Striking a balance: Luck vs Skill

Many games struggle with maintaining a balance: how much do you leave up to the player, and how much do you leave at the whims and fancies of Lady Luck?

Games are fun when you feel like your skill is being tested, whether it’s getting the timing of an attack right or choosing the right strategy. The same applies to gamebooks: good gamebook combat has a perfect balance between knowing which weapons to equip or which skill to use, and simple blind luck of the dice roll.

Some gamebooks give the reader just the right amount of control over the outcomes to create an enjoyable and immersive experience. Others fall short and lean too heavily on one or the other.

We asked DestinyQuest’s author Michael J Ward how he handled the balance in DestinyQuest. “In any dice based RPG,” he told us, “luck is going to play a huge factor in the success or failure of a combat (or check). The ‘skill’ comes in trying to get those dice on your side.”

DestinyQuest leans on the Speed stat, some say too much so: fall more than two speed below or above the enemy and the fight might as well be over. But the importance of Speed is balanced between your chosen attack stat (Brawn or Magic), and your skills. “These introduce the skill element of the game,” says Ward. “The goal is to reduce the luck factor by making the dice work for you, and not your opponent.”

There’s no denying that Speed is an extremely important part of the game. Speed lets you hit and avoid getting hit, but “there is no point having a fast hero and winning lots of rounds if you can’t actually capitalize on your wins and do damage to your opponent.”

Focusing on Speed is one strategy out of many. An alternate strategy is to go down the path of the archtypical RPG mage and give up defenses in favor of sheer power: hit harder but less often. Ward points out that some Warriors have had successful runs of the game with tank builds that emphasized Armor. Or you can do what my husband did and opt for a combination of dice-altering skills and passive DOTs at the expense of speed.

Ward puts it better than I could, so I’ll let his words end this post:

“Luck is where you start out in DQ, but as you progress you will find that careful decision-making – boosting your stats and gaining special abilities – will mean that the dice become your greatest ally. Epic heroes will soon find themselves rolling extra dice, denying their opponents’ dice, swapping die rolls, adding bonus modifiers to their rolls, even triggering special abilities from doubles and other die results. Epic heroes laugh at Lady Luck. They have skill – mastery of their attributes and abilities. And that is what makes a true DQ hero!”

DestinyQuest fans, what strategy do you use to go through the book?

Yuliya

Yuliya handles marketing and writing at QuestForge, and is the self-appointed chief of keeping Chris sane (despite Chris's insistence that he is the sane one).