Quote Originally Posted by Telok View Post
How about a game that plays great but has a custom dedicated "results" app that it needs in order to be played? Easy to use, hit three buttons in order and read the result. Consistently good and accurate range of results. The actual randomizing is completely opaque. Some people would hate it for the electronics bit of course, but that's not part off "is the game any good". High stats/skills are good and pushing three buttons to read a result is easy to understand, right?
Digital randomness is quite difficult to handle. Players easily over-interpret results and will quickly feel like the results are rigged or unfair. [Peoples also think their dice are cursed, but they blame the physical dice, not the game itself].

Opacity is seen as unfair. Just displaying the odds is rarely enough, as a lot of peoples don't trust randomness if it doesn't match their intuition. The two solutions I've see that seems to work to reduce player's feeling of unfairness are
(1) "Materialisation" of the randomness through explicit cards or dice.
(2) Lies and illusions. You fake transparency by displaying odds of success/failure that are wrong by using a different formula for your "odds" and the actual check. [Usually you undervaluate the probability of success for easy/medium checks].

IME, (2) is the most frequent choice, especially in tactical video games (Fire Emblem, XCOM, etc).