Is RNG manipulation a fair way to play games?

[WaterTypeStarter]

Unlike using external devices or abusing glitches both of which involve using advantages you were not supposed to have, RNG manipulation involves playing by the game rules. Except you use patterns or find some way to deliberately cause the RNG to do certain effects that a casual player would not normally do knowingly. If you simply memorize patterns, you can know what specific actions will produce certain outcomes and are not technically doing anything that breaks the rules even if it was clearly not meant for you to do. However, using external devices to pry into the code while not technically manipulating the game through unauthorized means, does involve you getting unauthorized access to info you were not mean to see. Is manipulation of RNG a fair way to play? While you are not technically manipulating the game, you clearly are not clearing it in a way to was meant to be cleared and when you access code by external means, you are technically gaining an advantage you were not meant to have. What is your opinion on the use of RNG manipulation? Would it be fair to tell someone you cleared a game when you used lots of RNG manipulation to clear it? And if you used external devices to gain access without actually tampering with the code, would it still be a legitimate way to win?

 

[Zora]

I'd lean towards yes more times than not.

If RNG is so oppressive that people feel the need to both learn how it works and how to manipulate it, it often reflects bad game design. I remember using RNG manipulation for Final Fantasy XII ZA for best gear because there's no skillful way to get the gear; you simply need to get lucky (and I didn't really need the gear, I just wanted an optimized party). Good RNG design should always create variation and/or replayability in the game you play, not simply elongate a grind. Also, I don't care much for the whole framing of "is it fair to do X" when the subject is single-player experiences; people should feel free to do what they want if it doesn't affect others.

There are a few cases where I'm less confident saying yes. Being a Pokemon forum, one that immediately comes to mind is RNG manipulation for shinies, which is much less defensible principally because of Pokemon's online trading.

 

[Divine Retribution]

However, using external devices to pry into the code while not technically manipulating the game through unauthorized means, does involve you getting unauthorized access to info you were not mean to see.

I don't think this is actually relevant to whether or not RNG manipulation is fair (it could be fully legitimate to access this information, but unfair to manipulate it through ways that the game developer clearly did not intend; fairness and legality are not the same thing) but at the heart of this question is the issue of whether or not you own the code to the game you purchase. After all, if you do, then the very concept of access to it being "unauthorized" is nonsensical. However, that's a more complicated question than you might initially think. On one hand, decompiling, manipulating, or otherwise modifying the code of a game you own is legally perfectly fine, so long as you don't redistribute it. However, if you do redistribute it, it's piracy.

A lot of companies don't want you modifying their games. Rockstar, the developers of the Grand Theft Auto series, are particularly notorious for this, and go through not inconsiderable lengths to make their games as difficult to modify as possible, and shut down modding projects they don't approve of. However, they don't really have a legal precedent here to say that decompiling their source code shouldn't be allowed, which they would need for accessing their game's source code to be considered "unauthorized". Basically, there's no legal precedent for companies being able to tell you that you're not allowed to examine the source code of a game you own, so I think calling it unauthorized is a bit misleading. However, the whole subject is a bit of a legal quagmire where there isn't a whole lot of precedent for anything, and it's undeniable that the publisher owns the creative rights to the code if nothing else. It's a question of whether or not that is enough to say that the end user shouldn't be able to examine it.

But again, none of that is really relevant to the question of whether or not RNG manipulation is fair, and the answer is pretty obviously no, at least in the most literal sense. If you take one player who used RNG manipulation to perfect his team and another player who didn't do that (I presume we're talking in the contexts of before Gen 4, when breeding wasn't a viable alternative to RNG abuse), the player who manipped has a significant and undeniable advantage over the other player. That being said, for better or worse RNG manipulation was considered the standard back then, so not doing it would be paramount to putting yourself at a disadvantage.

In a way you could consider it like EV training. It's debatable whether or not GameFreak truly intended for players to min/max their EVs the you do in competitive play, or if they simply wanted to encourage battling against other Pokemon to get higher stats instead of stuffing your Pokemon full of rare candies. A player who EV trains his Pokemon has a significant advantage over one who doesn't, but not EV training out of some misguided sense of honor or belief that EV training isn't how GameFreak intended the game to be played would itself be kind of a silly thing to do. RNG abuse is similar, but taken to the next level.