Board Game Design Day: White, Brown, and Pink: The Flavors of Tabletop Game Randomness

[@dirkroettgers]

This description of pink noise reminds me of another board game lecture on flow and fiero. The concept there describes the steadiness of gameplay as desirable (flow), which however needs to be able to produce surprising moments every once in a while (fiero).

[@jurvanoerle2845]

Do you have the link to that talk? Can I find it on GDC vault?

[@dirkroettgers]

@@jurvanoerle2845 sure, I even bookmarked it: kzbin.info/www/bejne/m2rFhWptr9-lY5Y

[@jurvanoerle2845]

@@dirkroettgers Thanks!

[@VirideSoryuLangley]

Do you have a link to this? I'd like to watch it.

[@yourMoonstone]

Love seeing the board game talks uploaded. Thanks!

[@ericfolkers4317]

I think Root's combat would qualify as violet noise to an extent. The odds of double zeros being rolled (meaning no change in the board state) is 1/16 while the odds of at least one 3 being rolled (meaning the attacker does a lot of damage) is 7/16.

[@veggiet2009]

Thank you, this is a subject that doesn't have a lot of coverage

[@AyyyyyyyyyLmao]

Quacks of Quedlinburg I think has the best representation of pink noise with that damn bag thing it has going on.

[@HeavyMetalMouse]

There's also something to be said for randomness that the player induces, versus randomness that is induced by the game. The most obvious aspect of this is in deckbuilder style games - you often have significant input randomness on each turn (from a drawn hand of cards), but the pool from which that randomness is drawn (your deck) is something you have a lot of control over throughout the game. Similarly, trading card games which have you build your own deck give you complete control over the initial *contents* of your deck - you will only ever draw cards that you personally put there in your deck - and the specific subset of those cards you're seeing available to play at any given time is somewhat pink-random (your hand is unlikely to change significantly from turn to turn except in predictable or small-random ways, but there are events that can uncommonly happen that can create large changes in that input randomness), additionally, the act of stuff that draws additional cards, while seemingly 'pure randomness' feels less random because of that initial control: you're not just drawing a random card that exists, you're specifically drawing one of the cards you know you put into the deck, even if you don't know *which* such card exactly you'll get. Players like to feel like they can influence fate. Candyland would not be a hugely different game if everyone got to pick what cards they wanted to include to the deck of movement cards before it was shuffled for play, but it would definitely *feel* like you made some choices that are going to matter - sort of the opposite of brown noise, where you still lack short-term predictability but can influence the general trend of the game in the long term.

[@Xan_Ning]

23:48 First use of exploding dice I know of is in Full Thrust (1992)

[@hackhenk]

29:00 Ask a question, don't make a speech..

[@CreepySilences]

There's always one...

[@mattikul]

Gotta love Toti 👌

[@robaustin_]

This guy is awesome

[@kevinbyrnes4081]

Geoff Engelstein is a national treasure.

[@uncannydice]

Some really good analysis here.

[@revimfadli4666]

I wonder if the player agency/decisions are placed both before and after the random process, what possibilities would it unlock? Perhaps an agency-based view to randomness would br a nice complement to the input/output one? Adam Millard's controllable/reactable split is also another complement to consider

[@gordo6908]

isn't that the case with mtgs turn player priority and pre/post combat main phases?

[@themonkeyhand]

Mansions of Madness has an ap that can track events and time so it could in effect lead to something bigger happening as time progresses. Not sure if that's programmed or just a countdown but it could be violet noise.

[@etofok]

you can pair up pink vs violet noise for opposing players or conflicting in-game systems

[@OffThePageGames]

Great video Geoff! Loved the whole thing and will be using some of these elements in my class going forward!!

[@fritzyberger]

As I am trying to design a 4x style board game that is in a way a combination of catan for resources, risk for war mechanics, and a casino table for monetary economy. I found this great because I can draw inspiration from other mechanics to make the game more unique and fun. Thank you for your research young man. Grand strategy gaming like 4x I find is a sort of making white noise by combining brown and pink noise mechanics. Anything is possible but with proper strategy implementation and tactics, it is possible to take over the world.

[@OodlesanNoodles]

Power grid has a really good economic system that could potentially work for you

[@eduwoodentoys]

Design Games really Good Idea，much fun during these, you can share speical games with your friends.some times i do this with my daugther.But most time we produce large quantity Games for the designers. Really Fun.

[@bt5270]

0:20 You guys have phones right..

[@Ggdivhjkjl]

Why isn't violet mentioned in the title?

[@matthewharris-levesque5809]

All the questions were the same basic question: How do you attain pink noise in a game with player randomness.

[@ldl1477]

Wow; this was good!

[@atkmonkey]

Would Blood Bowl be an example of violet noise? If you roll all skull dice (2% chance if two dice), then your turn is over. It is also very unlikely that your "player" dies, but it will happen on a long enough timeline.

[@SuperEssenceOfficial]

No its, pink noise. high chance of small results, and small chance of big stuff like player death.

[@kosterix123]

Diablo 2 also has pink randomness.

[@hillisko]

Great talk

[@mikiaibres6938]

Wouldn't russian roulette be violet noise?

[@Ggdivhjkjl]

No. The weight of the bullet causes it to be more likely to fall.

[@nobodyimportant4778]

It always baffled me that video games would rely on regular outcome rng so often. In terraria, why have the boss drop a weapon from a random class? Yes you could say it incentivizes getting good enough at the boss that you can easily clear it, but with the number of bosses in that game, you all but guarantee the player will have to fight the same boss over and over and over just to get a reward their class items affect. It would be simpler for the boss to drop a single item used to craft all of its weapon, forcing you to choose. Or in phasmophobia, the sheer number of matches you participate in will all but ensure that countless ghosts will never perform any of their behaviors used to identify them, meaning the investigation is revealed after the fact to have been a sham. A rigged question with no answer. They could simply have an hitscan cone firing from the player, and have it log what ghost events occurred on the player's screen, then bump up the odds of a ghost's unique behaviors occurring the longer the players spend in the hoise without those events occurring. Not only does that dramatically reduce the matches with no way of identifying the ghost, it also encourages the players to go outside their comfort zone by spending more time in the house.

[@badradish2116]

so... neopolitan?

[@jonaskoelker]

I'm interested in a more formal definition of input vs. output randomness. In single player randomized two-move games, you can distinguish between games where the RNG plays first and those where the RNG plays last. But that class of games is tiny and a poor model of the games people play. Consider random outcomes of battles in Risk. It seems to me that this is output randomness to the attacker and simultaneously input randomness to the defender and/or the next player in turn order and/or potentially everyone else. Is it then input or output randomness? If the game alternates between player decisions, random outcomes, player decisions, random outcomes, and so on-then each random outcome is output randomness with respect to the previous player decision and input randomness to the next player decision. Therefore the only randomness that is truly input-only is a random setup (such as dealing the deck). Output-only randomness is any randomness that happens after all players have stopped making decisions. But clearly this is not what the speaker means. Also we already have a term for random setup. I suspect end-of-game randomness is not a welcome design element; since we don't experience it, we don't need a word for it. I conjecture that random events feel more input-like the less control players have over how much randomness there is, over when in happens, and over the selection of which subset of the game state gets randomly reconfigured. For example, in Power Grid there are 42 power plants in a deck. During setup, you remove some number of cards (0 only at high player counts) and shuffle the deck, putting a special separator card at the bottom. During play you put some cards on the bottom of the deck, below the separator card. When you draw the separator card, you shuffle all the cards below it; it becomes the new deck. [Essentially the plants are temporarily in a single-use discard pile until they get shuffled back in]. Players can impact when the deck gets reshuffled by choosing how many power plants to buy (and by building many houses, trashing low plants). But: if you take two decks of cards numbered 1 to 42 and shuffle both of them before the game starts, you have all the randomness you'll ever need throughout the game. [For the first deck, number the plants from 1 to 42 and use the shuffle, but skipping all plants that were removed during actual setup. For the second deck, reuse the same numbering and skip all cards corresponding to plants not in the second shuffle] This essentially transforms Power Grid into a random setup game, but where the initial randomness doesn't become known until later in the game. And I would say that Power Grid's randomness is all input. Hm. Wait, I just turned Power Grid into a random setup game and I think Power Grid only has input randomness. Maybe you can transform all input randomness into setup randomness with a delayed reveal. Hm. This is unlike Risk, where player decisions determine how often and when you roll dice, and how many. I'm not sure how to classify Backgammon: player decisions (and randomness) determine how long the game is, but you could pre-roll an infinite sequence of dice if you had some way of revealing it incrementally; the structure of _when_ you roll the dice is predetermined. Does anyone have ideas about how to more formally define the concept?

[@jessejordan5658]

I like this

[@FragRevel]

Excelent

[@alexscriabin]

output randomness is good, actually.

[@Wylie288]

It depends on the game you are making though. Input randomness is great for a table of very competitive people that all understand the meta. Its a TERRIBLE design for a casual family board game. The lesser people playing have NO chance. Output noise is a very important factor for casual games. You don't want better players to have a guaranteed victory, you want them to have a statistical advantage. Know your audience. Picking the wrong kind of randomess is catastrophic. Input randomness is the absolute wrong choice for many games.