What if RNG was removed from Fire Emblem?

Design
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Just kind of a random thought that came into my head.
No RNG means no hit rates (attacks always hit), no crits, and no random skill procs. This would make skill/luck completely useless, unless you change what they do. You could also go the FEH route and remove them entirely, though I think that’s a little boring to think about lol.

Tanking would be a lot more useful, I imagine. Certain units might get countered harder than usual. It also makes counterattacks much more significant.

I think it would be fun to balance a game around this. I know FEH certainly has some interesting ideas, even they’re often buried in powercreep and other bullshit. Thoughts?

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Not a terrible idea to be honest. I have always thought that the way critical hits are designed in Fire Emblem serve to make the player experience worse rather than enhancing it. I wouldn’t be sad to see them go.

Having said that, RNG does allow for replayability and more variation in gameplay. Your map design will have to do the heavy lifting since there are fewer of the wow moments that RNG offers for free. Also gameplay becomes more deterministic and rote. An experienced player will know if he will win beforehand with 100% certainty, which can be good for some people and boring for others. All in all it would be an interesting experiment just to see what you’d miss and what you can live without.

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Not really bad but not really good. It would actually make the player strategize more since both you and the enemy will always hit. The bad one for me is it would make other classes that has high crit or rely on crit redundant. Example the Berserkers would just be speedier version of Warriors and Swordmasters would just speedier version of Heroes. Of course I’m only talking about vanilla since skills are a different world to explore to.

Overall, it will depend on the creator of the hack on how he/she will implement this kind of feature.

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The game would become more strategical for sure as you cannot just rely on lucky dodges.

But actual chess is kinda boring so I prefer the uncertainty.

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Not a fan, honestly.

That said, i think reducing RNG elements is not a bad idea.

Stray low% crits and the like are quite annoying, and i’d prefer if crits were limited to crit classes and weapons.

Same with trigger skills, replace them with passives/combat arts.

Although, the unpredictability can be fun in it’s own way hmmm. The wow moments and rng anxiety do make for memorable experience ngl

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Into the Breach

For a serious answer I think that having some random aspects to FE is what makes it so much more fun than many SRPGs, in FE there’s a lot of random elements so you have to gamble a bit with a lot of moves which makes it a much more human game, there will be some miracle crits and heartbreaking misses it creates a more unique and emotional experience overall.

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Now that my brain is not running on fumes at 3am, I guess I’ll actually try to run with this for a bit.

So basically, if you were to remove all the random elements from a Fire Emblem game without changing much else, it would be a worse experience. It would throw off unit balance, weapon balance (looking at you, Devil Axe), map balance (oh boy, siege tomes and status staves with 100% hit!)… it can be easy to forget sometimes how much RNG there is in a FE game. A lot of things are balanced around the RNG too, so just removing it would throw it all off. In that sense, I can see why its a bad idea. I can see why y’all were not thrilled.

But then, what if you did balance around it? How would that look? How could you make the game interesting, fun, and (ideally) replayable without RNG? That would be the better question, I think; and the angle I was actually looking at when I made this original post.

I’m not really sure how to answer this one yet, but maybe I will later if I come back to this. Its fun to think about stuff like this sometimes.

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fe12 devs asked themselves this question and the result is a game that seems designed around hits landing to the point that even one miss can be extremely punishing, but hitrates aren’t perfect so a miss will sometimes occur

i think an fe designed around every hit being 100% wouldn’t be bad if it were designed PROPERLY

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Removing randomness removes multiple metrics that can differentiate units.

Imagine you have Sigurd and Beowulf in FE4, Sigurd is bulkier and stronger, but Beowulf has a chance to do extra hits with Adept and Accost. Against an average enemy, Sigurd is better, but against something Sigurd cannot one-round, Beowulf becomes better because of randomness. Without randomness you only have strength speed and defense, which does a bad job at differentiating units in my opinion.

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Removing RNG would drastically change the type of game, leaning more towards the puzzle side, a bit more like FEH’s maps where you have to complete specific maps in a set amount of turns with preset units.

You’d also need to set some very tight rock-paper-scissor incentives to limit the lowmanning possibility since I suspect once your bulk and offenses get rolling, it would be basically impossible to break through outside of Fates-like dagger debuffs spam.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing and could still definitely be fun, just not very Fire Emblem-y in nature.

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Personally not a fan of removing the RNG, but one way to do this is to do what Battle for Wesnoth did. You still have a “hit chance” so to speak, but it’s actually more of a damage modifier. In other words, 60% hit would mean you always hit, but your hits only do 60% of your displayed damage

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Some srpg don’t use RNG at all, I’ve played an indie srpg a couple months ago that was fantastic and had no RNG elements, it was all about positioning and skill use.
That being said, Fire Emblem formula isn’t very adapted to it, it would require changing the system in depth - critical are one thing we can live without, but removing hit rate changes… everything. Would it still be a “Fire Emblem” game then… I’m not sure.

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Fire Emblem Heroes’s actual maps are already this unless they’re disqualified by all the RNG still being there, just punted into character recruitment

My feelings on this are informed by the fact that, at least until relatively recently, I doubt Fire Emblem was ever really intended to be a super number-crunchy, min-maxy, mathematically-consistent puzzle/strategy hybrid-type game, and, speaking only for myself, I don’t really want it to be, either.

The random elements are there to make each playthrough unique and to prevent (or at least greatly-mitigate) the potential for any given Fire Emblem title to become a solved game. Clutch hits, crits, dodges, and skill procs, by player and enemy units both, do create surges of excitement in the moment, but on a longer timeline, they also serve to keep maps from being entirely predictable, to make sure there’s always a chance for something unexpected to happen to which the player has to adapt on the fly.

Speaking less ludologically, it also helps to create interesting stories in each playthrough, which is also a reason permadeath was incorporated. Those clutch, unlikely moments in battles are also big moments in the “story” of your playthrough; the time when a character met a shocking end at the hands of an unassuming foe, managed to escape what looked to be certain death by the skin of their teeth, or made a big breakthrough in their training with a perfect level-up.

I don’t mean to insinuate that you’re not supposed to be engaging with the gameplay systems on a deeper level at all, because you clearly are, but I also don’t think Fire Emblem has ever really been balanced around the player taking the gameplay really, like, dread seriously, at least not until stuff like recent Lunatic modes and such.

I guess my big conclusion here isn’t that I think a minimal- or zero-RNG SRPG is bad or undesirable, but that I think it runs a bit counter to Fire Emblem’s identity and design goals as a series, at least by my assessment. I think the RNG is actually a pretty fun addition to Fire Emblem provided you don’t take it too seriously and are willing to take the good with the bad. That said, I also know that it isn’t going to be to everyone’s tastes, and that’s alright, too. Different strokes and all that.

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I think if you turned RNG based Proc Skills into Combat Arts you’d need some way to balance their use. Combat Arts could have downsides, or a charge time, or a MP cost, or some mix of the three.

Perhaps using a weak Combat Art like Smash would make you unable to counterattack for a turn, a combat art like Darting Blow would attack weakly and deny counterattacks for this battle, a combat art like “Stagger” could deal minimal damage and deny a foe counterattacks for a turn or even stun him next turn, and a powerful Combat Art like Astra or Aether would take one or even seven turns to fully charge up.

I hear Fire Emblem Engage decided to balance some of this by making each emblem’s super attack something for Engage Mode only, which lasts a set time. Haven’t played it yet. Reminds me of how Battalions in 3 Houses could be used a set number of times. I loved the utility-based ones like Stride a lot more than the raw power ones.

Giving each character a Meter for this stuff would help, whether you call it Mana Points or Skill Points or Technique Points doesn’t really matter. But really you’d need a lot of trial and error to figure out the perfect balancing between SP cost and skill power.

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