Random Seed on Reload?

[dwight_schrute]

Suppose I get beaten and have to reload. Given what I've learned about the enemy party, I make proper arrangements and prance through the fog of war toward the baddies. Is there a chance that enemy characters are positioned differently, have a different choice of equipped weapon, or have another tactic in mind?

 

I guess, two other questions are from the same category: will saves be disabled during combat and conversations, and do random monsters respawn in the wilderness the way they did on reload in BG?

[Zwiebelchen]

It has already been confirmed that there will be a fixed random seed for different aspects of the game so that a reload usually results in the same things unless you do something completely different.

 

This is to avoid save-scumming: Failed a saving throw? Just reload.

 

With a fixed random seed, the spell that hit you on your first attempt will also hit you on your reload attempt.

Edited July 16, 2014 by Zwiebelchen

[Gfted1]

^Link?

[ravenshrike]

It has already been confirmed that there will be a fixed random seed for different aspects of the game so that a reload usually results in the same things unless you do something completely different.

 

This is to avoid save-scumming: Failed a saving throw? Just reload.

 

With a fixed random seed, the spell that hit you on your first attempt will also hit you on your reload attempt.

Wouldn't that assume the same party formation, target choice, and item choices though? Unless the only save scumming they're really trying to avoid is lockpicking and mid-battle save scumming. Which would make sense.

[AGX-17]

It seems like a stretch to think that enemies would be randomly placed. What's the point of deliberately designing areas and constructing them by hand with elements like chokepoints if the game is just going to randomly spawn 8 wizards who just spam AOE spells at you through the threshold? Or a bunch of melee goons who gum up the doorway and make themselves easy fodder for your own AOE wizard/s?

[Kjaamor]

Hopefully it will be fixed seed for out of combat rolls (or ideally no rolls at all for things like lockpicking, just fixed skill checks), and saving will be disabled in combat.

[MReed]

This is pretty much irrelevant, I think, for this game:

 

In combat this is irrelevant unless you can save and restore in mid-combat. due to the players inability to exactly repeat a series of actions (movement especially) to ensure that the same set of enemy / friendly actions occur.  If it were turn-based, on the other hand, this would be a legitimate concern.

 

Out of combat it is irrelevant because the player can defeat the protection by "popping" another random number off of the stack by performing some repeatable action that requires a random number before attempting the critical action.  Using a stamina recovery effect would be the most likely candidate (if it heals "2d4 Stamina" then it pops a random number off of the stack), but bashing a container, activating an aura (if the effects are variable), and many other things would also be candidates.

 

No issue if the developers implement this, though -- it is trivially easy to do, and it doesn't hurt anything.

[Prometheus]

I think they said that you can't save inside of combat.

I doubt that there are any random rolls outside of combat( We know that dialog checks are fixed skill checks, stealth and finding hidden objects are also not random). Josh Sawyer also said that stand alone random rolls are pointless in a game with reloading, see quote below:

 

* Stand-alone random rolls are pointless outside of an Ironman-style mode.  Random resting encounters, rolls to learn a spell, rolls to pick a lock, etc.  The player is better served by having those things be thresholds (or non-existent) and giving them tools to increase their ability to meet those thresholds.  Failure to make a stand-alone random roll is not a failure on the part of the player; they just got a bad roll.  You can get bad rolls in combat, too, but those are part of a big shifting soup of randomized results hat happen over time.

[Sad Panda]

Out of combat it is irrelevant because the player can defeat the protection by "popping" another random number off of the stack by performing some repeatable action that requires a random number before attempting the critical action.  Using a stamina recovery effect would be the most likely candidate (if it heals "2d4 Stamina" then it pops a random number off of the stack), but bashing a container, activating an aura (if the effects are variable), and many other things would also be candidates.

Since the devs are developing (or "have developed" by this point, I suppose) their own engine, it'd be fairly easy for them to implement a system that accounts for such loopholes. For example, they could simply perform the initial roll, or several rolls, for all containers in an area as soon as it's loaded. Likewise, it's not exactly demanding to separately roll for all actions the player might perform in advance -- such mechanics are only really problematic when they need to be implemented by script on top of native engine functionality.

 

Hopefully it will be fixed seed for out of combat rolls (or ideally no rolls at all for things like lockpicking, just fixed skill checks), and saving will be disabled in combat.

For recent cRPGs like Fallout 3, rolls for skill checks are pretty much the first thing I usually mod in. The rationale is that no matter how utterly skilled you are, there's realistically always some variability to performance, and even more so if you're not that skilled, and are further performing under pressure. With things like lockpicking, there's also the fact that you're navigating on unknown waters, in which case it's a given that luck would figure into the result: Maybe you hit all the sweet spots on first try (natural 20), or maybe they happen to be placed such that you can't possibly reach them all without adjusting the pick (critical failure). Of course, there's always a balance the devs need to find between realism and playability, but to me it feels like cheating if this element of chance isn't included. >_>

Edited July 18, 2014 by Sad Panda

[J.E. Sawyer]

Out of combat, all checks are threshold/flat, i.e. they are not random checks at all.  In combat, all rolls are randomized.  A creature's AI instruction set remains the same between reloads, but their selection of an individual instruction is still randomized within that list (and the list contains weights, making it more likely for them to perform certain actions at any given time that they are available).

[Zwiebelchen]

^Link?

 

 

@rjshae

@mstark

I think we're all on the same page here and the only misunderstanding is in the implementation. The random element (the seed) that is involved in the equation is only generated once at the start of a session / play through. No more random numbers are generated after that. From there every time the player triggers a check, the game takes the seed and makes a blind decision whether it succeeded or not. It then considers the variables like difficulty of check, character's skill, gear, buffs, and alters the outcome using multipliers and additions. This means it's possible to bend the odds in your favor through skills and temporary tools like potions of master thieving, but the initial random number is always locked in place no matter how many times you reload or switch items around.

 

A quote of Kaz, though it has been 2 years since then.