Honkai Star Rail: Aventurine's FATAL flaw?

Honkai Star Rail’s is a gacha video game developed by Hoyoverse, the same company responsible for Genshin Impact. The second act of its Penacony arc that came with the games 2.1 version has received widespread acclaim and praise for its writing, particularly of the character, Aventurine. A man who was considered blessed by luck, and yet was born into a life of constant struggle, always having to gamble with his life in order to survive, eventually stumbling into a high government position with the Interastral Peace Corporation, Aventurine’s story is one of the best, most engaging tales the game has ever told, and deserves all the hype. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for his boss fight.

So in the final moments of the act, Aventurine engages with the player in combat, in order to “die” and put the leaders of Penacony in a difficult position. It's a good plan, but the issue is that some aspects of his boss fight are confusingly designed. The boss revolves around random chance, where during certain stages of the fight, both the player and Aventurine roll a die to see who gets the higher number, and either the player, or Aventurine will get rewarded or punished. For the first stage, I think this works fine. The player will usually have 4 active characters in combat, and depending on their element and path, will specialize in single target, support, AOE, or follow up attacks. Aventurine will choose one of the player's 4 characters to put into his “do or die” situation, which is a gamble in and of itself. The punishments are also detrimental, but not to the point where the player can’t reliably recover, as the losing character will only become stunned, and can either be healed of the status ailment, or the player can protect them until they can recover on their own with their support capabilities. Even if the support is the one that gets punished, they are usually built with a focus on defense or health, so they’d usually be the one best suited for survival.

In the second phase of the fight however, Aventurine changes things up a bit. Where before, he would only select one character and have them roll one die, now he has all 4 characters roll 4 die. And the rolls are counted individually, not accumulated between all 4 of the players characters, meaning that even if one character manages to win their gamble, any character that doesn’t will still be stunned. That by itself isn’t a problem. The problem is that the gambling mechanic will heavily favor some characters, while outright making it impossible for other characters to win. For example, Aventurine will roll 4 die and get a 10. A character with AOE attacks, like Kafka for example, that allows them to hit all 4 dice will have no problem beating this number. In fact, since the reward for winning is having their ultimate restored, then that would essentially allow them 2 rolls of all 4 dice instead of one. A character like Dr Ratio, who is primarily single target but has follow up attacks, will have a harder time but it would still be possible for him to win the gamble. Supports like Ruan Mei or Gepard, where they only have a single target option and no aoe or follow up attacks to speak of? It’d be downright impossible for them to be able to win and will thus get the punishment no matter what And while it’s true that supports are the best equipped to take the punishment, it also locks them out of using their support capabilities, which makes it harder for the player to recover from the punishment. Granted it is still possible for supports to win the gamble, they just have to hope that Aventurine rolls a number lower than a 6. And with 4 dice, that’s incredibly unlikely. This completely shifts the fight from a fight that has elements of chance in it, to a fight where the players supports will be mandatorily frozen, with little exception. It’s literally rigged against the player in this case. An “easy” solution would be to build more characters that have a better chance of winning the gamble, but that would involve actually building them to a competent state, which in this game can take weeks or even months to do, or, since Honkai Star Rail is a gacha game, having those characters in the first place.

The fight was eventually toned down, but the core design problem still remains. Aventurine’s boss fight explicitly favors certain characters over others, and in a gacha game, this can easily breed FOMO, and bad will in players. So how could they have done this mechanic better? While admittedly not a perfect solution, having the gamble revolve around a single dice would help to put all the characters on an even playing field with Aventurine, since it would be impossible for Aventurine to achieve a number higher than a single dice could achieve. Or the gamble could be counted cumulatively, as all the values each character rolled on the dice accumulate into a greater number, and have that compete with Aventurine’s. While both these solutions will emphasize the advantage AOE and follow up attackers already have, it will at least be able to give single target focused teams a greater chance at winning the gamble, rather than have to take a guaranteed loss