Wargame Design Discussion: How to Design Games

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**Easy E**

Greetings Designers,

I decided to post up the Designer's Notes from the last page or two of the Osprey Men of Bronze ruleset. It was in these pages that I tried to highlight some of the key design choices I made, and why I made the choices that I did. I figured I would put them up here to potentially trigger some more "in depth" discussion about how design choices are made and why....

Designer Notes

My interest in Classical Greek military history started when wandering through the stacks at my school library and I happened upon a book by Crecy called 50 Decisive Battles.Perhaps you have hear of it? I read about Marathon, Mantinea and the Greco-Persian wars and was fascinated. From there, I expanded my knowledge with college coursework and reading like crazy. My first attempts at designing a wargame were based around Hoplite Phalanx combat. They bear little resemblance to what you see here.

What brought me back to this topic was Dan Mersey’s work for Osprey Publishing . Both Lion Rampant and Dux Bellorum got my mind turning again to this bronze-age warfare. If you look close, I am sure you can see the points of inspiration I took from Dan’s work. However, the entire range of Osprey Wargaming Series has been very beneficial in expanding my thoughts on streamlined ancient gaming. Going into this game, I had a few objectives:

•Keep players engaged in all points of the game.
•Force decision making
•Capture some approximation of Ancient Greek warfare as I understand it
•Keep it quick and easy

When thinking about Classical Greek warfare, it was clear to me that it was not a game for skirmish combat. Their warfare seemed to be a battle of Units. Therefore, Units were needed for Men of Bronze. This decision logically moved me in the direction of Open Order vs. Phalanx formation. The intention was to give clear tactical and game related benefits to be in a Phalanx compared to other formations. However, Phalanx formations had their own shortcomings to be overcome, which I also wished to capture.

I wanted to keep players engaged by using opposed rolls and Arête Points. I purposely did not define when Arête points could be used so players would be forced to think about when and how they wanted to use them.To force decision making, I purposely made the Phalanx units hard to maneuver. Sometimes, they would need to risk breaking formation to cross terrain, turn, etc. Using Arête Points to initiate charges and Special Rules were also a transparent and obvious way to force decision making. Do you spend it now, or do you wait until a more opportune moment? Is it better to re-roll a dice or use a Special Rule? Should I try to steal the Initiative before they can charge me?

Support functions are also a method to force decisions on the players. Is it better to have the peltasts support or to continue to range around the flank and throw javelins? Who should be supporting who? If they are supporting another Unit, they risk being destroyed with the attacking Unit. Is it worth it?

Shooting is purposely downgraded in this game based on my reading of history. The Persians and other Greek adversaries had superiority in missile weapons and troops, but consistently had difficulty cracking Greek Heavy Hoplite armor. I wanted to mirror this. This dovetailed nicely with the focus of the game being successful use/exploitation of the Phalanx formation.

Finally, I really wanted to keep the mechanics consistent through out the rules to aid in gameplay and memory of the rules. They are pretty much always a stat equals a d6 with a Target Number of 4+. Movement not controlled by the player was always 1d3 Basewidths. In addition I attempted to abstract terrain effects and movement as much as possible. This was to keep the game easy to play and quick.

There were some key components of Hoplite warfare I wanted to maintain. The classic example is Phalanx Drift. However, they would add needless complexity to the core rules. Therefore, I added them as optional rules. I wanted them to be there for those who were a bit more hardcore into their Greek Phalanx battles, but not bog down the basic game with it.

Melees can be a bit of a grind, but once a unit routs, entire armies can fall apart relatively quickly with the current Morale rules. This was designed to simulate how real-Hoplite warfare often occurred. The loss of a key Phalanx unit could send the rest of the army fleeing quickly. Most battles were decisive tactical victories in only an hours time. Armies would disintegrate when commanders or elite units were lost.

Finally, a note on dice rolling.I purposely used a mechanics system with a good deal of dice to be rolled all at once. This is not to everyone’s taste. Since most of the probabilities in the game are pretty straight forward and easy to calculate wouldn’t it be easier to use a single dice roll with modifiers? I have two thoughts on that subject. First regarding the mathematics. The mechanics I chose made the math behind the scenes easy enough for a poor Liberal Arts major to resolve in my head. The more you play with modifiers and alternate Target Numbers, the more variability you get. Much like actual Greek Warfare, the outcomes were sometimes mathematical certainties. Much of Military History is like that.

Secondly, a single dice roll to resolve all the fighting is a bit anti-climactic. It is more fun to roll up a few dice and compare them with your opponent. There is something visceral and physically rewarding about rolling multiple dice. I tried to keep from going overboard on the dice but there are some situations with Elite Hoplites in Phalanx formation and supported by Rear Attacks where the dice can really stack up fast! Hopefully, those will be an exception and not the rule.

Hopefully that will give you some insight into my decision making process while building Men of Bronze. I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I did building it. I look forward to hearing the epic poems composed about the exploits of your troops. All said, I am really happy with the work I have done on these rules. I know it was fun putting them together, testing them, and learning more about the subject. I hope you have a lot of fun playing them. May a Trophy be raised in your honor!

This was about 2 pages (in a 64 page capped book) dedicated to how and why I made certain decisions in the rules. You can see that every decision had some rational behind it and were designed to align around the core design ethos of the game. To me, that is the essence of game design, "What are you trying to do, and what are the tools you are going to use to do it?" If you can answer those questions for yourself, then your design is on the right track. When your mechanics do not align with the ethos of the game, your game is in trouble.

So, let's dig in deep. When I approach a game I generally follow these steps to answer this question: "What are you trying to do, and what tools are you going to use to do it?"

1. Determine the high level concept- Research the Concept and put together some images/thoughts
2. Determine Game Goals
3. Outline the 4M- Movement, Melee, Missiles, and Morale
4. Add Chrome and Hooks (What makes a person want to play this?)
5. Flush Out the Theme Elements- Campaigns, Scenarios, Lists, etc.
6. Finalize playable game- Set-up, Terrain set-up, pre-game procedures, etc.
7. Playtest
8. Go back to review step 2 and repeat step 3-7 until "complete"

So, how about you? How do you go about designing games? Let's get a free flowing and in-depth discussion going

**Nurglitch**

The first thing I think about, after a theme has occurred to me, is what I want the players to be doing, and how I want the game to form a framework for how they're going to play together.

**Cyel**

hi! Thanks for your insight! It really shows how approaches vary. I found the following paragraph especially interesting as it is probably the most against what I consider the current trends in tabletop game design are.

Easy E wrote:

Secondly, a single dice roll to resolve all the fighting is a bit anti-climactic. It is more fun to roll up a few dice and compare them with your opponent. There is something visceral and physically rewarding about rolling multiple dice. I tried to keep from going overboard on the dice but there are some situations with Elite Hoplites in Phalanx formation and supported by Rear Attacks where the dice can really stack up fast! Hopefully, those will be an exception and not the rule.

I'd bet 9/10 of the boardgaming forums I attend would agree that such approach is almost half a century old as it puts on a pedestal something that is a boring (for most apparently) engine element that has no player involvment (decision-making-wise) and results in the player in question being emotionally divorced from the result.

And indeed "roll dice and see what happens" akin to Snakes and Ladders or Monopoly feels like a mechanic that was popular half a century ago, with designers assuming that it is enough to give players some tactile element to operate to make a fun and engaging game. For a long time it stayed true because of the lack (or weakness) of other approaches.

Nowadays, though, randomness, and especially output randomness (aka "make a decision and then RNG will tell you if it's a good one or not") seems to be frowned upon, and for a good reason! Player agency, decision making, "owning" the results seems to create a much more engaging, emotionally gripping gameplay. Some companies (GW!) hold on to the old ways, even advertising the clunky game's engine as the thing players actually enjoy operating.

But let's for a moment imagine that a video game with a RNG element (like the Darkest Dungeon or X-COM) asks its players to manually generate all the random results. You have to click once to start generating them, pick some of them with your mouse ("hits" or whatever), click once again to generate another pool out of the ones that have been chosen... you get the gist! I guess people woudl say the game is unplayable as all those things should run invisible in the background NOT TO DETRACT from the actual gameplay. And they do, because video game designers are not stupid.

It's the same with tabletop games. Modern designers seem to be aware of the fact that players enjoy doing what they want to do, not what the game tells them to do. That being a game's engine operator isn't as fun as being an actual player. They limit "upkeep/resolution" elements, so that they are as unobtrusive as possible, while decision making and impact of those decisions is put forward.

Having randomness is IMO a failure of design as it is a way to cover up the designer's inability to create balanced options to choose from. With RNG any option will be viable at least occasionally! No wonder GW covers their abysmal balance with a thick band-aid of randomness. Working their incredibly broad system out so that every option is equally attractive would be an impossible job! But add dice, extreme results easily obtained and suddenly no player will feel cheated with their sub-otpimal choice, this choice will still work at least from time to time.

Let's compare two Feel no Pain-like mechanics. One is of GW origin
1. When a soldier loses his last wound, roll a die, if you roll 5+ the soldier survives. - in this case the player doesn't really do anything on his own, makes no decision. He just manually "cranks" the game's engine so that it can work, but the player is just a passive observer of what is happening, most likely emotionally divorced from the entire process, as a result of his lack of agency. This rule is added "upkeep", not gameplay.

the other is my random example
2. When a soldier loses a wound you may chose to either keep him unconscious until a medic arrives and heals him, or have him perform one last heroic moveand attack before he's removed. - this case is low on resolution/upkeep, there's no manual operation of anything. It's pure decision making. It's up the rest of the game, though, whether this choice will be interesting and balanced! It would be much easier to just tell the player "do this and this and this and observe what is happening". As a designer you have to carefully balance both choices, but if you manage to do this, it will keep players involved and interested, because what is happening is of their own doing!

A nice example is the combat system from the Game of Thrones or Rising Sun or Cry Havoc boardgames. Despite being 100% deterministic (well, Havoc has this "cards out of the blue" mechanic I'm not a fan of) there's a lot of tension and uncertainty which comes from player's decisions, bluffs and counter-bluffs, other player's involvment. Those are excellent combat mechanics!

To sum up - fewer dice, more agency, better game!!!

**Easy E**

Thanks Cyel. Good comments. I would be the first to admit that I have no idea what "players" want to play, only what *I* like to play.

I had tried "1 dice roll to rule them all" resolution on many occasions, and ultimately it was a lot more work to calculate the target Number/result than just rolling a few dice with static target #'s and pick the successes out. Skip modifiers and add dice instead. Most success wins.

In addition, multiple dice creates a nice bell curve of results with d6 which gives a probability curve that can be exploited by the player to gain tactical advantage.

Finally, as a player it gets boring to simply stand there and watch other people play, so there are places to "decide to interrupt" and places where you can "counter-roll". These steps mean you can't go get a sandwich while the other player plays. If you do, you will miss out on chances to exploit your opponents' moves.

That was the thought process. As you say, how do we remove calculation and provide a result without removing the tactical elements of play? Dice pools was my solution.

**Nurglitch**

There's a genre of games called "Roll and writes" that are extremely popular and commercially successful. There's also games like King of Tokyo and The Three Little Pigs that involve lots of dice-rolling. It's a perennially popular mechanic.

**Cyel**

Easy E wrote:

Finally, as a player it gets boring to simply stand there and watch other people play, so there are places to "decide to interrupt" and places where you can "counter-roll". These steps mean you can't go get a sandwich while the other player plays. If you do, you will miss out on chances to exploit your opponents' moves.

Hmm, my point, though, was that adding a dice roll doesn't really add a "player action" as generating random numbers isn't really anything personal or gripping. It doesn't matter if you roll the dice, or your opponent does it for you or a random passer by does it for you or you call your grandma and ask her to give you a set of random numbers from 1 to 6. The result is exactly the same, you get a set of random results required by the game's engine.

An analogy with card games is shuffling and dealing cards - those are elements required by those games' engines, but not really "player actions" as anyone can do them. They are impersonal, boring things you want done as fast as possible so that you can get on with the GAME.

So by adding another roll to make the other player feel like he's doing something you don't really achieve interesting counterplay at all. You just make resolution longer and share its burden between both players, exactly as if you proposed a rule that before a game of poker all players have to shuffle the same deck and all of them have to participate in dealing cards, because otherwise some of them will have nothing to do when one player shuffles and deals.

If you want proper counterplay give the player on the receiving end of those attacks a decision to make. For example - do they want the unit to give ground and save lives or stubbornly stand ground but suffer more casualties/fatigue as a result?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRBcjsOt0_g - this video is mostly about video games, but it describes the concept of meaningful counterplay in a way that is applicable to all games.

I have a thought exercise for you, as a creative person. For every instance in your rules that asks players to roll dice/generate random results in any other way think of an alternative rule which is based purely on player decisions and choices. No need to think about its balance and minutae for now, just some general concept.

For example when two infantry formations meet in combat both players secretly bid how much they want their soldiers to be ruthless. The unit will suffer more casualties but will be able to push their enemies much farther or even break them! (not much out of the box, I know

but I'm no designer)

Now take a look at these new concepts. Will your game be better with some of those player-driven mechanics replacing tedious and passive RNG ?

**Valander**

Hmm, my point, though, was that adding a dice roll doesn't really add a "player action" as generating random numbers isn't really anything personal or gripping. It doesn't matter if you roll the dice, or your opponent does it for you or a random passer by does it for you or you call your grandma and ask her to give you a set of random numbers from 1 to 6. The result is exactly the same, you get a set of random results required by the game's engine.

This is a reasonable observation, but at the same time I think it's slightly confusing "player action" with "player agency." It's true that a die roll is just a random element and that any player rolling the die can generate that result. However, it feels like you're more "engaged" in the game if you get to roll the dice, too, rather than just watching your opponent roll everything. Sure, there's no real decisions to be made, thus no player agency, but there is at least player activity.

Now, if the system allows for some kind of decision to be made on the "saving throws" as well (various optional bonuses, etc.), then a little more player agency can come into play, albeit usually at the cost of resolution speed.

I think the general idea of trying to have actual decision making replace just pure RNG generation has merit, for sure, but at the same time that will almost always increase play time (which might not be a bad thing, and may not be significant depending on the rest of the mechanics).

**Easy E**

I think the question really is..... what is the best tool for what you are trying to do?

I would also argue, based on reactions I have seen at the table; that people seem to find some sort of saving mechanism pretty exciting. Almost more exciting than simply saying, "I am going to do X instead". That seems much more procedure and mechanics driven than the roll of the dice for luck. That has been my observation sitting around game tables and watching people play.

One is purely driven by player agency, but the other players simply nod along, or grit their teeth. Almost as if they were expecting it, because they were, because the list of potential outcomes is known. Chances are the optimal outcome is also a "solved" element of the game too. On the other hand, the unexpected results of a die roll seems to generate a lot more emotional reactions.

At the end of the day, games are a combination of decision points and emotional investment. If you only have one or the other, your game is missing a lot of potential.

That being said, I really have no idea what people want to play. I only know what I want to play.

**Nurglitch**

I think the notion behind the saving throw is that there's something for the player on the receiving end to do besides take a model off the table, tick more damage boxes, or otherwise sit there and take it.

Something I really enjoyed in Warhammer 40k (until they took it out) was 'Going to Ground' whereby you could improve your defense at the cost of limiting your next offense. But doing so wasn't just a balance of attack vs defense in the shooting phase, but also reducing your initiative in the Assault phase, meaning that forcing a unit to go to ground prepared a unit in cover to be prepared to be assaulted. Of course, frag grenades removed a unit's penalty attacking a unit in cover, but for armies like Tyranids that mainly lacked an assault grenade equivalent it was their way of getting around attacking an entrenched enemy and was pretty fun to play.

**StygianBeach**

I agree, saving throws are pretty exciting. Especially when the game is on the line.

**Nurglitch**

You need something instead of a saving throw if you're not throwing dice; some way of reacting to it. I think if you get to react every time it shouldn't always be successful, but if it's limited then in proportion to that limit.

**Cyel**

StygianBeach wrote:
I agree, saving throws are pretty exciting. Especially when the game is on the line.

I guess my gaming group just differs in this respect. Manually generating random results in games is more of a nuisance for us

As we have no way to influence the dice/cards it leaves us emotionally divorced from the result and it is the boring part of any game. We are like Epictetus from this comic strip (a nice one btw

when it comes to randomness.

**Easy E**

Nice comic. Loved it.

We do play a lot of Sorry in our house, and it is amazingly well designed to give a close game every time. It is a masterclass in letting the player who is behind stay int he game.

My daughter is Nietschean while my wife is Epictetus. I am probably Shopenhaur!

**Polkovnik**

Cyel wrote:

Having randomness is IMO a failure of design as it is a way to cover up the designer's inability to create balanced options to choose from.

I disagree with this. All wargames should have some random element if they are to be any sort of simulation of reality (or an imagined reality in the case of fantasy or sci-fi).
In a wargame we take on the role of the general, and in real life a general does not have complete control over his forces. Things don't always go to plan and random things happen. Part of being a good general is planning for the unexpected and being able to deal with bad luck when it happens.
Combat resolution without randomness can work in boardgames which are more abstract by nature than wargames. For example the "secretly play a card and add it to the combat strength of the unit" works well in games like A Game of Thrones and LOTR: The Confrontation. However, in war a general doesn't have that sort of choice - "okay I'm fighting two battles and I want to win that one but I don't mind losing that one so I'll play my 5 card here and my 1 card there" - that doesn't represent the sort of options a general has. Yes he might put his better troops into the more important battle but once he has given the orders it's up to the men on the ground how well they fight, and that's where the random element comes in.

One of the important decisions the designer faces is how much randomness he puts into the game and what ways are there of mitigating extreme results. Maybe there is a pool of leadership points to allocate which gives bonuses, or cards can be played to give rerolls or other advantages.

One issue if a game has few or no random elements is that a good player will always beat a worse player, and I don't believe this is a good thing. Yes the good player should win most of the time, but the weaker player should at least feel like he has a chance if things go his way.
In a strategy game with no randomness like chess, there is little point in playing unless the players are of similar ability as the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

**Easy E**

I suppose you could look at it as games fall on a spectrum:

Candy Land <---------------> Go

The level of randomness in a game falls somewhere on this access. Some games are on the GO side, while others are on the Candy Land side. The question is where does your game fit on the spectrum and more importantly WHY it belongs there.

**Nurglitch**

Polkovnik wrote:

In a strategy game with no randomness like chess, there is little point in playing unless the players are of similar ability as the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

Sometimes people play these 'foregone conclusions' in order to learn and advance their own skill at the game.

**JohnHwangDD**

Polkovnik wrote:
Cyel wrote:
Having randomness is IMO a failure of design as it is a way to cover up the designer's inability to create balanced options to choose from.

I disagree with this.

I also disagree. And it strongly suggests that Cvel has no clue how to properly incorporate randomness, or what it's role is in a particular game.

The examples of Snakes and Ladders, and Monopoly only serve to prove that Cvel lacks a basic understanding of what those games are, and what randomness is.

Snakes and Ladders is about taking turns, counting and following instructions. It's not some sort of deep strategy game, because that's not the intent. The intent is to teach preschoolers how to play games at a very basic level. With that understanding, Snakes and Ladders is a *good* game that does exactly what it's supposed to do.

Monopoly is about what it says: monopoly. No more, no less. The game is about monopolizing resources so that the rich get richer, and the poor starve to death after bankruptcy. As written, Monopoly is an *excellent* game that optimizes its mechanics to drive toward a fast conclusion, with no time wasted on losers. Pretty much anyone who doesn't like Monopoly dislikes it because they play badly, not because they have bad luck, and definitely not because the game has bad mechanics. The forced random move is strictly necessary to ensure that players land on opposing property specifically so that they go bankrupt and lose.

If one fails to understand these basic points, then one is inherently unqualified to discuss randomness in game design at all, much less to make blanket statements about randomness being a sign of failure in design.

Randomness is about unpredictability, which is different from player agency. If you can't predict the weather, then it's reasonable to make it a random input. If you can't predict the combat result, then it's reasonable to be a random output.

Making combat a bidding contest is one of the stupidest things I've seen suggested, when combat is inherently messy. People can't even predict the outcome of a ritualized combat via a sporting event (football, baseball, cricket), where they have all sorts of information available. Even boiled down to a basic 1v1 boxing match or MMA fight, and there are still upsets. All this despite a modern era where we have vast amounts of film, data and stats available. And yet, some idiot is saying that you can determine the outcome of a mass battle based on some kind of arbitrary bid of willpower? That's completely ludicrious, utter nonsense.

Getting back to player agency, the correct "fix" is to give the player tools to influence the result. If the player has adequate information to make decisions, and the tools to bend the result, then it's fine. It's a balance of player agency and randomness.

That said, it's totally OK for people not to like randomness. If Cvel had simply said "I don't like randomness in games", that would have been fine.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Polkovnik wrote:
In a strategy game with no randomness like chess, there is little point in playing unless the players are of similar ability as the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

This is the reason why Chess is a well-known, but little-played game.

For the vast majority players, games of Chess and Go are boring. For any given pairing, they always reach the same win / lose result when playing "seriously". Once you sort out who the "better" Chess player is, there's no real need to play. The only difference is when players are still learning. The player who learns more about the openings and such will invariably win more, but this is really boring homework, requiring a lot of rote memorization.

That said, I've been trying to create such pure strategy games lately, and they can be fun, based on pure novelty. I can't shake the feeling that it's a trap, where there's going to be an obvious strategy that defeats the point of making the game.

**Cyel**

JohnHwangDD wrote:

Making combat a bidding contest is one of the stupidest things I've seen suggested, when combat is inherently messy.

And yet games that do this are either very good (Cry Havoc) or very good and popular (Rising Sun) as are other games with deterministic, player-driven combat resolution (A Game of Thrones, Scythe, Imperial..the list is more or less endless).

I don't care if real combat is messy. I want a good game. If abstracting messy combat to something deterministic makes the game better it is the way to go. I want to be a decision maker not a mindless dice chucker. I think being bent on a true-to-rl simulation which results in the game being lousy is a design mistake, pure and simple.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/164869/GDC_2012_Sid_Meier_on_how_to_see_games_as_sets_of_interesting_decisions.php - a game is supposed to be a series of interesting decisions. RNG or simulation is absolutely not something that a game requires. You may want it there, but sacrifice it without mercy at the first notion that it collides with the overall premise.

JohnHwangDD wrote:

This is the reason why Chess is a well-known, but little-played game.

For the vast majority players, games of Chess

That is one VERY wild assuption on your part. Actually two assumptions which BOTH are IMO very, very, very, very,very, very, wrong.

**JohnHwangDD**

Cyel wrote:
And yet games that do this are either very good (Cry Havoc) or very good and popular (Rising Sun) as are other games with deterministic, player-driven combat resolution (A Game of Thrones, Scythe, Imperial..the list is more or less endless).

I don't care if real combat is messy. I want a good game. If abstracting messy combat to something deterministic makes the game better it is the way to go. I want to be a decision maker not a mindless dice chucker. I think being bent on a true-to-rl simulation which results in the game being lousy is a design mistake, pure and simple.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/164869/GDC_2012_Sid_Meier_on_how_to_see_games_as_sets_of_interesting_decisions.php - a game is supposed to be a series of interesting decisions.

First off, Chess is a gak game for how many people have learned to play it, have a copy, but simply don't play it. Pretending otherwise is complete and utter nonsense. USCF has only 93,000 members, of which, only about 20,000 are adults - the vast majority of Chess players are elementary schoolkids aged 7-12, who drop out by middle school. The retention and play rate for adult Chess is terrible, because the game itself is terrible. In comparison, Contract Bridge has nowhere near the elementary school push, typically being learned during college with much lower exposure, a much less aggressive recruiting system, and not even 100 years old compared to the long history of Chess. Despite this, the ACBL has 165,000 members, overwhelmingly adults, so Bridge is an order of magnitude more popular despite the fact that it depends on input randomness and hidden information like Poker, which is far more popular yet again.

Second, claiming that those games are "good" is meaningless, when they are simply a reflection of various personal preferences. Rising Sun is rated significantly lower than Kingdom Death : Monster, which uses very heavy negative RNG effects for overall game balance.

Finally, making decisions has nothing to do with determinism or randomness. We make decisions all the time, based on limited information, not knowing their exact outcome - financial investments, making friends, etc. are all uncertainties that we invest time, effort or money without being able to foresee whether they will turn out well.

Nothing about Warhammer (or most other games with dice resolution) is "mindless", even if you completely suck as a player. In Warhammer, there are a host of decisions starting before you even unpack your miniatures, deciding what forces to bring, then how to deploy, how to move, when to engage, and so forth. To characterize that entire series of decisions as "mindless" simply means that you are a terrible player, because players who know the odds and effectiveness, and use that information to guide their decisions will consistently win out. Sid Meier would recognize the sheer number of interesting decisions in a typical Warhammer tournament game.

Again, it's totally OK for you not to like random factors, but it's ignorant bullgak of you to claim that the incorporation of randomness necessarily makes a game bad when basic popularity and committment shows obviously otherwise. Based on your follow-up, I'm just going to ignore you because you obviously don't have anything to add here.

**Cyel**

JohnHwangDD wrote:
Based on your follow-up, I'm just going to ignore you because you obviously don't have anything to add here.

Cool strategy. "Read my TL;DR but don't answer because I'm not interested in a discussion". Real winner here. Suit yourself.

**chaos0xomega**

Wow. John came hard.

JohnHwangDD wrote:
Cyel wrote:
And yet games that do this are either very good (Cry Havoc) or very good and popular (Rising Sun) as are other games with deterministic, player-driven combat resolution (A Game of Thrones, Scythe, Imperial..the list is more or less endless).

I don't care if real combat is messy. I want a good game. If abstracting messy combat to something deterministic makes the game better it is the way to go. I want to be a decision maker not a mindless dice chucker. I think being bent on a true-to-rl simulation which results in the game being lousy is a design mistake, pure and simple.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/164869/GDC_2012_Sid_Meier_on_how_to_see_games_as_sets_of_interesting_decisions.php - a game is supposed to be a series of interesting decisions.

First off, Chess is a gak game for how many people have learned to play it, have a copy, but simply don't play it. Pretending otherwise is complete and utter nonsense. USCF has only 93,000 members, of which, only about 20,000 are adults - the vast majority of Chess players are elementary schoolkids aged 7-12, who drop out by middle school. The retention and play rate for adult Chess is terrible, because the game itself is terrible. In comparison, Contract Bridge has nowhere near the elementary school push, typically being learned during college with much lower exposure, a much less aggressive recruiting system, and not even 100 years old compared to the long history of Chess. Despite this, the ACBL has 165,000 members, overwhelmingly adults, so Bridge is an order of magnitude more popular despite the fact that it depends on input randomness and hidden information like Poker, which is far more popular yet again.

Is membership in a league/federation/association really an accurate way to gauge popularity of a game? Is only looking at the numbers for one particular region an accurate measure vs worldwide membership? I know lots of people who play Chess recreationally, only one of them is/has been affiliated with any sort of club or league, etc. As far as Bridge is concerned, I'd assume the large scale membership is more due to popularity of the game amongst senior citizens in the US, both my grandparents are members because its a requirement at the senior clubs they attend (two different clubs) if you want to participate in their organized Bridge events/leagues. If nothing else, it seems there are only 10,745 40k players registered globally in the Best Coast Pairings system used by ITC, which is only 11% of the membership of USCF (or, if you prefer, about half of the 20k adult members) - what does that say about 40k? What does it say about 40k in relation to Chess?

**Easy E**

Both John and Cyel came pretty hard with blanket statements of what is good and what is bad. That is okay as it leads to discussion. Sometimes, you need "lines in the sand" to drive discussion.

The real question for most designers is not the "What" or even the "How". Instead, it should be the "Why"?

"Why am I doing it this way?" is the key question in game design. If you can answer it meaningfully, then you are on your way....

**Cyel**

Easy E got it right. I actually play and enjoy a lot of games with randomness

My stance in this thread is purposfully in direct opposition to notions presented here, because saying "it depends", while true for most subjects doesn't make for an interesting exchange of ideas

My real gripe with RNG is that for some designs (which I consider outdated) it seems to be the main driving force. I think it's a supporting actor, neither the most important nor necessary (nor the most interesting). As Easy E is saying it should be there for a reason, not "because that's what wargames have been for decades and making a wargame without dice is taboo".

**Nurglitch**

I went completely deterministic with Titanomachina because I realized it often involved choices that were indistinguishable from random chance.

Usually when we think of non-random we think of situations where a player had to choose between a payoff of 3 and a payoff of 1, and rationally speaking they would never choose 1 and so need an external, random wiggle to make sure they occasionally had to take the 1. When the choice is between a payoff of 2a and a payoff of 2b, then it's effectively random even when the player figured that a > b several more choices down the line - they're essentially betting on their choice being right.

The result has been fantastic, to toot my own horn. Betting on a particular layup involving two or three steps and having it interrupted is funny, and it's super-cathartic to pull off.

**Easy E**

Nurglitch wrote:
I went completely deterministic with Titanomachina because I realized it often involved choices that were indistinguishable from random chance.

Great point Nurglitch. I recall an old adage I was taught as starting Dungeon Master, "If the result of a dice roll adds nothing, then do not have them roll the dice"

i.e. Only roll dice if it ADDS something to the game.

**precinctomega**

Of course, in a game of D&D, sometimes all a dice roll actually adds is tension, but the players don't always need to know that.

Going back to Eric's original post rather than to the question of whether RNGs are or are not a useful contributor to game design*:

I start every design from the same place: how should the experience of this game feel to the player. I'm fundamentally uninterested in historical verisimilitude or scientific accuracy except so far as it contributes to the experience of the player.

Player experience, in my opinion, exists on two levels:

The level of the mind is the engagement of the imagination. I want them to smell the blood and powder. I want them to hear the cries of the dying and the clash of blade on armour. I want them to see the flash of lasers and the steaming breath of their enemies in the morning light...

Obviously, I don't write VR games. I write tabletop games. So when it comes to evoking the experience of the player's imagination a lot of work belongs to the player, but I still try to make sure that the game design gives every opportunity to pull the player into the experience.

The other level is the level of reality: how the game should look on the tabletop. Do I expect a player to stand or sit? Will they stay on one side of the table at all times or pace around it, deciding on their next move? Will the game favour dense, multi-level terrain or an open space or something in between? How many miniatures? Of what manufacturers? On what bases? How many counters are too many? What kind of haptic feedback will players get from their dice?

From these two questions, everything else follows. I try to use photography, video references and art to build a design mood board for every game I write (I use Pinterest for this, btw). And although I do eventually tackle all of the questions Eric suggests, it's not done in any kind of order or structure. I very much start from the vision, throw minis onto the table and start moving minis and rolling dice and writing down the rules as they come to me from that experience.

Of course, often I have to step away for a long time because a lot of things come up at one go. So, for example, I may put the minis down and then immediately spend the rest of the day working out rules for deployment, movement, objectives, shooting and damage. But as soon as the inspiration stops coming I head back to the table, start moving stuff around and work out all the bits that I forgot, which don't work the way I thought they would or which need finetuning or adding to.

R.

*Answer: you're on Dakka, so they are. Take your disagreements to BGG where they belong.

**Nurglitch**

It might be something to think of uncertainty rather than randomness, as that can include things like other players without collapsing the discussion with arguments about randomness. The point of playing a game is, I think, to work out what the result would be because the result is uncertain.

**chaos0xomega**

Yeah, to some extent I feel like folks here are talking around eachother a bit with regards to uncertainty and randomness, etc. I think all of us recognize that uncertainty is necessary (otherwise whats the point?) and that the outcomes of an action or an interaction need to be subject to some form of uncertainty in order for a game to be interesting (probably not the right word), etc. Really I think what Cyel is getting at is less about randomness and more about mechanical resolution, i.e. providing manual inputs to crank an engine in order to generate the random outputs.

I.E. the issue isn't so much that there is randomness as it is that the player isn't really playing the game so much as they are playing an engine. In the 40k shooting phase, for example, you roll x many dice to hit, a subset of that to wound, and then your opponent rolls a further subset of that to determine how many wounds are actually suffered. Add additional steps as needed for rerolls, feel no pains, etc. After that, they are rewarded with *additional* dice roll resolution in the form of a morale test, which may then trigger *another* dice roll resolution in the form of a combat attrition test (new to this edition).

On average I would guess the entire process lasts about a minute per unit on average, and you will repeat this process a dozen times per player turn, probably about a hundred times over the course of a game. In the process of working through this repetitive process, neither player really had any true agency - they weren't making decisions, they weren't even really playing the game, they were simply working through mechanical resolution - i.e. the outcome of a decision. Yet, in terms of time spent, this is what they spend the majority of the game doing - counting dice, rolling them, and rerolling them.

Theres nothing really meaningful or exciting about this, yet you will probably spend more time working through the above process than you will on everything else in the game combined. Put simply, the majority of the "game" is spent cranking an engine for outcomes, rather than interacting with the game or your opponent in a meaningful way (deciding where to move, deciding who to shoot, deciding when to charge, deciding what psychic power to use, etc.). The problem here is basically the resolution process is overly lengthy relative to the inputs that go into that process (and arguably relative to the outputs of that process - there are much quicker and more efficient methodologies that could be utilized to generate the same result, perhaps at the expense of the haptic feedback and satisfaction that comes with rolling dice), and the player has very little in the way of control or agency through the course of this process.

This doesn't mean *randomness* is bad, it just means that resolution which prioritizes randomness at the expense of agency is bad. By all means - you can have a RNG based resolution system, but you shouldn't spend more time working through the resolution of that mechanic than you do actually deciding how to implement it as a player, and if you can find ways to incorporate some degree of player agency or control through the process, then you've succeeded in designing something that is more meaningful, interactive, and deep than what a simple one-off dice roll will provide.

**Nurglitch**

Something Eric Lang mentioned about game design, which I'm adopting for SaaS, is that game design is part of testing. Which is to say that all the design in the world is a subset of the actual work of making a game, part of which is testing to make sure the game.

I've had pushback from SaaS people saying you have to build something before you can test it, but where you're just grabbing existing software off the shelf and making sure you can manage users, security, et al, it really a matter of making sure it all works as the intended product. In games I think there's something likewise to be said about not inventing anything but making sure existing elements contribute to the product in the intended way.

**Cyel**

@chaos0xomega - yes, Warhammer is like a card game where you spend most of the playing time shuffling the deck rather than playing the actual cards.