To RNG or not to RNG

[DubskiDude]

Resurrector mech serum?

I never seem to find any :/ the few times they're a quest reward, I couldn't participate for whatever reason. I wish there was another way to get them (that has similar challenge or cost, of course). There's also the problem with the time limit a corpse has before resurrector serum won't work anymore, and also the potential brain damage which can't be fixed. I've never seen the raw numbers for it though.

[Roolo]

I really love this game's approach. Yes, there is some unforgiving RNG sometimes, but I think you cannot completely prevent RNG unfairness without watering down the game. Whats unfair and frustrating one time can make for a good story the other time. Exactly for this reason I don't play on permadeath mode, as savescumming, how bad it sounds, gives me control over the fairness of the game. I do accept a lot of punishing, and when a fight goes bad, I accept the losses. But when everything goes bad for a reason that's really unfun for me, I just savescum. A typical reason for savescum former would be: a hauling pawn is drafted out of screen and drops his stuff in a really crucial doorway that later gets overwhelmed, totally ruining everything. I don't expect you as a developer to fix literally every unfair situation like this, I just take responsibility and savescum. To be honest, I don't think Rimworld is very well suited for permadeath. While indeed you can recover from most losses, recovering isn't always fun, especially when you feel you didn't deserve the punishment. IMO, what you as a developer should do, is what I think you're already doing: reduce both positive and negative unfairness by balancing the game as good as possible. With thousands of players, there will always be ones that get incredibly unlucky or with a particular playstyle and complain, but they just have to accept life on the Rim is like real life: Not everything goes as planned, with the exception that in the Rim you always push the reload button (or forcefully quit the game in case of permadeath).



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

So my answer to this would be no, not with the normal game mechanics, but they should be able to achieve this with savescumming if they want.

[Kalre]

People talking about savescumming as a game mechanic and a valid way to enjoy the game is beyond me, may as well just use Dev mod when stuff doesnt go the way you like it.

[JohnLG]

When I play the game, there are a few things that will make me reload early on.  If I get an event that literally just reads: "You've lost, start a new game" like very early plague on everyone without the doctor/medicine to overcome it, I might reload instead of starting a new game.  Generally though, I'll just keep on going even if I lose a few promising pawns or suffer some serious setbacks.  As the game goes on though, the temptation to reload for certain deaths kinda creeps up on me.  It just doesn't feel like the opportunity to replace a pawn that's been training and doing stuff for the last 30 hours of game play is there a lot of the time.  Part of that is just the RNG of what enemies decide not to randomly die I suppose.  Sometimes it's many hours before another pawn with decent crafting potential that doesn't have totally disqualifying traits shows up for example, other times they're in the next raid.  In my last game, there really wasn't a lot of good potential recruits because so many of my major threats were mechanoids. 

To me at least, pawns feel less and less replaceable as time goes on.  I still don't really reload very often, but it does cross my mind any time someone important catches a charge lance to the liver or something. 

Speaking of which, I really don't like one-shot kills through armor.  I just plain don't feel like any single attack that was actually mitigated by armor should be able to kill.  If it penetrates the armor to hit the neck, sure.  I think you're overestimating the need for such things to have RNG screw someone over.  There's plenty of opportunity for bad luck to build up and kill a pawn or three even without one-shots.  The current state of lancers pretty much just makes me want to find game exploits to cheese them instead of actually facing them.  And they come in such high quantities for how one-shot prone their weapons are!  I kinda wish there were charge rifle scyther-like mechanoids or something, but you've probably already considered that and want them to feel more distinct than normal raid groups and their mixed weapon types. 

If resurrector mech serum was somewhat reliable to acquire and keep one or two around after a few years (although I wouldn't want to have enough to just resurrect everyone) then I suppose I wouldn't mind the one-shots so much, but I still prefer less preventable deaths and rare resurrection. 

Maybe I'll try to convey my thoughts a bit more succinctly later.

[mndfreeze]

For me it boils down to how the RNG and the failures are handled.  I feel there is a definitive difference between the type of RNG that was my fault vs the game just being programmed to make me fail.  For example, if I run my melee guy into the fray and he dies to friendly fire, I get upset because I'm attached to the pawn, but I'm not going to reload over that.  It was my fault in the end.  I made a bad tactical choice and when the dice were rolled on hits I lost.  One could argue that the super lancer neck one shots are part of this and I mostly agree, but I do think they are a little to powerful and when it comes to battles specifically. 

The type of RNG I don't like would be the tornado hits back when they were in.  They spawned, nothing I did in the game caused them nor could I do anything about them. It was just pray and hope it doesn't wipe out 20 hours worth of playing and building up a great story.   

One of the biggest issues I think people have with the RNG in rimworld is that the 'going for story' approach is almost pushed to far in cases.  Like the RNG is extreme in areas it probably should be a little less.  When you spend tens of hours building up a colony, getting attached to pawns, the layout, the progress, and then have the storyteller bombard you with situations (usually a series of them at once) that in reality you were never going to win mostly just feels bad to people in general.  I want my game to end because of things I somehow control or had influence over, not just because the storyteller decided to be a dick for the lulz and stories. 

Really though for me its the beginning of the game that is the most important to get this stuff right.  I'm far more accepting of bad things that happen in the mid or end game with RNG than I am in the beginning because there is more opportunities to find solutions, recover, etc.  In the early game a single event can be the end of your story before any of it even was written or became memorable and there is nothing more frustrating to me than starting a new game, going through all the screens, pawn selection, gathering that first food then on the very first mad animal or single naked raider getting killed by something I just had no way to do better.  That's not a story, it's just a restart failure only now I'm not even going to reload, I'm starting alllll over again.  So far the changes on this path have been pretty good.  Infections are no longer naked brutality game enders right away, food poisoning no longer knocks me unconcious until I starve, etc..   but there is definitely still work that needs to be done on balancing.

RNG for story should feel like epic peaks and valleys, but too much nullifies the epic / special sort of feeling.  Too much of something blurs it and removes it feeling like a unique/special/critical hit or failure and just normalizes.  I want a gun battle friendly fire death to feel like my sniper, who is a great shot, etc etc rolled a critical failure AND the pawn he hit critical failed a saving throw and took it in the neck and died, not that all my pawns are missing 50% of their fired shots and a chunk of all of them seem to friendly fire, with one or multiple hitting my guy and he died.  Not sure I'm explaining it right or not but hopefully that makes sense.

[Firestonezz]

I think the reason behind a lot of the frustration is the fact that many people treat Rimworld as a basebuilding game. That's not to say that the game doesn't have basebuilding elements (cause it obviously does), but their goal is to create the "perfect" colony that lives forever and is large enough to support massive colony growth. They don't create a new colony thinking "will my group be able to survive these future hardships?" but rather "I can't wait to make this massive symmetric 200x200 base with a perfect trap-maze killbox surrounding the perimeter."

This view applies to colonists as well. Due to skill decay and passions, people assign roles to each colonist to do specific tasks. This means their view of a "perfect" colony is shattered when their lv 20 constructor dies, which tempts them to reload a previous save.

Additionally, there seems to be this idea floating around that not playing on the hardest difficulty is considered "weak" or "casual." This only exacerbates the frustration that these players feel because the increased difficulty level is much less forgiving during instances of bad RNG.

Getting back to the discussion at hand, I think the current design is fine because I play Rimworld as a story-generating survival game. I usually play on Cassandra Hard or Extreme on tribal starts with my main focus being "how long can I survive?" For this style of play, the current design works very well as the story would be boring if there were no setbacks. For this reason, I never reload previous saves or use dev mode, but I can definitely understand the mentality of players that do since their goals in the game are different than mine.

[NotTheMattGuy]

I have only recently picked Rimworld up for my wife and myself, so my views are rather new. I have also only played in 1.0 (Beta), no earlier versions.

Given that, I think what Rimworld tries to accomplish with the story generator is highly preferable to me. It is why I bought the game (twice). Unfair outcomes are fine, it adds a challenge to overcome, even if the loss -feels- overwhelming. I started out savescumming, reloading whenever I did not appreciate an outcome, but I have switched to permadeath and it's much better. This experience is largely echoed across the forums from what I can see: permadeath makes the game more enjoyable due to the risk inherent to the Rimworld design.

The vision of Rimworld as early as the kickstarter page (which I read through, as well as oodles of forums before purchasing) has included unfair outcomes for the sake of story. I think this is why the game has done so well - it is something quite different from the games we are used to. My suggestion is to NOT cater to the folks [for lack of better term] crying about the RNG outcome. "Reload Any Time" mode exists for those people, does it not?

Things exist in the game already to mitigate bad RNG luck as is - healer serum, res serum, bionics/prosthetics, etc. If you get extremely unlucky and 5 of your best colonists die, including the 3 you crash landed with, then yeah, it sucks... But those stories I read on the forums are what make Rimworld exciting. Its original vision and the fact that Cassandra, Ricky, and Phoebe can be cruel, cruel b*******.

Some changes here and there to balance out the RNG couldn't hurt. Making some of the above items more available via quest rewards or from friendly outlander towns, etc... If Caravan-ing becomes much less of a royal pain, I think the accessibility of trading can assist many issues.


End notes:
I've already poured 143 hours of my life into this game in its current state and I have only owned it for ~3 weeks. I am devoting more time to it than a full time job. Its intrigue keeps me addicted.

Also - I hate Toxic Fallout. I don't want to build an all-indoor megabase. I prefer building 'towns' and that event is incredibly punishing without an all-roofed megabase. Screw toxic fallout :-p.

[Jibbles]

Speaking only for myself:
I tend to get attached to my pawns, so I try to keep them alive and well. 
I try to build big colonies (40+) and keep everyone safe.
I've experimented with trying to detach myself from pawns, but things seems less interesting then (unless its big colony) and removes most of the challenges the game has to offer.

I'll accept negative traits such as pyro, but try to avoid things like scarred pawns since
those kinds of injuries are quite common and random with no reasonable way to fix.
I'll tolerate a pawns death and roll with it especially if it was due to my actions, but it does get to me
if Rng is involved and died in uninteresting way such as a disease. Those things are bound to happen yes, but if you ask me how my pawns usually die it's cause of a disease (early game), or a bs shot. Every now and then, a crazy raid I can't handle which I accept and find enjoyment out of it.

Each game takes a considerable amount of time to play if a player goes for the ship... Many players like myself, they play it til they get bored if they're surviving, so they're in the game even longer making their own goals or challenges. I imagine other players take it to the next level on caring their pawns.. Doing grinding techniques to level up, and upgrade their body parts with bionics, yet they lose them to rng in most cases if experienced player. That's not just a pawn they lost due to rng but the time they invested in doing all that as well.

I like freak accidents and wished the game steered more into that direction. Examples:
- A mortar shell hits a room stocked up of chemfuel and blows up the pawn inside.
- I used to build roof traps a while back, sometimes those will backfire and crush my pawn due to my actions.
- A meteor crashes down and blocks the only entrance of my hospital. (I even accepted death from meteor since that was rare in my gameplay)
- Traders fighting each other on my map since they have hostile relationship.
- Animals getting into drugs. (I can't think of many at the moment, sorry)

This comes off kind of harsh but I don't mean for it to be.  Difficult time finding the right words at the moment. The current events we do have don't add much depth. they're not crazy interesting either (they're between fantasy and realism, but they don't fulfill neither) so usually provides a shallow/bland story to tell as outcome IMO; Unless storyteller is chaining events in an unusual manner. Pawn traits play a role too but they only contribute so much. 

Events and scenarios are the Rng elements I accept. However, I do not like lots of Rng in areas such as combat damage or healing when there's no solid way to counteract.

[Andy_Dandy]

Sometimes bad things happen, I really hope Rimworld doesent turn into another 100% predictable yawn of a game.

[gadjung]

Is the anger reaction a consequence of caring about characters, or them being not easy to replace? Nobody minds that much when a marine dies in StarCraft because they're replacable. But either for story or gameplay reasons, people do tend to at least care about when people in RW die. Which sounds like a design success. But it also creates this anger reaction in some circumstances.

Imo both. As opposing to SC marine, pawns are specialized and each is different. So Player cares if he loses his best miner/medic/crafter/etc.
At the same time, since getting this pawn to be better, attachment to it grows - imo it's great succes and achievment, but players are kinda not used to that (and ppl in real life too).

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?

Yup. Problem here lies with probability though - Rimworld is packed with action - so even if there is 1/10000 chance to have friendly fire into neck, relative chance is high.
One solution might be tuning numbers for shooting/melle accuracy: shooter lv.<5 barely hits anything and if then it'll be rather friendly fire, shooter lv.15 will have really high chance to hit (higher than now-20lv.) and really low rolls for friendly fire (in general punishing more low stats, rewarding more high, but that's design decision)

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?

Yup. As i see replies (and sometimes play myself) it's kind of 'sim city' x 'tower defense' x 'rpg'. On A18 it was ok-balanced, on A1 it's ok-balanced too but in different way. There can always be just special 'unadjusted' mode/storyteller that will make it more as tower-defense rather than above said mix.

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

Game will be boring then for some/lots players. What makes this game 'THE' game, is risk that one bad decision/incident can be painful without soft cushion to land on.

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?

Heh, some kind of tutorial, that is set to player failure with final message that "not every time all has happy ending" might give some insight of what game is going about. But still, some RW players (like normal ppl) will reject randomness in stuff they care about.

[Namsan]

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.

[Tynan]

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.

Good point.

[Albion]

I personally like the balance and randomness of Rimworld. Sure I savescum a lot myself if a pawn dies in a firefight or I get a toxic fallout when I'm super low on food and my rice is just at 40-50%.
However I think that's part of the game and part of the individual player because they or rather I want to get a decently perfect colony. On the other hand it's also a hint that I should "git gud" or play on another difficulty. Or accept the loss and continue on. Not every pawn death is colony ending but I still try to avoid it.
I personally think its better the way it is because usually I can avoid the reason I savescummed after doing so because I was using a suboptimal tactic before or the RNG was just not in my favor.
What I'm trying to say here is: there is a reason why there is a commitment mode and why people play ironman modes and other people don't.
Investing 20+ hours in one colony and seeing their favorite starting colonist with his wife and 10 bonded animals shot in the head can be frustrating. But mostly because of the time commitment, attachment and the feeling of "RNG fucked me". However that's what saves are for aren't they? In a single player Shooter you reload to the last checkpoint and no-one complains. In Rimworld I reload to the last auto or player save and try again.

Honestly, if rimworld wouldn't be so challenging I would probably have played it once and then cast it aside to play something else. Having to constantly struggle is what makes it engaging. That's actually what kills most 4x strategy games for me. There you struggle until you're eventually ahead of the AI and just casual stroll to victory but essentially just have to grind to get there.
In Rimworld you struggle to get your base running and once you do you can grind until the ship is done. However you still have to struggle since the next raid can destroy your colony, the next disease can cripple you or the next food shortage can starve you. You never actually achieve the state of "nothing can touch me now". I'm talking about the vanilla experience here obviously...

Randomness is also great for another reason: you never know what you get. It keeps things interesting. That's why the ship crash event in my mod has high randomness in regards to the layout of the crashed ship, the rewards inside and even the enemies inside.

[Scavenger]

Part of what makes Rimworld stand out is the infinite possibilities and random events, some of which kill you for no good reason, where losing is synonymous with fun. It captures some of the magic that you only see in other games like Dwarf fortress and Rimworld! Oh.. Look at that, it's already part of that legacy! It's like life, sometimes sh*t happens.

2- Absolutely! You can't, and shouldn't try to appeal to everybody.. Both your time and the game would be spread too thin. Focus on continuing to nail the points that made RW the game everybody fell in love with!

3- Again, part of the fun is risk! You should be able to minimize it, but you have to keep people on their toes!

4- yes, but it's a rather specific kind of player that likes that, a bit of an acquired taste. Though it makes victory far more satisfying! Not to mention the very best stories stem from random events and craziness! How is it a good story if everything goes your way? You need strife!

[Mehni]

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.