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> When people say they want to "randomly shuffle a playlist", they really don't want that.

Same in games. "I had an 80% chance to hit and didn't" is a perfect example.



Leading to features like "Karmic Dice" in the recent Baldur's Gate 3


There is a consideration there that isn't necessarily a problem with randomness itself. (Though I agree that the randomness does bring its own problems.)

Say you're playing through someone's electronic D&D module and you try to do something with a 90% chance of success. Then you roll a 2. You didn't make a mistake when deciding what to do, so that feels wrong -- this is a problem with randomness.

What do you do? You reload from right before you tried to do the thing, and you reroll. The game can't actually make you accept randomness if you don't want to. So they have to do something else.


It also depends how well that randomness makes sense in games. In my recent memory nothing was more ludicrous that the modern XCOM games where you were upclose to an enemy and got only 90% hit chance with a shotgun.


To be fair, this is due to game devs giving percentage chances that are straight-up lies. "80% and didn't hit" is actually "92% and didn't hit" in many Fire emblem games, for example (https://fireemblemwiki.org/wiki/True_hit).




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