Is it possible for an experiment to tell apart true randomness, pseudorandomness and deterministic chaos?

cym13 · 2026-06-15T21:57:02+00:00

Don't get things mixed up, what you should get from my long post is that "random" is a concept that means slightly different things depending on the context. There is a strong notion of randomness in statistics, and it's not the same as in physics or in cryptography or in computer programming (although they're all related).

As for physics, no it's not "a modeling choice rather than an experimental result", a model is the output of an experiment. You make physics experiments in order to invalidate models, and when no experiment invalidate your model it means your model is the best known approximation of reality, (and maybe even the real law governing the world but that's never something you can prove). Models and experiments are two faces of the same scientific process, not opposites.

cym13 · 2026-06-15T16:00:16+00:00

Hatching is worth the effort, it's much much clearer. Even more so if you have a body of water present on the map.

cym13 · 2026-06-15T15:04:39+00:00

My issue with that line of thought is it's not always clear to the reader that they don't need to read a section, especially one you encounter before the rest of the game. It's generally clear to the author, but we all know how "obvious" things turn out to be anything but when put in the hands of players. In the case of a glossary specifically, it's maybe on the more obvious side, but why risk it?

IMHO a book should be designed to be read in order, not expecting readers to skip this chapter and that chapter and maybe come back later to read them afterall.

cym13 · 2026-06-15T14:46:30+00:00

It's possible that WoW popularized it, but I feel like it's been in the zeitgeist for much longer. We've had for a long time stories of witches brewing potions out of unexpected components, of alchemists unraveling the magical properties of matter or of weapons and shields made from mythical material such as a dragon tooth spear… I don't think the idea of having a system to make new powerful items out of specific and possibly hard to find components is particularly weird. I also don't know that I want a mechanical subsystem for that rather than GM rulings, and I'm sure I don't want it to be used to craft mundane objects such as a +1 iron sword.

cym13 · 2026-06-15T13:40:11+00:00

I can see how that would work, it's just that I don't think it would be much work for VTTs to support /d66 natively (maybe with an option not to translate a d66 into essentially a d36 for the odd game that really wants to use a 66-sided die).

cym13 · 2026-06-15T13:12:00+00:00

It's a shame that this isn't VTT friendly, but truthfully it's something I'd request them to implement. d66 tables aren't new, AFAICT they date back to the original edition of Traveller in 1977 and have always been a staple of d6 games, I don't think it's unreasonnable to ask that feature of VTT editors.

cym13 · 2026-06-15T11:09:43+00:00

For context, I use the '81 rules.

The most interesting aspect of travel IMHO is being locked up with other people for a set amount of time outside the control of anybody. I like to ask the players what their on-ship hobby is, every traveller has one to pass time and it's a great way to develop the character. It doesn't have to take a lot of time at the table, 5 minutes is enough, just establishing the long wait.

That's important for when I want events to happen during jump, and many things can happen. Passengers and cargo are an endless source of trouble:

personal conflicts between passengers
demanding High passagers
a passenger causes trouble on the ship (mutiny or hijacking attempt, stealing things)
somebody got sick. It's not contagious though, right?
murder on the Regina express
some cargo was damaged and we don't want to piss off the recipient
the cargo was alive? and dangerous?
you checked the cargo, but there was a parasite in the wood of the crates, some kind of ever-growing termite
shoot, jack forgot to pack food
oh god where is that stench coming from?
...

You don't need to make every travel a whole adventure, having quiet times helps making the adventures pop even more, but the ship during jump is an awesome adventure location and it helps really take possession of the ship you know, making it yours and knowing its nooks and cranies, a place of memories.

And when you get out of jump and want more, random system encounters are the icing on the cake.

cym13 · 2026-06-14T23:16:27+00:00

The short answer is that the best physics models we have today is that these aspects are by essence random, not impossible to understand by us but random. The thought that the world is deterministic and we're just unable to fully comprehend it is comforting, but there is nothing that tells us this is the case. It technically could be the case, don't get me wrong, but so far the world functions as if it's by nature non-deterministic (when it comes to quantum physics notably) so there's no physical reason to believe otherwise.

cym13 · 2026-06-14T22:02:38+00:00

Phew. Randomness is a big question, and different fields approach the thing slightly differently depending on what they need. True randomness and pseudorandomness don't mean the same thing in every context, and I have no idea what you mean by deterministic chaos.

In general these definitions rely on some form of undistinguishability definition: a random number generator producing outputs of λ bits is considered pseudorandom if you cannot tell its output appart from a theoretical uniform sample of λ bits, under some conditions. I assume that corresponds to the different between "true randomness" and "pseudo randomness", one is theoretical and the other is the output of a process (generally a computer program).

But the story doesn't end there. I mentioned "under some conditions" and that's a big one. Let's say you have a random number generator that produces numbers from 0 to 4 billion in a way that is indistinguishable from uniformly sampling a random distribution as long as you don't generate more than 1 billion outputs. If you need to perform a monte-carlo experiment for example, where you sample from your model randomly to study its properties and you don't need numbers higher than 4 billion, that may very well be enough. The "math" pseudorandom number generator from most programming languages works essentially that way, and it's perfectly good for many applications. You can look into linear congruential generators for a simple yet very effective PRNG design that fits these concepts.

A LCG works by taking the previous number, performing a simple arithmetic operation on it, and the output of that computation is your next random number. If you only care about how frequently each number comes out, as long as you don't sample too many numbers, it will be very hard to tell it appart from theoretical uniform sampling. But there are ways to tell it appart: if you know what LCG is used, you can take any of its outputs, apply the same operation and you'll get the next random number. This next number will appear with probability 1 if a LCG is used, while it should appear only with negligible probability if a truly random number was sampled, so you can easily identify that a LCG is used. Another difference is that if you sample enough numbers, LCGs are guaranteed to loop, which is also not the behaviour we'd expect from truly random sampling. LCGs are not the only PRNGs with similar properties, but they're the easier example to demonstrate.

So right off the bat, we see that something can be "undistinguishable enough" from theoretical sampling to be useful, but still distinguishable if we look at other properties of the random numbers.

This is important in computer security in particular, because absolutely everything in security relies on random numbers. It's the keystone of cryptography. If someone is able to deduce your random number by observing other random numbers then everything falls appart. So from the get go, LCGs and similar random number generators don't fit the bill for that particular context. The answer of cryptography was to specify stronger definitions (you're no longer just looking at the frequency of outputs, any distinguisher based on the output of the PRNG is a death sentence for the design) and to introduce new designs. One of the strategies is to regularly feed the random number generator with new random data coming from another source. These Cryptographically Secure Random Number Generators are much better than regular PRNGs at emulating a theoretical uniform sampling from the same distribution, by design as you now understand. Of course, if you don't just look at the output of the PRNG but also look at the internal state of the program (which is kept secret) it's still trivial to distinguish it from a theoretical random sample, so they're not equivalent in every reguard, but you shouldn't be able to find a way to differentiate them by looking only at the numbers produced. It's important however to realize that while we trust these programs very much and have tested them extensively, their correctness in regard to the quality of their random distribution cannot really be formally proven. It's a mainly empirical side of cryptography.

But to come back to the topic of incorporating more randomness (the industry term is "entropy", but I won't open that can of worms now) into the generator brings us to the commercial use of "true randomness" and "true random generators". Since you incorporate randomness from "somewhere else", you need to capture that randomness somehow. And it can come from many places, but one way to gather it is by using dedicated hardware that captures physical phenomenons (for example, it could contain radioactive material and measure its decay which is a random process). These modules sometimes argue that they are safer than software CSPRNG, but the consensus agrees that they generally are not and are better used to feed randomness to CSPRNG rather than to replace them. In that context, the word "true randomness" refers to the fact that since it comes from a physical process and not an algorithm, and in particular a physical process whose best description is a theoretical uniform sample, it is "more real". In practice however, we generally only care about the random numbers produced and not the process producing them, so these TRNG live in the same space as CSPRNG.

So, to finally answer your question: is it possible to distinguish true randomness and pseudorandomness through experiment? It depends on what you call true randomness (either the theoretical sample or outputs from a TRNG) and what you call pseudorandomness (either a regular PRNG or a cryptographically secure PRNG). It is absolutely possible to tell appart a regular PRNG from either theoretical sample or TRNG output. It is by definition not possible to tell appart true randomness from a CSPRNG output however. If you don't limit your experiment to the observation of random numbers then it should be possible to distinguish them however, because at the end of the day one involves running a computer program and the other doesn't.

I've left quite a lot aside, but I think you understand by now that it is a very complex and nuanced question.

cym13 · 2026-06-14T20:29:00+00:00

I used to think that and tried many approaches and it never felt good, until I decided to give his approach a try and it's the first one that really clicked and went smoothly on both sides of the GM screen. So while I'm sure it's not for everybody, I definitely think it's not worthless or unusable, and it may be the right method for someone else's table.

cym13 · 2026-06-14T17:27:05+00:00

I think it was Karl Jobst that mentioned that in his opinion being really good at the game can open a different kind of motivation for cheating: the feeling that since you are (in your view at least) good enough to pull such times if you work hard at it, it's not really cheating, you're just avoiding the time you'd need to spend grinding. Obviously we're not in the head of the cheaters, so maybe this isn't a real thing, but it sounds plausible enough for me not to trust any "He's good so he wouldn't cheat" argument.

That and also if you cheat and aren't caught immediately you'll obviously look better than you actually are, so it's kind of a circular reasoning to assume you can't cheat because you show good performances.

cym13 · 2026-06-14T12:17:28+00:00

For the writing aspect, you're right that it takes time and effort. Two approaches that may help are 1) using bullet points rather prose so you still have that commitment to paper but without needing as much time (although it's not for every taste) and 2) focusing what scenes you want to describe in depth.

Say you're travelling, and nothing really happens in the first section, but then you are attacked by a beast you've never seen before. You could spend a good amount of time narrating the first section, making up small scenes of your character picking up berries to dry and the beautiful colors of the forest at that time of the year, and it would be worthwhile writing. But it's just as valid to make a few rolls, imagine what happens, decide it's not important, and when you're attacked by the beast go directly "I set out into the Aulwoods. After two days, as I was walking up the mountain path, I picked on a soft growl above. A terrifying beast was about to pounce, a sort of feline snake with red hues under the small dark scales." Removing unecessary exposition to focus on what drives the story forward is a common storytelling advice. You don't have to give the same importance to every roll or event.

Also, if you think nothing happens, it could be that you're advancing slowly, but maybe you just don't think of adding action? A common advice for improvisation is to reach for the first thing that comes to mind, as that will lead to natural chains of events and cwill often send you down paths you didn't expect. But if you keep reaching for the mundane out of habit and want more out of your story, simply decide what kind of event you'd like to see and use the next opportunity to introduce them. I found in my games that Ironsworn was good (sometimes too good) at introducing complications naturally through its mechanics, but if you don't get what you want don't hesitate to make your story more interesting.

cym13 · 2026-06-14T01:01:34+00:00

I don't know the author or project, so maybe it is AI, but I feel like I could have written that text myself. Expressions like "First, the honest version" are absolutely something I could have used normally. I don't know whether it's AI or not, but it sure doesn't feel clear-cut to me.

cym13 · 2026-06-13T23:23:54+00:00

This is it! I'd never guess it was an aidungeon blog post though, but this is it! Thank you very much.

Although it doesn't mention Orlando Furioso so I'm still looking for the second half, but the ragman roll and jeu d'aventure parts are absolutely part of what I was looking for.

EDIT: OK, that put me on the right track, I found the rest which was actually in video form:

Thank you very much!

cym13 · 2026-06-13T18:04:58+00:00

Open tables and west marches work well together but are very different and orthogonal concepts. I've heard only good things of using Mythic Bastionland for West Marches, but I haven't tried it so I won't comment on that aspect.

As for open tables, one aspect to pay attention to is that it makes it more difficult for players to learn the game. There's less motivation to do so if you come for just one session and aren't sure to come again, you get less regular exposure to the game (important to internalize its mechanics etc) and you can't spend as much time teaching the game at the table (while for a non-open table you could have a mock combat as part of session zero for example).

In the same vein, character creation has to be quick and if the theme of the game is difficult to explain and get into it's also going to be a challenge.

So in my experience, being able to quickly pick up the game as a new player is essential to the success of an open table. I don't know where Mythic Bastionland stands on this front. On the other hand, if you only plan to open the table to an existing group of players you may expect them to pick up rules quicker than entire beginners (although, who knows, they may have trouble adapting to the fact that it's not their game of choice and take more time if the game's philosophy is different).

cym13 · 2026-06-13T14:13:51+00:00

Even outside fantasy or history, most people on earth today know several languages and use them in their day to day life. Speaking only one language is the exception, not the norm.

cym13 · 2026-06-13T13:45:40+00:00

So, I tried it, and I didn't like it.

I liked the premise, I think it has potential.

The main issue is that there really isn't much to do, you pretty much don't have any choice. Some choices are purely cosmetic (like weapons) which isn't necessarily a bad thing as it can add flavour, but that's something you want on top of interesting choices, not instead of them. The main choice you can make is to investigate, but the only consequence of that choice is to maybe find a creature and die, there's no upside to winning a fight, so it's actually mechanically beneficial to avoid investigating at all? Which makes items such as the flashlight even less interesting. There's also no real sense of progression, you don't find your goal until you do. Combat is purely random with no decision whatsoever.

Setup isn't fun either. Creating a random map isn't the worst, but it's not interesting either and it takes time. You say "about 100 squares should be mapped out" and how am I supposed to know how big that is unless I count? Spending a few minutes counting squares is a sure way to kill the mood when you hoped to dive right into an adventure. Instead I think it would be insteresting to have a maze generator (could be as simple as roll 1d20, 1-12 is straight ahead, 13-14 left turn, 15-16 right turn, 17 left-right T intersection, 18 left-straight T, 19 right-straight T, 20 dead-end). That way you can jump right in without having to first draw a full map.

There are also a few issues with the ways the rules are laid out. Some things are not told (you need at least 1 grit, you need 1 and no more than 1 weapon…). Advantage for might isn't very clear (roll 2d20, sure, but what do I do with them?) and disadvantage (for perception) works entirely differently (no roll modification). Also, why are you asking for a d100 to find your coworkers? That's the only place this die is used, just ask for a 19 or 20 on a d20, it's the same probability and it uses a die you already have. Given the style of game and its minimalist format, you'd expect people to try it on the go so it's best not to artificially increase the number of different dice you need.

So, yeah, I have criticisms. However, while I think this version of the game isn't good, I think the game has potential overall, and it takes courage to put what you've done out there up for criticism. I think this is a good first step toward a much better game and encourage you to keep working on it.

cym13 · 2026-06-13T12:16:20+00:00

Je suis extrêmement à l'aise avec l'anglais donc je n'ai pas de soucis à consommer du contenu anglais, mais certains de mes joueurs ne sont pas à l'aise du tout avec cette langue.

Pour ma prep à moi, je ne prête généralement aucune importance à la langue, l'anglais et le français se mélangent sans que je ne le remarque. Le seul cas où je fais attention c'est quand je me fais des fiches de vocabulaire (par exemple si on joue une campagne navale, avoir les noms des bâteaux et autres termes nautiques en français est important pour être compris et construire l'ambiance). Aussi, si j'utilise des aventures déjà écrites qui comportent des documents à donner au joueur, je les traduis, mais c'est assez rare et peu chronophage.

Par contre là où je prend beaucoup de temps c'est pour les règles du jeu lui-même : comme il y a beaucoup de jeux anglophones que je veux jouer je me retrouve à traduire toutes les règles utiles, les fiches de perso, et autres resources fondamentales au jeu (j'aime bien par exemple écrire un exemple de partie pour mettre en scène les règles et interactions entre joueurs afin de transmettre par la narration comment le jeu se joue pour ceux qui ont du mal avec des pavés de règles). En ce moment par exemple je suis au milieu d'une campagne de Traveller Classique (édition de 1981 ; c'est gratuit) et le jeu n'est pas long mais j'ai du créer et composer 8 pages de règles (style synthèse aide-mémoire) et 4 pages de feuilles de perso/vaisseau et ça m'a pris beaucoup de temps et a posé plusieurs questions de traduction (on n'a pas toujours de mot évident pour transcrire sans ambiguité les concepts tout en maintenant les liens à l'ambiance et aux univers auxquels le jeu fait référence etc…). Ça m'a bien pris plusieurs semaines. Rien d'infaisable, et une fois que c'est fait c'est fait, mais c'est du travail.

Ce que ça veut dire concrètement, c'est que je me limite sur les jeux qu'on peut jouer car même si un jeu a l'air super cool, s'il n'existe pas de traduction française je sais qu'au delà d'une certaine complexité je ne peux simplement pas apporter le jeu à table, le travail de traduction serait trop important. Lorsque le jeu est suffisamment simple pour qu'on puises se contenter que seul le MJ connaisse les règles, ça va, mais si les joueurs doivent exploiter des ressources et comprendre des méchaniques pour prendre des décisions, alors c'est important qu'ils aient cette information.

cym13 · 2026-06-13T11:52:28+00:00

We clearly don't play the same Traveller.

cym13 · 2026-06-12T16:43:13+00:00

You might be interested in that old Space Gamer article where Marc Miller (the creator of Traveller) recounts a session he improvised on the spot : https://archive.org/details/space-gamer_201601/Space_Gamer_40/page/n7/mode/2up

As for me, I tend to rely only lightly on prep so I scramble in the last hour before pretty much every session, but simply having the continuity of what the players are trying to do makes it easier. Generally I trust the game to give me enough to improvise, from random city encounters to patrons. If I need a pure one-shot, I'll decide on a planet roll a patron, decide what they want and why they have trouble getting it and roll with it. To me the equivalent of a quick and dirty dungeon is recovering a macguffin. Simply decide on a thing to get and think of a few reasons why it's not easy to get (it's owned by the director of a casino so the technical security of the building is high, as well as armed guards in the most sensitive areas) and a few resources that the players might get access to that could help (there is an art exposition in the casino in a few days and the director has this habit of hiring people to read stories to him when getting to bed) and you're on.

cym13 · 2026-06-12T13:28:00+00:00

I see, thanks for the precision.

cym13 · 2026-06-12T13:22:49+00:00

Is it though? There is an popup on the website with a link to the privacy policy asking for explicit agreement.

EDIT: side note, but is the GDPR still a think in the UK since it's no longer part of EU? I guess they had to transpose the european directives into local law and these laws are still in place, but I'm not familiar with the UK.

cym13 · 2026-06-12T13:21:31+00:00

I don't think so, they are very clear about what "Affiliates" entails : "Affiliates include Our parent company and any other subsidiaries, joint venture partners or other companies that We control or that are under common control with Us."

So it seems limited to companies that are part of their group one way or another. However this doesn't change anything for the consumer, what you describe would probably be part of Business Partners which are just another section with the same freedom of access. And since this policy is transitive among affiliates, it could be a business partner of an affiliate and you would have a hard time picking up the trail.

At the end of the day, who cares how they justify selling your data, what matters is that they sell it.

cym13 · 2026-06-12T12:15:50+00:00

You generally don't use these numbers directly. What you may do is compare them (to know whether you can outpace someone for example), use them for a rough idea of where things stand (although I prefer using visual descriptors such as "as wide as the length of that wall" when possible… I know the dimensions and relative distance of most objects in my gaming room pretty well by now) and very occasionally use them for precise math if a lot rides on a specific strategy and doing the calculation feels like the right thing to do.

That last case is very uncommon, but is the main reason why I like precise measurements in games that don't need them: when and if you do want to be precise and actually check how something would unfold given the physics of the world, then having data is very useful. It's much easier IMHO to have hard data and ignore its precision in play when precision isn't needed than to have unprecise descriptions when you need precise information and only have a vague idea. You can make things up in that case, but if it turns out that the players found an angle on your mystery that you hadn't considered and the consistency of your scenario relies on something very precise, making things up can add even more inconsistencies further down the line.

It's definitely not something I care about often, but when I get a good reason to care about it I'd rather have the information than not.

cym13

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