The thing is... TomE4 and Incursion do not represent the majority of Roguelikes.
Nethack does.
Which would make my point even stronger... nethack has been effectively
solved by more than one person. It's certainly not genuine randomness that's stopping people from winning.
Being fair, though, I don't notice the nethack influence in most roguelikes, largely because I've never played nethack for more than a few minutes, despite playing the majority (Probably better than 2/3rds by this point, heh.) of english language RLs.
Most deaths in roguelikes aren't due to randomness, but carelessness
It depends on how well you can play. If you play very well then it is almost all due to randomness.
Except not
I didn't say "most deaths for good players," I said most deaths, period. Yes, the deaths that hit very good players tend to be due to randomization -- but 90% or better of the time, they
could have mitigated that random cause, through one means or another. Certainly the majority of deaths, overall, in RLs is due to a combination of carelessness and unfamiliarity with the game's mechanics.
However you forgot the OTHER aspect. Not Randomness but "Unfair" or "Unknown" mechanics. A lot of the time people who are able to continuously beat roguelikes are ones who are aware of these unknown mechanics you have no way of knowing.
Fairness has nothing in particular to do with difficulty in an asymmetric game (i.e. most games, these days.), except to the extent which the situation has been balanced toward one side (player, non-player, etc.) or the other. Certainly a asymmetric game isn't going to be fair, for one side or another. The issue isn't fairness but
enjoyability (which is largely subjective) and
if it can be beat (which is not subjective). "Beat regularly" may or may not be something desired or actively fought against, depending on the designer, of course.
As to the unknown aspect, that is somewhat fair. Much of the intial difficulty in RLs can, indeed, come from hidden mechanics. However, the 'people who are able to continuously beat roguelikes' don't have some special case method of gaining knowledge -- they gain it through experiential testing (i.e. playing the game), 'spoilers' (advice from those more experienced), or code diving, same as anyone else. There's nothing really
stopping anyone here from being able to streak on nethack except the time and effort investment.
So REALLY you have to split roguelike deaths into three
1) Stupid mechanics, 2) Randomness, and 3) Genuin[e] fault of the player
One is largely subjective, and somewhat self-contradictory -- if the mechanics were genuinely
stupid, they'd be easy to identify and circumvent, not leading to many overall deaths at all. Certainly there are some mechanics in RLs that aren't entirely well thought out, but name me a computer game that
doesn't have that issue.
Two and three are tied together -- a great deal of the strategy in roguelikes is, specifically,
mitigation of random events. The RNG is quite likely to be actively out to kill you and preparation and appropriate reaction when the time comes is very strongly in the hands of the player. There are, of course, cases where there is genuine death-by-RNG: Running into an exploding dart throwing kobold 3 steps from the starting tile in Dungeon Crawl is a good example. There's also cases in bullet hells where you die because you sneezed
I don't like bullet hell games myself, and if I did make a game, I wouldn't implement many of their design choices, but I don't go about saying they're badly designed
No... Those games are genuin[e]ly difficult where while a large amount of memorisation is required it isn't sacrificed for gameplay.
I am talking about Roguelikes where the majority of the time the difficulty comes as a sacrifice to gameplay or by degrading gameplay.
So gameplay is a combination of memorization and fine motor control? The difficulty in roguelikes have always struck me as specifically built to encourage and direct the player toward a particular
sort of gameplay, namely long term and/or logistical thinking, with short-term action being devalued. How does RL's particular brand of viciousness sacrifice or degrade gameplay of the type engendered by the genre?