To add to my own comment a bit, fundamentally I think this boils down to randomness vs. hidden state. It feels very "emergent" for a game to have lots of subtly

To add to my own comment a bit, fundamentally I think this boils down to randomness vs. hidden state. It feels very "emergent" for a game to have lots of subtly interconnected systems, but if they depend on factors the player doesn't know about, or depend in ways the player can't possibly intuit, then they're indistinguishable from randomness, so you might as well have flipped a coin. For me the canonical example of this is Nethack, which is full of such things - monsters that are slightly more dangerous during a (real-life) full moon, and so on. One can argue that NH is a special case, with its rich tradition of players reading the source code as they play, but in general I think it's an anti-pattern for game developers to beware.