Does anyone else kinda hate RNG in Doom?

[plums]

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Supercharge yet, as one of its touted features is no damage randomness, and it works as a general-purpose gameplay mod (I think).
 

Quote

Normalized damage across the board! Each player and monster attack now does a set, non-random amount of damage. The non-random values are generally what the average random version would be. A projectile formerly dealing between 10 and 20 damage would now do 15, for example. 

 

 

Personally I like randomness. Especially Heretic's weird and unbalanced drops. Relinquish your illusions of control and enjoy the surprises that randomness brings.

[Caffeine]

Honestly, the RNG in Doom is pretty bad: by which I mean the actual random number generator. How it then determines damage rolls with modifiers is also bad. I understand given the age of the original game that it needed a simple RNG that ran quickly on hardware of the time, given how many times per game tic it might need to be called.

 

The one silver lining of the bad RNG of the game is it enables amazing TAS runs such as pacifist MAP30. While technically feasible on any PRNG, Doom's is a bit easier to exploit than more modern algorithms.

 

Spoiler

 

 

[ObserverOfTime]

I personally like it. There's a certain tension knowing I could survive an Imp fireball at 25 health or that I could be dead on the next hit. It keeps me on my toes and sometimes leads to riskier behavior on my end. If I am low on health and I see enemies for example, I might be more inclined to rush through to see if I can find more health pickups instead of taking a slower and more methodical approach.

 

What I do think is unfair is the "predictable" randomness. Sometimes you wake up a closet full of revenants and 3 out of 4 rockets fired by them are all homing, because they were all instantiated by the same call to the RNG function (as opposed to calling it once for each revenant that wakes up). This bothers me way more than the random damage rolls because it makes for some impossible situations at times.

 

I do wish that berserk punches had a fixed damage though. Having to berserk punch an Imp like four times is just silly. A singular berserk punch should kill Imps, Zombie men, Shotgunners and Chaingunners 100% of the time, every time!

[Billa]

Quote

Sometimes you wake up a closet full of revenants and 3 out of 4 rockets fired by them are all homing, because they were all instantiated by the same call to the RNG function (as opposed to calling it once for each revenant that wakes up).This bothers me way more than the random damage rollsbecause it makes for some impossible situations at times.

 

This isn't how it works, homing rockets use the global timer - it depends on whether the rocket fired on an even or odd tic. There is no RNG value "reuse", every call to RNG increments the index, even if there are multiple calls within a game tic. How would it be 3/4 if the value was reused each time?

 

I agree with everyone about the Berserk damage, having done Tyson runs that depend on getting consistently good rolls. Every other weapon in the game has some padding to make it less RNG - the rocket launcher deals 110 in splash, more if you aim your rockets well and hit multiple enemies with it, shotguns/BFG fire so many traces with each hitscan attack that it creates a bell curve, and likewise you have to fire so much chaingun/plasma to deal decent damage that it averages out the rolls. Berserk is a flat 20-200 and you can't do anything about it. The ranges are pretty ridiculous, a Baron for example can take 5 punches or 50 - with the most common being 7-13.

 

[THT]

As others have said, it spices things up. If, say I take that 80-damage rocket from 100% health, I can't reliably run past those hitscanners anymore and thus whole strategies change. It engages your decision-making and makes for a more dynamic experience. Somehow I find it almost always works that when I take a hit that feels like a glancing blow it gets a low roll but that's probably confirmation bias...
Either way, Doom lacks accurate aiming--you're simply looking to hit the target with as many shots as possible--so randomized damage feels at-home here where it would be frustrating in a game where you can actually make a headshot and roll a dud.

[zokum]

5 hours ago, Billa said:

 

This isn't how it works, homing rockets use the global timer - it depends on whether the rocket fired on an even or odd tic. There is no RNG value "reuse", every call to RNG increments the index, even if there are multiple calls within a game tic. How would it be 3/4 if the value was reused each time?

 

I agree with everyone about the Berserk damage, having done Tyson runs that depend on getting consistently good rolls. Every other weapon in the game has some padding to make it less RNG - the rocket launcher deals 110 in splash, more if you aim your rockets well and hit multiple enemies with it, shotguns/BFG fire so many traces with each hitscan attack that it creates a bell curve, and likewise you have to fire so much chaingun/plasma to deal decent damage that it averages out the rolls. Berserk is a flat 20-200 and you can't do anything about it. The ranges are pretty ridiculous, a Baron for example can take 5 punches or 50 - with the most common being 7-13.

 

If I'm not mistaken, the tic they wake up matters. Even or odd tics lead to a revenant firing homing missiles 75% or 25% of the time. With 4 waking up at once, it's fairly reasonable that they can fire 75% homing. Decino has a long explanation of the algorithm involved. A revenant is forever stuck in the high or low homing mode.

You basically have two sub types of revenant, the one that fires mostly dumb missiles and the one that fires mostly homing. You won't need much data to figure out to a high degree of certainty which tic type you got. This is probably a lot meaner on nightmare skill.

[baja blast rd.]

On 2/12/2024 at 11:25 PM, plums said:

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Supercharge yet

Well, you were the first post of page two, which is pretty early. 

[Maximum Matt]

I agree that the berserk fist damage shouldn't be randomised - it should be max damage all the time.  Nothing's worse than having your screen all angry red and you can't even drop a bunch of imps with one hit

[besus]

I absolutely fucking despise how large the rng damage range is and how uniform its distribution is.

[Kinetic]

A lot of this game is pretty predictable already even the ones involving damage rolls. HKs and spiders die in 3 SSG/rockets the overwhelming majority of the time, same for revs with 2 rocket/SSG, pinkies in 1 SSG, cybers dying in 2 BFG if you know how to use BFG, viles in 4 SSG, etc.. It's still pretty predictable imo for scenarios where there's more commonly 2 outcomes, such as barons taking 5-6 SSG/rocket, mancs taking 3-4 SSG/rocket, viles taking 3-5 rockets, pinkies taking 2-3 SG, imps taking usually 1 SG but sometimes 2, cacos/PEs taking 2-3 SSG/rocket, etc.. I'll fire 4 rockets at a vile, but i know to double check if he dies since it's common that he doesn't, so it's not predictable per se more than it is you know it's either going to die or not and there's a good chance of either happening.

 

Anyways like others have said the rng the game does have makes a lot more things a read-and-react type of gameplay, which I prefer.

 

Spoiler

I would like to counter the point about berserk rng though and how people hate it, i actually really like it. It's very funny that it's damage is all over the place, and that a vile can die in like 4 punches or 12+. Also, in casual play ive never found it that bad, probably because mappers usually give other options for weapons. All the other weapons are pretty consistent in the damage they deal relative to the enemies you face, so it's actually awesome that the berserk exists as a weapon that can either decimate the monster(s) in front of you or just completely fail at its job, it's just very funny. It's only in speedrunning that berserk rng really messes things up, but I don't blame the berserk I blame the run and myself for running a map to a degree of optimization that damage rng for berserk (or chainsaw) matters. It's like deciding to run a map with elastic collision like you know what youre getting yourself in to.

 

Summary ^^ berserk is awesome cuz its rng is funny and it's your fault if u speedrun with it

On 2/12/2024 at 5:43 AM, slowfade said:

It's kind of useful in speedrunning. Most of the time you get killed, sure, but sometimes you lose hardly any health and something that seemed impossible becomes viable.

i know youre a speedrunner yourself slowfade, but not sure if you've run much outside of stroller, but rng is actually consistently the biggest issue in speedrunning for pretty much every other category and specifically with regards to optimization in many categories/runs.

 

Or maybe the biggest issue in speedrunning is being bad at it and thus needing to rely on rng to get an optimal time ^_^

[Maribo]

When you play this game from the angle of optimization, efficiency, speed -- whatever term you prefer that more or less boils down to "getting good", it's not the monster damage RNG that starts to get to you. The behavior of the blockmap, in conjunction with the damage RNG of your own weapons, is what hurts much more. Every time you shoot an imp with the regular shotgun and it survives, you probably lost a pellet to blockmap, spread, or just rolled low. Every time you don't single punch an imp, you rolled low. Fat fuck mancubus/arachnotron decides to park on top of a blockmap line, your SSG blast voids half of its pellets. Things like this happen all the time and once you start seeing them, it's impossible to unsee them, and many instances of imperfection in your play (on a micro level like this, I mean) can actually be chalked up to the game being painfully jank. Will it kill your run potential when you're speedrunning? Probably not, but it eats at you. It's so ugly, getting a 7-punch revenant, voiding an SSG blast on a point-blank target, imps that just won't die, chaingunners that survive and immediately tax you 50%+ health in retaliation. You watch everything back and you notice it even more than when you were actively playing.

 

There's also cases like rd mentioned: Cyberdemon needs to infight, decides to try out long-term pacifism. The inverse as well: Turret Archvile decides you're actually playing on Nightmare and constantly re-targets you over and over. You wake up a big pack of revenants on the wrong tic and just made your life much harder because they'll all shoot homing at you 75% of the time.

[galileo31dos01]

42 minutes ago, Kinetic said:

spiders die in 3 SSG the overwhelming majority of the time

 

pause 

 

Do we have the same game or... joking aside, majority of the time, yes, but an optimistic estimated of 70% isn't exactly overwhelming to me :P

[Orii]

Personally, I play with the perspective that minimising RNG is a skillful part of Doom and it can all be manipulated and worked around.

Knowing the damage rolls of monsters leads to better decision making. For example, being at <64 health with no armour, I know a hell noble can one shot me and to be more careful or go pick up health.

Knowing the damage values of weapons like rockets leads to better targetting. For example, I know to shoot a manc with the rocket launcher atleast three times, but to not be caught off gaurd if he needs a fourth rocket. Fighting enemies with this knowledge will lead to better positioning and dodging, (particularly with ssg damage rolls.)

I think the part of doom that has the most RNG variance has to be the enemy behaviour, but I still approach this from the perspective that it can be manipulated to a certain extent. While definitely a lot less obvious, knowing how your movement around the map affects and manipulated enemy movement in other parts of the map is definitely a learnt skill that people can get better at. (Just look at some of the high level pacifist runs.) Furthermore infighting uses the same idea, you can change your movement to promote better infighting, being conscious of what enemies you're infront of and what can infight will always help.

Obviously it isnt always the case that you can do something, for example awful slow monster closet teleporters that simply takes ages no matter what you do, but those are only a problem if you're speedrunning and at that point you just have to route around it. 

[Mr.BP-D [CBG]]

When it comes to RNG in DOOM I would've like to see the "randomness" implemented on Monster behavior moreso than anywhere else.  Years ago on another profile I used to be a small time UV-Max runner mainly (some UV-Fast and maybe one other category for fun), and what I noticed from doing runs, and watching other runners demos is that DOOM is overly predictable when it comes to where the monsters go, and what they do to the point where you can place yourself in certain areas or do subtle small movement to kind of get them where you want them (The RNG is more noticeable with when and how often they shoot especially with in-fighting.  It's almost like it's personalized for each person too because some people have more luck than others).  While it was definitely frustrating having to expend more ammo to kill a target, or the wild range of the Berserk Fist, I'd want to see (in some alternate universe if I were releasing DOOM) static damage output for player weapons, and more RNG with Enemies such as:

 

• Speed - This value would be activated after the monster leaves its look state, it's range depends upon enemy type.  i.e. Chaingunner's speed range is acute, while the Revenant or Cacodemon's speed range is wider.

 

• Run Away - This value would become active after monster's HP goes lower than 60%.  The lower the HP the higher chance of the monster actively trying to move as far from the player(s).

 

• Aggression - This value is almost the opposite of Run Away.  Ties into speed as well and if called for will increase the speed of the monster by a value of 1 or 2, and speed up their attack animation or call for them to fire at you more often.  Active when enemy has 60% or more HP.

 

• HP Value - This would essentially be tricky, and would more

 

• Passive Turret - Basically activates the -fast parameter for that particular monster BUT when not within sight the monster will always keep distance from target

 

• Goofiness - Can activate at any point (even in look state), and will make a monster walk/run in circles, attack a wall repeatedly, get stuck walking in place and occasionally call for the attack/melee animation but not fire anything, force them to move in opposite directions while animations remain the same, attack nearest barrel with melee, or get stuck repeating its pain animation for 5 seconds.  This would be a rare RNG value for obvious reasons.

 

• Gib Chance - If monster has a gib animation this value would activate after the death state has been called for no matter how little damage killed it, and lowers its mass to increase the illusion that the player pulled a critical hit or the game just being silly since you could just pistol shot a target, and their big flies half way across the sector.

 

• Infight Chance - Monster will randomly attack the nearest "thing" to it.  Another rare RNG parameter.  Alternatively this would happen regardless of who pissed off the monster since there's a cool down meter before they retaliate on a new target.  i.e. Player shoots monster, but it gets hit immediately after by a stray imp, and goes after the imp instead.

 

• Fall asleep - Literally makes them go back into their look state when target is out of range and sight.  (Won't work if they aren't 'deaf')

 

• Suicide - Activates their attack animation, but kills them instead of firing a shot.  Another very rare RNG value

All of this would be optional.  Hell make these terrible features a command line parameter and call it -monsterRNGmadness.  Glad we don't live in an alternate universe where I made decisions on DOOM.

[xdarkmasterx]

Quote

does anyone else hate RNG in doom?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

32 minutes ago, Mr.BP-D [CBG] said:

When it comes to RNG in DOOM I would've like to see the "randomness" implemented on Monster behavior moreso than anywhere else. 

I agree. I always wanted a crazy/drunk monster tag that made them behave as if their target always has partial invisibility on

Edited February 19 by xdarkmasterx

[Lucius Wooding]

3 minutes ago, Mr.BP-D [CBG] said:

When it comes to RNG in DOOM I would've like to see the "randomness" implemented on Monster behavior moreso than anywhere else.  Years ago on another profile I used to be a small time UV-Max runner mainly (some UV-Fast and maybe one other category for fun), and what I noticed from doing runs, and watching other runners demos is that DOOM is overly predictable when it comes to where the monsters go, and what they do to the point where you can place yourself in certain areas or do subtle small movement to kind of get them where you want them (The RNG is more noticeable with when and how often they shoot especially with in-fighting.  

 

In a certain sense, the monster behavior is very random. Your examples are more about having the behavior follow distinct and recognizable patterns based on a random seed. Doom's implementation is more about giving the monsters several moment to moment options and rolling for new ones every time (some conditions may restrict the options available, like having line of sight to the player to attack). Random behavior isn't about having each monster do different shit or getting something completely new every time. That's the opposite of randomness; it's an attempt to make the monsters seem like they have their own self contained behavior or personality. Doom's RNG is fairly chaotic even though it's very basic in how it works.

 

The consequence of the original game's design is that it may seem like monsters are predictable, for example when unable to attack the player, at a large distance from the player, in an open area, or in large groups their movement will generally be nearly the same since those things cancel out the randomness to some extent. These situations in slaughter maps or other large engagements will allow the player to manipulate the crowd in a way that a handful of monsters in a smaller area could not be manipulated reliably or uniformly. 2 revenants are very unpredictable while 20 revenants will be way more predictable. Crowd control is a skill while predicting single monsters is much more of a crap shoot. Even the map's geometry itself can make things easier for monsters to navigate or easier to predict where they might go; wide straight hallways tend to funnel monsters a lot easier than craggy cramped tunnels. And finally, fast monsters are generally more predictable since they act like turrets whenever you're in sight. The fact they're more aggressive actually means they have fewer choices determined by RNG than normal.

 

 

[Powerlord]

Most of my problems lie with revenants and shotgunners, also mancubi health pools. I value consistency over most things in games really so it can be extremely frustrating to go into a fight with no armor against a crowd of revenants, eating a stray tracking rocket and being reduced to single digits if not dying outright, reloading a save, eating another stray rocket but it barely even makes my screen flash red because it was in the teens or something. Shotgunners, while a bit more understandable and mostly relying on range, still can ruin level starts with a lucky shot that puts you to 30 or 20 health. Mancubi also randomly decide if they wanna eat 3 SSG shots or rockets and die or live with just a few health points, I usually auto-swap to the chaingun just to make sure to pick off the last few points but it often leads to me getting tunnel vision trying to finish the mancubus so some imps get fireball shots on me or the like. At the very least with monster behavior it's something you can adjust to and understand on the fly, you can see if the monster is attacking or just shuffling in place or infighting or in pain etc. You can't tell if that revenant rocket is 10 or 80 damage. I really think they should just sit somewhere around 30 or 40, close to hell knight/baron projectiles. To balance it out I think I'd make the non-tracking rocket move a bit faster so they aren't quite as ineffective as they are now.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

It is more than fine.  But 80 damNO you always have green or blue armor in Iwads as the player otherwise you've messed up and now get punished with deadly damage. Same goes for most Idtech games, even Q3 revolves around controlling the armors and that game barely has this kind of RNG.

[Burgish]

The occasional big damage from Rev missiles it what makes them scary.  The fact its doesn't proc every time makes those fights easier than if it was consistent, but the threat is 80 damage every for missile. Same with shotgunners - if they couldn't occasionally blast you for huge amounts up close they wouldn't be the same priority targets.  Threat is damage potential, not damage.  And threat is exciting.

 

That exact calculation stuff is for RPGs, and IMO is just bad in action games unless its as dead simple as 1-2-3 (say, Cuphead health)

 

I actually kinda hate any modern action games posting exact damage numbers, and if it needs to truncate to x.xk or x.xM then its just a bad damage system (I'm looking at you, modern Diablos).

[Amaruq Wulfe]

The RNG itself isn't bad, it's the absurd differences in the value that makes me question the programmer's thought process. Plasma Rifle for example, has a strange damage curve where each projectile has a chance of dealing 4 to 44 damage. Not sure what's with such an absurd difference between the numbers but it... works? It does make the game severely unpredictable at times and screws over my muscle memory.

[SleepyVelvet]

Sometimes RNG feels like it punishes you for making the "correct" play, especially for interactions that are expected to "almost always" behave a certain way.

 

Example: Monsters are pressuring you from the sides, but you've got just enough time to duel the lone archvile that's also in front of you, so you play chicken with it by launching 4 rockets at it.  But then it turns out to be an unlucky 5-rocket vile, it zaps you, and you just die.  Etc.

 

In general play, and especially "combat puzzles" or other situations where the player is cornered (where it's often the objectively safest play, outright), it's intuitive to treat these "almost always" interactions like they're deterministic.  But sometimes the game just fucks you instead.  Imagine playing chess, seeing the board state across a few branching moves from now - your enemy is set to lose their queen one way or another.  The turn has come and your bishop is set to trade with their queen.  You move your bishop onto queen and... BONK!  Your bishop bonks their head on the queen, falling one space short due to RNG, causing you to lose the game right there and then.  Feels kinda lame, doesn't it.

 

Or... maybe you're supposed to feel suspense when playing chicken with an archvile.  Dunno.

[Cutman 999]

It is more in the janky/wack side than in it being "bad". A thing no one mentions is that doom's damage ranges are very high compared to future fps games, like come on, 2 enemies can surpass 80% damage ranges, the cyberdemon has practically an instakill, also lowtiers like shotgunners can surprisingly deal more than 30% damage in a bad day.

 

Rng in this case helps mitigate a bit this wide range of high damage values, making so you don't rely completely on armor to not get destroyed by projectiles and hitscan, it definitely helps, but not in the way it would be completely mandatory. What I mean is, if enemies had their max damage rolls as their default, probably yes, you'll need megaarmor most of the time to not get destroyed, meaning that rng actually helps balance a bit of the damage output.

 

For the player's actions it can be a bit annoying, especially the famous inconsistencies of the regular shotgun failing to one shot an imp and other obscure wack damage outputs, but at least is consistent with the demon's damage ranges.

[baja blast rd.]

Following up on the subject, I enjoy most forms of RNG for reasons Kinetic said ('read and react' gameplay is fun) and also because good strategy involves hedging against RNG.

 

I'm using this example (again) simply because I have a convenient clip of it, but SWTW map02 has this encounter where 70%+ of the time, the turret cyber will fire for you and an infight-centered strategy will go as planned. (Everything here is about casual play rather than a maxrun.) Sometimes, though, the cyber refuses to fire for seconds on end and you'll get killed by the incoming mob of hell knights. A lot of people might consider this a badly designed RNG fight because of that, because their "good strategy" gets screwed -- but hovering around and hoping for the cyber to fire isn't really all that good of a strategy here. Instead what you can do to hedge against RNG is melee-bait the HKs into a loop, which keeps them in place and gives you pretty much as long as you want to get the cyb to fire. 

 

 

[pantheon]

Sometimes, but in a love-to-hate kind of way. To me it's a big part of the personality or "soul" of the gameplay... I'd so much rather have to dip and dive and swear out loud at that especially hellacious 5 rocket AV than know for sure that 4 hits kills any of them every single time. Yawn. Then again, I'm not a speedrunner where maybe RNG butts up against other skill factors more.

[El Juancho]

I enjoy RNG in casual play because it makes every playthrough different but my opinion changes when talking about speedrunning some short and extremely polished runs :)...

[Mr.BP-D [CBG]]

8 hours ago, Lucius Wooding said:

In a certain sense, the monster behavior is very random. Your examples are more about having the behavior follow distinct and recognizable patterns based on a random seed. Doom's implementation is more about giving the monsters several moment to moment options and rolling for new ones every time (some conditions may restrict the options available, like having line of sight to the player to attack). Random behavior isn't about having each monster do different shit or getting something completely new every time. That's the opposite of randomness; it's an attempt to make the monsters seem like they have their own self contained behavior or personality. Doom's RNG is fairly chaotic even though it's very basic in how it works.

How would they be patterns if they're all values in a random table?  I'm no programmer or coder.

 

They'd be different sides of the RNG Dice Roll.  Maybe I didn't explain that correctly, or I'm not understand how this stuff works.

8 hours ago, Lucius Wooding said:

The consequence of the original game's design is that it may seem like monsters are predictable, for example when unable to attack the player, at a large distance from the player, in an open area, or in large groups their movement will generally be nearly the same since those things cancel out the randomness to some extent. These situations in slaughter maps or other large engagements will allow the player to manipulate the crowd in a way that a handful of monsters in a smaller area could not be manipulated reliably or uniformly. 2 revenants are very unpredictable while 20 revenants will be way more predictable. Crowd control is a skill while predicting single monsters is much more of a crap shoot. Even the map's geometry itself can make things easier for monsters to navigate or easier to predict where they might go; wide straight hallways tend to funnel monsters a lot easier than craggy cramped tunnels. And finally, fast monsters are generally more predictable since they act like turrets whenever you're in sight. The fact they're more aggressive actually means they have fewer choices determined by RNG than normal.

I haven't noticed that, but that's really just me (in regard to single monster movement vs crowds)  I used to do UV-Fast runs and I kinda liked that it was a pseudo nerf to RNG since as you said, they're more prone to be like turrets.

 

8 hours ago, xdarkmasterx said:

I agree. I always wanted a crazy/drunk monster tag that made them behave as if their target always has partial invisibility on

 

This would be one of the best things if there was something we could add to Vanilla DOOM if we had a time machine since I'd assume it'd be easy to implement...or not.

[ObserverOfTime]

On 2/14/2024 at 3:56 AM, Billa said:

 

This isn't how it works, homing rockets use the global timer - it depends on whether the rocket fired on an even or odd tic. There is no RNG value "reuse", every call to RNG increments the index, even if there are multiple calls within a game tic. How would it be 3/4 if the value was reused each time?

 

I agree with everyone about the Berserk damage, having done Tyson runs that depend on getting consistently good rolls. Every other weapon in the game has some padding to make it less RNG - the rocket launcher deals 110 in splash, more if you aim your rockets well and hit multiple enemies with it, shotguns/BFG fire so many traces with each hitscan attack that it creates a bell curve, and likewise you have to fire so much chaingun/plasma to deal decent damage that it averages out the rolls. Berserk is a flat 20-200 and you can't do anything about it. The ranges are pretty ridiculous, a Baron for example can take 5 punches or 50 - with the most common being 7-13.

 

 

Very informative, thanks for educating me instead of just telling me I'm stupid or something. I guess I got something wrong and happily stand  corrected. I  am never ceased to be amazed that I continue to learn something about a game I've been playing on and off for like 30 years. Cheers!

[Kinetic]

On 2/18/2024 at 11:37 PM, galileo31dos01 said:

 

pause 

 

Do we have the same game or... joking aside, majority of the time, yes, but an optimistic estimated of 70% isn't exactly overwhelming to me :P

?

 

My assertion that spiders die in 3 SSG (same for all other assertions I made about the number of shots it takes to kill various enemies) is based on the idea that you land all your pellets/land your rockets. If a spider isn't dying in 3 SSG when you land every single pellet on it, I would assume some absurdly low rng occurrences are happening or you're playing with a mod or something. You may shoot a spider and the pellets don't even hit, which is due to the blockmap bug, and I can only assume this is what you are referring to in your post.

 

For what it's worth though, there are strategies and techniques you can use for trying to avoid the blockmap eating your pellets.

 

Quote

Then again, I'm not a speedrunner where maybe RNG butts up against other skill factors more.

RNG becomes much more magnified when you reach higher levels of optimization in a speedrun for many categories. UV-Max runs likely suffer more than any other category from RNG when running it at higher levels of optimization, here are just a few instances where RNG dictates a max speedrun:

 

1) monsters not teleporting from their closets on time (bad closet design? blocked teleport destination from random monster movement?)

2) poor weapon damage rolls (shotgun, fist, and yes, even chainsaw in some runs)

3) bad monster positioning (monsters don't lineup for a crucial time-saving double kill, don't stand close enough to barrels, etc..)

4) pacifist cyberdemon/infighter as rd mentioned already

5) trying to push/run through a crowd or run through a gap in monsters before it closes

6) hitscanners spamming attacks (underhalls UV-Max)

 

A lot of these also overlap with other categories, like UV-Speed, pacifist, UV-tyson. Again, rng is an issue in these runs since often for a more highly optimized run, you need to stick to a more rigid route that tolerates less variance in how both the map plays and how the player plays...small deviations in expected or necessary behavior can result in huge time losses. In the UV-Max speedrun for Doom II Map01, a chainsaw killing an imp in 3 hits instead of 7 or 8 makes a massive difference despite it saving less than a second. Nightmare runs and UV-Respawn runs have their own special RNG regarding the randomness involved with when enemies spawn in again.

 

One category immune to rng for the most part is NoMonsters, where there are no monsters as you might expect. Since monsters shoulder much of the rng in the game, not having them in the run takes all or almost all of the rng out of it most of the time.

 

On 2/19/2024 at 2:21 PM, baja blast rd. said:

A lot of people might consider this a badly designed RNG fight because of that, because their "good strategy" gets screwed.

Yes! Understandably when people are frustrated with a game or speedrun they will blame the game or RNG. Sometimes that blame has a lot of merit. But many times it is reasonable to look at your own strats and see if there are flaws in them. The better a strategy is for a fight, the less RNG it requires, generally speaking. A bad strategy will typically rely more on RNG. The exception to this is if you have the additional goal in a fight to complete it as fast as possible (as is the case in many speedruns), where more RNG may be needed for a faster completion.

Edited February 24 by Kinetic

[D0M0]

On 2/12/2024 at 8:59 AM, Logamuffin said:

What do y’all think about the RNG and specifically the damage rolls?

 

As several people have echoed throughout this thread, RNG is always black and white. In other words, you could argue both ends and make valid points.

 

Personally, I love the whole concept of RNG. The idea that something like damage rolls could be integrated into a highly skill based game and can make a pretty significant impact on the gameplay itself is pretty jarring to me. As someone that used to play Pokemon, attempt to do several nuzlockes and even shiny hunt (all of this being under a different alias), a lot of what I did was all somewhat based on RNG. If everything was too formulaic, things would get pretty stale fairly quickly.

 

Another thing that's obvious is that the more you play doom, the more fond you become of RNG within the game. Likewise with speedrunning (which has been countlessly mentioned since I assume a large part of the community is based around that), many speedrunners will take RNG more into account that the average doom joe. This is simply because many speedruns require good damage rolls, good monster movement, good monster attack patterns, etcetera. You won't need that kind of precise thinking when you're just casually playing Doom II or TNT, simply because it's pretty unnecessary for the most part.

 

Coming back to your question. To an extent I do blame RNG in my runs, but ultimately I like the idea of a slightly unique experience each time I play a level. I like all the goofy stuff that can happen solely because of RNG, it's the sort of thing you only see once and you laugh at it for how stupid it is. Therefore I can say that RNG (as well as damage rolls) play a bit part in my enjoyment for this game. 

[SealSpace]

For fists and pistols, it can be an annoyance.

 

But I like how RNG's give your weapons a more complex and varied approach to combat itself, with surprises arising out of how effective your direct attack may be against enemies in certain circumstances or instances. 

 

That's about the extent of my commentary on it I believe.