Properties › Randomness
Randomness: output
Chance resolved after the player decides.
29 mechanics are coded this way.
Advantage / Disadvantage
A modifier applied by rolling two dice instead of one and keeping the higher result under favourable circumstances or the lower under unfavourable ones, in place of a numeric bonus or penalty.
Aim and Recoil
The player steers a reticle onto a target in real time while spread, recoil, and sway perturb it after each shot, so whether a shot lands is decided by continuous pointing precision and recovery rather than by a roll.
Combat Results Tables
An attack is resolved by computing the ratio or difference between attacking and defending strength, finding that column on a printed table, rolling a die, and reading a graded result such as eliminate, retreat, or exchange.
Critical Hits
A rare band of the attack roll, usually the die's maximum face, that amplifies a successful hit with multiplied damage or an added effect, as an exception layered on an otherwise binary hit-or-miss check.
Degrees of Success
A resolution procedure that grades the result of a check into three or more ordered bands, such as critical success, success, partial success, failure, and fumble, each with its own consequence.
Dice Pool
A randomiser in which the number of dice rolled scales with a rating, and the result is read by counting dice that meet a target or by taking the best die rather than summing a single roll.
Doubling Cube
Before rolling, a player may offer to double the stake of the current game; the opponent must either concede at the present stake or accept the doubled stake and take sole possession of the right to double again.
Downtime Phases
Between adventures or scenarios the game runs a structured phase in which each character takes a limited number of actions from a menu such as recover, train, work on a project, or indulge, and campaign time advances.
Exploration Procedures
Travel through unknown terrain is divided into fixed units of time or distance, each running a set sequence of steps such as mapping, ration use, and an encounter check, so exploration is a repeated procedure rather than free narration.
Group Finder
An automated queue assembles players, usually strangers, into a temporary cooperative group for a chosen piece of content by filling required role slots such as tank, healer and damage, then places the group in it together
Hit Location
After an attack hits, a further roll or a called shot assigns the damage to a specific body part or component, and each location has its own damage capacity, armour, or impairment effect.
Item Modification
The player changes the properties of an item already held, rerolling, adding, removing or upgrading them by spending consumables or materials on it, often with a random result, so an owned item is improved in place
Lifepath Character Generation
A character is created by stepping through successive periods of a prior life, choosing a career or event at each step and rolling for its outcome, so skills, assets, age, and sometimes death accumulate from a generated biography.
Loot Boxes and Gacha
Players spend currency, often real money, on a sealed container whose contents are drawn from a weighted random pool, so the purchase buys a chance at an item rather than the item itself.
Loot Distribution
A cooperating group allocates each shared reward, such as a boss drop or a treasure hoard, among its members by a stated rule, such as ranked need and greed rolls, turns, a leader's award, banked points or per-player loot
Loot Tables
Rewards from a defeated enemy, opened container, or completed task are drawn from a weighted random distribution, so what the player receives is decided by chance after the action is taken.
Morale and Rout
When a unit takes losses or faces a shock, a test against its morale rating decides whether it holds, and a failed test makes it break, flee, or surrender, so battles are decided by nerve giving way before every unit is destroyed.
Opposed Rolls
Two parties each make a roll and compare results, so the number one side must beat is set by the other side's roll rather than by a fixed threshold, and the higher result prevails.
Procs
An effect attached to an item, ability, or character fires automatically with a stated probability whenever a trigger event occurs, such as landing a hit, casting a spell, or being struck, separately from that action's own roll.
Pseudo-Random Distribution
Successive trials of a chance event are made dependent on earlier results, usually by raising the chance after each failure until a success resets it, so the stated rate holds over time while long droughts and streaks become rarer.
Push Your Luck
A player who has banked a provisional gain repeatedly chooses whether to stop and keep it or to continue for more at the risk of a bust that forfeits everything accumulated this turn.
Resource Gathering
Players obtain raw materials by harvesting resource nodes placed in the world, such as ore veins, herbs, trees or fishing spots, which deplete and later respawn, so supply is fixed in place, often skill-gated and open to rivals.
Roll and Move
A die roll or spin determines how far a piece moves along a track, and the space it lands on determines what happens, so the randomiser rather than the player sets the piece's position each turn.
Sanity
A separate track for a character's mental stability drains as the character witnesses horror or strain, usually through a roll, and falling past thresholds brings madness, breakdown, or removal from play short of death.
Saving Throws
A defensive roll made by the target of a harmful effect after the effect is triggered; success negates or reduces the effect, failure lets it apply in full.
Social Conflict
Characters settle a dispute through a structured exchange of argumentative moves that wears down each side's position until one yields, and the losing side is bound by the result, often softened by a compromise.
Target Numbers
A single roll succeeds if it reaches a fixed threshold set by the task or read from a table, so the chance of success is fixed before the roll by the gap between the threshold and the roller's modifier.
Usage Dice
A consumable such as torches, rations, or arrows is tracked as a die rather than a count; after each use the die is rolled, and a low result steps it down one size until a low roll on the smallest die exhausts the supply.
Vulnerability Windows
A player-owned structure can be damaged, captured or destroyed only in a scheduled period, often after an attack has put it in a protected state whose end the defender partly sets, so sieges are fought at appointed hours
Coding guideline for randomness
Input = randomness resolved before the player decides (a dealt hand, dice rolled then allocated, a generated map). Output = randomness resolved after the decision (an attack roll, a loot drop). Code "both" only when the canonical form has both stages.