- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
That's only if you are rolling for two binary results: Success and failure. Sometimes the degree of success and failure can matter as well; a win by 5 points might mean we won by the skin of our teeth, while a win by 50 points might mean a crushing victory.
Not to get too deep into it, but some of the "traditional" and/or most common methods of writing a narrative, like having clearly foreshadowed consequences and events playing out to cause a certain pre-determined dramatic conflict, aren't the only way to write stories. Heavy use of dice rolling, like as done in Quests or Tabletop Roleplay, are a very different style, and when done well it can make things more dramatic and immersive. The risks and uncertainties the characters face are things the audience also faces along with them. Even if it means characters sometimes fail at things that would have been very narratively satisfying for them to succeed at in a normal story, it means the successes and failures feel more well earned since the consequences weren't chosen ahead of time.
One of the quests that I believe handles its dice rolls best is Divided Loyalties. The QM always depends heavily on the context of events to determine the outcome of said dice rolls. To use a less spoilery example: Mathilde, a combination spy-wizard, once passed along information about a secret cult that was threatening the Empire to her Master. Soon after, she took a standard learning action from said Master... and rolled a critical failure. Rather than Mathilde stubbing her toe or some other silly failure, it turned out that the secret cult had done something so terrible that all information that said cult even existed couldn't be allowed to get out, and so no lesson could take place at the time. Later on, we learned what the cult had been up to, and it had some wide-reaching consequences for the setting that were very fun - but if we'd rolled a normal failure, that entire story wouldn't have even happened.
On the other end of things, recently Mathilde had a friendly duel with an important foreign lord, and rolled a crit failure there too. But because it was a friendly duel with both combatants being cautious, the result of that was Mathilde simply failed to impress said lord with her dueling skills in what was a too-cautious fight where they both restrained themselves from actually fighting.
Some quests are extremely swingy, letting a single dice roll give outrageous success or bafflingly unrealistic failure. Those quests are, to put it gently, highly flawed. Dice rolls done right shouldn't obviate a character's choices and actions, but rather bring out the uncertainty and opportunities of being in a living, unpredictable world.
P.S. I'm not sure why two critical failures were the examples that sprang to mind. *shrug*
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