To RNG or not to RNG

[Teleblaster18]

Is the anger reaction a consequence of caring about characters, or them being not easy to replace?

It's easy to replace characters.  It's an emotional response, and it's an unequal response - note how many people will refuse to continue if their original colonist(s) are killed;  there's a much greater emotional investiture in them.  They're part of the legacy of the colony's story.  Note also that in late game, the same emotional attachments tend not to apply to the same degree - they have less "history", and their "identities" haven't been formed in the same way that the original or older colonists have been.

I think it's important to underscore the major difference between anger and frustration, though.  Frustration kicks in when you perceive you were beaten "well".  Anger kicks in when you feel you were beaten "cheaply".

I do think that repeated frustration without respite can ferment into anger in any situation, and it's a fine line as to when that's going to happen.  I've said previously that I believe frustration needs to be blunted with something - humor, or an extraordinary (and unrepeatable) experience - to keep it from souring to anger.

1. Should the game have a such a thing as bad luck outcomes that's not induced by some obvious, non-pressured, voluntary player decision? Or should I make a universal design standard that nothing bad ever happens unless the player actively induces it or makes some clearly-traceable mistake to cause it?

Both.  Segment the game into two categories.  One need not come at the expense of the other.

I'd love to see you offer a "Developer's Cut" - the game exactly as you envision it, devoid of any outside feedback - including our own.  If there was ever a game element that you personally were in love with that was cut due to poor feedback, put it back in.  I'd spend most of my time playing it.

2. Should I just ignore some classes of player feedback as simply not linking up with what RW is? Are some players worth leaving alone to try to make a game that's different from the usual assumptions? Even if it leaves them pissed off because they intepreted a story generator as if it were a skill test?

This game is a skill test, in many regards, and there's no way to ever remove that from the game:  play foolishly, make bad choices, and you'll fail.  It requires a significant amount of knowledge, insight and skill to have a chance at succeeding. 

Where it differs from many other games is the outcome of those skill tests:  playing intelligently and with skill is no guarantor of success.

Again: do both.  One which directly emphasizes skills in determining outcomes, and one which introduces pure (but plausible) chance which can at times utterly negate good gameplay. 

3. Should players be able to consistently avoid losing people/resources even at high difficulty? At any difficulty?

Yes, as different people measure game success differently...but, categorically: not at the expense of the game's original vision.

4. Is there a way to set expectations (relative to the whole game, or relative to a given difficulty level) to encourage players to accept some degree of randomness to game outcomes? Or will they always reject this randomness and demand to be rewarded in accurate proportion to their skill/effort?

Screen their gameplay tolerance and preference via pre-game survey.  Make it fun, full of dry humor, and personalize it as if it were a real, 1st Person perspective interview.  It's a non-judgmental, highly tailorable way to find out thresholds of risk/preference, and then set the game's parameters accordingly.  Resident Evil Remake did a very primitive and clunky version of it, and I'm sure that other games have elaborated on that theme.

Under all circumstances, though:  your original vision must be retained.  It's what made the game a success to this point.  If you can't reasonably reconcile these conflicts, for whatever reason - go with YOUR vision of the game.

[Scavenger]

There's a huge time investment in a RimWorld colony, and it's something you underestimate.

You said you consider it a decent success if a player hits 30 hours and a high success if they hit 100. You also said that the average playtime is 92 hours.

Getting to a point in a colony that's beyond the early-game struggle takes a few hours. It takes a couple of minutes to roll colonists and pick a landing spot. It takes about an hour to play through the Classic Intro. It takes a few hours more to get to a stage where a colony becomes its own. Compare that to say, They Are Billions, and it takes three clicks to start a new game. I am okay with loss in They Are Billions. It's not much of a time investment. The time investment for RimWorld is out of proportion in relation to the RNG it tosses your way.

There are more RNG scenarios to lose a pawn then there are scenarios to gain a pawn.

If one of my four people get shot in the head and die, I'll slog on but I often know I reached a situation that's unrecoverable. I've been in that situation enough to know that if I don't get a replacement before the next raid, I'm dead. If somebody got headshotted last raid was already a challenge: the next raid is going to be equal-sized or bigger and I'm down a gunner.

It's fun watching individual colonists struggle for survival. It's not fun watching a colony struggle for survival.

This is all quite a good point, and I have to agree with it for the most part. But it's also true in dwarf fortress, takes a long time to get built up and going, and damn near anything can suddenly end your whole fort, while people keep forts going for loooong time periods.

I would suggest maybe making raid threat levels a little more based on your colonists population than wealth, that way it's not quite as punishing to suddenly lose one when you have you to begin with. Keep the rng, but not always make it a death sentence at certain parts of the game. At least, unless you are so unlucky it happens twice or you make additional mistakes.

But really, this game is your baby Tynan. You have to decide if you want to grow up to be a strategy focused game, that is very difficult, but rewards perfect planning with almost no risk. Or a.. Dwarf Fortress? I'm not sure what the name for that actually is haha. Where the sheer number of possibilities, craziness, and RNG makes for the most entertaining stories and potentially punishing playthroughs.

Right now, you are doing a marvelous job of straddling the line between the two, and I love it! I would vote keeping it somewhere in between, or leaning a bit more towards Dwarf Fortress RNG.

[Koek]

I'll give my 2 cents, for what it's worth, on the questions you asked.
I always play rough/permadeath because that just feels to me how this game is intended to be played. For me at least.

1) I absolutely love the thrill of every decision having a possible negative outcome if you don't plan right. Your example of the guy rushing in a melee fighter and friendly fire killing him is simply a bad decision (perhaps a calculated risk?) on the players part.
Should he have flanked with his melee fighter and at the moment he engaged his target focus fire his ranged fighters on another target? ofcourse, if that tactic was possible at that moment.
Rushing in melee fighters, fully armored or not, should always be a risk. But these are risks you can play around and plan for, somewhat. Just don't expect a pawn to be invulnerable just because he has the best armor in the game.

And then there is this example of what happened to me yesterday. My previous colony lost to a bad run of events in succession. It was day 20ish when I lost my tribe because I was not prepared to fighting 2 reasonably well armed raids in succession using just recurve bows, all while I had to fight of a plague, a few infections, food shortage and an incoming wall of fire due to a flashstorm. Long story short, I didn't make it.
So I start a new tribe, roll for a decent starting crew and a day 1 social fight has 1 pawn bite off the hand of another.

The first tribe I lost was bad luck in combination with bad preparation. The second I simply quit day 1 because losing a hand is just (excuse my language) shit tier rng. The clearly-traceable mistake in the first colony was preventable on my part. Could I go on with the second tribe? I guess so, but is it worth it having 2 wounded guys on day 1 and even when they recover have 1 work on 50% efficiency? I'll just start a new colony.

2) For me personally Rimworld is about the story. Ofcourse I play out combat as an RTS and I hate it when I lose pawns to either overwhelming numbers, bad preparations or bad luck, but that simply drives me to improve my tactics and defenses the next raid or tribe I play.
About ignoring the players who cannot deal with bad luck, I guess being able to reload should be enough for them tbh. If you have a vision for a game I say you should stick to it and simply decide what is fair/unfair and, most of all, FUN to play. I wish you all the insight and wisom in the world to find a good balance between those factors

3) No. I refer to answer 2; it's your job to find a good balance between fair, unfair and fun. Us players can give some feedback, but most of it would be in our favour as in getting rid of everything perceived as unfair. Is it fair my pawn lost his hand on day 1. No. Neither is it fun, for me that is. I'm certain there are players who accept the challenge and play on, see how far they can get with a start like that. I'm not 1 of them. So I decide I just start a new tribe and hope the first phase of preperations goes well enough to see a pawn losing his hand later on as a setback I can live and deal with. For me those kind of decisions are part of this game and I wouldn't want it any other way.

4) I guess that simply varies for each player. I also think people tend to remember the bad situations and forget that psychic soothe that saved 2 of their pawn from going berserk. It all boils down to how well everything is balanced out.

Which brings me to the conclusion it all boils down to just that; Balance. I think people would be more willing to accept the bad situations more if the overall balance of the game is improved. Skill is a big factor in this game, but imo it shouldn't be so that skill could save you from everyhting.
edit: Just don't come complaining about fair when you insist playing Permadeath Randy Extreme 

Maybe put a disclaimer on the sales page: If you cannot deal with losses in Xcom, prepare to contact your local psychologist after playing Rimworld

[bbqftw]

I think the comparison to xcom is inaccurate, because that game gives you plenty of ways to establish redundancy, such that a campaign past early game is not irrecoverable off the loss of a good character.

Meanwhile, many of the candidates in the rimworld characters pool are ruled out straight up by being saddled with traits that guarantee they will practically never be worth their upkeep. So while a decent player knows to establish redundancy in colony critical areas, the mechanisms of the game make this subject to very high variance.

[alfons100]

I think armor change on 1.0 is making RNG more important.

Prior to 1.0, armor was always reducing incoming damage.
If someone had 40% armor in their head, damage from autopistol bullet becomes 6 or 7.
Therefore, his brain won't be destroyed by single pistol bullet.

But in 1.0, Armor is now heavily affected by RNG.
There is always a chance to receive full damage from bullets unless your colonist have 100+% armor.
So even weak attacks like autopistol can destroy brain, because autopistol has 10 damage, and brain only has 10 HP.
It makes the game more unpredictable, but it's also making far more RNG deaths.

Perhaps old damage reduction is still present in the game but it is its own stat, no? Padded armor/Clothing reduces damage, but does not deflect, Flak deflects, but has less damage reduction once it pierces.

[ExplodingShadows]

I am a lurker. I never post in forums I read ever. So this is a first for me but I love this game so much I felt the need to come out from under my shell and say something.
I have 1058 hours of playing this game since it was released on Steam. I don't know which Alpha that was.
What I love about this game, what I play it for, are the stories and the characters in them. No other game I've played comes close to capturing my imagination like this game does. Sometimes I save scum, but rarely, and when I do it's usually because I've messed up or I've been given a character that I can't in my head fit into the story that I'm playing out. That doesn't happen very often though, and honestly I don't see it as a bad thing or a design flaw in the game if I happen to save scum. That's on me.

I play peaceful, I don't cannibalise pawns or make hats out of my enemies, but I wouldn't want to see those elements removed from the game.
Sometimes RNG really f's me sideways and kills a pawn I really don't want to lose and there's a chance I might save scum, but I wouldn't want the chance that that could happen removed from the game.

A lot of the complaints I see when I read through some of the posts on this forum seem to me to come down to players playing on extreme and complaining the odds are stacked against them. Which of course they are, the menu even says as much. I don't think there's much you can do to change people from this mindset though and I would hate to see the game changed because of it.
It's probably worth noting I play on medium difficulty mostly but sometimes higher if I feel like a real challenge. Never extreme, I'm not a masochist 

If I could make any suggestion to the game it would be around feeling more connected to the pawns you've got. I don't really know how this could be achieved though. More backstories? The ability for teen pawns to gain an adult backstory once they reach the appropriate age? More customisation with pawn appearance? The ability to set a 'leader' of the colony? Nothing terribly game changing and all things I would like but could live without and still enjoy the game.
The only mods I use are prepare carefully and Spoon's hair mod. The hair mod for the extra hair options and prepare carefully to make sure my starting pawns fit for the start of the story I want to unfold.

Do with this game what feels right to you. Personally I love this game as it is and would be sad to see it neutered and I really really hope you don't go down that path, but as long as I can still generate interesting stories I will continue to play.

Thank you for making something I really love and pour far too much of my time into.

[Zombull]

For me it's a mix.

If a pawn dies because of some dumb mistake I made such as friendly fire, I may reload and do better. That includes taking the completely wrong approach to a big battle leading to many casualties. I may reload and try for a better outcome. Not always a no-deaths outcome, mind you. Just better.

If a pawn dies because the game mechanics or AI do something dumb, I'll likely reload. This has taken many forms over the years, but most often it's some form of the pawns not doing what I told them to do.

I know that colonist deaths are part of the story. But my dumb mistakes (and, frankly, your dumb mistakes) aren't.

I like the story generator concept, but please know that not all stories are equal. Everyone wants a story of success despite great odds. No one wants a story of inexplicable failure despite great planning and execution. The latter is what too much RNG gives you, imo.

[Emulsion]

1. IMO RW would lose it's favour if it was possible to avoid anything bad happening. I played for a few hundred hours and know a lot of the threats that might come my way and can prepare for a lot of them but it stays thrilling due to the fact that random things can and will happen.

2. I agree that this is a question,only you can answer. And I'm sure, if you decide in favour of the game you want to design and play, it will be good. Like it was/is since I started to play a few years back. There's no way to please everybody.

3. IMO: No!
I agree with 'Scavenger' that you're doing a great job at balancing between strategy and RNG and if I had to choose in favour for one or the other I'd take the Dwarf Fortress RNG (I have to state that I didn't really play that game and for me RW fills this hole ;-))

4. I guess both is true, for different kinds of people. The new descriptions of the difficulties make quite clear what to expect, I think.



And I agree that there is the option to reload a save if so desired and/or even to switch the difficulty/storyteller in an ongoing game so it'd be possible to adapt the game multiple times during a play through (which wouldn't feel quite right to me but the option is there,which I really like).
I reload when something really annoying happens,like my only builder getting one-shotted or sometimes when I made one small but really bad decision that wipes the whole colony out. Or if I wanted to try something out but I try to not overdo it because for me it takes some flavour out of the game.

I also support the opinion that some handicaps could turn out to be advantages in the long term.
Imagine a good melee fighter that gets his arm cut off and gets a prosthesis. After a while he learns to handle things with this handicap almost quite as good as a healthy pawn and besides that his other arm is getting even stronger so he'd then profit from a bionic arm even more than a casual pawn. The story of this dude would be legendary IMO.
Or that other colonists get used to the big scar in the face of someone else at least.
Some way for Colonists to learn to live with handicaps or even getting enhanced by it..
Would make the stories more dynamic IMO and RNG that doesn't outright kill you more interesting to deal with in the long term.
But that's probably something for the suggestions-thread..

[cultist]

I think you may be overthinking this.

People get mad at the game for these reasons because it wastes their time. Building a colony to a point where you can wear full plasteel takes time and effort. You have to survive numerous attacks to even get there. You also spend time leveling the skills of your pawns, relationship and all that. All of that time and effort is then wasted through circumstances that at least appear (and often are) completely outside the player's control.

Lots of games rely heavily on RnG but I've never seen a game both rely heavily on RnG and dish out heavy punishments for perceived failure as Rimworld does. If you compare Rimworld to a traditional MMO (where RnG plays a big role when it comes to gear drops), the equivalent would be a raid boss killing your character and the game then deleting your character along with all of their items that you worked hard to get. Sorry buddy, that's life.

I'm a big fan of Rimworld and your approach to design, but I think you sometimes forget just how much time people invest into your game (because it's really good) and how devastating it feels when the game just rips 40-50 hours of progress away from you because of what appears to be a random "bad roll". There's a reason D&D has a DM who can bend the rules and compromise in order to make sure everyone has a good time and don't become frustrated and quit the game over a single bad roll.

I think stories like this contribute a lot to the idea that melee is broken or not worth it. The only sensible choice in most cases is to hide behind a million deadfall traps with sniper rifles at max distance because it poses the least amount of risk to your pawns, and pawns/skills are by far the most important resource, being both expensive, difficult and time-consuming to replace.

If you want to stick with the current system, I think you should consider making pawns less irreplaceable, perhaps by increasing skill gain or decereasing the "power gap" between a really good and a really bad pawn.

[Polder]

I hate losing pawns because it is so difficult to find replacements. Most pawns generated by the game are so bad they are harmful to have.

It is also hard to recover from setbacks that involve losing multiple colonists. The next raid will be the end. Setbacks are often not so much setbacks but devastation, because when things go wrong, they go really wrong. Raids (especially sappers) and manhunter packs (that destroy doors) can also easily obliterate an entire colony at once (especially in the beginning).

[Venatos]

RNG is fine, but pawns dieing to a random friendly fire pistolbullet is just not fun, not even close.
getting shot in the head by a snipermech, barely survieving with braindamage or even becoming a savant is a lot of fun.
both are RNG, one is infuriating, the other is an exciting story of a heroic rescue, a devastating realization and longterm care and connection to the character.

at the moment instadeath feels to common, raiders dieing from a handfull of bruises doesnt help that perception either... it makes pawns feel very throwaway....
not saying instadeath needs to go, getting it back down to B18 levels is all thats needed.
is there an RNG for how much damage a hit does? if not i would recommend a 50-100% damage rng on hit, not every hit is perfect and does full damage, should cut down the instadeaths and bring some more variability to the combat. not having a guarantied limb removal when hit/hitting with some weapons would be nice too.

[Tynan]

So I start a new tribe, roll for a decent starting crew and a day 1 social fight has 1 pawn bite off the hand of another.

The first tribe I lost was bad luck in combination with bad preparation. The second I simply quit day 1 because losing a hand is just (excuse my language) shit tier rng. The clearly-traceable mistake in the first colony was preventable on my part. Could I go on with the second tribe? I guess so, but is it worth it having 2 wounded guys on day 1 and even when they recover have 1 work on 50% efficiency? I'll just start a new colony.

It's an interesting isolated case, because here you reject the "lost your hand on day 1" situation as simply bullshit. Which is reasonable from the "skill test" game frame. After all, if you lose because of random events, it's a pretty shitty skill test.

But in a story, losing your hand day 1 is actually a really common sort of thing to happen.

There's this movie called The Edge (with Anthony Hopkins) about these three guys who crashland in an airplane in the Alaskan wilderness. In many ways the theme matches RW perfectly. But watch this movie and imagine this stuff happening in RimWorld and realize that many/most players would have quit several times due to "shit tier rng".

For example, one of the guys slices his own hand or leg (can't remember which) open with a knife a few hours after crashing, accidentally, while trying to cut a piece of wood. Totally random. Later the blood attracts a bear that kills him, and so on.

It's a great movie. And the loss of that guy's hand amps up the tension early on. So this works really well as a story element.

But it seems to totally fail when placed into the "skill-test" game frame. A large proportion, maybe majority of players intepret it as "shit tier rng". Yet it's exactly what you'd want to have happen to recreate storylines like in The Edge.

I've got no point here except to note just how clear the conflict is between the story-frame and the game-frame here. Each point of view is totally legit within that frame, yet completely ridiculous in the other.

So there's some other ingredient/restriction to making a game that generates stories beyond simply generating the events of the story. There's some new restriction to follow, or expectations to set, or something.

[Koek]

After reading a few other posts I do like to add that losing pawns to random stuff beyond your control hits quite hard. The pawns which are worth recruiting are quite rare.
I just accepted a refugee chased by raiders. Turns out he is greedy, abrasive and cannot fight. First thing he does as he walks past my pawns I'm setting up to encounter the raiders is insult someone.

For balance sake, either give us more information about the refugee, traits at the very least, because this will be the last time I accept this request.
The raiders managed to get 3 of my 5 guys quite heavily wounded and now I'm stuck with a walking debuff as well. I guess I'll just roll a new tribe.

Rng is fine, but sometimes this game screws you over in ways which are simply annoying and are preventable for example by balancing some OP (positive as well as negative) traits.
This game requires a lot of time investment and too much rng is simply bad.

edit: judging by your last post it is clear you are putting a lot of thought into this issue. Since I can only comment from personal experience and how I aproach this game, all I can say is I wish you all the wisdom in the world to tackle this (imo) balance issue. Seems like hell of a job tbh, and in the end you can't please everyone.

[gadjung]

So I start a new tribe, roll for a decent starting crew and a day 1 social fight has 1 pawn bite off the hand of another.

The first tribe I lost was bad luck in combination with bad preparation. The second I simply quit day 1 because losing a hand is just (excuse my language) shit tier rng. The clearly-traceable mistake in the first colony was preventable on my part. Could I go on with the second tribe? I guess so, but is it worth it having 2 wounded guys on day 1 and even when they recover have 1 work on 50% efficiency? I'll just start a new colony.

It's an interesting isolated case, because here you reject the "lost your hand on day 1" situation as simply bullshit. Which is reasonable from the "skill test" game frame. After all, if you lose because of random events, it's a pretty shitty skill test.

But in a story, losing your hand day 1 is actually a really common sort of thing to happen.

I think it all boils down to what one wants to do with game. For me it would not be a showstopper and restart, but i'm more ok with setbacks even early-game. Some people can accept more 'shitty-RNG' later in game when it's more easily mitigated (prosthetic/medicine/etc).
So for some ppl it's kinda like 'storyteller, i want to build nice base but i want some challenge, so hurt me some, but not too much, and remember that i decide afterwards if it was too much'.
Example would be 'send raiders, but they can shoot only that my pawn not lose limbs or dies. no infection also. and no kidnapping. and not too much sappers, since i like my base layout. and no centipides, not ready for them'. I guess it could be scripted, but then the core idea of game is compromised that way.

As You have said, people tend to go for not the difficulty they should. Also I think not everyone realizes there's possibility to change storytellers during game (for ex. to recover from Randys ideas of how your colony should look like ).

An idea could be to add 1 checkbox and 2 sliders when choosing storyteller.
checkbox, unchecked by default [] custom story
slider 1 : negative events amount (including 'shitty-RNG')
slider 2 : negative events strength

It can give players some 'control' about what and why is happening and then, only they (players) would be to blame.
It could create more scenarios (lots of almost-continuous weak raids/fewer but a lot more difficult events where limbs are flying left and right)
Story would be still told and kept, with it's extremity chosen by players
I guess that would be a nightmare to balance though.

[Koek]

There's this movie called The Edge (with Anthony Hopkins) about these three guys who crashland in an airplane in the Alaskan wilderness. In many ways the theme matches RW perfectly. But watch this movie and imagine this stuff happening in RimWorld and realize that many/most players would have quit several times due to "shit tier rng".

Definately, but the difference between a movie and Rimworld is the time investment and the ability to start over hoping for a different outcome.
That movie is always the same and the end result is written up in advance. When you watch it for the first time everything is new and exciting, but the script is set.
Rimworld on the other hand has random events, which over time will write your own unique story and you have a goal to achieve; get into space.
How you get to that goal doesn't matter that much, you just need to get there and the end result is either a cool story with a few survivors, or everyone dies in a horrible sequence of events.
Movies usually don't have that horrible sequence. "And then everyone dies, the end, thanks for watching, clean your litter on the way out please"

As it stands now, the chance that horrible sequence can occur is quite high (to me playing rough/permadeath that is) and usually it is a downward spiral quickly raging out of control. Therefore, when I get a day 1 hand gnawed off I'm like, yup, this is that first step into a downward spiral. Day 1, 2 wounded, 1 who is 50% effective till I get bionics.

I might be wrong on this one, but rough difficulty has no mood boost or penalty, right? Hence I choose that difficulty. One feels like cheating, the other just lame. But it seems rough also has an increase in severity on the random events, so for me choosing a difficulty I enjoy is tough. Do I go for the mood boost and easier encounters or a balanced mood and harder encounters? Quite a big gap there.
Perhaps a few extra difficulties to give us players more options to find the most optimal fun challenge without feeling too easy or difficult, all while keeping how you intend Rimworld to be intact could fix some frustration for us players?

I've got no point here except to note just how clear the conflict is between the story-frame and the game-frame here. Each point of view is totally legit within that frame, yet completely ridiculous in the other.

Perhaps my suggestion of adding more difficulties, or better said, more options for us players on how our story unfolds, isn't that far off a solution?
Perhaps remove mood bonusses from difficulties and/or adjust parameters we can choose which combined calculate a difficulty?

In the end you have a vision of this game and we simply have to deal with it, but having ways to influence to our needs and wishes how our story unfolds, well, there lie some answers maybe? We can deactivate events we don't like. Don't know if you keep that option for the official 1.0 release, but there seem to lie a whole lot of options on giving us a bit more control of our story.

On RNG, I can deal with it, to an extend. I guess it all boils down to balancing out the good vs the bad AND the amount of it. The new armor calculations for example are, for me, yet another source of RNG in a game which already had enough tbh.

Edit: gadjung's idea of sliders sounds appealing. Don't know how it fits your vision of Rimworld, but in the end it is a single player and moddable game.
edit 2: spacing and grammar