The one quest I had in mind was “Saviour” from Ashes of Malmouth, the one with the man who’s barricaded himself in a room to protect a couple kids from the Aetherials, where the game basically rolls a die to decide whether or not he goes along with you.
I looked it up afterwards and it was interesting to see the comments a lot of people made about it. A lot of people felt the game had cheated them out of something somehow, and that there should have been a way to act so as to reliably get a good outcome.
I’m in two minds about this myself. On the one hand, the game explicitly uses choice and consequence as a selling point, and a quest like this would undermine that because it gives the opposite message: that there are some things outside your control. I think that’s a valid thing for a game designer to want the player to feel, for two reasons. One, it makes the world more believable, and therefore allows for more immersion. But more importantly, if everything was completely in the player’s control, and they knew they could engineer some good outcome to every situation they come across (barring bad reading comprehension or misclicks), then it takes all the tension out. There’s no sense of relief when things go well.
I personally like the idea of quests like these, though with slightly different execution. I think one thing that annoyed people was the fact that this quest was based on pure RNG and the player’s input didn’t matter at all. I talked about believability earlier, but if you take it to this extreme then it stops feeling believable itself. I think a better way to do it would be weighted probabilities. You come into a situation, evaluate it rationally, and make your choice. If you made the safe choice, then you get maybe a 90% chance of the “good” outcome, meaning your choice mattered, but there’s always still the chance that the people you’re dealing with (who may be on edge, justifiably paranoid or even sleep deprived and not thinking clearly) won’t go along. Alternatively if you mess up or if you deliberately act like a dick, maybe there’s a 99% chance of the bad outcome (because hey every once in a while miracles do happen).