What Makes A Good Luck Mechanic?

Luck mechanics in games aren’t only about blind boxes and gacha. Luck can inject a hint of randomness in any game design, and the right combo of elements can nudge players into play styles you’d be hard-pressed to create any other way. Let’s talk about the options at your disposal, from the simple to the subtle, and find out how you can put the FUN back in FortUNe.

Featuring:
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
Hades
Unicorn Overlord
Fire Emblem
Crisis Core
Balatro
Mario Party
Disco Elysium

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[PragmaticAntithesis]

I find it interesting how the "rock paper scissors" nature of most fighting games causes the players to introduce luck. In a good fighting game, every option has a counter... including the counters themselves. This forces players to be unpredictable in order to not get countered, which creates random-seeming situations. However, because people are terrible at being random, this opens up the opportunity for reads, where you exploit your opponent's patterns to correctly guess what move they'll do next and counter it. The goal of most fighting games is to send your opponent to the RNG shadow realm while you know exactly what you'll face.

[rainpooper]

Stache from Mario&Luigi. Not really because it's a particularly interesting mechanic, I just think it's funny that they canonized mustaches being tied to luck in battle in the Mario universe.

[Rogeryoo]

A good luck mechanic is when it benefits me, and a bad one is when it goes against me. It's as shrimple as that.

[leetri]

9:44 I had the exact opposite issue with the Xcom remake. It was the very final mission and I only had 1 chance to win since I couldn't possibly train and gear enough guys to replace my elite troops if they died. I get onto the alien ship, when one of those disc enemies flies out of the shadows and grabs one of my guys. They're going to die next turn if I don't kill the disc, but luckily my mega-upgraded sniper has a 100% chance to hit her shot and will at minimum still overkill it. I breathe a sigh of relief. I let her fire her 100% chance to hit shot for the guaranteed
AND SHE MISSES!
I had to rush all of my guys out of cover and do a bunch of ultra risky and suboptimal things to kill the disc that turn, but I barely managed it. That almost entirely killed my will to continue playing, and had it not been the final mission I probably would've dropped the game out of sheer frustration. If it says 100%, it must hit. That's what 100% means. Missing a 99% chance is just extremely unlucky but understandable, missing a 100% chance is the game lying to you. How can I make decisions when I can't trust that the game will actually do what it promises?

[AshtarteD]

Cannot express how important luck mitigation is in games. Hades' rerolls or Hard West's Luck mechanic to stop you from getting bad luck streaks are very impactful.

[GmodPlusWoW]

Honestly, I do prefer it when random failure isn't necessarily an all-or-nothing situation. I like the notion of having a "fumble" state in-between success and proper failure, like if a bullet almost misses, but still grazes the target, or if you successfully unlock the door, but it's loud enough to attract undue attention, or you ARE able to pull off casting a complicated spell, but it took a lot more juice out of you than it would have normally.

[thehans]

One thing this vid didn't talk about was the contrast between pre-decision and post-decision randomness - having the random result before the action and forcing you to react to it, or having the random result after the action and have it affect your action result. Both are good to have, but the former is usually better for actions that carry more weight.

As an example, I like how Invisible Inc. (an XCOM-like rougelike from Klei) deliberately makes ranged weapon accuracy _not_ random - both players and enemies are expert sharpshooters that will always hit their targets. On top of that, players always have faster reflexes than the guards. The guards, however, are placed randomly around the map, and you are heavily penalized for killing them.

[DatMageDoe]

Terraria's luck mechanic is notable due to how... abnormal the triggers for it are. For example, touching a ladybug applies a long buff to luck, while killing one or using it as bait for fishing reduce your luck. Then there's the fact that Torches of all things affect luck - using the correct biome-dependent torches increases luck, and the "wrong" ones lower it. Originally torches could give you negative luck, but community outrage forced developers to only give positive luck or none at all.
Otherwise the mechanic affects basically everything. Drop chances, damage rolls, chances for rare critters/enemies, how much money enemies drop, etc.

[Nyperold]

I don't know if this is particularly weird, but in the Animal Crossing series, there's a whole lot of luck involved, particularly in what items you get. This can have some funny interplay with the dialogue. For a couple of examples, in New Horizons, I once got a wheelchair from a Normal who told me, "I hope it's something you can use, " and a Peppy has given me her photo before, telling me I'm her test market, and that she's considering having her face put on them.

[FeederBot]

The luck mechanic introduced to Pokemon since gen 6/7. To those that don't know: You can pet your Pokemon and give them treats to make them like you more, what the game doesn't tell you is that it silently increases a "luck" stat on that Pokemon the more you play with it. This "luck" stat can manifest itself into something like critting when you shouldn't or survinvg a hit with 1 HP when you shouldn't, and the game will tell you that this is happening because of "the bond you share". It's pretty interesting at first, but it can almost feel like you're cheating when you're fighting battles with higher stakes. The bad part about it, you can't disable this, so the only way for you to not get this "luck" stat is to not pet your Pokemons at all, which is kinda bad for some people who still wants to pet their Pokemons without feeling like they're cheating, but who knows, maybe I'm just the minority.

[wrenbeck]

Shout-out to New Vegas for giving Luck a use outside combat (namely in the game's many casinos; the higher your luck, the higher you are of "feeling lucky" and lining up the reels on the slot machines, getting the ball to hit the righs segment of a roulette wheel, or getting a good deal in blackjack.)

[cheyenneoliver]

I'm surprised there was no mention of Pokemon, given how infamous it is for leaving you at the mercy of RNG. "Can I get a crit that bypasses the opponent's defense buffs?", "Oh no, I'm paralyzed! Will I be able to attack next turn, or will I be fully paralyzed?", "Is my will o wisp attack gonna land, or will I keep consecutively missing it, causing the game devs to buff its accuracy from the next generation onward?"

[atsukana]

D&D (and subsequently BG3) is a game built on infulencing the die rolls for both narrative value, and to highlight character strengths and weaknesses.

A character with a good athletics will be able to get a large bonus to rolls. Making them inherently higher than other people’s on average. You can take feats such as sharpshooter that make you more likely to miss, in return for getting a large bonus to damage. A good DM will turn both success and failure into narrative value meaning that a player shouldn’t feel completely bad (missing 5 attacks still hurst lol). That last part I am still imrpoving on.

[nopeleader]

ah yes, my favourite game mechanic
rng

rigged number generator

[Connor_Moore]

I would’ve loved to see Peglin as part of the deck building section. Luck in this game can be viewed as the probability of achieving a damage outcome or avoiding a damage taken, but there are many different paths for you to get there. The luck factors into your dexterity shooting your orbs into chaotic system of the peg board; you may get a lucky run out, but you might not. Even as you improve your deck and gain really powerful relics, you’re always fighting luck, a point that I think could’ve maybe added more to the discussion. I think Peglin really masterfully shows how luck can be both your biggest friend and your biggest adversary in a game.

[NachoAdventurer]

I find very interesting in Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 the Treasure Hunting stages, changing the pieces location every time to make sure every attempt you get on the stage is completely different. In replaying these stages you get better and better identifying every possible spot an emerald can spawn in Adventure 1 and insta catching the hints with only the first one in adventure 2. Also knowing how to navigate through the stage faster. Making going fast on these stages a decision making depending on your luck

[ivanbluecool]

I like when the game gives you chances to adjust your crit value and not when it's affecting the drop of an item which makes it more rng than actual luck wasting time to grind. Wish games could fix that by offing enough of one species you get the items to drop every time.

[coreymyers]

If luck can be affected by skill, you must make sure the player does know how to affect your luck.
If luck is some random roll, make sure the roll is random and the luck does work. Otherwise, why have it.

[coreymyers]

The Wheel of fortune in Balatro says it has a 1/4 chance, but it sure doesn’t feel like it.

[jacobwansleeben]

The way I see it, a 'good' luck mechanic is one that either doesn't cause a large amount of variation in potential outcomes (specifically in regards to how effective you are in the gameplay), or one that can be circumvented via strategical methods that are complex, interesting, and engaging.


Edit: As an example of the latter, Sushi Go and Coral Reef are two extremely simple card games that are largely luck-based due to being card-drafting games. However, they're also quite strategic in that they challenge you to make decisions each turn based on what you think is most likely to get you a lot of points and/or deny a lot of points to your opponent(s).

An example of the former is ZZZ because gacha mechanics don't affect the player's overall power very much, especially if each character controls very similarly and is well-balanced, or the gacha unlocks are purely cosmetic.