On the one hand, hobby how you want, do what brings you joy and annoys the irksome parts of the community. On the other hand, I think both ends of the spectrum equally miss a key point of warhammer, which GW themselves have obfuscated over the years.

For all the complaints I could easily voice over 40k, especially the setting as it has iterated over the decades since its inception, the aspect I most appreciate is that original idea of having no "good" factions; that even in this game we are playing for fun, in the fiction the violence is never justified as "fighting the good fight."

However, reading their pitch blurb, one rule immediately crushed that curiosity: measuring dungeon turns in real session time, rather than in-fiction increments.

It's easy to hear the procedural elements of dungeon turns and assume this is fine; it reduces book keeping, after all! Just cross off a torch & check for wandering monsters every 30 minutes, maybe update a clock behind the screen.

However, this design misses the primary purpose of dungeon turns on player decision making: providing consequences for actions that take significant time in the fiction but not at the table.

As an example that came up in a recent session I ran as part of a test of my own dungeon procedures, one player, noticing a secret door the party had missed after approaching it from the other side (as they hadn't spent the time to investigate the original room), stated "I'm going to run my hands along the wall of every room, checking for crevices and such that might indicate secret doors."

Now, you could just tell the player they'll need to describe that in every room (or tell them "no," which will have the same effect); with a session-time dungeon turn, that's the only way to make that action have consequences for the party.

The dungeon procedures I was testing, however, used in-fiction dungeon turns (as the party was aware), so my reply was "Ok; note that doing so means every room will cost an extra turn, then." The consequence of which would be doubled torch expense & more chances to encounter wandering monsters.

The player decided to just check specific rooms they were suspicious of, and would tell me when they wanted to do so.

Such is the design purpose of dungeon turns beyond resource tracking: providing consequences for the party to weigh with each exploration action they take in the dungeon. There are plenty of variations on the principle of the dungeon turn, such as the overloaded encounter die or the underclock, but they primarily strive to improve on that basic design structure of making exploration actions matter without weighing down session time.

Luck is pretty basic: it's a party resource that anyone in the group can spend to negate incoming damage on a 1-to-1 basis (with most attacks dealing 1 damage and character health rooted in single digits), or to increase the result of a test on a 1-to-1 basis. It's partially inspired by Arnold K's blog post on Deconstructing Healing Potions, specifically his second point:

If you have 4 people, each with 10 HP, and the party is carrying 3 potions that each heal for 5 HP, then the "party" has 55 HP, and the potions can be consumed by whoever needs them the most. Through this lens, potions are a form of insurance carried by the whole party.  They're a resource that the party shares, that limits how long they can delve into dungeons. (Although obviously the parties that play better will take less damage, delve deeper, and get more treasure.)

However, because of the overall lethality of this system, the damage-absorption provides a small safety net that the player characters can leverage to act daring & heroic; it is the glue that holds the rpg side of this system together.

Now, how do you get luck?

When the party takes a week or more off to rest and train, they reset to a minimum luck of 2 per character. This is structured to ideally occur at the end of an adventure; in the middle of an adventure, the party gains luck from reflections.

At the start of each session of M&V, the gm goes around and asks each player for a reflection on their character's adventures so far. Each player that provides a reflection grants the party a luck point.

I'm sure other ttrpgs I haven't had the chance to read have a similar mechanic, but I initially brainstormed this mechanic with a friend as a solution to player engagement between sessions. The problem we identified is players didn't have a reason to think about the narrative of the game over the week, resulting in a slow start to sessions and lost players. Some of that problem is note taking, some of it is a player attitude of not wanting to think about the game outside of session. Looking at the other tabletop games we play, MTG and Warhammer allow players to engage with the hobby outside of playing the game (deckbuilding for MTG, painting & list building for warhammer) in a way that's commonly understood as part of the fun, rather than homework. Some trad TTRPGs offer a form of this engagement with character building, but that's specifically focused on a different character / game than is currently active.

We settled on this idea of reflections because it doesn't have an explicit "homework" element.

If somebody comes into session thinking about the game and knowing there will be reflections, they generally come up with a reflection without much problem.

If someone had a busy week, that's no fault on them.

If someone comes into session disengaged and can't come up with a reflection, there's some small social pressure to avoid that scenario next time.

The idea is that a player can think about reflections on the train, when work's slow - when there's nothing better to do - and allow them to engage with the game away from session.

These aren't tactical RPG / D&D 4e-esque minions; common goblins, foot soldiers, and even the party's followers are all 1 hp characters, while player characters will only start with 3 max hp (with small opportunities to increase it). The vast majority of characters in this game have single-digit HP, with the two highest I've written being a 15 HP dragon and 10 HP mountain troll, both of which are 4+ times the size of a human.

What ties these together is the harm roll: after succeeding an attack test against a target (a d12 roll modified by attacker's skill and target's defense), the attacker rolls a d12 + their attack's Strength modifier (12s have a 50% chance to add a d6, which similarly compounds on a 6), and if the total equals or exceeds the target's Fortitude rating, they deal their weapon's damage to the target (1 damage unless stated otherwise, i.e. two-handed weapons like longswords and halberds). Most characters have a Fortitude of 5, but armor increases it, and weapons have a basic Strength and can have special properties, like maces and warhammers halving armor's effective Fortitude bonus.

(This general mechanic is largely inspired from the old warhammer Strength vs Toughness chart / MESBG Strength vs Defense chart. The wound roll representing the difficulty in dealing effective damage to a target as a design principle makes it easier to manage large units since you don't also have to track the health of the damage dealt to those models, which I realized meshed well with my overall design goals for basic enemies to be at risk of going down with a good hit but not automatic minion fodder. I use "Fortitude" instead of "Toughness" because I like the word better and its primarily representing armor, while I called it a "harm roll" due to the narrative explanation of HP in this game and wounds sounding more visceral.)

Now this might raise alarm about null results and missed turns; however, I have found in playtesting that, outside of some specific cases, the 1 HP baseline makes each roll an event in the action. When every attack has a decent chance to instantly remove an enemy from the fight (combined with an action point system that provides room for maneuvers), players try to make every attack count with grabs, trips, pins, and sneak attacks.

Of course, the same goes for the player characters. While they do have a few more hit points than their opponents, and a small pool of communal luck to cushion a few blows, my players have quickly realized how thin that cushion is when they fall into a bad situation.

There's a cave system in icewind dale which, for some reason, is basically a bunch of short, wide tunnels connecting large rooms full of undead - like, 30+ or so per room (admittedly I didn't bother to count and the wiki doesn't list them, but it was a flood). The first few times I tried to get through the level, I would almost immediately TPK as my frontline got surrounded and pummeled while my wizard and thief just ran for their lives. I was initially confused why, as my frontline could easily dispatch zombies and had high AC to shrug off a lot of blows, and the game doesn't have special flanking rules other than for sneak attacks.

Of course, the problem with being surrounded is just facing a significantly larger volume of attacks; this is obvious in retrospect without being stuck on the positioning minigame of later D&D editions and offshoots. Once that reality fully sunk in, I started approaching combats with an eye for my party's formation, preferring to start my ranger in the backline so she could replace anyone in the frontline who got too injured and needed time to heal, and developing a strong sense of where my wizard could safely place her fireballs. Feeling out how to best utilize my party's formation was a fun tactical puzzle to figure out, even with the relatively simplicity of the core game system.

I got reminded of that experience from the last session of this playtest I'm running of my RPG for some friends. Most of the battles so far have been skirmishes moderated by the wizard's sleep spell, but the adventurers picked up a small squad of skeletons from a necromancer they bargained with to reach some relics on the other side of some goblin-claimed dungeon areas for him.

In the first fight in these dungeon halls aided by the skeleton squad, the battle turned into a fight between two line formations as characters on each side either joined their formation to prevent and/or gain outnumbering bonuses, tried to flank the enemy formation to overwhelm enemy opponents, or tried to break past the formation fight and pick off leaders & backline support.

This was emergent play from rules interactions; I don't have any special rules for opponents fighting in formation. However, this is in line with what I'm expecting/hoping will emerge in the game as I'm trying to design it for each player controlling a "hero" character leading a small squad of followers.

The highlights of Divinity Original Sin 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 have been their Act 2 and Act 1 respectively, for similar reasons: they're both built around a set of distinct-feeling areas that you can cut off in bite-sized chunks based on your level & gear. This gives them a sense of exploration & progression; the black pits vs bloodmoon island or the swamp vs the goblin camp stand in stark contrast with each other as you move through them. However, whereas DOS2 bulges at Act 2 (with Act 1 acting more as an extended prologue, for what problems that has) and then tapers into the ending, BG3 has sort of an hourglass shape to its content: act 1 (part 1) has quite a bit, the creche, grymforge, and Act 2 are monotone without many quests, and act 3 is massive. This leads the game to taper to a point with the Act 2 boss fight then expand and drag onwards through the back ~third of the game.

I've seen quite a few critiques in the past of Arx in DOS2 for being too small and not really feeling like a city, and Larian certainly seemed to take that to heart with what parts of Baldurs Gate they did get the represent. However, in doing so they missed a significant structural point that the relatively small Arx map achieved: it didn't interrupt the momentum of the game.

Arx basically has 4 main quests - Adrahmalik, Queen Justinia, the Lizard Consulate, and Lord Kemm - to knock out before you head for the Crypt of Lucian and finish the game. 3/4 of those are directly tied to a companion's quest (Lohse, Beast, and Red Prince). The act is entirely about tying up a few loose ends from Act 2 that weren't resolved in Act 3 (typically with a single fight), and as such it gives the game a much cleaner pace as it narrows in for the ending - you don't have much else to do here anyways.

Baldur's Gate, meanwhile, is massive and sprawling, with lots of side quests to resolve (if you can be bothered) and even some new quests popping up. It's good for portraying a city, but it absolutely kills the game's momentum, especially as the last two levels (which you'll knock out rather quickly) don't meaningful add much to prioritize certain encounters over others outside of narrative reasons - if anything its mostly about when you want certain equipment.

(Arx also stagnates in levels, but its small amount of content makes it less noticeable).

BG3's ending sequence exacerbates this further; while yes it has four fights between taking the boat & ending the game (versus DOS2's 2 + puzzle, one of which is a throwaway gimmick encounter), the first is a throwaway intellect devourer fight (that I highly recommend just skipping with some spells) and the second is the slowest damn fight in the game because there are too many enemies (and if you make the mistake of summoning allies, it's even slower!)

I like the expansiveness of the city, but it needed to take up more of the middle of the game rather than the end.

For BG3, that could have meant trimming Act 2 down (it tends to overstay its welcome anyways) and/or having the upper city available as Act 4 but heavily trimmed down (flaming fist securing the city and what not) with just the orin, gortash, raphael, and annals of karthus (/maybe Nightsong) quests to deal with.

Even with the whiff factor of new adventurers and a few pains figuring out how things worked, that was easily the most fluid combat I've had the pleasure to run. We knocked out something like 10-12ish rounds of combat in about 40 minutes (with a good portion of that just from learning the rules & hit location + critical hit tables), and the players reported loving the base mechanical choices available to them.

What really surprised me though was how evocative the specific critical hits were when discussing this with a friend. In the final rounds of the fight, the three PCs surrounded the skaven leader and pummeled him - the zealot's flail crushed his arm and his sword fell to the ground (Arm, critical effect 4), then the elven scribe scraped his scalp with her sword and blinded him with his own blood (Head, critical effect 3). He tried to run for it, only for the zealot to catch him again with a brutal flail swing that crushed him into the ground (Torso, critical effect 10 "Killed in spectacular and gore-drenched fashion).

My two main complaints are just that cover is entirely vague (I couldn't find any recommended numbers or reference for it other than the suggestion that "cover should matter") and it's lack of rules for enemy morale.

One of the players had procured a bow for their character and felt that ranged attacks were underpowered (especially with a -20 penalty for firing into melee), but, as we ended up discussing, they're primarily familiar with combat as represented in 5th edition D&D where ranged attacks are significantly lacking in restrictions. I like how the rules for ranged attacks work since they feel more like having them is a tool that you can use to great effect if you employ them well.

I don't have the pre-sequel as memorized as BL2 unfortunately, mainly due to some gameplay issues (side quests being near-required and overall annoying, some of the most nightmarish enemies in the series) I've only really seen Athena's, Nisha's, and Willhelm's responses throughout the campaign. This is particularly an issue for TPS since (unlike 3), each vault hunter's unique responses represent their perspective and therefore build on the game's themes.

While the game has its issues, it feels like Anthony Burch (here using Burch as a synecdoche for the writing team as he was the lead writer for BL2 & TPS) was working through an idea of what the series was about when writing it, and it is an absolute shame we never got to see a BL3 following that line of thinking (in fact BL3 didn't pay any attention to TPS and seems to have read a misinformed spark notes summary).

The pre-sequel's portrayal of jack highlights how not every corporate leader in the universe is the kind of villain to scoop out somebody's eyes with a spoon and laugh when telling the story, but they're still awful people. When you meet him, Jack's already pretty bad: he's already locked up his daughter and turned her into a secret weapon and he treats those he has power over like shit (unless he thinks they're useful or "cool" enough). He still thinks of himself as a hero, however, and over the course of the game you watch him make decisions he deems necessary and heroic that are simple cruelties to those who trusted him. I think his interaction with the Meriff is rather telling here: Jack initially lets him live because it's part of his heroic script, then gets angry not really because the man betrayed him, but because it made him abandon his script.

Zarpedon is a fantastic anti-villain, basically a complete inverse of Handsome Jack in BL2. She has set herself to a terrible purpose in hopes of saving the universe from corporate greed, recognizing (rightly) that the moment any of the corporations learned about the vault of the watcher they would never leave it alone. The game basically smacks you over the head at various points about how much she cares about other people, and therefore her decision to destroy Elpis - at the cost of everyone on it - was actually a painful decision for her. She doesn't betray her allies, and doesn't even try to directly interfere with the vault hunters. Instead, she mainly just aids and/or warns people they were trying to kill anyways. Easily her best line is at the end of an early side quest to pay last respects to one of her fallen soldiers she couldn't recover: "You will not have my mercy, but you do have my respect."

They also contrast her with Jack when he protests that she's killing innocent people, she agrees, and he decides she's lost her mind. Jack's death toll in BL2 is likely far more than what Zarpedon would have wrought destroying Elpis, but it all works in his mind since he already decided those people weren't "innocent." Accepting the need to cause harm to someone for a greater good without refusing their humanity is an alien concept to him; he must make everything he does sound morally correct in his head.

I also like how the game explores the identities of what kinds of people serve the corporations with each of the vault hunters. You have the three who enjoy the status quo: Nisha enjoys cruelty in the name of justice, Willhelm is a merc with no morals, and Aurelia got her wealth from her family exploiting people. Then there's Claptrap, who's literally owned by the Hyperion corporation and gets modified without much question of his will (and then scrapped and dumped by Jack, alongside all of his product line). Timothy became one of Jack's body doubles to pay off his student loans, employment that permanently changes his appearance and labels him disposable. Athena needed money, but she also needed a purpose after losing the only one she had known as an Atlas assassin.

Of course, as the narrator, we get a lot more insight into Athena's perspective as one of the many people in this universe searching for a new meaning to their life and their potential. Given the nature of the universe in Borderlands, most people likely end up in the corporate machine because there aren't other evident options. Many of them would have their lives so defined by their role in the corporation, wherever that is, that when they are betrayed or discarded by that corporation they won't know where else to go. Maybe they'll have some vengeance on their mind, maybe they'll just ply their trade wherever they can to keep living, but it's hard to move on from that sort of world-shattering experience for a purpose other than survival. Athena is one of the few with the benefit of training and opportunity to survive that betrayal and find a new purpose. At the beginning of the pre-sequel she took on Jack's offer mainly since she needed money, but I think that line she singles out - "Come to the moon, hunt a vault, be a hero" - clues into how she still susceptible to some of the same concepts of heroism that Jack's obsessed with. By the end of the game she leaves that mindset behind and tries to find a new life with Janey Springs, but as we glimpse in Tales from the Borderlands, the life the two of them try to find - just avoiding all the problems with corporations and vaults - isn't sustainable.

Handsome Jack isn't just some charismatic villain that garnered a lot of affection from players by some fluke, but rather an excellent personification of the dystopian elements of Borderlands' background setting that make it engaging.

If you look at Borderlands 1, for all its effective lack of plot, the game is about these megacorporation's disregard for the human lives they ruin and their self-defeating obsession with attaining power and control (as seen with Commandant Steele's death). Borderlands 2 took that premise and swapped out the corporate antagonist, but it's not just a new coat of paint/roster of enemies: the motivations change while following similar themes as implied in BL1, now personified in Jack.

In BL1, the Atlas Corporation believes it owns Pandora, and everything (and everyone that primarily DAHL brought), on it is unrealized property they have free claim over. They believe the vault and its contents are owed to them, and it falls on the vault hunters showing up in the nick of time to remedy the potential resulting calamity.

Handsome Jack, meanwhile, has that similar belief that Pandora is "his," just that it's his to "save." He's Hyperion's current CEO because he is willing to do whatever it takes to get what he believes he is owed, one of which is respect as a hero of the people. The people he hates the most are those who deny or deprive him of those things: see his treatment of his daughter, after "what she did to her mother." His ego and disregard for the humanity of basically anyone else, treating them as a character in his story to be stepped on and/or discarded reflects an attitude of the megacorporations that makes the backgrounds of Borderlands so dystopian. I 100% believe that the system that makes a person like Handsome Jack could have produced nearly anyone in a similar mold.

Meanwhile, the Borderlands 1 vault hunters in 2 stand in stark contrast to not just Handsome Jack/Hyperion but also DAHL. Unlike Jack, they don't care about the aesthetics of heroism; they're just trying to protect as many people as they reasonably can from the horrors of Pandora. Unlike DAHL, they didn't abandon the planet and the survivors still there when the thing that brought them in the first place didn't pan out.

I think there's also something to the crude city of Sanctuary supporting plenty of residents versus the pristine city of Opportunity that's almost completely vacant of anything except instruments of war.

Of course, Jack's fall is thematically different from Atlas. Atlas gets defeated when it's claimed "property" slaughters the military sent to claim it; Jack gets defeated by watching his notions of heroism fall apart as the vault hunters cut down the calamity he summoned to "save" Pandora.

Then you get to Borderlands 3, which understood nothing but the aesthetic of the preceding series.

The only difference between the corporations you ally with and those you fight is the former have some friendly franchise blorbos (Rhys, Zer0, and Hammerlock). The corporations aren't fundamentally flawed factions that drive the terrible conditions of the setting for their lust for profit, they're just sometimes headed by someone evil and/or incompetent who maybe wants a merger (The "merger war" between Atlas and Maliwan is a good idea in theory, but it's ruined by going "this one is good" rather than focusing on helping those caught in the crossfire).

Meanwhile, the twins don't present a coherent threat as an element of Borderlands' underlying dystopia. They're just bad guys with lore things (derogatory) and their streamer gimmick. What I think is most insulting about them, though, is that they're just an excuse to use bandits everywhere with no though for an underlying point. The bandits of Pandora are the people DAHL left behind on that desolate rock of a planet, many of whom never wanted to be there in the first place. The twins could have shed some light on how receptive the bandits are to promises of salvation by whatever means because they have no hope otherwise.

Specifically, I've been thinking about how that campaign has gotten into the psychology of that adventurer archetype of character (in this case particularly leaning towards revolutionaries).

One character feels like the party went of-course and just wants to rescue their mentor & retire, with or without the party.

Another figures the group's done enough for what they wanted (ensuring the safety of their family) and is ready to retire at a moment's notice.

One is going along with it but is ready to retire whenever things calm down.

One can't stand the thought of just lying down while there are others she can help, even at the potential cost of forfeiting her family.

My ttrpg project is built around an expected episodic mission/heist/adventure structure; the crew of vagabonds decide on a mission (via personal incentive or contract), prepares, executes the mission, then returns to their haven for a respite. There's no levels; progression is almost entirely gear & achievement oriented.

Renown, a small form of progression that increases as you complete missions & make notable impacts on the world. Your renown contributes to the group's maximum Moxie, a resource anyone in the crew can use to influence dice rolls.

A Vagabond's saga is mostly just a notes section for their Foes, Exploits, Allies, Treasures, and Scars. Most of these are just to have a nice record on the character sheet of their adventures. Scars have a mechanical effect; whenever you take a wound, you mark the cause; when the wound heals, you record it as a scar, and get +1 to saves against related harm. This part is inspired by Goblin Punch's "Legendarium" post.

Quests track a vagabond's personal goals. Motivating quests answer the question of "why is this character living this life of danger instead of trying to just find some peace elsewhere?"

Last of all is retirement and woe. Certain experiences increase a vagabond's woe (losing an ally to death or retirement, every fifth scar, etc). If a vagabond doesn't have a motivating quest, then when they get a respite they need to roll 2d6; if the result is less than or equal to their woe, the vagabond is inclined to retire. You as a player can choose to keep the vagabond going for "One Last Job," but they're doomed until they do retire (which interacts with a seperate Luck mechanic). This is inspired by Goblin Punch's "Death, Trauma, and Retirement" post. Of course, a player can always choose for their vagabond to retire or leave the crew for other reasons.

They function as games, they can be enjoyable, but I have yet to see a ttrpg that delivers a tactical experience without a good bit of smoke and mirrors.

For a long time I thought that crpgs could just deliver the tactical expectations of a ttrpg better since they could crank up the difficulty and mechanically highlight more options to actually provide a challenge. But since I've gotten into skirmish wargames, it's dawned on me that what ttrpgs really lack is the real potential for failure that's effectively required to make tactical gameplay rewarding.

In a tactical ttrpg where each player pilots a single character at a time, failure by death can be catastrophic for player's engagement - if not for the entire table in the case of a TPK situation.

A lot of advice & design for tactical ttrpgs try to fix this by emphasizing secondary objectives - "free the captives," "stop the ritual," etc - but the last thing a player can stake regardless is their character's life. If an NPC will die unless the character intervenes, character death is what the player gambles. Some games try to fix this by removing death from the equation, but whether you just eject from your mech or get raised from the dead later, it removes that final stake a player can gamble with.

CRPGs can manage that fail state by giving you save games you can reload from and/or multiple characters to control. If you fail to play well enough, you might need to reload and try again with a new strategy, or you might need to say goodbye to a party member you've grown attached to. In either case, failure isn't a complete fail state - you can in some way keep playing and adapt to the situation.

A skirmish wargame manages this by limiting the lasting impact of the fail state. You're controlling a whole warband/gang/squad and the effects only last for this match or short campaign you're playing. When you gamble a unit's life, intentionally or by blunder, it's main real impact is on your ability to affect the current game, not in a long-lasting narrative or engagement sense. (Tactical board games fall in a similar category)

The majority of ttrpgs - and expected ttrpg experiences - can't deliver those same benefits. Their tactical challenge doesn't work in practice.

I have been properly GMing my main group for six years now (though I've often assumed a similar role since my childhood, just without a proper ruleset) and am a player at another table with a campaign going on three years now. Knowing what issues I encountered when I GMed, I decided after a bit to take a more active role in the group and hopefully ease some of the inherent stress of running the game.

With that in mind, here are some things I do for my group as a player that are a general help for our GM & the table in general:

Take good notes & share them. I understand different people have different matters of notes & attention, but notetaking is just a basic skill you can bring to a table to the benefit of yourself, your fellow players, and the GM. The more notetakers at the table, the less likely information will fall down the cracks. I'm one of two notetakers in my second group, and between our two different styles it's typically easy to double check an event from real years prior in the campaign. The first ~15 sessions before we started taking proper notes? Lost to time, fuzzy memory, and context-free notebook lines in the single digits per session.

State your Plans. This applies to a lot of things, but basically boils down to "communicate with your GM." Give your GM a heads up if you have a course of action in mind for your next session (like wanting to visit a specific shop to get some new gear, wanting to investigate a haunted house, chasing down a specific lead in a mystery, etc).

Wrangle Your Fellow Players. GMing can be exhausting needing to run the game, manage the social group, and throwing time at prep that can get chucked down the drain. Again, each group & their needs & styles will be different, but you can ease some of this just by being a bit mindful. If scheduling's a problem, take the initiative on sorting out prime session time with everyone. Engage your fellow players openly on their plans heading into future sessions (and remember to State your Plans for the GM so they can focus their time where it will be of the most use). If your group can get a bit rowdy and/or the GM has trouble getting everyone's attention, give them a hand in returning the group to the game.

Provide Information as Necessary. This will entirely differ depending on group and game, but sometimes the GM might need help tracking a bit of information or looking up a rule (or, if you have good notes, looking up an NPC name or similar past encounter the group has had). GMing can be hectic what with managing the entire game beyond the party in many systems. You can respectfully bring up a forgotten mechanic or the text of a rule (especially if the GM asks for it). Importantly, strive to act as an impartial reminder of information and rules if you aim to perform this facet; you are arguing not to better your case, but to ease some load from the GM. A corollary to this that shouldn't need to be said, but sometimes does: strive to understand the game & how you interact with it. For D&D likes, this means "know your abilities & their functions; read your spells." If something's vague or unclear, ask your GM before or outside of game how they understand it (not that they're necessarily correct, but that you'll be on the same page).

When you hand action resolution over to the dice in a ttrpg, you are not asking for the grace of fate but rather the whims of lady luck. The dice are not dramatic; they are impartial to the limit of cruelty Therefore, your chosen ttrpg system should engage with the dice according to your desire for impartiality.

If you want a controllable story, do not roll dice. There are systems that minimize the impact of dice or don't use them altogether, as well as just other forms of collaborative storytelling.

What dice can contribute to a ttrpg is an emergent story: the unexpected highs and lows that come from the noise of chaos they represent. So rely on them as much as you would rely on uncertainty, and stack the odds in your favor to avoid their rule when you can. If you throw yourself to the dice, expect no mercy in their judgement.