A ball falls through a field of pins and lands in a slot with a multiplier. That is the whole game. Rows, risk levels and strategies rearrange the same arithmetic without changing it.
Eight to sixteen. More rows means more slots and a wider gap between the centre and the edges. Compared.
Low, medium or high. Reshapes the payout table and leaves the return untouched. How.
The only setting that changes what a session costs. Sizing it.
The path of the ball. In every online implementation the outcome is fixed before the animation starts — the bouncing you watch renders a result already decided. Most operators publish a seed pair so you can verify this yourself after the round.
At sixteen rows the ball makes sixteen left-or-right decisions. There is exactly one way to go right every time, and thousands of ways to split evenly. That is the entire reason the edges pay so much and hit so rarely.
Published RTP sits between 97% and 99% — high for a casino game. It still means the game keeps one to three units of every hundred staked, forever, and no setting changes that. What the settings change is how violently the balance moves on the way there.