Natural randomness is found in great quantities in many popular boardgames. Arguably the three most popular Eurogames: Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, and Settlers of Catan all have a large amount of randomness to their play.

These games often get called "family games" partially for this reason. The level of randomness gets even more extreme with games like Munchkin or Saboteur, which are usually classified as "party games."

The second approach is rubberbanding. Mario Kart is probably the best example of this I've ever seen, in that it exhibits some of the most dramatic rubberbanding effects. First of all, as most people have experienced, the items in Mario Kart are not completely random.

If you're in first place, you tend to get only the more benign items such as banana peels (which drop behind you, creating a road hazard) or mushrooms (giving you a speed boost). If you're behind, however, you're treated to a fantastic arsenal of easy to use, powerful items.

One such item, the infamous Blue Shell, travels the entire course hunting after the first player, hitting many players on the way. Even better (or worse?) yet is the more recent addition of the Bullet Bill item, which gives your vehicle a tremendous, prolonged speed boost and the ability to wipe out anyone you touch on the way. One could
be forgiven for feeling that when drawing a Bullet Bill item, they've just effectively been handed first place. Therefore, in this way, Mario Kart's items work to combat skill deficits in both ways: randomness and rubberbanding.

The rubberbanding in racing games is not limited to items, however. Many popular racers -- the Ridge Racer and Dirt series, for example, have rubberbanding baked into the actual racing mechanisms themselves. So, if you're in the lead, your max speed might be lowered. If you're behind, it might be increased. Some of them have even gone as far as to give players who are behind a speed boost in the area right near the finish line, to "synthesize" those "caught up at the last second" moments.

These days, the discussion of skill deficits can mostly be heard in the form of talk about accessibility. The arguments for something like randomness or rubberbanding is generally framed as a measure to allow a larger amount of people to enjoy a particular game. And it may indeed be the case that a game that has a sizable amount of randomness or rubberbanding helps accomplish that task -- but at what cost? 

Costs of the Modern Approach

It can't be argued that a naturally random game has taken any kind of "damage" from its method of dealing with skill deficits, since its method is something fundamental to its character anyway. In the case of games with injected randomness, however, there is a serious cost.

Taking a look at Mario Kart, we have a generally coherent and deterministic gameplay loop as the basis: accelerating forward, turning, avoiding obstacles, trying to maintain your speed. Players engage with this, making decisions about when to start turning for this curve, which fork in the road to take, whether to dodge that obstacle on its left or its right, etc, and get consistent, reliable, deterministic feedback for it.

Then, there's the items game on top of this, which not only is random, but is extremely powerful. In fact, rarely do you get similar positive feedback from playing well as you do from drawing random items well. So this can have a very frustrating, confusing effect for players. It diminishes the feeling of accomplishment from a win, and diminishes the feeling of having learned anything from a match.

Further, while many players might shield their ego by saying something along the lines of, "I only lost because he drew a Bullet Bill right at the end there," it also signifies a disconnect between that player and the coherent, natural system that he is trying to understand. Again, a game is essentially a conversation between a player and the system. Losses in particular are a place where the game speaks volumes to the player about what he can learn, but in the "lost due to randomness" situation, the conversation is shut down. So, while you may get a short-term benefit from this effect, the long-term interest in the game is likely to be diminished.