Item Toss. Upon activation, Faust will throw a random item with a special effect. For example, he could throw a vial of chemicals which poisons the opponent's character or a banana peel which causes a character to slip should they run into it. As neither player knows what item Faust will toss until the move is activated, this is a form of output randomness. Both players have to quickly react to what item Faust throws in order to come out on top, as some items can easily swing momentum in either player's favor. This rewards speedy decision-making for both players as well as calculated risk-taking for the Faust player.
Platinum the Trinity's random element is her Drive: Magical Symphony. Similar to Faust, she has a variety of items with special effects, including a hammer which breaks the opponent's guard and a missile she can launch as a projectile. Unlike Faust, however, both players are told what item Platinum will pull out next, making this a case of input randomness. This allows each player to formulate plans based on what item Platinum can utilize next, rewarding foresight and knowledge for both players.
Case Study: Dungeons & Dragons vs Dark Souls: Unofficial Role-Playing Game
While I wish I had a more well-known title to compare to the goliath that is Dungeons & Dragons, there are very few dice-based tabletop RPGs that center around input randomness. As such, I'm comparing the output randomness of TSR's classic to the input randomness of Emanuele Galletto's freely available Dark Souls: Unofficial Role-Playing Game. Each game made a deliberate decision in what randomness to use in order to capture specific themes as well as levels of accessibility.
Dungeons & Dragons, throughout its many editions, shifted to center itself on the d20. For every attack, skill, or saving throw, the player must roll a d20, add their modifiers, and compare to a target number to determine whether they succeeded or not. This system is easy to understand, as players can just declare a course of action and the GM can rely on the dice to adjudicate it. However, this can cause a couple of problems. If players can attempt anything, it may lead to analysis paralysis. In addition, characters can feel inconsistent, especially in editions where modifiers are low, as the flat distribution of a single d20 can lead to enormous variance in character competence. This lets Dungeons & Dragons, especially in its most recent edition, lend itself to more comedic adventures.
The Dark Souls: Unofficial Role-Playing Game is unusual, as outside of combat, there is no randomness. Interactions between characters and the world is purely a conversation between players and GM. This element alone can make the game both more accessible as a player yet requires a more competent GM, as an inexperienced or immature GM will be left to flounder without mechanical guidance. Once combat starts, all active participants roll a number of dice in accordance with their stamina, and these dice can then be spent to activate various abilities at different times in combat. There's all sorts of strategies and mechanics to experiment with, but generally speaking, dice with lower results are used to act sooner but with less powerful options while dice with higher results are used to act later but with more powerful options. This system, while difficult to understand, does an excellent job at emulating the tactical resource management and risk-reward structure of Dark Souls while also lining up well with the fiction. Just like Dark Souls, players are rarely punished by pure random chance, it's just a matter of them not fully utilizing the tools they were given.
Combining Input and Output Randomness: Double-Random vs Double-Choice
Whenever you design a game, you never have to choose solely between input and output randomness for a given mechanic. You can always apply both. Personally, I have not seen a specific term used for this, so I have opted for the two following terms: Double-Random and Double-Choice. Double-Random occurs when you have input randomness which determines options available and then output randomness that determines whether that option succeeds. Double-Choice, in contrast, occurs when you have output randomness that determines whether a choice succeeds, but that output randomness also becomes input randomness for another choice.
An example of Double-Random happens in various trading card games when a given card asks you to flip a coin, roll a die, or randomly interact with the deck in order to determine its effect. Specific cards of this type in Magic: The Gathering include Boompile for coinflips, Treasure Chest for die rolls, and Mind's Desire for deck interaction. This is easily the most chaotic form of randomness, but can generate wild and interesting interactions, especially in multiplayer environments. However, the unreliability of this type of randomness can make it feel uncompetitive and result in players feeling uninvolved with the game. There can be ways to temper this type of randomness, however, such as allowing players to manipulate it. An example of this in Magic: The Gathering is changing the top card of a player's deck with a Sensei's Divining Top to make better use of Possibility Storm.
Double-Choice can happen organically in any game as the output randomness of previous actions becomes input randomness for the next set of actions, but an example of Double-Choice in a single action set is the Opportunity system in Genesys. Like most other dice-based tabletop RPGs, you declare a course of action, then roll your dice to see whether you succeed. Unlike such games, however, your dice may also give you Opportunities, which you can then choose to spend on additional effects for your action regardless of whether the initially chosen action succeeded or failed. For example, you may choose to fire your gyrojet pistol at an approaching space pirate. While you hope to hit them square in the jaw, you fail to roll enough successes, causing you to miss. However, you also rolled Opportunity, which you can spend to make the shot hit a nearby machine that sparks and distracts the pirate, scare off civilians to avoid collateral, or make the shot hit a nearby light source, flooding the area in darkness. This system allows unexpected outcomes to happen to maintain tension, but without making players feel like they wasted their time when a failure would otherwise result in no change in game state.
Concluding Thoughts
If you think your game needs a random element to keep it engaging and exciting, take a moment to think about what type of randomness best suits your game as well as what other design choices compliment it. Feel free to experiment, as innovation never stops. Next time, I'll be taking a look at motion inputs in fighting games, why they exist, and ways they can influence other genres.
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