Random events are always a double-edged sword in game design. On the one hand you can keep players excited by the "what's behind the next corner" feel, especially if they're replaying. On the other hand, random events can seem so arbitrary that they're completely unfair, even stupid. So what would you need to know to manage these random situations: 1) You're flying a ship whose engine has been blasted to pieces and patched back together. The engineer warns that repairs will probably only hold for another 3 or 4 days, and leaking radiation may even attract predatory pirates. 2) When you get to port, astroengineering firms tell you they can fix your ship, but ultimate repair prices depend on what they find. Some are more reputable than others, and this can not only affect the price, but whether or not they're incompetent/sneaky enough to do more damage as they try to fix things. 3) Later, you're one of several ships racing to claim rich asteroids in a newly opened system. Initial scans reveal possible promising rocks, but never a guarantee. You have to weigh the risk of deploying and defending a mining team to test drill each candidate versus covering a larger range of territory. With each candidate, the estimated yeild spikes and dips as the team drills samples, so what looked barren or promising can ultimately turn out, days later, to be a wash or gold strike. 4) You dock with a derelict starship. Registry records show it was a lost transport, possibly working for blacklisted research company. On board is a silent mutation which doesn't manifest until days later. One by one your crew begin to become withdrawn or extremely violent, and you must race against time before your ship becomes yet another derelict. What do you need to know in these situations to weigh the risk? Is a simple percentage or set of percentages with attached outcome descriptions enough, or too ham-fisted?

Probabilities and consequences, and the knowledge that, long-term, unfavorable outcomes do not immediately preclude you from success. The problem with these situations in many games is that the long-term risk is too high: pick the wrong choice and it's Game Over. A more intelligent design allows you to recover from unfortunate events through shrewd management and strategic play.

The math is useful, but it's really the ethical guarantee that this is not a "Bow before me, the Game Designer!" cheap-mechanism-to-end-your-game-and-force-you-to-replay-most-of-the-galaxy that's the deal maker. Or breaker.

A bit off the thrust of the topic, but my problem with random events is that they can easily reveal the "man behind the curtain" if they occur repeatedly. However, if you are going to use them:

Generally, if these are things like you have mentioned, I like to give players a way to turn them "off". Don't like having to patch your engine together, then purchase a spare engine or a containment field or don't overstrain the engines, etc.

Also, if you put the player in a bad situation as the result of a random event, it can get in the way of better content that is carefully planned to put the player at risk without making the challenge overwhelming or heavy-handed. Okay, so you've just saved the princess from the Death Star. . . now is probably not the time to have an engine failure.

Personally, I think "random" events are generally much better when they are't random at all. Randomizing is cheap content. . . it can work well for indy content or budget software, but it isn't going to send people out to spend $50 on a title.

I think it depends on the circumstances, i wouldn't want to have my engine fail while being hammered by pirates and my entire crew going crazy from a mutagentic virus we picked up all at the same time, and at the end of the day getting screwed for parts when trying to fix my battered ship thus making the whole derlict run a waste of time. As long as their kept generally mutually exclusive.

-Things like potential engine failure when my engineer patched up the engine i could easily deal with, even expect though i'd like him to tell me in no uncertain terms "it might not hold for long", this way i can factor it into whatever future plans i make.

-Being screwed on repairs randomly would kindof annoy me, thats something i'd like to control through bartering skills or other cirumstances, though i suppose sometimes we just wouldn't have a choice. I think your hardware should also factor in, since some equipment is more common and easily fixed than others. So say you have an Uber-Lightdrive, finding replacement parts for it would cost you a left nut because its a top of the line drive and generally expensive, where as having the Cheap-Master3000 would allow you to pickup replacement parts out of any dumpster in the galaxy.

-Mining and drilling seems like it would be more a matter of reliable intel and equipment for both detecting and mining equipment. If i spent 10,000 creds on a top of the line scanner, then i should be able to more easily detect potentially good sites over the people who randomly pick a potentially good spot and setup camp. Of course its no guarentee, but it should improve my odds of finding a good spot. (unless you have things like sensor echo's, then it would be upto the player to figure out the pattern and find the "sweet spot").

-Docking with an unknown ship is always a risk, so i would expect the possibility of there being an alien onboard that kisses on the first date. But it would make sense if i could follow quarentine protocols for the poeple who went across to it, and weight the potential risks/benefits from initial scans. (like it just floating there, fully functional with no apparent outer damage would make me rather suspicious and cause me to take further precautions when going over). This could also be a factor of whether or not you bought good enough equipment for your medbay, or proper bio-hazard suits before hand.

All in all random is good, but the player should be able to tip the scales in his favor and have a better chance of defusing a potentially bad situation with forethought and planning.

I think that an old classic, nethack, is the perfect example of this. Vile things can happen, like getting food poisoning, but there are things you can do to prevent this from being a problem, like carrying a unicorn horn, not quaffing unidentified potions, and not eating rotten corpses. Sam goes for a spaceship. if you go to a dealer who has a crappy reputation, expect to get screwed. A bad repair job will give you a working for a certain amount of time, but stress it a little, and it craps out. Details about when and why it took a dump on you are known only to the engineer and God.


The only reason to use random numbers in a game is to simulate some process that is too complex and minute to be worth modeling. Do not bother to read the following paragraph, as it is boring, overly technical, and complete BS

On a space ship, the engine dies because a lazy repairman didn't tripple check all his solder points to make sure they were properly reinforced, and did a weld with insufficeient flux, resulting in air bubbles in the weld. when your ship is jostled by an explosion, or the natural vibration of the engine, the unreinforced solder joint to a backup auctuator works itself loose as a result of said jarring/vibration, and the flailing power cable connects with the part attached to the poor weld, which is normally grounded to an ion emitter on the outer hull, but the air bubbles in the weld increase it's electrical impedence, the weld heats up, fails, and your engine goes KA-CHUNK and falls out of the back of your ship.

Resume reading here

Now, you could model all of that, but there's really no point: it's too much work to simulate it all just for a game that doesn't deal primarily with spaceship engines. The game is about spaceships, no thier engines, so this is too much detail. far better to give the firm that does the repairs a float that describes thier respectability on a scale from 0 to 1, and make htat the chance of them screwing up your engines. if they do screw up your engines, use the same float and a random number to find out how bad they screwed up, and your engines have that chance of failing every minute of gameplay. If your ship has an engineer, then compare his skill to how badly theyu screwed up, to see if he figures it out or not. Simplicity.

This is the only application of random numbers in a game that I can figure out.Can anyone think of any others?

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What do you need to know in these situations to weigh the risk? Is a simple percentage or set of percentages with attached outcome descriptions enough, or too ham-fisted?

Percentages are fine, but to sing my usual refrain: hide the numbers...

Reflect the percentages in other ways. To take your "repair shop" example, you could do the following:

• Reflect the shop's popularity and level of business in its appearance. A shop that doesn't have spare parts and tools around everywhere probably doesn't see many ships. Why's that then?
  
• Allow the player to walk around the spaceport and talk to other captains about their experiences with the local firms.
  
• Have information about previous visits to a shop readily to hand (i.e. you go there and it pops up in the UI).
  
• Let the player have their engineer come with and 'get a feel' for a shop. (The tradeoff is that the engineer then doesn't get any R&R, which would have improved their morale and stress levels).
  

It's really a question of strategy versus tactics. Do you plan things out ahead, gather data on the probabilities and possible outcomes beforehand (strategy), or do you just dive in head-first and deal with things as they're thrown at you (tactics)? Arbitrary encounters aren't popular with the strategic players, but keep things interesting for the tactical guys. The optimal balance between the two is something that will differ for each player, so the biggest win will probably be to assess where that balance is based on the player's actions and adjust your randomness accordingly.

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The engineer warns that repairs will probably only hold for another 3 or 4 days, and leaking radiation may even attract predatory pirates. ... What do you need to know in these situations to weigh the risk?

In this particular example, I'd say I need to know exactly that much! :-)

The engineer probably wouldn't be sure himself of what the engine is likely to do and a specific number would be either boring or misleading. The situation you describe would be interesting and leave the player seriously concerned about the situation. If you said, "47% chance of blowing up" the player would be like, "screw that I'll reload my last savegame". But saying "we've taken damage and I don't know if we can make it back to port! (she cannae taken any more cap'n!)" is genuinely interesting. Would the player be able to minimise the harm to the engines by travelling slowly? Would that also make them less obvious to the pirates due to lowered emissions, but more vulnerable to the pilots if they are caught? Could they save the situation in any other way than reaching port - sending out a help beacon (risking the pirates again), or some other idea they might come up with?

In other cases, it's not so inviting. If you do get back to port, the engineers can take their time, assess the damage, and see what materials are available. They can probably give a very specific assessment of the situation. (Incompetence or sneakiness at this point probably isn't very fair, as in real life we get so much of that from body language and instinct, which a computer game can't portray).

Likewise, the virus idea... would the player know or be able to guess it was because of the ship they boarded on? Would they be able to recognise what was happening, or dismiss it as a game bug? If someone you've known for ten years starts acting violently you get concerned. If a game character starts acting violently you don't know if that's normal or not.

In summary... it varies with circumstance. In some cases being "fuzzy" would be a genuinely interesting game mechanic, especially if well handled. In others it would just be annoying. Knowing which to use when would be the mark of a good game designer - or, the result of good focus testing. :-)

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Original post by Gyrthok I think it depends on the circumstances, i wouldn't want to have my engine fail while being hammered by pirates and my entire crew going crazy from a mutagentic virus we picked up all at the same time, and at the end of the day getting screwed for parts when trying to fix my battered ship thus making the whole derlict run a waste of time. As long as their kept generally mutually exclusive.

Actually, the engine failure after saving the princess *could* be considered an interesting part of the story, but that's off-topic :) I know what you mean.
The point is that eventually some random events will overlap, creating impossible situations. The player should only be able to deal with 1 or 2 at a time.
So there must be a system in place that doesn't let bad random events happen when the player already has his hands full -- if you know anything about probabilities, then you know these situations cannot be dismissed, they *will* happen!
It could be something like a system of points based on the difficulty of an encounter. You sum up the points of the current situations to see if a threshold is reached. If it is, no more random content will be created, at least until the problems are solved, decreasing the counter again and making room for more nerve-wrecking experiences :)
As a bonus, this maximum threshold could be defined by the player as the "difficulty" of the game!

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-Mining and drilling seems like it would be more a matter of reliable intel and equipment for both detecting and mining equipment. If i spent 10,000 creds on a top of the line scanner, then i should be able to more easily detect potentially good sites over the people who randomly pick a potentially good spot and setup camp. Of course its no guarentee, but it should improve my odds of finding a good spot. (unless you have things like sensor echo's, then it would be upto the player to figure out the pattern and find the "sweet spot").

Hey, I just had this cool idea for the interface of a mining sonar: instead of showing you the exact location or area where the good stuff is, it gives you fuzzy directions. Let me explain. Picture a radar in your head: instead of a single rotating scan line, it would show lines in all directions; but these would be stronger in the directions of big or nearby resources, and weak or non-existant otherwise.
On the technical side, what I'm imagining would be implemented with a fan of triangles, and the outer vertices would change their alpha blending based on the resources in that direction. It doesn't have to be like this... but it would be really cool if you had something that resembles a sonar, but looks much more high-tech :)

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So there must be a system in place that doesn't let bad random events happen when the player already has his hands full -- if you know anything about probabilities, then you know these situations cannot be dismissed, they *will* happen! It could be something like a system of points based on the difficulty of an encounter. You sum up the points of the current situations to see if a threshold is reached. If it is, no more random content will be created, at least until the problems are solved, decreasing the counter again and making room for more nerve-wrecking experiences :) As a bonus, this maximum threshold could be defined by the player as the "difficulty" of the game!

I disagree. I think that random events will eventually overlap in a bad way, as you said, but I tend to think that nethack has the right Idea here. Random bad events are pretty rare by themselves. There are, however, certain things you can do to affect thier frequency of occourence and magnitude of effect. Like in real life, There are tings you can do that will increase risk, and things that will decrease risk. Risk management is just part of the game, and if you do it poorly, you get screwed. if you do it well, it takes some serious bad luck to take you down.

I think what'd I'd need would be the ability to see or figure out the cause of the random effect. The fact that my crew going nuts because of a ship we recently visited would more likely occure to a captain or a doctor but not necissarily the player. Even if you don't hand the answer to the player on a silver platter, the ability to come to the answer of what happened through maybe a log or talking to your crew I think would give me some sense that I could learn from my mistakes and avoid them in the future. At the very least, be able to view a log of events to track back to possible causes of a problem. I suppose being able to talk to crew or other people about a decision before I make it would help put me at ease too.