>>315028
>Randomness is not a good way to enhance the challenge of a game. If you want to make things harder, you should do it in deliberate ways like enemy placement, enemy design, increasing their stats (in an RPG), etc. Randomness does not feel fair to the player and does not feel gratifying when overcome. Long-term strategy and planning are a gratifying skills to develop in genres like RPGs (i.e., building a good party versus a bad one), but they hinge fundamentally on information and predictability. If you cannot make accurate predictions because your information is unreliable, there is no such thing as strategy.
Pokemon would like to disagree with you, that game is full of RNG bullshit and it is, let me check, the most successful media franchise of all time. You can play the game a dozen times, using the same monsters, and everytime they will have different stat distribution that will force you to play with them in a different style(especially post Gen 4 when there was the physical/special split). What you do have control over creates even more opportunity for builds and lets you salvage a bad monster if need be as well. Not that most of these stats or strategies matter unless you're playing competitive anyways, but without that randomness you wouldn't have the autistic depth the franchise has either, therefore, smaller competitive scene. If done well, little bit of RNG can do wonders for your game.
>>315028
>Imagine if the game of Chess randomly converted one piece to a different piece or randomly made pieces lose a turn or limited their mobility. It would be widely understood to be an unserious game, with its apologists mocked for being gambling addicts. Yet somehow in the area of RPGs and SRPGs there is a certain subset of fans who get away with excuses for dysfunctional randomness all the time.
You need to have some ground rules set up, of course, but nothing wrong with stats of pieces being random to an extent. In a well designed game, each piece or unit should have several possible uses/builds and the game selects one it is most optimal for, which guides players in that direction. Experienced players might be able to mitigate that and create a build they want anyways if they know the game mechanics well enough.
>>315028
>I'm reminded of Battle for Wesnoth debates where people excuse its random hit system (which could very easily be replaced with deterministic damage without undermining game balance) with the completely batshit rationale that it somehow 'enhances' the strategic depth of the game (instead of doing exactly the opposite).
That sounds retarded, random hits are bullshit. I am guessing we are talking about Morrowind styled "sword hits but you miss" battles, which are indeed bad game design. RNG damage is also bullshit, you should be able to know exactly how much damage a certain weapon or attack will do based on how high your stats are and how much armor/resistances enemy has. Random damage per hit is awful in any game, especially shooters.
>>315030
>Bad randomness happens when bad outcomes punch the player in the face for trying to do any sort of long-term planning. Examples:
>-enemies getting critical hits on players that undermine defensive planning (Fallout is shit)
>-random stat gains that make the player question why they even bothered to collect experience points
>-random success systems that poorly communicate to the player how much of a particular stat is sufficient (Fallout is still shit)
All of these either sound like a skill issue or a nitpick. I am talking about random stat increases or random abilities given to the player to enhance replayability, not core gameplay mechanics.
>>315035
> Strategy game fans often fall into this unjustifiable pitfall that both sides in a war ought to be governed by the same mechanics, and it leads to them making unrealistic expectations of human-like computer behavior and getting mad or dismissive when the computer side "cheats" with things the player can't do.
If the AI has to cheat in a strategy game, then it is shit. Perfect strategy game AI is that which is highly scripted, but can also adapt to player inputs as to not make it too predictable or vulnerable. Having the enemy cheat in a bunch of resources or units is just lazy, not to mention unfair, especially on higher difficulties.
>>315042
Roguelikes are perfect for heavy RNG, precisely why the genre has skyrocketed in popularity in recent years. That said, RNG still has place in more traditional games if done properly.
>>315070
>i am very tired of the "Git Gud" crowd and the Skill based slippery slope and i really hope the Gaming industry collapses or slopifies enoug for all of these niggers to go out of business or something, buying a Videogame has become akin to gambling, it has to be one of, if not the most Anti-Consumer industries around the block, whereas if you buy a game well, if you like it good, but if you don´t you just dumped 20$/€ into the Abyss with no way to recoup anything as 100% of game communities are hostile and will not help you at all, the current climate of videogames is that Devs are Demigods and that you, the player, should grovel at their feet to even let you play their game, no effort into QOL, side or additional game modes will be made (Can anyone tell me the last time a RTS game came with an Editor? an ACTUAL EDITOR, not "oh this game is on unity so you can reverse engineer if you are a Junior Programmer bullshit", or "oh this game has 13428374283748 third party tools that let you modify it kind of, sort of, because everything is hard-coded" , this is the cult piece, and you are the cultist, adore the god on his pedestal or be sacrificed like the heretic you are
Grinding has a very precise place in a well designed game, and that is to punish the player. Did you let your experienced unit die in battle? Have fun spending an hour or two training a level 1 unit to keep up with the rest of your squad! Maybe next time you will be more careful! What's that, your skill distribution is shit? Well, have some rats, kill 200 of them and maybe distribute your next batch of skill points better. I don't mind that sort of design since it rewards good players and punishes bad players, it also leads to some good planning on replays, since you know there is a genuine punishment(waste of time) if you don't plan well enough, something goes wrong or you're just shit at the game. Grinding isn't supposed to be fun, and if it isn't used as punishment but rather as a way to pad out gametime, then it is an absolute design sin.
>>315072
Fallout 4 came out after Andromeda, plus that game didn't suffer from bad mechanics as much as just being a flaming garbage fire of incompetence and hiring diversity hires. Fallout 4 and MGS5 are popular because normalfags love deep as a puddle, wide as an ocean open world games. You can't change this, that's just how it is and because this is what the demand for games is now. I am very much enjoying how most of AAA games are so similar to one another, then they wonder why nobody buys them anymore. This is why you don't listen to normalfags, you make what you want to make because they will buy it anyways.
>>315073
>>RTS
>Is a dead genre, it's now consigned to the same happy hunting grounds as the arena FPS, scrolling shmup, IF, or point&click adventure, existing only as a phantasmal echo within open sores engines used by hobbyists to make free knockoffs of what once was or misremembered in unflattering ways by modern games in other genres that occasionally deign to attempt references to them in shallow side mechanics.
RTS is anything but a dead genre, it's just not mainstream anymore. Plenty of good strategy titles out now and upcoming, I know because I keep tabs on them eventually. Hell, Paradox alone is going to make sure RTS is never, ever dead, and that's not accounting for Total War and other big RTS franchises, not to mention smaller games or fanprojects.