Why don't you just play a guy whose life is on the rocks and everything has a chance of going wrong? Why do you care that you get 18 oodles of content as opposed to 19?
I'd fail more than half the checks if I took the red/white nodes immediately. Even with 6+ in a skill the roll chance is still 40-60%. And I'm talking about the first 2 days. Then without backing out to inventory (must exit dialogue) I'd barely ever do any of the hard checks. For me the first day is the worst, there are many side quests to start and too many skills.
Also some of the gated content is very interesting (having passed the checks) and there's no way to find out what's going to happen
prior to passing the check. Failing has flavor text but doesn't open up anything.
I've only played Day 1, but my "let's pick attribs and stats based on a vague larpy concept, not switch out clothes, and just roll" character failed some checks, succeeded others, got plenty of content to keep him busy all day long. Plenty of tasks were left undone - some on purpose, some due to incompetence.
It's not about "click check -> failure -> some COOL and AMAZING thing happens" all the time. The very fact that you are stymied in conversation with a witness and cannot seem to break them down, might mean you have to accept their shitty bargain, or leave them be and operate with less knowledge somewhere else.
When you start to calculate your way out of that and line up the numbers to pass all the checks you want, then you might as well pick and choose what scenes you want to see from a director's reel disconnected from all sense of roleplay and consequence. I'm not saying that makes you a horrible person, I'm saying I think that will suck all the fun out of this game for you.
Let me put it this way - sure, your guy will miss out on some cool scenes if you can't pass the check. Is that really a problem? Is solving that problem worth destroying the sense of choice and consequence, of character building, of a well paced and organically built adventure? And beyond this particular game, isn't the definition of C&C, the Codex holy grail of RPGs, that you will miss out on certain kinds of content? The weird and wacky endings/scenes in Alpha Protocol, the tightly guarded secrets around the NPCs, are so special
because you don't see them most of the time,
because of the knowledge that many characters will not reach this secret and you did so because of your character's many choices all throughout the game. If you just watch that content on Youtube or extract it all by gaming the ideal numbersbot the very first playthrough, it's not half as worthwhile.
