Thursday, July 19, 2007

Random Number Generators

Complaints about random number generation in the game usually sound like this:

"I lost concentration 5 times in a row! The number generator isn't random if it is giving the same thing 5 times in a row!"

There are many many flaws with this argument. To me the biggest is that when a player is casting 5 spells in a row, there are literally thousands of other random numbers being generated (for other purposes on the mud) between their specific spell casting actions.

A person believing they can decipher nonrandom events from an incomplete list of events, such as this, should surely be able to predict when they will occur (otherwise they would believe them to be random).

As a person who believes in personal responsibility, I therefore think it is the player's fault for losing concentration. They chose poorly when to cast their spell within the stream of random numbers and got a bad roll.

So, the next time that a person thinks they are smart enough to tell you that the number generator is broken, you can tell them that they are a fool for being a bad player and not taking advantage of it.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Those are wise words from the master of lost concentration!

Anonymous said...

Even if there were no other random numbers being generated between castings, it couldn't be truly random without the possibility for winning/loosing streaks anyway.

Anonymous said...

Haha, true. The people who roll dice at my D&D campaign roll 8 natural 20's and 9 natural 1's consecutively. It creates epic lulz.