>Dude. 90% of the skills in the game only have a couple factors
>that aren't too hard to figure out.

Well fine, then only put the related-factors description on skills that have some. An absence of that description can mean "skill roll only"

> This is just glorified dice-rolling, there's #### you're never going
> to figure out and you're not meant to.

In D&D you have rulebooks that very explicitly outlines all the game mechanics. For a million reasons D&D is not like CF. The biggest one is that you have a human instead of a computer applying the rules.

> I find that the more I know about the mechanics of
>the game, the less interesting, surprising, and fun it is.
...
>Surprise and chance are what keeps things fun. I don't
>understand why you can't appreciate that and want to get rid
>of it.

Well, I feel the opposite. And if you don't want to know how the skills work, don't read the helpfiles. You can go ahead and hamstring yourself in the name of mystery and surprise if that's what you find fun.

Personally, I find it fun pitting my creativity, quick-thinking and tactical intelligence against other people on a relatively equal footing. There's nothing especially fun about being surprised by failure (or success) simply because I'm ignorant of the rules. What is fun is being surprised by a really clever use skill that I could've thought of, but didn't, or thinking of a clever choice of skills that surprises my opponent. Or engineering situations where the odds are stacked in my favor (or having the reverse done to me). But having the outcome determined by factors beyond my ability to discover? Not so fun. You can't learn from your successes and failures if you can't understand what contributed to those outcomes, even if that just means knowing that it's straight-up chance.

Indeed, I have no problem with chance-based outcomes, when it's knowable that chance is what you're dealing with. If the situation is "well, if I can land an impale now I'll gain the upper hand, but if I miss I'll probably die" that's a fun thing because I'm taking an informed risk.