I think Randomness really has its place in role-playing, and in gaming in general. When done well, it means the player will have a unique or at least somewhat different experience based on how the numbers roll - or in the case of battle, it will create interesting situations that the player can react to. Too often, it's not done well, and it's simply there for its own sake, creating more frustration than excitement and making the player feel like she doesn't control her own fate.
I love seeing the RNG in elements like item creation, minigames, skill usage, or even plot branches (although your own actions should still be contributing to the overall result more than the RNG does). There are times where it's great to have in battle, too, but I'm a strong believer that if you can't articulate a good reason why misses/dodges - or even critical hits - make your battle system better, then you should seriously consider removing them entirely.
In both VX Ace games I've released, I've set every character and enemy's hit rate to 100% and evasion rate to 0%. It's a guaranteed hit every time, unless the characters have states applied that give them a chance to miss or evade. I couldn't justify having default percentages to miss or evade, because they added so little to the strategy of the battle and simply lengthened the battle without making it more interesting.
I also felt that the default Critical Hit system took too much control out of the player's hands, modifying it in both games by reducing the Crit bonus, increasing the base probability, and basing Crits off of a single stat for the user and target (as well as introducing a few skills that let you, for example, automatically Crit on your next turn). In one of these games scoring a Critical Hit grants a "Crit Point", and getting five Crit Points gives the character a free turn where their stats are massively increased and skills cost 0.
In the other, many skills have "Crit Effects" such as freezing the target or restoring HP to the user if you score a Crit with the skill. This makes things even more elegant because instead of having a separate RNG roll to determine (with a fixed probability) the chance of a certain effect, you as the player have some power to control your destiny by investing in equipment that boosts that stat or using a skill that lets you automatically Crit the next turn.
My friend TheHonorableRyu at the RPG Maker Pavilion
made a few posts that I really liked in a similar discussion about when random results enhance or harm a video game. Among a few of my favorite excerpts:
I'm currently playing through Legionwood 2, a commercial VX Ace game that I got with the recent RPG Maker Humble Bundle. Similar to the Wizardry series on the PC, the creators were inspired by the high degree of randomness and dice rolls from tabletop RPGs and placed them into their RPG video game. In general I think this is a dubious idea because part of the fun of tabletop RPGs is the story the DM and players create out of what happens--the actual in-character role-playing elements. Even if you're losing the dice rolls you can make the most of it by telling a dynamic story around it with other people, whereas single player RPGs and most all video games in general lack this element.
So in Legionwood 2 I'm finding a lot of the bad kind of difficulty, where the player can do everything right and still be punished for random things beyond their control, where the player can make the exact same choices and get wildly different results that make the difference between whether just saving and reloading is the best strategy.
I don't think most would rather save scum over ancillary things
in general. But I do think there can be this tension where the more the player
really cares about the
results of a RNG the more they are likely to either save scum or just become dissatisfied with or stop caring about the system. Even if a game is still playable there's other things a player might care about, such as unique or missable items or events or units/characters, access to certain classes or skill trees, whether something is worth their time, whether something will affect the experience over long stretches of the game, etc.
A player might not care
that much if the RNG says that their item craft may result in one of a number of random consumables, be it one that restores 54 HP, or 38 HP, or 12 HP and 6 MP, or 10 HP and 10 MP, each with its own flavor text. In that case, the variation may very well add interest, shaping how the player will have to adapt to their changing circumstances. The same could be said if they're dice rolling for starting player character stats and if they get lucky on most of the stats they might not care that much if one or two random stats are low and are randomly at 12 instead of 11, 13, or 14 or some other arbitrary number.
But I can definitely think of situations where a player may be likely to either save scum or stop caring about the system you've designed, even if the game is still
playable. Just a few examples:
- The player has a big time investment in harvesting rare crafting materials and knows that the RNG determines whether their craft will result either in an item they can get elsewhere in a shop or a rare item they scarcely can get anywhere else.
- The Wizardry series on pc is heavily inspired by D&D, and Wizardry 7 had dice rolls for generating your starting character's stats. While a lackluster roll wouldn't necessarily make the game unplayable, all it did was make your characters suck more (more misses, less damage given, more damage taken--not very interesting) and--worst of all--delay their ability to change to job classes best suited for their race by possibly dozens of hours, since each class has certain stat requirements that the player character might not reach even after dozens of level ups due to the randomness of how per level stat bonuses are applied. You better believe that players re-rolled to get the stats and hence the classes they wanted, which unfortunately was a huge time-waster because you had to recreate another character and rename and reallocate starting traits before you'd get another chance at a dice roll. What player would want cruddy characters by choice except for the challenge of it, and in that case why not handle that aspect through difficulty settings rather than a RNG? I just created a new account in Sryth and it flat out tells me that "You'll also be randomly determining your character's Melee Rating (combat ability) and Stamina Points (health). Having high scores in these two statistics is extremely desirable. You should aim for scores of 25 or higher for both of these stats," but in the case of Sryth rerolling is easy and expected, so the randomness is balanced by a significant degree of player control.
- In Pokemon an individual Pokemon's max stats depend upon "IVs"--a random number between 1 and 31 (worst to best) for each stat that determines that stat's growth rate. Most players who simply want to complete the storyline quest don't care about IVs; they may as well not exist. But because IVs actually matter in competitive battles, most players who battle competitively will save scum to get high IVs when capturing or breeding Pokemon they want to use, or will by common agreement use game-altering tools or simulators where available such that all Pokemon in battle will have max IVs.
