Opinion On 1RN And 2RN?

I’m saying that people don’t get much worse at probability from 2RN, unless they’re constantly looking at a chart for it and only ever play FE instead of other games with RNG. Thinking that 2RN makes people worse at probability due to it rewarding safe choices and punishing unsafe ones is frankly, in my opinion, quite ridiculous.

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If your 90% hit will get you killed if it misses, it isn’t a safe choice just because it’s likely. If those risky 90%s work almost all the time anyway (since actual 9/10 is not, in fact, ‘almost all the time’), it breeds complacency. Even being in favour of 2RN above 50% myself, the link is pretty intuitive to me.

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90% hits and above already give complacency, 2RN or not. Humans are provably absolutely terrible at probability, and skewing the numbers does not change that. It only serves to help curb frustration since the probability will more closely follow how we, as humans view probability.

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Weighing probability and what attacks are safe to make is like, arguably the core skill of FE tactics. It’s not just a thing that can be waved away as something everyone sucks at. Novice players will make strategies that come apart if their 85% misses, and get punished for it either 15% or ~5% of the time, while experienced players will know they need a fallback in the event of it failing. Obviously you won’t be going through a map able to guarantee 100% hit rates everywhere, but you still need to be prepared to get unlucky and not just blame it on the game hating you!

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Personally I prefer 1RN, just because it’s is what you see, if people is bad at probability is on them, and the average videogame player doesn’t really care what system the RNG uses besides the feeling that “corrected” %hit chance makes the game easier to play.

So 2RN makes the game feel easier, but it also crushes the possibility of pulling off really risky moves, trying to use a 30% hit attack to kill a boss is a 1 in 3 success on 1RN, in 2RN is way lower and it actually is gonna punish you if you think of it like a 1 in 3.

One can say that is “punishing bad play” but taking risks is part of the fun, specially is you see it pay off.

Meanwhile Crit always uses 1RN to be triggered, because otherwise 1% crit would never happen, and that inconsistency between how hits and crits works is rarely adressed.

“Oh 10% crit, I could use that/I should be wary of that” meanwhile “10% hit? Useless”. And yet, both are 10% chance.

1RN is not perfect and can be frustating, but at least every 10% is equal, a 1 in 10. And the added layer of chaos can actually make for more engaging battles.

In FE is not a problem of just reading probability, but that when you get unlucky, you lose a unit for good and have to reset or move on without them, and people rarely do the second specially when games are getting longer.

Now try 1RNG on Casual mode, and now everything is different, because getting unlucky is not so bad and you can enjoy the chaos of losing some guys and having to fall back on alternate plans without losing them or being able to enjoy the game without having reset at every bad play, just adapt to your mistakes and random events with less frustration.

That is all that I could say about this, I think I have rambled long enough.
So, enjoy a bit a of chaos people, things are more fun when they don’t go according to the plans.

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Don’t forget status staff accuracy which is actually a form of accuracy. Not sure how disconnects like this help mold the game around human probability problems. Since my 95% attacks almost always hit, surely my 95% sleep staff should be totally safe and reliable and not act like the displayed hit is about 10 points lower than it actually is, right?

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Im not saying you should blame the game. I’m saying that 2RN doesn’t create more complacency than 1RN due to the simple fact that high probability naturally creates complacency due to how we as humans perceive probability.
Probability is an important part of FE yes but it’s also important to not just write off people’s complacency as a problem with the system instead of how the player interacts with these games.

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Staves use 1RN hit? That I didn’t know, since it was hit I just assumed it was the same as attacks, so I never used them at low hit%.

Edit: This is actually a good example of how using different RN for different stuff can confuse the player.

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Yup, though granted this is another case of my initial “hacks can fix this” point, it’s not uncommon for recent hack designers to force status staff hit to 100% which makes their RN type irrelevant (as a side effect to the intended effect of making these low use tools actually worth using)

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Something that I think is missing from this discussion is the asymmetric nature of Fire Emblem. While the player and enemy forces for the most part draw from the same pool of classes and items there are some key differences. Most maps are designed around a small pool of player units going against a larger army of comparatively weaker enemy units. The enemy’s main advantage is that resources aren’t an issue for it. It can haphazardly throw units at the player because getting a kill on a player unit can be a huge setback, denying the player use of a unit for the entire rest of the game while losing a single unit has a minimal effect on the enemy. The player can’t really afford to put units in risky positions just to defeat one or two enemies because he risks running out of resources to finish the game.

This asymmetric nature is what makes the added reliability of 2rn reduce the potential frustration of the game. Because the player typically gets fewer attacks per phase than the enemy, a miss is a much bigger setback for the player than the enemy. Missing several attacks in the 80-90 range within the same phase risks making the game start to feel bad to play due to the player developing the mindset that the outcome is determined more by luck than strategy.

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I like dodgetanking, though. Sometimes you’re in a tight spot and you just gotta take off a high spd/luck chump’s weapons and toss him on a fort to attract aggro (and probably die). It’s funny, and with 1RN, the funniness wouldn’t last nearly as long on average.

To make 1RN and 2RN functionally similar, you’d have to mess with hit/avoid formulas, and like, no one wants that. lol. Unless you’re one of those people whose favorite FE gen is DSFE for some reason.

OTOH you could make hit/avoid lean really hard into things hitting and make positioning influence it much more, but for romhacks, there is currently no way to get enemy AI to intelligently use repositioning skills.

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You know, now that it’s spelt out, perhaps the issue isn’t with the RN’s, but with the players. If players would simply play through the deaths and mistakes, it wouldn’t matter what type of RN the game used; but if players will never own up to the fact that they have a faulty understanding of the probability of the risks they take, and then get upset when they get burnt, then why even impose randomness on them at all? We can’t do anything about the players, but we can do something about the game. It would probably be better if FE were simply reworked to exclude randomness, rather than the current situation where the player simply gambles and the game supports that gambling by lying to them about what the actual numbers are behind the screen.

That might be a hot take, cause randomness is really inherent to FE, but there does seem to be some tension between whether it wants to be a strategy game that’s deterministic, a dice rolling RPG where the outcome of any given combat is indeterminable, and a visual novel where you’re meant to care about the lives and personalities of your pawns on the battlefield. The tension between the three forces the game to make compromises and be dishonest about basic things like probability; and the game would probably be better off if it didn’t compromise and simply committed to one of the three, rather than try to be all three.

Option On 1RN And 2RN
FEHR-0

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FE without any randomness sounds horribly boring IMO, though just make it 1RN and wham bam you solve the problem of the numbers lying to the player. Still gonna have players, even if aware of how probability works, still get bummed/upset sometimes when they’re on the unlucky end. 'Cause sometimes you just get unlucky and that can suck ass losing a character you liked for one reason or another.

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I think Parrhesia’s opinion about the topic is the closest to mine. 1RN below 50 makes you less likely to write off low% hits as something that’ll almost never connect, while 2RN above 50 makes hitrates you consider “reliable” more reliable. 1RN is also fine in a vacuum, but it’s more volatile, and I can’t pretend I didn’t blame 1RN for missing several high% hits in a row whenever 1RN was present and I knew about it :joy:

Basically, I agree with “more attacks hitting = good.” That said, I find DSFE hitrates too extreme, but that is not because of the RN system in these games.

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