Tyler Thompson on Game Randomness

Gamasutra has posted up a summary of Tyler Thompson’s (Flagship Studios’ director of technology) speech at the 2007 Montreal Games Summit.

Tyler speaks of the challanges of using random generation for items, levels, monster and the overall game design. He also speaks of the advantages of using these, although he mentions how things can go wrong. There is a detailed write up about each item and it’s a very interesting read.

“All RPGs are a little random,” Thompson began, explaining, “You can’t imagine a
bunch of guys getting together to play D&D without using dice.” As almost
every RPG uses some basics, such as random damage ranges on items/spells/skills,
or random selection of item drops, it’s worth asking — why do players like it?

“First, it kind of fits into a gambling mentality,” said Thompson.
“Random combat is similar to craps or roulette, where you take your chance and
see what happens. Randomness can create excitement — a weak character could
randomly manage to beat a much stronger character, and vice versa.”