Originally posted by Fzanco:

You may be seeing a pattern where there is no discernable plan. In other words yeah you cray cray 😜

People see patterns in random data, and you don't have to be crazy. There's even a word for it which I'm too lazy to look up.

OK, I looked it up: Pareidolia.

But game designers can also manipulate the odds of deer skittishness according to how much they have been hunted. Unless they are meant to be stupid, we don't want enemies to just blindly run into the pending bowshot, so devs make them change direction randomly when a bow is visible.

And devs can exploit pareidolia by scheduling some events to simply occur randomly at a fixed frequency. Easy to do, and with luck you'll have players convinced they need to take their lucky bow or half-used torch on every dangerous mission.

(There. I've used pareidolia in a sentence. Two sentences)