Image by Lionel Abernathy
A guest post on this site last year went after the dungeon trap that comes down to one roll. Dungeon Traps Done Right called that kind of trap a coin toss and a random punishment for bad luck, then added that a choice made blind might as well be random too.
Its fix kept the dice and moved them: clues come first, and a failed check hurts less. Most design arguments about chance come down to three questions. When does chance enter, how much control does a player keep once it does, and what does a bad result cost?
Digital games of chance answer those questions too, usually out of sight. Once money or a prize rides on the outcome, the answers stop being a matter of taste, and platform owners, courts and regulators start writing some of them.
Before The Choice Or After It
Designers sort randomness by when it arrives. Input randomness lands before a decision, the way a freshly dealt hand or a shuffled market row does. Output randomness lands after it, when a d20 decides whether a committed sword swing connects.
Characteristics of Games, the 2012 MIT Press book by George Skaff Elias, Richard Garfield and K. Robert Gutschera, draws that line. Geoffrey Engelstein and Isaac Shalev use it again in Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design, which CRC Press first published in 2019.
Input randomness rewards planning around whatever just appeared. Output randomness rewards weighing a risk before committing, then living with the result. The trap article was asking GMs to trade some of the second kind for the first: describe the gouged tiles, then let the party choose.
Can’t Stop Hands Players The Brake
Sid Sackson’s Can’t Stop, published by Parker Brothers in 1980, uses both kinds on every roll. A player throws four dice, splits them into two pairs and moves temporary markers up the columns matching each total, from 2 through 12. Only three neutral markers exist, which limits a turn to three columns.
Splitting the dice is a response to input randomness. Deciding whether to roll again is a bet on output randomness. Stopping locks in the turn’s progress, while a roll that cannot move any marker is a bust and erases everything gained since the turn began. The first player to claim three columns wins.
Sackson never softened the dice. He handed players the brake and priced a bust at a full turn’s work, and a cheaper bust would make pushing the obvious move every time.
Filling The Bag Before Drawing From It
The Quacks of Quedlinburg, Wolfgang Warsch’s game from Schmidt Spiele, won the 2018 Kennerspiel des Jahres with the same push-your-luck spine and one large change: each player fills their own bag. Ingredient chips come out one at a time, and if the white cherry bomb chips in a pot add up to more than 7, the pot explodes.
Warsch charges less for failure than Sackson did. An exploded player still takes one of the round’s two rewards, victory points or a shopping trip for better ingredients, but not both. A flask lets a player return a freshly drawn white chip to the bag.
Control moves from the moment of the draw to the contents of the bag. Every chip a player buys shifts the odds of every later pull.
Gloomhaven, Isaac Childres’s 2017 campaign game from Cephalofair Games, drops dice from combat entirely. Each character draws from a starting 20-card attack modifier deck with one null card, which cancels an attack, and one card that doubles it. Perks earned over a campaign strip weak cards out, and curse cards slip in extra nulls that leave the deck once drawn.
A deck also remembers what dice forget. Until it is shuffled, that lone null cannot turn up twice.
Blades In The Dark Sets The Price Of A 4
John Harper’s Blades in the Dark, published by Evil Hat Productions in 2017, rolls a pool of six-sided dice and reads only the highest. Its action roll rules sort that die into bands: a 6 means the character does it, a 4 or 5 means they do it with a consequence, and a 1 to 3 means things go badly.
Before anyone rolls, the player states a goal and picks an action, and the GM sets the position (controlled, risky or desperate) and the effect level (limited, standard or great). The table knows roughly what a 4 will cost before the dice land.
Players can also buy dice at posted prices. A teammate who assists takes 1 stress to add one. A player can push themselves for 2 stress or accept a Devil’s Bargain, but not both, and the bargain’s price comes due whether the roll succeeds or not.
One Advantage, However Many Reasons
Dungeons & Dragons handles circumstance with a single dial. Under the 2014 rules, advantage meant rolling a second d20 and keeping the higher result, and no stack of favorable conditions added a third die. The 2024 rules glossary kept that ceiling: a roll can’t be affected by more than one Advantage, and Advantage and Disadvantage on the same roll cancel.
The timing of banked luck changed instead. In 2014, spending inspiration gave advantage on an attack roll, saving throw or ability check. In 2024, Heroic Inspiration lets a player reroll any die immediately after rolling it, and the new result stands. The choice moved from before the roll to after it, so a player now spends it knowing how badly the first die went.
The last row below is where a paid digital draw breaks from the rest.
| Design | When chance enters | What the player controls | What a bad result costs |
| Can’t Stop (1980) | Each roll of four dice | Pairing the dice, and when to stop | The whole turn’s progress |
| The Quacks of Quedlinburg (2018) | Each chip pulled from the bag | What goes in the bag, and when to stop | Points or shopping for the round, not both |
| Gloomhaven (2017) | Each card drawn for an attack | Which cards perks remove | A canceled attack on the null card |
| Blades in the Dark (2017) | One roll, after position and effect are set | The action, plus dice bought with stress or a bargain | A consequence scaled to position |
| D&D Rules Glossary (2024) | Each D20 Test, once Advantage is settled | Earning Advantage, plus one banked reroll | The failed test |
| Paid Loot Box | After payment, out of view | Whether to buy | The purchase price |
Every tabletop row shares two things the last one lacks. The odds sit in plain view, and a group that hates a rule can change it by the next session.
Real Money Takes The Rulebook Away From The Table
Alberta’s regulated online casino market, which opened to private operators on July 13, 2026, shows what replaces the house rule once the prize is cash. Bonus offers there come with conditions written before any player sees them, and those conditions make up a rule system of their own.
A playthrough requirement sets how many times bonus funds must be wagered before they can be withdrawn. Game weighting sets how much a wager on each game counts toward that total, and an expiry date ends the offer whether or not the playthrough is done. Bonus.com’s bonus casino alberta promo-code guide covers those terms.
The operator writes those rules, not the people playing, and a player’s control shrinks to reading them before agreeing. Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis sets the outer limits for registered sites, which accept players 18 and older. A launch-day summary of its advertising standards by Harris + co. notes that ads may not mislead players about odds, outcomes or the role of skill.
Belgium And The Netherlands Disagreed About The Same Draw
Paid loot boxes forced regulators to decide whether a random draw inside a video game counts as gambling, and two neighbors reached opposite answers.
In April 2018, the Belgian Gaming Commission concluded that the paid boxes in FIFA 18, Overwatch and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive were games of chance under the country’s gambling law. It told publishers to remove them or risk criminal charges and fines of up to €800,000. Star Wars Battlefront II, the fourth game studied, was not found in breach because its paid boxes had been switched off during the review.
Blizzard blocked Belgian Overwatch players from buying loot boxes, and in 2019 EA stopped selling FIFA Ultimate Team packs for real money there. The finding did not clear the shelves, though. Leon Y. Xiao’s study, published in Collabra: Psychology in 2023, found the ban unenforced, with 82 of the 100 highest-grossing iPhone games in Belgium still selling paid loot boxes.
The Netherlands went the other way in court. On March 9, 2022, the Administrative Jurisdiction Division of the Council of State sided with Electronic Arts, voiding a penalty the Kansspelautoriteit had set at €250,000 for each week EA left the player packs in its game.
Bird & Bird’s summary of the ruling explains why: the court treated FIFA packs as part of a game of skill that adds an element of chance, rather than as a stand-alone game.
Both countries were arguing over where the chance sits. Belgium judged the paid draw on its own, while the Dutch court judged it by its place inside a larger game.
Korea Put The Odds On The Purchase Screen
Disclosure rules target the out-of-view part of that last table row. Since December 2017, Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines have required apps that sell loot boxes to disclose the odds of receiving each type of item before purchase.
South Korea’s National Assembly went further in February 2023, writing disclosure into the Game Industry Promotion Act. The amendments took effect on March 22, 2024, and require domestic and foreign companies to show loot box probabilities on the purchase screen.
By July, Game World Observer reported that the Game Rating and Administration Committee had found 266 games in violation, 60% of them foreign. Developers of 185 of those titles had already fixed the problem.
Korea’s competition regulator had punished hidden odds shortly before the amendments took effect, using an older consumer law. In January 2024, the Korea Fair Trade Commission fined Nexon 11.6 billion won, then a record under that law, over the paid Cube items in MapleStory.
The commission found that every Cube option was equally likely when the items launched in May 2010, and that Nexon began making some options rarer that September without telling players. From 2011 to 2021, it found, some outcomes could not be drawn at all.
Nexon is fighting the fine, arguing in part that it punishes conduct from before disclosure became mandatory. The Seoul High Court has postponed its ruling four times, and Money Today reported this month that the decision is now set for October 28, 2026.
That ruling is due about 15 weeks after Alberta’s market opened, while the province’s bonus and advertising standards get their first full season of live use. Bonus.com on X posts updates as those casino rules change.