Hey y’all! So this question popped up in my mind. Found out a while ago about the whole “some FE’s have 1RN in the hitrate percentages and others have 2RN” thing. And I was wonderin’, what do y’all like better? 1RN or 2RN?
Thanks for answering!
-MegaCowsamMan
0 voters
2rn definitely feels better imo and it gives incentive to safe hitrates by giving them a secret boost and gives disincentive to lower hitrates
1rn just feels bad imo, especially with how many hits we see in FE. Humans are bad at probability, plain and simple.
Something that I think is mentioned less often is that, even if the player were a totally rational actor that also fully understood probability distributions, 1RN is objectively more punishing than 2 RN.
Consider the following: you’re fighting a dodgy boss but you have a unit that can hit with 95% accuracy. In 1RN, that’s a roll of the d20. You have a 5% chance of being unlucky; low, but not prohibitively so by any means. In 2RN, if the real percentage values were displayed, this unit would have a 99.55% accuracy. Your odds of failure here are objectively much lower.
“But”, one might say, “would you not simply design around 1RN if this is not your intent?” That is, as illustrated by this example, completely impossible. Unless you change how hit and avoid work entirely, FE hit and avoid only change by single percentages. That means that, since the true hit of 2RN 93% is 99.09%, everything from 93% to 99% is an unreachable threshold of safety that cannot be achieved in 1RN short of getting 100% hit. Confirming innate human bias aside, 2RN offers safety that mathematically surpasses that of 1RN.
That’s not to say 1RN is bad. Some projects benefit from having greater uncertainty, either because of their gameplay focus or for narrative reasons. However, a project needs to be designed properly around that idea. Bosses on thrones with 1-3 range weapons do not a fair fight make in 1RN, unless the game has a recruitment flow that supports losing a unit or two to bad luck, or a turnwheel mechanic so no one is resetting at the end of a long chapter. If you are not fully certain of what your final intent is or what you’re doing in regards to your numbers, then imo you should use 2RN or include some sort of turnwheel mechanic.
2RN is what enables the evasiontanking meta that has been prevalent since FE6 which has decidedly not been healthy. You should not be able to reduce enemy hit down to ~30 and then fight a swarm of them all at once with a very low chance of death. Likewise, high hit rates are too consistent and make inaccurate weapons feel less inaccurate.
I like the vibe of 1RN
Despite its issues, I nevertheless prefer to play with 1RN over 2RN simply because I’m someone who greatly values honesty and transparency.
That said, for my current SRPG Studio project I’ve recently added a difficulty option that lets the player choose between 1RN (Honest) or 2RN (Consistent) before starting a new game. So far I’ve gotten good results from it and look forward to hearing what players have to say about it in practice.
This is blatantly untrue.
Things like DS avoid formula and increasing weapon variety and enemy skill fixes this issue easily. 1rn doesn’t fix low hitrates from enemies across the board and if the enemy is consistently getting low hitrates like you claim is so common then that’s a problem that 1rn doesn’t just fix instantly.
2RN makes the game less random overall by making high hit rates more consistent and lower hit rates less consistent. While 2RN makes high evasion very powerful, it also makes it more likely that a player will be punished for poor positioning if, for example, he puts a unit in range of several enemies with hit rates around 70 and said unit can only take two before dying. While 70 isn’t a great hit rate, it’s still more likely to result in a hit than not, so it isn’t a good play to count on a unit dodging multiple 70 hit chances, and this is expressed better under a 2RN system. On the other side, it isn’t an unreasonable move to set up a unit on a fort or forest and expect the unit to dodge at least 2 of 5 attacks that have a hit rate around 20 or 30.
In Fire Emblem, I think most players will play under the assumption that a 70 hit chance from an enemy will be a hit. Compare that to Pokemon where most players won’t even run 70% accurate moves like Thunder and Blizzard without dedicated weather support to fix their accuracy. The third and fourth gen games even acknowledge that those moves are less valuable than less powerful more accurate moves by putting the TMs for Thunder and Blizzard in shops while Thunderbolt and Ice Beam are game corner prizes.
Bro i evasion tanked in FE4 and 5 more than any other game in the series combined
Not to mention Fates and Engage use 1RN below 50%
Genuinely like the 1RN <50 // 2RN >50 hybrid. Discourages dodgetanking as the ultimate form of durability and keeps even relatively weak enemies dangerous, rewards safe attacks and gets more of them into the range where you can rely on things happening on Player Phase. It’s more attacks hitting in general, which is, I think, a good thing.
If I have to commit to one or the other, I lightly lean 1RN, but I don’t feel strongly about it. This is more vibes-based, but I feel like 2RN encourages the all-too-common mindset among players that low hit rates just should never hit, and high hit rates just should never miss, and exceptions are ‘oh, I’m getting unlucky!’ When a 15% is secretly more like a 5%, then yeah, it might well be a long time since you’ve seen an enemy ‘15%’ hit, it becomes very easy to take them for granted, and feel like you’ve been ruinously unlucky when one in 20 does, in fact, hit you… besides that, it’s mostly just that transparency is generally a good thing.
2RN has just made this problem even worse. At this point, IS should be increasing the number of RNs used for accuracy by 1 with each new game to keep up with how player 2RN brainrot has evolved. I can’t begin to count the amount of times I’ve seen people treat 75% like it’s 100%, only to get fucked over because hey guess what goober it’s actually 87.75% and not 100%. I’m sure you wouldn’t treat an 87-88% displayed hit in 1RN like it’s 100% and would look for better alternatives, right?
I see 1RN as no different from other things that people used to think couldn’t work just because they didn’t work in vanilla, and later came to accept that you did not in fact have to stick to every vanilla design choice that hindered these things.
Archers? You’re not required to follow the common IS approach of giving them no stats, throwing so many enemies at the player that most combat is done on EP anyway, and sometimes even tacking on 2x effectiveness for good measure.
Armours? You’re not required to follow GBA IS’s approach of making overkill bulk a niche that is either irrelevant, replicable by a mounted unit, or both, and combining that little quandary with 4 move for good measure.
1RN? You’re not required to follow Kaga’s approach of being afraid to let weapons exceed 70% hit on a regular basis and capping hit at 99% for good measure.
To wit, the 1RN hacks I’ve seen generally inflate hit values so you end up with similar levels of offensive reliability as a typical 2RN game (sometimes even better!), while at the same time making dodgetanking harder to achieve. Of course, there are ways to do the same in 2RN, I admit 1RN doesn’t have much in the way of advantages over 2RN besides transparency and I don’t hate 2RN either, I just feel 1RN gets a completely unfair rap for reasons unrelated to the mechanic itself.
Both 1- and 2- averaged really suck, and I resent them.
Two averaged numbers (rand1 + rand2 / 2) creates far too much stratification on a lot of numbers. Displayed 25 and 75 being bumped to 12.5 and 87.5 is just too dramatic in a lot of cases, and dupes players into thinking that low odds don’t happen. This was attempted to be fixed in Fates and Shadows of Valentia with its sine wave based formula for the higher numbers.
Whereas 1-100 allows the player to get destroyed because statistics are not intuitive to most people, because a normal child will see a 90+ and assume it’ll happen almost always and strategize around it being consistent and then get totally destroyed when it doesn’t, creating incredible frustration.
And in my opinion, the sine formula inherits the worst of both of these. It still stratifies the range very strongly, so players don’t eventually learn that statistics are unreliable (a displayed 75 is now… 85! still a huge jump), while also leaving things incredibly frustrating (die to a 10… 10% of the time!)
The thing I personally really like about a manipulated randomness is that it makes specialists better than generalists, something that the game’s other formulas don’t do as well. This would be important if enemy quality was higher, but in most of the actual games, enemy quality is well below the player’s stats. That’s the thing that, in my opinion, makes the overall system terrible. In most games enemies hitting is almost guaranteed on the most evasive, or becomes unrealistic on even the slowest.
For example, in Geneaology of the Holy War, a lot of enemies just can’t offer big damage against your better fighters. Lots of player units are pretty bulky in G1 even without holy weapons and this also makes ie. Arden not very useful, because having an option for dying in five hits instead of four is incredibly marginal - you can just position units while baiting to avoid these issues.
But, unlike in Thracia 776 or Binding Blade or Blazing Blade or Sacred Stones; there isn’t an enemy archetype running around in large quantities that does 8 damage with 20 hit. Enemies have better hit rates or damage, making them maintain some scariness despite your units’ available health – and there’s the times when the game forces you to charge into range of 8 or more units at the same time to get a good fight going.
And yet, your own units can keep missing these foes, which makes things take longer and just get tedious, and isn’t something that high skill units don’t suffer from.
Whereas in the GBA games, we get both! Enemies that have horrible hit rate and evasion, making them totally free kills for units that have high speed stats. But at least they’re not obnoxious to deal with, we just watch them march into their death - just boring and not offering a challenge.
So, for me, if you’re going to leave enemies as having low hit rates, then you should let them hit, which means using 1 RN. If you’re going to improve their abilities to be actually a threat, then either the increased consistency and average-player game-feel of 2 RN or the statistic-friendly 1 RN are both quite appropriate.
Despite all that, I prefer the idea represented in a stratified randomness system, because quite simply, I’m also a human who is bad at statistics. I’ve played so much Angband (100 floors of dungeon!) and it still hasn’t really rubbed into my intuition that, no, a 1% chance to fail is going to happen, you can’t rely on it in any capacity, and I’ve lost at least a dozen characters due to them failing their 99% chance to cast a spell twice in a row.
But god, ((A+B)/2) is terrible. Like, let’s look at some ridiculous things, okay?
Disp | 2RN | Sine
65 | 75.85 | 72.01
70 | 82.30 | 78.87
75 | 87.75 | 85.00
80 | 92.20 | 90.14
85 | 95.65 | 94.16
90 | 98.10 | 97.05
A unit with 75 displayed hit actually connects with the target a whopping 17% more often than they “should” in 2rn, decreasing to “only” a 13.3% boost in the sine formula. I call this “relative” change; in contrast to their “absolute” changes being 12.5% and 10% respectively.
That’s a very substantial increase and it just makes me hate them both, because it stratifies the values so far from their originals that I know even kids noticed the manipulation was happening.
I think, overall, having the randomness be manipulated is good, but that nobody’s actually made a system that only covers what we really care about – the actual tips. What people truly despise is missing a 97, getting hit by a 6.
Tear Ring Saga did something similar to this, with a weird table. Unfortunately it’s still almost comedically dramatic, but it does a slightly more reasonable job.
Dsp | TRS
10 | 3
15 | 7
20 | 12
25 | 20
30 | 26
...
70 | 74
75 | 80
80 | 87
85 | 92
90 | 97
But you can see an important seed here - By homing our manipulations to only have those hugely dramatic effects on the edge, you get the upside of not lying to the player as much in the middle, which lets someone learn how probability “should” work, but still be leaning into how humans look at the edges of chances and incorrectly dismiss the unlikelier result too soon to avoid frustration.
We could do this with breakpoints Hit <= 5: actual 0; Hit >= 95: actual 100; possibly with curving instead of abrupt jumping, or entirely with a formula like True = Disp*1.1-5. We don’t… actually have to have our curve map directly in the range, if we’re having one.
I’ve done lots of things like this with the overall point being that, and the one I like the most is 9x/8 - 6 and at its maximum swing it only pushes RNs by 6% - A displayed 94 becomes a 99.75; a displayed 6 becomes 0.25. At the previous extremes, 25 and 75, it’s only pushing a 3% absolute and 5% relative change (25 → 22.13).
Of course, all of that is pointless, because it starts to miss the point of why you would want to do 2RN: To help people who are bad with statistics. Budging probabilities by small amounts doesn’t really help them.
So it depends on what you want. In a game where enemy stats are actually competent, I think it’s better to have randomness be modified such that it accentuates the consistencies of those who specialise in consistency, while not making units that lack that consistency also become reliable; which is directly why 2rn (itself) sucks - If I give you a 0 skill unit in 2rn they’re actually usable, but if I give you a 0 speed unit they’re awful – because the basic formula at hand doesn’t do good enough a job at making different stats worth even remotely the same amount.
You might think that “speed is the best stat” has no relation to the rn formula but they’re the same statement, because one of the reasons speed is the best is because base weapon hit is so high that against enemies without huge speed stats, you already have consistent hit from 2rn fixing you up.
All of these things really interplay with one another, and looking at each one in isolation is useful but also can trip you up because they all in the end comprise one actual thing –
2rn is about making the game consistent and reducing player frustration from randomness, ie. allowing the player to feel both the joy of making a tactical decision, but also to reduce the frustration of low success rates.
You know what else does that? Units with high skill stats. But it feels bad to use only the highly consistent units instead of playing with the more dangerous ones.
I’m babbling on and on too much, agh. The point is that each option has good and bad points about it, and that someone will feel betrayed no matter what you do.
If your game has enemies with actually competitive stats compared to player units, then it comes down to if you want more consistency on units whacking one another, or if you like having to manage the chaos of misses and needing multi-layered plans.
If your game has fodder enemies with strength stats, then you risk 2rn becoming tedious juggernauting, and 1rn being that but also with “oops, you died!” sprinkled in when getting whacked by 10%s.
If your game has units with low skill stats, there’s a good chance they’ll feel bad without a corrective factor, and a lot of those have enough influence that makes units with high skill stats feel out of place.
Overall, I like modified randomness, because missing 95s and getting whacked by 5s more than once a map is why I’ve got so few completed runs of Angband, and they’re incredibly frustrating moments that make it feel like the strategy I crafted was perfect if-only-my-units-didn’t-suck, instead of like I made an actual error in counting on them, because I am one of the many people who are bad at statistics.
… That’s not how brains work
Yes, people would. As I said, humans are bad at probability.
2RN is simply a good system to give incentive to safer options while punishing less safe options. Also with how many combats take place in FE it’s just nicer to have more security in higher hitrates.
I like both. It really depends on the game. As was said above, 2RN is probably better for MOST projects. 1RN can be good if it is properly kept in mind in the design. That said, I DO use 1RN for my project, because I like it when what you see is what you get. It does make balancing the game a bit more challenging, but I try my best.
I’m a bit of a reckless player and love the heck out of dodge tanks-- not just in Fire Emblem just in general (Hello Dunban), so I definitely love 2RN a lot more,
In games with 1RN I usually basically play the same and just end up resetting more, I know it’s going to sound a wee bit childish with how I know it’s my fault, but I don’t like it so much, not as fun.
Keep in mind the formula that actually determines hit is (roughly)
(usually 60-90) + skill * 2 - speed * 2 + WT + supports
there’s a lot that can be done with this formula
2rn is just a simple way to make this formula better
Whereas 1-100 allows the player to get destroyed because statistics are not intuitive to most people, because a normal child will see a 90+ and assume it’ll happen almost always and strategize around it being consistent and then get totally destroyed when it doesn’t, creating incredible frustration.
To be fair, isn’t this just ‘playing badly’? If you will get ‘totally destroyed’ if you miss a 90%, don’t take the 90%. That isn’t the game’s fault, it’s just a straight-up misplay.
There’s rarely a turn in FE where you’re not going for 70-90%s, by nature of the series I feel that especially new players will find themselves having to rely on those 90s to hit.
It is not a misplay to have to bank on a few 90s to get by as there’s really not much else that can be done in a game like FE unless hitrates were dramatically altered to create many more opportunities for 100% hitrates.
So wait, have you never heard the term brainrot before and genuinely think I’m suggesting that 2RN causes brain matter to rot, or are you naysaying the idea of people overestimating the impact of 2RN (i.e. humans being bad at probability, as you say)
It depends on both the player and the game:
If you view Fire Emblem as more of a strategy game, then you’re more likely to favor 2RN (assuming you know it’s there and how it works) because it reduces randomness and makes planning easier, since randomness is generally considered bad in a strategy game.
If you’re more into the RPG aspect of building a narrative, perhaps you’ll prefer 1RN. When it comes to designing an unpredictable and unique story with twists and turns, and if the player wants to be a part of that unpredictability, 1RN may be more fun (we already see this in vanilla in respect to growth rates, where each time you play the game your army will end up different even if you use the exact same units).