To do that I'll be talking about Bloodbowl and Monopoly
Warning: This will probably be crunch heavy and fluff light, but see the last post 'Fluffy Crunch in the forty first millennia' on how this relates to fluff.
Chances are almost everyone reading has played monopoly, but just quickly its a game where you roll dice to move around the outside of a square landing on random properties and buying them and charging rent if other people land on them. Its a tad more complicated than that but not much, and for the purposes of this you can almost substitute any 'traditional' board game you might have played as a kid.
Bloodbowl on the other hand is a little bit more complicated and a lot more unknown, although the recent series of bloodbowl video games gave it a lot more attention.
Broadly speaking its a fantasy football boardgame in which the ball often takes a backseat to brawls between two teams of fantasy creatures, every action is decided upon dice, and death is always one step around the corner, you can even trip fall over and die when trying to run a little bit too fast.
So what do both of these games have in common? Well dice decide basically everything. You can't chose which properties to land on in monopoly, or what card you might draw, in the same way that even a giant treeman might, against all odds, lose a fight to a goblin and die, or an elf somehow managing to miss a throw to a team mate 5 ft away.
But whats the key difference? Well I'v sort of already said it 'Against all odds', see in bloodbowl you have a very very clear idea of the chance of every action and exactly how it will play out, and most importantly WHAT YOU CAN DO TO CHANGE THOSE ODDS. Now that's not to say monopoly doesn't have an element of risk management and odds playing, for example buying or not buying certain properties and ... that's about it, if you play auctioning (which you should be) how to go about doing that.
So what do both of these games have in common? Well dice decide basically everything. You can't chose which properties to land on in monopoly, or what card you might draw, in the same way that even a giant treeman might, against all odds, lose a fight to a goblin and die, or an elf somehow managing to miss a throw to a team mate 5 ft away.
But whats the key difference? Well I'v sort of already said it 'Against all odds', see in bloodbowl you have a very very clear idea of the chance of every action and exactly how it will play out, and most importantly WHAT YOU CAN DO TO CHANGE THOSE ODDS. Now that's not to say monopoly doesn't have an element of risk management and odds playing, for example buying or not buying certain properties and ... that's about it, if you play auctioning (which you should be) how to go about doing that.
This brings me back to 'Agency', agency is one of the most important things to consider when designing any system. It's basically how does the user feel like they have control over the system. This is vital otherwise the user will just feel like they are wasting their time, or watching a system essentially use itself, or in the case of multiplayer games like the other player has all the control.
In monopoly, and many other 'traditional games' the player is basically at the whim of the dice and even the best player they can only change the variations of the dice by small degrees. The prime example of this is snakes and ladders, you literally have no agency at all and no matter what you do you have the exact same chance of any action happening.
Contrast this to bloodbowl where almost everything is changeable, you can chose not to attack a treeman with a goblin, you can mark players, you can move players deep into the other players territory on the off chance you gain control over the ball. Its so extreme to the point that, and this is very common in games of this style, 1s always fail. So no matter what you do there is a chance of failure.
Basically if the user can't affect the system, why use it at all?
But that doesn't really cover the question of 'why randomness as a core mechanic' if more agency is good, and randomness reduces agency then why use randomness at all in systems?
This is a good point, and many systems take that idea and run with it, chess is a prime example, the only tiny amount of randomness is who goes first.
But if you look at chess the 'skill ceiling' (how good you can get and how much that affects your chance to win) is incredibly high. There are grand-masters who have studded for years who still don't fully know everything.
And the 'skill floor' (how good you have to be to even stand a chance against a somewhat competent person, the 'barrier to entry') is very very high too, so a beginner would have no chance unless against someone of equal skill or someone 'playing easy'.
What randomness does is provide a quick and easy way of lowering both the skill ceiling and skill floor, no matter how good you are something can go wrong, and no matter how bad you are something can go right.
It also it provides variation, things wont always go the same every time. For example almost every move in chess has been planned out and counter moves thought out, but in games with randomness that's just not possible, so the next game, even with the exact same inputs by the users may have a vastly different output.
Snakes and ladders provides an excellent example here because the skill floor and the skill ceiling are identical (0 'Skill'). However this isn't very satisfying, but the barrier to entry is very low, which is why its almost the first game anyone will play.
So what this comes down to is randomness provides a way of making a system accessible, and also not identical, In the end randomness is a way to make games more interesting, but when implementing it into a system you have to be weary of sacrificing too much agency to make it happen. A good way of thinking of it is every time you add randomness, think both 'how can a user circumvent or make allowances for this randomness' and 'how does this lower the skill floor, ceiling & barrier to entry, as well as mix things up'
This was meant to be a short one too...
In monopoly, and many other 'traditional games' the player is basically at the whim of the dice and even the best player they can only change the variations of the dice by small degrees. The prime example of this is snakes and ladders, you literally have no agency at all and no matter what you do you have the exact same chance of any action happening.
Contrast this to bloodbowl where almost everything is changeable, you can chose not to attack a treeman with a goblin, you can mark players, you can move players deep into the other players territory on the off chance you gain control over the ball. Its so extreme to the point that, and this is very common in games of this style, 1s always fail. So no matter what you do there is a chance of failure.
Basically if the user can't affect the system, why use it at all?
But that doesn't really cover the question of 'why randomness as a core mechanic' if more agency is good, and randomness reduces agency then why use randomness at all in systems?
This is a good point, and many systems take that idea and run with it, chess is a prime example, the only tiny amount of randomness is who goes first.
But if you look at chess the 'skill ceiling' (how good you can get and how much that affects your chance to win) is incredibly high. There are grand-masters who have studded for years who still don't fully know everything.
And the 'skill floor' (how good you have to be to even stand a chance against a somewhat competent person, the 'barrier to entry') is very very high too, so a beginner would have no chance unless against someone of equal skill or someone 'playing easy'.
What randomness does is provide a quick and easy way of lowering both the skill ceiling and skill floor, no matter how good you are something can go wrong, and no matter how bad you are something can go right.
It also it provides variation, things wont always go the same every time. For example almost every move in chess has been planned out and counter moves thought out, but in games with randomness that's just not possible, so the next game, even with the exact same inputs by the users may have a vastly different output.
Snakes and ladders provides an excellent example here because the skill floor and the skill ceiling are identical (0 'Skill'). However this isn't very satisfying, but the barrier to entry is very low, which is why its almost the first game anyone will play.
So what this comes down to is randomness provides a way of making a system accessible, and also not identical, In the end randomness is a way to make games more interesting, but when implementing it into a system you have to be weary of sacrificing too much agency to make it happen. A good way of thinking of it is every time you add randomness, think both 'how can a user circumvent or make allowances for this randomness' and 'how does this lower the skill floor, ceiling & barrier to entry, as well as mix things up'
This was meant to be a short one too...
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