Quote Originally Posted by Kaurie View Post
Without randomness, games would be pretty boring.
In other words: Nearly all sports are pretty boring. Platformers are pretty boring. Shooters are pretty boring. Racing games are pretty boring. Fighting games are pretty boring without Mokujin. Most Tower Defense games are pretty boring. And the majority of any given Legend of Zelda game is boring as well. TIL.

RNG is cheap design and for good reason rarely applied where things matter. Whether you advance to the next stage is almost never decided by RNG, but either your merit (eg fighting games) or point accumulation (eg experience levels). Whether your controls work is also never decided by RNG and you typically get set abilities, rather than random ones, when you advance. Level caps are never random either. Whether a boss is inside a dungeon or a quest target in the game and you can actually complete it isn't random either. Whenever things are important, RNG is kept out, because it's bad design and that's very obvious when you try to apply it to things that matter.
It's innately unfair, too, because it means people aren't rewarded for their merit or effort but rather the luck of the draw. I'm pretty sure more people would agree to have their salary performance based than to having it decided by a dice roll, because most people prefer just rewards over unjust ones.

Nevertheless, RNG still is common, no doubt. It's simple and adequately stupid, but very easy to implement and a great carrot on the stick because any time could be winning time. But that doesn't make it any less bad. It's a design relic that thankfully is being slowly phased out.