When I play board games I tend to get a bit… competitive. More so than I would like to admit. Consequently, I tend to be pretty irked when randomness gets in the way of a good competition. I prefer something like Puerto Rico to Race for the Galaxy (but love both). It’s rare to find games like Puerto Rico with almost no luck involved at all, however. Usually I settle for a game where luck is the least important factor. One of the reasons I love Modern Art (the game, not the movement) is that while the paintings you get are random, you get the vast majority of them up front. How and when you play those paintings is what completely changes the gamespace from game to game, not the random distribution of cards.
Randomness can completely undermine carefully planned strategies. There are a lot of examples of this in board games, but one that sticks way out in my mind is Twilight Imperium. This game is a complex game of diplomacy, warfare, and science. It’s a 4X game that feels somewhat like playing Galactic Civilizations 2 with a small hex grid. There’s lots of complexity and great choices to made throughout the game. However, the fights in the game come down to rolls that can instantly destroy a plan made over several turns. Even if you get a series of good rolls and somehow pull off something you shouldn’t have been able to, how good do you feel when your win wasn’t even your fault?
Apparently most people feel pretty damn good because there are a huge number of games revolving around luck. The popularity of gambling makes this evident enough. For me, though, I don’t want luck in my competition.
Recently I played Last Night on Earth. It’s a simple zombie game where two players move zombies around and two others are humans trying to accomplish some goal (usually a zombie movie trope). Most of the theme for the game is B-horror movies, and it fits the game very well. Strategies in the game are pretty simple for both sides. For the zombies, units move pretty slow so you try and box in the players and then take them down. For the players, lots of agility means moving around the environment looking for safe points to accomplish goals and kill zombies whenever possible. Every turn players roll to move and zombie players get to draw cards. Often, players will search environments and get to draw cards as well.
Hopefully you can see from this description that Last Night on Earth is extremely dependent on luck. But it gets away with it because it doesn’t masquerade as a tactical competitive game. Last Night on Earth uses luck to tell interesting and dynamic stories the player is a part of. If the humans are completely overwhelmed, the game is still fun because of “that one turn” where one human did something amazing. The same is true for the zombies. The cards are all gloriously designed to set up these fantastic scenarios. In one game, a player could spend 5 of the 12 available turns searching for a weapon, and then after finding it rolling consecutive sixes killing all nearby zombies and saving the day. If the zombies are having too much trouble with humans running away, try playing a locked door card when they try to exit a room and soak in that fear that has suddenly filled them.
Lots of other games attempt using randomness for storytelling opportunities as well, but few succeed. Most tabletop role-playing games feature heavy use of dice prominently. D&D is a great case study here. In its earlier iterations, like in 2nd edition, the rules of the game were mostly built around telling a story rather than providing a tactical battle system. (For instance, when you hit level 15 as a fighter, you automatically got an army and a fort. Great for your characters story, but has a tendency to break all combat scenarios from then onward.) In 3rd and 4th edition, Wizards of the Coast have moved the game to a more and more tactics focused system and less of about storytelling. In fact, a new role-playing system called Pathfinder emerged after 4th editions release because of players dislike of the tactical focus of the game. They wanted more of the story focused 3rd edition rules provided. There’s nothing wrong with 4th edition’s approach to role-playing games. A good tactical battle system could provide the sort of fun you see in video games like Final Fantasy Tactics or dungeon hacks like Diablo for a group of friends. So why do dice still factor so heavily into the system? They are a remnant of the past focus of the series and don’t serve their purpose in D&D anymore.
Dice and random elements certainly serve a purpose in games. To use them well is difficult, however. The designer must know exactly why they are adding randomness to the system. Randomness, when carefully applied, can add strategic depth to a game (in the case of Ra, Race for the Galaxy, or Modern Art), but it can also completely undermine a player’s choices. It can be a great storytelling device, but when misapplied, as I believe it has been in 4th edition, it can drag its other systems down so far its original benefits are lost. A game should only have an element be random if the designer can give a compelling reason for it to be random. Otherwise, why take control away from the players?
Dice and Storytelling
When I play board games I tend to get a bit… competitive. More so than I would like to admit. Consequently, I tend to be pretty irked when randomness gets in the way of a good competition. I prefer something like Puerto Rico to Race for the Galaxy (but love both). It’s rare to find games like Puerto Rico with almost no luck involved at all, however. Usually I settle for a game where luck is the least important factor. One of the reasons I love Modern Art (the game, not the movement) is that while the paintings you get are random, you get the vast majority of them up front. How and when you play those paintings is what completely changes the gamespace from game to game, not the random distribution of cards.
Randomness can completely undermine carefully planned strategies. There are a lot of examples of this in board games, but one that sticks way out in my mind is Twilight Imperium. This game is a complex game of diplomacy, warfare, and science. It’s a 4X game that feels somewhat like playing Galactic Civilizations 2 with a small hex grid. There’s lots of complexity and great choices to made throughout the game. However, the fights in the game come down to rolls that can instantly destroy a plan made over several turns. Even if you get a series of good rolls and somehow pull off something you shouldn’t have been able to, how good do you feel when your win wasn’t even your fault?
Apparently most people feel pretty damn good because there are a huge number of games revolving around luck. The popularity of gambling makes this evident enough. For me, though, I don’t want luck in my competition.
Recently I played Last Night on Earth. It’s a simple zombie game where two players move zombies around and two others are humans trying to accomplish some goal (usually a zombie movie trope). Most of the theme for the game is B-horror movies, and it fits the game very well. Strategies in the game are pretty simple for both sides. For the zombies, units move pretty slow so you try and box in the players and then take them down. For the players, lots of agility means moving around the environment looking for safe points to accomplish goals and kill zombies whenever possible. Every turn players roll to move and zombie players get to draw cards. Often, players will search environments and get to draw cards as well.
Hopefully you can see from this description that Last Night on Earth is extremely dependent on luck. But it gets away with it because it doesn’t masquerade as a tactical competitive game. Last Night on Earth uses luck to tell interesting and dynamic stories the player is a part of. If the humans are completely overwhelmed, the game is still fun because of “that one turn” where one human did something amazing. The same is true for the zombies. The cards are all gloriously designed to set up these fantastic scenarios. In one game, a player could spend 5 of the 12 available turns searching for a weapon, and then after finding it rolling consecutive sixes killing all nearby zombies and saving the day. If the zombies are having too much trouble with humans running away, try playing a locked door card when they try to exit a room and soak in that fear that has suddenly filled them.
Lots of other games attempt using randomness for storytelling opportunities as well, but few succeed. Most tabletop role-playing games feature heavy use of dice prominently. D&D is a great case study here. In its earlier iterations, like in 2nd edition, the rules of the game were mostly built around telling a story rather than providing a tactical battle system. (For instance, when you hit level 15 as a fighter, you automatically got an army and a fort. Great for your characters story, but has a tendency to break all combat scenarios from then onward.) In 3rd and 4th edition, Wizards of the Coast have moved the game to a more and more tactics focused system and less of about storytelling. In fact, a new role-playing system called Pathfinder emerged after 4th editions release because of players dislike of the tactical focus of the game. They wanted more of the story focused 3rd edition rules provided. There’s nothing wrong with 4th edition’s approach to role-playing games. A good tactical battle system could provide the sort of fun you see in video games like Final Fantasy Tactics or dungeon hacks like Diablo for a group of friends. So why do dice still factor so heavily into the system? They are a remnant of the past focus of the series and don’t serve their purpose in D&D anymore.
Dice and random elements certainly serve a purpose in games. To use them well is difficult, however. The designer must know exactly why they are adding randomness to the system. Randomness, when carefully applied, can add strategic depth to a game (in the case of Ra, Race for the Galaxy, or Modern Art), but it can also completely undermine a player’s choices. It can be a great storytelling device, but when misapplied, as I believe it has been in 4th edition, it can drag its other systems down so far its original benefits are lost. A game should only have an element be random if the designer can give a compelling reason for it to be random. Otherwise, why take control away from the players?