To RNG or not to RNG

[Syrchalis]

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.

That really is the point. Story (movies/books) and gameplay (games) are inherently in conflict, because one is interactive and one is not. The interactive one will always leave you angry, unsatisfied and disappointed when something bad happens which you have no influence on.

For example in the telltale game The Walking Dead Season 2 there is a character you can save, going through a lot of trouble, and the next scene that character dies anyway. Basically all you achieve is that character staying alive for one extra interaction/scene. This really angered me, despite me having played many telltale games before and knowing they are far more story than game.

Rimworld is clearly on the game side for me, yes it might have a huge focus on story generation, but at it's core, it's fun because of gameplay and not the stories. The stories just add to it.

My very personal, very subjective opinion is that stories write themselves if the difficulty is high enough. It doesn't take "rng instant death which was barely foreseeable" to write a dramatic and good story. Randy is so popular for a reason. Sometimes he just throws a lot of shit at you and that generates a spike in difficulty you will not overcome without some losses. But that feels good, fair and not RNG, even though it is RNG. Why? Because YOU, the player, chose this difficulty and you chose Randy with his shitstorms, you had agency in this loss and your decisions lead to this.

I am a dirty cheater when it comes to Rimworld. I barely ever lose someone and I like reloading whenever things go really poorly (though I avoid it whenever possible). And still often enough I let colonists die, not reload, not revive them or anything like that, because I feel it's right. I played poorly and so I lost them. There were unfortunate circumstances, so I lost them.

In my second most-recent playthrough I lost everyone after getting 3 people on naked brutality, except for my starting character. I didn't reload or use the dev tool, but accepted it, because I was really getting hammered by bad events and this was the price for overcoming those. Plus, looking at the adaption graph gave me hope. It stayed in the negative for almost a year and events were really easy.

[mightyhuhn]

i don't see a problem in killing your own pawn by friendly fire the problem of the exsample is this is BS in thie case.
ok i don't know the weopen used but getting killed by one bullet when you are waering heavy armor is just not luck any more it will not happen with a weopen like  a pistol when futureist armor plates are used like plasteel there are no eyes and no weak spot from behind to kill him in one shoot. if the pwan would be naked it would be way easier to except this outcome because this sounds reseonable and on the other hand a simple shield would have saved him every time even with strong weopens which is strange... so the whole armor feels unrewarding.
even knoking him out would feel ok in this case.
you will pace palm but you can recover from this unlucky accident and it doesn't feel as BS anymore.

and that's the problem here the game doesn't know this and how do you balance this it's like food poisoning a level 10 cook should never ever do this or the food poisoning shouldn't be as bad as it is right know. a tummy ache is fine with a god tier cook not everyone can handle every food or he just eat to much but thowing up with a god tier cook for hours? what did he even learn in his live... that BS.

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?

clearly leave it as it is the dakrest dungeon is popular for the same reason. searching for these edge cases where it is BS sounds un doable

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?

clearly ignore them. if you want to make everyone happy you will create a terrible game.

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

no

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?

some will always not except this outcome human have a real problem with loosing that as it is...
but i guess thsi combat loooses come from unreasnable balancing.
so let's talk about the power armour for exmaple.
what does the gmae understand as a power armor soemthing like a TANK as in starcraft or in fallout 4 or is it onyl compareable to kevalar we have today?
what so ever as a player i have a feeling that a power armour should be very strong against weak weopen as a pistol or a even a bird/buck shoot shootgun like it is used in this game and doesn't give any real defense against a mechonoid lancer.

but how to balance this poor tribales.

[Ser Kitteh]

I have 500+ hours with this game. The most memorable games are those where I failed, something stupid happened, or something silly happened. "Perfect" games where RW turns into a pure base building simulator with perfect pawns are like the junk food of RW playthroughs. Fine for a while but gets very stale later on.

I know a lot of people really love their bases that cover 90% of the map with 300 pawns and vulcan turrets covering the whole perimeter. I did too, for a while. But then I decided to embrace the chaos. No more Prepare Carefully, no more overpowered stuff and the game I feel, is a lot more memorable and fun.

On the "unfair" topic: Yes, sometimes the game's unfair and that's just the roll of the die. I posted in the 1.0 thread baffled why my colonist sprung a trap (he was hauling an animal he just hunted) only to see him die to a single trap. This was to me, unacceptable, and it is the only reload I've done in my current 3 year plus desert colony. My colonists have been oneshotted by charge lances, lost a leg after an arrest, have limbs blown apart by guns, all of this is acceptable because it is entirely MY fault for messing up.

Said current colony also had two cold snaps at the start of fall and spring, meaning that I was really suffering for food. This was also fixed if I was more active with building hydroponics and greenhouses.

It's only human to get angry when you lose your best builder, but that's the nature of the Rim. I accept it and embraced it, but probably only after the 300 hour mark. RNG will always be a thing in Rimworld no matter how much you minimise it. It's a matter of separating the frustrating (the bit about the pistol and the helmet) and not having a caravan for two months (which is why I set it so caravans appear every 5 days in scenario editor).

Better UI, better pawn control in combat, clearer instructions, the ability to get all the available info at a glance. This will make the game smoother and I think this will quell the "unfairness" complaints you get. You can't satisfy all of us, so don't. It will only lead to a bad game.

To each their own, it's your game Tynan. I trust you will do what's best.

[gadjung]

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.

That really is the point. Story (movies/books) and gameplay (games) are inherently in conflict, because one is interactive and one is not. The interactive one will always leave you angry, unsatisfied and disappointed when something bad happens which you have no influence on.

I think You guys missed the point (or I did).
I think Tynan was making parallel to the plot/events of movie from acotr/character perspective, not to compare experience of playing RW to watching a movie (that comparision does not hold for the reasons said above).

[D-Wiz]

I actually really like the fact that I can't plan for everything in this game, and random stuff can and will happen at any moment. It makes for fun, engaging gameplay where I'm constantly trying to adapt to new situations and recover from whatever the last "bad" thing that happened was. It's fun and different than other games, which I think is Tynan's goal.

The different difficulties/storytellers do allow for some player choice in how punishing the random events will be. I know Tynan's talked a lot about how hard it is getting people to change difficulties to tailor the game experience to their expectations, and I don't really know how to solve that problem, but I like that the option is there. I've never played base builder mode, but I'm assuming random bad things can happen even on that difficulty, which again, I personally think creates fun gameplay, but maybe  it makes sense to have a "no bad random bs rng events" mode on a difficulty like that.

Ultimately, every game can't be for everyone. It's understandable that Tynan wants to reach as many people as possible with his (awesome) game, but I think the core tenants of the Rimworld game I've been playing for the last 8 or 10 Alphas/Betas and now 1.0 make for great fun, and I wouldn't want to see its formula altered to appease a few players who might just be playing the wrong game. RW is different than any other game I've played, and that's what makes me come back to it time and time again, even through all of its various states of unfinished-ness. There are thousands of other games to play that offer the typical good play -> constant improvement feedback loop, and I like that RW is different and offers a completely different set of challenges to play through.

Just my two cents...

[Razzoriel]

Part of every game is learning and adapting. If he didn't want his pawn to get shot in the neck, then he shouldn't put his own pawn in the line of fire (or just put him directly next to the shooting pawn).

[mrofa]

Tyn 1,2,3,4 just dont, Rimzy just need some polishes and not total conversion.
Idea of that person getting mad for colonist to die is simple a evidence of him getting invested in the game, which i assume is a goal of every game designer.
Friendly fire is obviously  PICNIC error.
Any person that dont fight cheeky using every unfair adventage he can find against enemy, deserve for his colony to die.
Pyro not usefull ... well, imagine your in a god damn iceland, getting struck by constant solars eclipses and power fail`s(Thanks Alot Randy...), close him in a room with vents , and look hows your colony is still not frozen.
Yes game require some inventivness from players, still rng is atleast for me a core part of the game.

[Skaer]

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

They already are. I've been consistently playing 10+ year colonies with little to no losses (2-4 colonists lost total per game, and in most cases those were preventable as well) on Cass extreme iron man in previous versions. In the current build, I'm dropping 10-15 man raids with my two colonists who have nothing but looted gear - without taking any damage in the process.
You just need to treat any chance of return fire as completely unacceptible; it's tenchnically possible and not even all that hard untill you have to micro it in more than 2-3 places at once.

My point is, if someone says that they played it perfectly but still lost, chances are they did not have the patience to actually play it perfectly.

[ZaPhobos]

I think that after reading through these 4 pages of responses that we can all agree on one thing:

Losing a pawn sucks.  Losing a pawn early on sucks even more, and there are few chances to gain pawns back, let alone good pawns.

People also specialize their pawns so that when one is lost, the hit is incredibly hard.  People also don't like losing pawns to things they perceive to be entirely out of their control.  Tactical decisions that weren't smart results in reloads because they could have done better.  Losing a pawn to a forest fire, sickness, and subsequent raid ends up being for many people an automatic reload from what I understand.  The game has base building elements so people approach it as a base building Sim that you can optimize and NEVER lose when that's simply not the case!  That seems to be the main issue.  Instead of taking it as a story generator players want things to be perfect, to avoid the risks of randomness unless they're in their favor.

As one poster said, people build massive and elaborate symmetrical bases with optimized kill boxes to stand the test of time.  It's just a disconnect between the games perceived purpose and your actual vision.

[PercussionPower]

1. Yes bad luck should always be a factor that skilled players will have to account for. However this bad luck should more often manifest in a way that generates further possible player interaction - for example one-hit KOs from brain or heart or liver shots should be toned down a lot, and instead have the player have to deal with the immediate consequences (them almost immediately bleeding out from this massive wound and scrambling to a hospital bed), and the long-term consequences (brain damage, more frequent heart attacks from heart scarring, can't use drugs or will immediately OD etc) and the counters to these long term consequences.
Though maybe this is too forgiving and my answer just comes from my conditioned response to the "Colonist has been shot to death" message that I find unsatisfying / frustrating. Hiding the effective O-HKO's behind an urgent bleeding out colonist would prompt more player thought on their playstyle though ("what if I had the hospital beds closer to the entrance of the base? what if I had the guy with Jogger carry him?" etc), making these situations have more cognitive impact on players, maybe not so much emotional impact.

On the subject of O-HKO's, I'm guessing the changes in 1.0 have been a case of "push things too far for testing and see what interesting experiences come from it". Personally the armour RNG changes have screwed with my head the most, I mean on a logical level I can easily accept an autopistol round penetrating an advanced plasteel helmet through a weak spot or the eye or something, but on an instinctive level it screws with me that a) it happens so often and b) when it does happen the outcomes are very limited, i.e. colonist 1HKO (due to changes in organ HP), or bullet pings off helmet harmlessly.

I'd like to suggest combining the previous system with the current system and instead of a % chance of negating all damage, have a probability distribution "function" for each piece of armor which when called will give the damage reduction value for that shot. This way you could possibly have more fine-grained control over balancing how many OH-KOs there are. I'm probably not explaining the concept very well so a couple examples below:

Cloth Tuque - practically no armour so a high chance of receiving full damage on the shot
%  100%
C   80%     _
h   60%     _
a   40%     _
n   20%     _         _
c    0%      _         _           _           _           _
e     
            |0%|    |30%|    |60%|    |90%|  |100%|
       
                        % Damage reduction

Advanced Plasteel Helmet - good armour but there's still a chance of a shot going through a weak spot

%  100%
C   80%     
h   60%                                          _
a   40%                                          _
n   20%     _                                   _          _
c    0%      _         _           _           _          _
e     
            |0%|    |30%|    |60%|    |90%|  |100%|
       
                        % Damage reduction


Guessing this would be challenging to implement however. Just a suggestion which more closely matches my expectations of how armour should behave


2. Yes. But as said earlier by other posters player agency is important in satisfaction, so it's difficult to balance the different priorities people have. I'd say just go with your vision

3. I want to say yes because of my personal playstyle (get attached to colonists, use dev mode way too much to turn those "fuck you" scenarios into just manageable with losses scenarios), but loss and setbacks are part of what makes the game interesting and not a bland positive feedback loopfest

4. Re tuning player expectations, perhaps you could more aggresively introduce the idea to players in more of the in-game text that life on the rim is not fair and that loss (or loss of expected reward) comes part and parcel. For example on the Storyteller Selection screen have a tagline "not every story ends happy ever after" or something similar. I also like Teleblaster18's suggestion of a pre-game interview that sets the game's experiences according to your answers - it reminds me of games like Daggerfall, Morrowind, Mount and Blade where you're given a questionaire and the game generates your character and therefore experiences based on that. Not sure if you want to too closely emulate other games. It would help the problem with players choosing difficulties that don't match their expectations though, which helps with question 2.

2) If you're interested in storytelling mechanics, there's really nothing in the game that overtly rewards people for sticking through adversity. The only outcomes of a closely hard fought fight is your survival ...and host of only negative outcomes (you could say shooting xp, but that can also be gained with approaching fights in a very cheesy manner). Maybe some guy with injured eye can learn to perceive better in time (so eventually restoring full vision would give him elevated sight relative to normal unhandicapped pawns). Or guy that kicks an addiction gains better tolerance to mental breaks. Maybe some permanent bonuses that can only be obtained through managing auto-reject trait pawns. So that you feel like there's actual accomplishment for sticking with crappy pawns and crappy circumstances, instead of doing so as some masochistic handicap.

I really like this idea, it would help rimworld in an area which I think it is lacking in, character development. As in development of traits and personalities, not just skill development and how many injuries they've accrued. An already existing example of this in-game is the Psychology mod, where pawns can develop anxiety after traumatic events (read: dramatic negative mood changes).
I really think that giving pawns more opportunities to show development of character traits will let rimworld shine as more of a story generator. It will have huge impact on players if they can tell stories like "my trigger-happy pawn got gored by a manhunting Muffalo while hunting and now has the Careful Shooter trait" or "that pawn had a break because of a psychic ship and now he's Psychically Sensitive".

I know I'm in danger of being told to take this post to the suggestions forum but I'd like to give constructive criticism where possible, with solutions that match my view of the game experience. I do think it's possible to at least partially reconcile the game- and story-frames in rimworld in a way that's fun to play.

[giltirn]

These are all very tough questions to answer. For what its worth I would not advocate making fundamental changes to the game this late on in the process. Obviously its a great game as it stands given how much play time we have all invested in it. I'm a little concerned with how you've been completely rewriting core game systems on a daily basis; will Rimworld 1.0 feel and play anything like B18? I think B18 is great and would have been happy with just polishing of the existing systems.

With regards to setting expectations, I don't think it's possible; people will be drawn to the game for different reasons. Some like to building bases, some like the simulation aspects, some find pleasure in spectacular failures. To cater to these diverse tastes we have difficulty options and the option of whether to allow saving, not to mention mods.

When it comes to balancing I would not say you should "ignore" certain classes of feedback per se, but you should retain the final decision on whether to act on that feedback according to your vision. If you have the time to explain your decision to us that would be great, but ultimately you should make the game you want to make.

[Franklin]

This should go without saying, but there's always a degree of confirmation bias that comes with issue-reporting forums like this. Small voices will sound louder, small issues larger. It's always the end of the world when you're freshly mad. The vast majority of your players aren't going to complain here, and arguably if they're not complaining anywhere, they haven't much to complain about.

I personally like getting dealt a bad hand sometimes. I find the 'flawless game through flawless play' mindset towards games like this dull, as RW's supposed to simulate life to a tiny degree. There should be dangerous accidents, and lopsided odds against the wilds. That's what makes this game fun to me. Ironman or bust.

If there was no RNG, and I knew I could min/max my way to a flawless colony, then most of the fun in the game would be lost.

[Serenity]

(decked out in plasteel plate armor and advanced helmet) was one shot KO'd

Clearly the frustration here doesn't just come from the death but those specific circumstances.

If an unarmored pawn is one shot killed that can be annoying, but it's at least understandable. With good armor you'd expect such kills to be converted to injuries. How about instead the pawn goes down (so you do suffer immediate consequences) and gets a concussion or broken ribs depending on where he is hit? Damaging the armor is also a sensible punishment.

Multiple hits to the same body part could still kill because earlier shots damaged the armor. So it's not like pawns would be invincible

[EvadableMoxie]

I do feel like Rimworld is a good generator of immersive stories, and that is important, but a bunch of events occurring sequentially are only a story when there's cause and effect linking them. Yea, Luke didn't reroll when his parents died, but that's because Darth Vader's death is the culmination of 3 movies.  We know why he died and it makes perfect sense.  It wasn't something that happened arbitrarily or randomly. 

If Darth Vader was friendly fired by a Storm trooper in the back of the head and just dropped dead, we'd all have left the theater scratching our heads. It would have been a pretty big twist if Luke got the plague on Dagobah and just died, but it wouldn't have made a better movie if a new Jedi wandered into the plot randomly and took over.  Han Solo getting ripped apart by Chewbaka because they got a -36 psychic drone would certainly have been a memorable scene, but perhaps not the best bit of storytelling.

When success or failure happens due to the actions of a player and not just randomness, then it's a story.  Because the player understands why it happened. They can trace back their decisions and see what they did right or wrong.  Feeling like the results are due to your choices and not randomness is satisfying, even when the outcome is bad.

Ultimately, it's my story, and I want the successes and failures to be written by my decisions, not a random number generator.

Yes, some uber players might never make mistakes and only succeed, but that's going to be a very rare minority of players.  For the vast majority of players, they're going to make mistakes, and they are less likely to feel frustrated and want to reload when they understand the results are due to a mistake they made and not a random number generator not going their way. When that rare player does play perfectly and have only a string of successes, I don't see that as a bad thing, either. There are always ways to make the game more challenging.

That all said, I don't think RNG shouldn't exist or it should be impossible for pawns to get one shot.  But I strongly feel that by far the biggest factor for success should be a player's skill, not a random number generator.

[Franklin]

When success or failure happens due to the actions of a player and not just randomness, then it's a story.  Because the player understands why it happened. They can trace back their decisions and see what they did right or wrong.  Feeling like the results are due to your choices and not randomness is satisfying, even when the outcome is bad.

This is entirely fair and you're right, RNG can produce bad stories by killing off key actors without a climax, but RW doesn't really have a Luke or a Vader. Every pawn is unique but replaceable, and their value (and ultimate role in the story) is random by design. They may turn out to be an unlikely hero, or they may not, the story isn't linear like Star Wars is.

And from a tech progression perspective, RW always builds easier and safer. You start with sticks and scraps, where any real mistake could kill everyone, and build towards power armour and laser rifles where, outside of the occasional bad raid, you don't sweat much anymore. The reason a degree of RNG is important is eventually you hit that progressive 'safe spot' with what buffs and protections you acquired. The raids scale, but weather doesn't become worse, moods only improve outside of event spikes, food needs scale linearly, body parts and skills are improved not worsened, so eventually you hit a mid-to-late game lull where, without a little RNG, you'd grow bored. You 'beat the odds' and now just sort of exist.