To RNG or not to RNG

[Injured Muffalo]

Let me tell you my story about Kimmy.

Kimmy was a escape pod refugee. She was the best colonist I ever found. She was passionate about 9/12 disciplines. She was an optimist. Not capable of everything, but everything important. Burning passion for medicine and growing. She was a star.

Although I knew this, I didn't treat her like a valuable object. I used her more or less as one of my solid choices for anything. This willingness to put her at risk for the greater good cost her an eye and a leg, but fortunately B18 has eyes and legs, and I was happy to be able to give those to her.

Kimmy wasn't the best at everything - she was just excellent overall. Well, she was the best doctor. But there were other people in the colony who had greater skill in various things. One day, we came across the ancient danger. It was the second map for this colony (I moved it to a warmer climate). I ordered the wall to be deconstructed, and people were busy. One low tier colonist was going to do it, but then something came up (maybe time for bed or whatever). Kimmy came up. I knew in the back of my mind that it was a grave risk - not that I didn't think I could handle some Ancient Danger, but if things went south, why risk her?

It was one of those situations where you aren't really thinking and just skimming over the normal procedures to get to the grand scheme; step 1, uncover ancient danger, step 2, ???, step 3, profit. It had been slow lately; Randy hadn't sent much. So I allowed Kimmy to deconstruct the wall.

Now, I knew what could be in there. I had done this before multiple times, and I thought I knew how to control the risk. It seemed unnecessary to shoot out the wall from a distance. If there was bad shit inside, step aside immediately and leave it alone. It turned out to be mechanoids.

Kimmy had two options. Flee north and then west, or flee west. She started fleeing the instant the wall was down. She went west. I could have directed her north, but I felt gaining distance on the scyther was more important in case it failed to notice her, or missed. I also was concerned that drafting her and giving her directions would slow her down.

Anyway, you know how this story ends. The scyther took one shot, and Kimmy died instantly.

It pretty much ruined my day. Maybe another day after that. I knew how preventable it was, but I was also caught by surprise. My first reaction was I had to let it go, so I played for a while before quickly losing interest. Then my next reaction was the "this is BS RNG" and so on. So I loaded a very old save and replayed from there.

Now, my personal feeling on this is not everyone's. I can't stand it. It's cheating. I saw Kimmy walking around and working her miracles, but it felt like a lie. And so, my compensation ended up being to send a group of my very best people on a suicidal caravan. It wasn't consciously designed that way - I just didn't care; I felt numb and I felt like I had a zombie colony with fake cheater colonists.

So they loaded up with a treasure to go fight an outpost; 4 people. One of my first 3, a social expert, Kimmy, and a couple of other solid guys. They never had a chance; I wasn't prepared for it. When they finally arrived at the outpost and fought their vain battle, I felt very little. They all bled to death. So did the pack animals. Ironically, the enemies fled the outpost when one of them dropped due to blood loss, so we received a reward for destroying it even as our people bled to death. There was no way for me to reach them in time. I let them all go.

By loading that old save, I inadvertently resurrected a crafter who had died of a heart attack. Now I love Joyce and her work in the colony, but god damn it, she should be dead. So I just send her on caravans every time they happen and give her risky tasks. I also received Jup, who died in a, um, "Thrumbo experiment." It really was just an experiment, but she died and I just felt like I was straddling a line between accepting it was an experiment gone wrong, and reloading in the most vile way. I don't do that in games. I lower the difficulty if I need to and I play the story through. But I completely understand some people have other perspectives.

So anyway, I did reload for Jup, and I ended up with Joyce again, and I hated it. They are still alive. I am still playing this old B18 game. Joyce and Jup go with some random newer, low value colonists on every caravan. I'm not trying to get them killed; I just want them to be used and in the past.

I don't think it's reasonable to separate the RNG from Rimworld. The reason I was upset by my reloading was that it debased the accomplishments of my colony beyond that point from an exciting, living, real, unpredictable reality, with hard won achievements, into a scenario where everything thenceforth has been improved from beyond the fourth wall by my load button. This interferes with what we in the theatrical field call suspension of disbelief.

You already have a tool you made great use of to control the way events happen in reality - the difficulty. I am not suggesting in any way that the randomess, or intensity of events be neutered or increased, because that could harm whatever experience you get on those difficulty levels. But it sort of already exists. Unfortunately my long winded answer is it's your choice as the developer to assert what lies within reason. All I have to contribute is that difficulty levels are one great way to satisfy everyone with different standards.

[HappyNihilist]

I am another lurker, and like some of the others in this thread, I felt it necessary to jump in here to have my say to help preserve the game I know and love. For reference, I was a name in game backer from the early alphas, and have hundreds of hours in both before, and after Steam release. I nearly always play on Cassie Extreme.

First, I hope you do not remove most of the randomness of the game. I enjoy the negative events almost as much as the positive. I look at it as an opportunity to overcome adversity. Do frustrating moments happen, sure, but I also enjoy figuring out how to survive after one of them happens. Now, I am not saying I like every single thing that happens, but for the most part the unpredictability is what makes this fun. That said, as a hardcore player, and someone who watches streams of other hardcore players, I have noticed a few patterns that lead to the rage your talking about here. 

First, thing falls on the players themselves. if you want everything to go smooth and you do not want to lose anyone, then maybe you should not be playing Extreme. Not calling out anyone specific, but if your playing on Extreme, then coming on here complaining that your pawns died because they were one shot by whatever, then you should probably consider bumping down the difficulty. Yes, when you play on the hardest difficulty there are more raids, which gives more opportunities for negative RNG rolls to cripple/kill your colonists. I kind of think that this is how it should be. Playing on Extreme, to me, is saying "Bring it on" to the game. I love that about this game, and would hate to see that nerfed.

That said, I also do understand some of the frustrations with deaths caused by things that just do not make sense. Take the social fight example used by someone else earlier. My issue would not be that one of my pawns lost their hand on the first day, it would more be that it did not make sense. When people fight, especially when they are just pissed and not actually in a life or death struggle, they just do not do that kind of thing. People just do not bite another person's hand off during a social fight with an ally. Another example of this would be when your colonist has been with you for years, had a general positive mood throughout that time, then has a single bad day and decides to "Give up on the colony" or "Run Wild". In this case it breaks the story of this guy having it pretty good and being generally happy, with all of a sudden a bad day or two makes the guy flip out and leave your colony. In my opinion, it breaks the story when these events happen and they do not make sense. Now if the same thing happened but my pawn was Neurotic Bloodlust Abrasive, and had experienced a rough time over the course of a month, then it is good storytelling and although it is the same negative event, it makes sense and I would completely understand and respect it.

The second point of frustration is the frequency of these events. Say one day my colonist is out hauling and a nearby rat goes mad and manages to get to my colonist and give him an eye scar before being killed. Now that is pretty random, and kind of hard to believe, but if it happens once every 10-20 hours that the game is played, it is kind of cool and interesting. It brings variety, and drives home the "Anything can happen" feel a lot of us enjoy. It makes a good story. If, on the other hand, this event, or something similar, happens frequently, it is just frustrating. It is fun to tell the story of the thing that happened to that one colony that you never have seen again. It is another feeling entirely when you shudder every time you see a rat manhunter pack because you know odds are it is a minimum of two eye scars and four infections if you do not hole up in your base for a day or two.

In the end, I think the majority of the hardcore players want the randomness that Rimworld has. We enjoy it, and love to figure out ways to fight back our colony's demise despite some "shit tier RNG", but when what should be random, very low frequency, story variation type events happen a few times every month in the colony, it does tend to induce rage.


TL DR:

I think we like our "shit tier RNG" events, and want them to stay. We just want them to make sense in both how they happened and the frequency in which they happen.

Just my two cents anyway, but if you gave me the choice between no random events that cost pawns or what we have today, I would take what we have every time. Thanks for the great game.

[Zombull]

Not all stories are equal.

Not all stories are wanted by every player/viewer.

Tynan, your movie reference is great. It shows how something might make a great story, but not a great game. A lot of great stories are terribly bleak and doomed from the getgo. A lot of people don't want to even watch that kind of movie. If they went to the theater expecting to see a story of struggle and triumph but instead were shown one of drawn out desperation and tragedy, they aren't going to be happy. They might even walk out early. With heavy RNG in RimWorld, there's no predicting - even based on player's planning and execution - which story they're going to see.

[Crow_T]

The first time I played Rimworld, A17, it was pretty obvious what to expect from the difficulty levels. It still is obvious, but it seems some people aren't picking the right difficulty for the experience they want to have, and that's on them. There are so many things for players to customize, even changing difficulty mid-game, I don't see what the problem is.

Also, a good percentage of Royal F%$# Ups in my games could have been prevented by better play- one gets lulled into base building and neglects defense sometimes. Or I was simply reckless. I don't consider bad events "bad rolls," I consider them Life on the Rim. That's why I am playing this game in the first place, for the danger!

Regarding RNG I don't really feel it in this game as an obvious force, it feels pretty obscured behind the complexities of, well, everything. Anyhow, I think Rimworld has become an amazing game and the team has steered it in a good direction, they should continue to make the game they want and let modders deal with the things a few people don't like.

[Greep]

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 would argue that virtually nobody plays this game as a story generator in this way to be honest, regardless of how much they might say they praise it, and it's not really the skill test issue you're raising so much as early game repetition.  It's easy to see this by looking at an extreme hypothetical (yay brain in a vat philosophy)

Imagine if the game wiped out you completely, and in a "dramatic" way, always in the first two weeks of the game, with virtually no exception and no agency whatsoever on the player's part.  It would be fairly realistic: exactly how long do you expect to last on your own exiled and starving or crashlanded on a foreign planet? 

People would find this fun for a few hours for a freeware game but not a $30 game expected to give them a fair amount of enjoyment.  Because what are you doing when the game wipes you out? 

You're clicking restart game, you're weeding out a few bad colonists/tribals, picking a spot to settle on the map, building your standard prison/a few bedrooms/a perimeter/ going hunting/ whatever.  Oh everyone died again from bugs!  Now....

You're clicking restart game, you're weeding out a few bad colonists/tribals, picking a spot to settle on the map, building your standard prison/a few bedrooms/a perimeter/ going hunting/ whatever.  Oh everyone died again from the plague! Now...

You get the idea.  You got an interesting "story" but now when you restart your game it's like you're doing math homework for a test you've already mastered while your friends are out partying.

[stormholder]

Honestly I like the randomness; it's essential for keeping tension in the game and getting me fully invested in how I solve problems.  The only frustrating element to losing a pawn is how equally random it is to get a replacement pawn.  It'd be brilliant if I could pay silver to hire/entice someone to come to my colony.  Or maybe some way of using a Comm Station to reach out to a family member of a pawn and to attempt to recruit them to join the colony. 

Really just looking for some proactive tool at my disposal to replenish fallen pawns.

[Foefaller]

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?

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?

I believe recovering from disaster is part of the fun of this game myself, and its not something that mainstream games have completely shied away from either.(XCOM probably being the best mainstream example of "I did everything right, but things still went wrong." Crusader Kings II has also netted a loyal fanbase and has no moral qualms about sending your carefully-laid plans into chaos with a series of "fun" events.) Though I feel sometimes the game could be a bit more transparent about why X happened, I don't think it's wrong for you to expect players to accept "Stuff happens" as a part of the game, at least to a degree.

That's not to say that there is nothing to be gained from listening to the feedback of those players, as they might be the canaries that are warning you of frustrations that go beyond just the story generator you are trying to make. (I do think there is a genuine problem of minor events snowballing into serious, pawn crippling-or-killing scenarios, specifically in the first quadrum, which can be extremely frustrating depending on how much time you spent picking pawns and the place you land) But IMO trying to make a game that appeals to everyone is a fast track to a game that appeals to noone.

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

I feel like that answer comes with your answer to a question:

Is Rimworld a game with defined win conditions that players are suppose to strive towards? Is the game supposed to be played until all the colonists are dead/offworld/whatever new ending you can think of, or is it OK for you that players might merely play until they achieve some personal goal of their own and then leave that game for a new one under new settings?

I know there are the spaceships, both the nomadic one and the one you build, but it has always felt to me you put those there so people can say they've "beaten" Rimworld. (I've never gone for it myself... though I've yet to have a game get that far either.)

...But if that's what you want, if you want people to go for the spaceship, or other victory conditions you might create in the future, then I would say yes, you want to give players, especially players that might have spent double-digit hours on their game, ways to avoid all but the greatest disasters.

On the other hand, if that is not something you really want or care about, and Rimworld is all about players creating a story and setting their "own" win conditions (whether that means going for an official one or not), then you don't need to... Unless, of course, you think it would create a good story. 

That being said, you could always add a new Storyteller that can do that: ensure that the player always has a way to recover.

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?

You might do what Darkest Dungeon does, where the very first screen basically goes, "In this game you are going to fail for BS reasons, many times in fact, and recovering from that, even if it set you back to square one, is the whole point. You have been warned."

You might also give some acknowledgement to what the player has achieved up to that point when their colonists are all dead and/or they start fresh with a new group, so they can feel like they've accomplished "something," even if it ended in perceived failure. I don't know your opinion about achievements, but there is a reason why they are so popular.

Again, I think it's OK to accept some people might not ever "get" your game, as long as you remember that criticism =/= ignorance of your sublime genius. That's always the tricky part.

[EvadableMoxie]

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.

If the game isn't challenging in the late game then that's a balance problem and the only solution isn't RNG. Why not make the end game harder and create more situations where you have to continue to make good decisions just like in the mid to late game?

Also I don't think just throwing RNG at the problem solves anything.  If the only challenge is due to random events beyond my control, why even bother playing? I have no control over the outcome anyway. That is a lot more boring to me than the alternative.

[Scavenger]

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.

Also I don't think just throwing RNG at the problem solves anything.  If the only challenge is due to random events beyond my control, why even bother playing? I have no control over the outcome anyway. That is a lot more boring to me than the alternative.

That's kinda the whole point of this game. You make a colony, and weather RNG you can't control. Crashed poison chips, raids, solar flares, toxic fallout, Manhunter packs, Etc. The goal is to respond as best you can and try to survive despite all of this. Some of it is beyond your control.

[AkraSiA]

People constantly complain about rng in games. Most of my experience outside of starcraft is in shooters. When I played counterstrike, people complained about the rng of first-shot accuracy on the weapons. In Rust, people complained about the weapon spread and loot spawns on weapons and locations. Currently, in fortnite, people complain about the weapon spread of assault rifles and shotguns. These complaints are always understood by good developers to be bullshit. Valve has done nothing to change csgo, Garry and Helk have changed Rust for the better with the same rng mechanics still in the game, and fortnite has added a first-shot accuracy mechanic while keeping the "rng" of weapon spread. Supposed "RNG" is an integral mechanic to all games - not just shooters - that allows for greater skill depth than a solved game could. Poker is a boring card game that still competes in the era of skyrim and world of warcraft solely due to its "RNG".

I played a game of rimworld yesterday on naked brutality where the first person I recruited went insane within a day and scratched out my starter pawns eye. I decided to kill that pawn for hurting my starter pawn and then spent then next year struggling, and eventually dying, because I didn't manage to get another pawn and got food poisoning & raided. Annoying? Yeah, but that's part of it. I was down early game and if I could have pulled through, it would have been awesome. If I'm going to win every time I play Rimworld, I'd rather be playing Skyrim where constantly winning isn't so boring. I think contextualizing the game as a story generator is a fun way to approach it, but my reason for playing the game - as someone who generally sticks to competitive multiplayer games - is completely for the challenge and development of skill in the mechanics of the game (which, coincidentally, seems to mesh well with a story generator-styled game). I enjoyed FTL, a similar game, for about 5 hours after I figured out how to beat it 80% of the time and lose to rng 20% of the time. I'm well into 500 hours in Rimworld and think the game is only getting better with each update. RNG is core to any GREAT game that's more than just a 10 hour call of duty campaign romp. I would hate to see Rimworld change from its intended design to cater to people that want to play Win Simulator. If people are upset about dying to "RNG friendly fire", something that only happens if you create the conditions for it, they should be playing on an easier difficulty - and you, the developer, should not design the game around someone that wants to win, rather than to accept the conditions of the game they're playing.

[Venatos]

the theme i see emerging is that people are fine with bad stuff happening, its just the complete loss of something important like a pawn or a hand that tick people off. its a binary event, accept it or reload, a dead end if you will.

i would like to point out that the guy in the movie didnt loose his hand or leg, he wounded it severily.
it makes a world of difference if your pawn strait up dies or looses a limb, instead of a severe long term wound!

now that i think about it... rimworldians do heal up extremely quickly... i think it would be fine to double or triple the recoverytime of wounds if we get less instadeath and limblos for it.

[ZaPhobos]

*Snip*

Basically, yes, the came is made around RNG being a determining factor that you must overcome and mitigate to the best of your ability.  I know that one of these days a manhunter pack is going to come roaming through, and I've learned such a fact.  So what do I do?  I make a big wall to mitigate the damage.  I know raids will come over and over if I'm playing with Cassandra.  What do I do?  I invest in protective garments and better weaponry on top of my walls and sandbags.  I know that at any time a volcanic winter or toxic fallout may hit.  What do I do?  I make a greenhouse.  The game is about adapting to what's being thrown at you as much as the game is adapting to kill you.  It's not "set yourself up and win the game," it's "struggle against the odds and maybe, just maybe, you progress enough to get the hell out."  Without the random events that disrupt my gameplay I would win time and time again against the raids that I KNOW are going to appear.  If bullet impacts weren't random, if the skill of the shooter was the only thing that mattered, I wouldn't worry about sending my people into combat, because I know there's no risk unless one of their guys is REALLY good at shooting.  But even then, if you're a good shooter but the dice don't roll in your favor you could be screwed over.  Sure, it sucks when my guy dies instantly to a lancer, but I know the risks when I engage them, and I try my damn hardest to keep the "bullshit RNG" from killing them, even if I know that they could get shot in the face and die instantly I armor them up regardless, because I know that my chances, the dice, are just slightly more in my favor if I can manipulate them.

The game is RNG mitigation and struggle in the world where everything is going to go wrong except when it occasionally goes right.  There's more opportunities to die than to gain, and even when you have an opportunity to gain there's often a level of risk.  A colonist crashed down outside the colony?  Go grab them, treat their wounds, and either hope they join or keep them in prison until they do.  You don't get a say in what they're skilled at, but you have a new person.  Someone just called for help?  Well now there's a raid behind them, or you have to caravan out to get them and there's a ring of turrets.  You want to revive your dead colonist who was skilled?  Well you can get a serum but you know very well they're going to go nuts when you use it and there's a risk of brain damage.  Did I mention you have to destroy a raider encampment to get it?  Risks and reward, you just have to make your chances better.  There's a counter to almost every event in 1.0, or at least a way to mitigate the damage - being prepared, be it with drugs to prevent sickness, as expensive as they may be, or being decked out in armor.

[jacker474]

I think rng is an important part of what makes rimworld well rimworld. I think your vision of the game is what made me play the 700+ hours i currently have on it, and i dont think you should change it.

[Dargaron]

Here's the thing with the argument "it's a story generator!": if that's the case, why is anyone concerned with "exploits" or "gamey strategies," even to the extent of decreasing available story options?

An example: say you want to make your next colony to concentrate on selling guns. You'll intentionally not sell the "easy" money-makers, like Smokeleaf or Corn: you're going to sell manufactured goods. Your researcher spends uncountably-long hours slaving away at that research bench, your crafter hones her skills to a razor's edge, and your miner gathers materials that will, one day, make colonies for a hundred miles safe from the fear of raiders and hostile animals.

Ha ha, silly player! There's a -80% sale price reduction on weapons, because being able to sell raider's weapons at full price made wealth gain "too easy" (and it was apparently too difficult to put a "tainted" modifier on said weapons). Your carefully-crafted Charge Rifles aren't even worth the plasteel they're made of, because otherwise, things wouldn't be *balanced*. (not counting the cost of the Advanced Components required to make them: the raw Plasteel to make a Charge Rifle is worth several times a Normal-quality Charge Rifle)

Likewise with Tainted/Deadman's Apparel: selling that was apparently deemed unworthy of inclusion in 1.0. However, as anyone who's played Fallout can tell you, there's an awful lot of science fiction in which "scavenger" is a valid profession. Why should the player be stopped from making a scavenger colony, scraping together the few silver they can from selling clothes off their fallen victims? This doesn't even make sense from an in-universe standpoint: the settlement next door to my current colony sells human meat at premium prices: why would they be squeamish about buying "used" clothing?

Tynan made a point earlier in the thread that the situation in the movie "The Edge" would be viewed as "shit tier rng." Well, here's a counter example. Imagine that there was a way to kill entire herds of Muffalos with nothing but stone and wood. You don't even need to fight them directly: you just use your pawns to chase the Muffalos off a cliff, they go *splat* and you get free meat. That sounds like a horrible AI exploit, and it should be patched immediately, right? Except that's exactly how the Plains Indians hunted their prey for thousands of years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump Why should that story be made impossible? Where are the stories where something REALLY good happens, and changes the whole progression of the colony, the way that, say, losing your one and only Master Craftsman/woman to an unlucky Charge Rifle shot makes the colony significantly worse off on a long-term basis?

Over the course of the Unstable version there have been constant efforts to make indirect means of combating threats less and less viable: decrease door health so that fortifications are less useful, make ranged weapons unable to fire in melee, (and you can't have your gun-toting colonist carry a sidearm because that wouldn't be sporting), increase the number of drop pod raids which completely bypass any and all defenses (unless the moral of the story is that your pawns should sleep in bedrooms with enough internal defenses to kill 8 or 9 scythers) etc. But humans don't fight fair: we haven't since the dawn of modern humanity. The fact that you have to artificially reduce our options (Embrasures when? Murder Holes when? Firing from concealed positions when? Reinforced roofs when?) demonstrates this.

In short, if the game is "focused on story generation," (Mr. Sylvester's words from earlier in the thread) then there are a suspiciously large number of game mechanics/changes that appear specifically designed to limit the kinds of stories a player can tell. Why should my "trapmaster extrordanaire" story, in which the colony defends itself entirely with triggered defenses, be any less viable than one in which the player decides to forgo autonomous defenses entirely?

The tornado was a perfect example of lack of player agency, a "screw you" event, to use the current parlance. Thankfully, that event is gone now. But how is that different, really, from seven or eight scythers dropping into your bedrooms and destroying literally everything in the time it takes to mobilize your colonists to fight them? You can't prevent mechanoid raids. There's no way to, say, "funnel" drop pod raids to certain parts of your base (except for Overhead Mountain, which triggers its own version of pointlessly-destructive raids). And there's no way to know ahead of time, so that you can have your colonists guard the valuable stuff.

Finally, regarding the argument "if you're struggling with the current nerfs, just go down a difficulty level:" why should I have to be the one who changes? I play on Rough because I've tried Some Challenge: it takes virtually forever to get out of the "raids consist of one dude/ette with a terrible weapon" stage. If folks want to use suboptimal and risky strategies, like beating folks to death w/ weapons several thousands of years out of date, why don't they lower the difficulty to a level where that's viable?

[Koek]

I think rng is an important part of what makes rimworld well rimworld. I think your vision of the game is what made me play the 700+ hours i currently have on it, and i dont think you should change it.

To be fair, this thread isn't so much about changing stuff as it is about finding a good balance in the RNG aspect while still keeping the story creation intact.
Some stuff in this game feels unfair and my guess is Tynan is trying to figure out how to create a well balanced, fair and fun game without removing the challenge and randomness he so desires in this game. Hell of a job