Randomness in Narrative Video Games: Aesthetics of Different Random Systems
I got nerd sniped last week with a question about applying different flavor of randomness to games, and ended up starting an essay that very clearly could have been a longish monograph. So I'm splitting it up into manageable parts - a new series on randomness as it pertains to narrative games.
In this first essay: the aesthetics and expressiveness of different flavors of randomness, and how they play against narrative. By 'flavor of randomness', I'm referring to the different ways we dress the naked PRNG (which, typically, is just a function that spits out an endless sequence of real numbers between 0 and 1) for the player's consumption: as card draws, rolls of the dice, and so on. Here's a (non-exhaustive) set of examples, with commentary on their typical usage scenarios.
Naked outcomes
This is kind of the null case; a 'naked outcome' is just the game deciding on something based on a random chance without telling the player the odds or even being explicit about what exactly happened. This is widespread in video games. A common example are all the games that insert variance into damage rolls, from Pokemon to various multiplayer shooters. In this case, the randomness isn't aesthetized - whatever happens simply happens, and the game doesn't call attention to the variance under the hood.
Pokemon players only figured out damage ranges existing by being very attentive about how many pixels are left in an hp bar, and they only figured out how exactly it works through a lot of experimentation and even data mining. A normal player, playing casually, might not even notice they exist.
The most common place where naked outcomes are used in narrative design is in the selective or generative step. That is to say: input randomness.
It's much less usual to let naked outcomes affect how a story branches, ie output randomness in a narrative system. Letting unaesthetized randomness determine how a story branches kind of gets you nothing; if the player doesn't know that the result they got for had a random component, they are experiencing the story just as if it was deterministic, so what was the point of doing all the extra work?
There may still be reasons to do this – a future post in this series is about the motives why we use randomness in narrative systems at all. For example, you may want your story to be replayable, so having the player get different results even if they play the same way might be valuable; this would then be how players would experience the variance.
But dressing up the variance in some aesthetic shell (like a die roll) does make it feel more motivated and 'fair' to the player, even if the odds are exactly the same.
Die rolls
Dice as a narrative resolution mechanic are strongly associated with tabletop RPGs and therefore the RPG genre in general, so much so that their presence can be unwieldy in games that are trying to avoid being placed in that genre. Of course, for some games, that historical connection is a reason to use dice.
Overall, a few of the aesthetics of dice in video games:
- Tactility – some games will go as far as fully simulating a virtual die and rolling it across the screen, but even ones that don't will usually include sound effects, visuals, and anticipatory delay when a random roll happens.
- A good mix of intuitiveness and obscurity – people, especially RPG players, are generally pretty good at understanding the odds of a single die roll; by combining die rolls (such as by rolling 2d6 or the 'advantage' mechanic used in D&D 5e), you can make this understanding fuzzier. Players know that advantage is better, and they know that 2d6 are more likely to roll average results than either high or low; but they don't know by exactly how much, which is helpful in keeping players from being tilted by random outcomes.
Die rolls, again stemming from TTRPG tradition, are typically affected by modifiers or difficulty checks.
Percentages
Percentages feel very 'scientific' and 'objective', so much so that there's a tendency to use them (over dice) in simulationist games or games with a sci-fi or military theme; Mechwarrior, XCOM, and so on.
I get the feeling that people tend to read a percentage not as odds for a random roll but as a forecast, and there's a tendency to overestimate the most likely outcome of a forecast. Players tend to read '60%' to mean 'much more likely to hit than not', and they tend to read '90%' as 'guaranteed to hit', so much so that you may need to adjust the underlying odds relative to the displayed numbers; XCOM did just that on lower difficulty settings.
The other aesthetic benefit of using percentages is that they feel neutral and unobtrusive; Fallen London, for example, uses percentages. Because the game was built for the web circa 2010 and taking an action involves a page load, the lack of animations and 'juice' associated with a die roll is a pretty reasonable reason to go with something that feels more neutral.
Card draws
Card games are a genre unto themselves, although it's very possible to have a card deck as an ancillary mechanic. Card decks do a lot:
- Quasi-bad luck protection: A card deck will always, eventually, draw every card unless previously drawn cards are shuffled back in.
- Decks can be manipulated; effects and order cards, reveal cards, search for cards, add or remove cards, etc.
- Cards can exist as self-contained units that hold content, ie, storylets.
- Cards can have multiple properties (eg, rank and suit) which can overlap, producing more complex outcomes than the simple up/down result of a die roll.
Overall, card decks lend themselves to a high-agency system where players have a lot of tools to manipulate the deck; alternatively, they lend themselves to a system where the randomness is more about the ordering of elements than it is about what happens exactly.
Cards are also often used for their presentation. There's a very established language of how to present information on cards which works towards both easy iteration on the design side and easier comprehension on the part of players; a card is a canvas for text and imagery in a way that a dice can't really do.
Deck-like objects
This isn't a special case of a card deck; these are systems that have the presentation of a card deck but aren't actually mathematically equivalent to one. An example is the deck in Fallen London, where in reality cards can be more or less likely to be drawn, which cards are present in the deck changes dynamically based on game state, cards return to the deck immediately after being played, and the deck itself has no meaningful state or ordering. Another example is Blue Prince, where you draw rooms from a notional deck but in reality the game is following various complex rules to determine which options you're given.
The trouble with these systems is that they are inherently misleading, and they will in particular mess with the brains of optimizer players who will take certain assumptions with them when they try to crack them. When designing a system like that, it bears thinking about:
- Whether you could accomplish what you're trying to do with a 'real' deck instead;
- Which mathematical features of a card deck you want to preserve;
- How you plan to communicate where you're breaking from it;
- Whether you want to adjust your presentation to sidestep being misleading
An example of sidestepping might be, for example, presenting cards as coming out of a booster pack - thus making the point that they are not actually being drawn from a singular deck.
A space of random aesthetics
We can think of these different approaches as sitting in different places in a space across different axes.
One axis is legibility: how explicitly a system displays its probability space to the player. The other axis is tactility: how much the system mimics real, tangible random phenomena the player has familiarity with. As such:
| Low Legibility | High Legibility | |
|---|---|---|
| Low Tactility | Naked outcomes | Percentages |
| High tactility | Deck-like objects | Dice, cards |
Edge cases and further explorations
There are a few styles of randomness used in tabletop games that I've never seen in a video game that wasn't a direct adaptation of a tabletop game.
Coin flips
Mathematically, a coin flip is just a special case of a die roll. Aesthetically though, I think the associations and themes are very different. But I can't think of a narrative game that actually uses flipping coins as a mechanic; I cite this then as just an area for experimentation or research.
Drawing from a bag
A bag is essentially an unordered deck – the tokens are always 'loose' and are picked out at random. Similarly, there's no salient example that I can think of, but I call this out as an area of experimentation specifically because the 'bag' metaphor might more closely approximate a deck-like object or opaque random selection than a 'card deck' presentation; that is, it could be a way of achieving tactility while giving the player fewer preconceptions about how the system works.
Outcome roulette
Essentially, showing all the possible results together and picking one at random, with a lot of visual feedback on how the probabilities are changing as the circumstances change.
One example of this is Orion Trail, where the game very deliberately shows how the final probability is arrived at – including directly correlating risk to the way the result is animated. I'd love to see other takes on this kind of mechanic; another analogue here are 'dice building' games where you are assembling the individual faces on a die and rolling it.