>>533856110
One of the biggest lessons that I've learned from participating in /agdg/ is that after listening to all the nodevs and NGMIdevs cry about skinnerboxes, I've figured that thinking about game design terms of maximizing but obscuring gambling mechanics is the best way to go. For example, let's say you create a simple JRPG dungeon crawler, and the player is expected to grind levels or gold. You could have a slime just give the player an immediate +10exp or +10gold upon death, but if instead of giving them immediate exp/gold, you give them an extra drop (let's call it a slime core) that they need to take back to town to turn in (e.g. "evaluate" the slime core) for a random 1-100 exp/gold normalized around 10EV, then all of a sudden you've turned the functionally the exact same mechanic into something much more engaging with much more playtime.