And in tabletop, 'luck' is no more than a powerful illusion cast by the DM. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. That lucky critical miss from the evil dragon which saved your character was mandated by God. Not by the false idol of the Dice.
And yet you are all blissfully ignorant. Fools.
My DM in our D&D group makes most combat rolls public so we can see it. If she doesn't make them public, she does ask us "what's your AC right now?" and she grins and giggles when she lands critical hits on us.
She enjoys putting us into trouble.
Pretty much every character in our group has died at least once during our campaign which has now been running for years. I died twice. The bard and rogue died thrice. We always carry a diamond around with us, which is a required material component for the resurrection spell. We once had to sell our bard's lute to afford his resurrection after he drowned in a river while being grappled by a kelpie. I managed to get him out by trying a rope around our halfling rogue and throwing him into the water to grab our bard so I could pull them both out, but it took me three tries to throw the halfling far enough to catch the bard. Once, almost our entire party was close to death (most were unconscious) in a fight against a giant salamander, and our rogue saved the day with a lucky critical hit. In that fight, all rolls were open so our DM didn't cheat to grant us mercy.
She's completely merciless and enjoys throwing hard challenges into our way. Death is always a possibility. When the dice say you die, you die. Pay 5000 gold for a resurrection spell and lose a level. Sorry mate.
Oh, and once we even managed to completely ruin the plan she had for us. She planned for us to be captured by drow, even prepared an entire side-plot for it. The drow attacked us as we camped, hitting us in the neck with paralyzing poison. Only I and our wizard chick managed to stay conscious. We fought the small hit squad off, and dragged our knocked-out party members through a heavy door into a chamber in which we fortified ourselves for the night. We decided to rest in there, and put up as many defences as we could manage. It was only me and the wizard chick now, everyone else was conscious but paralyzed, so they could only watch but not move. It seemed almost hopeless.
Our wizard chick put explosive runes on the outside of the door. Any drow who read it would get a big explosion into their faces before they stepped through the door. There was a narrow flight of stairs going up to the door from our room, so we'd be able to block the passage so they couldn't easily swarm us. Thusly prepared, we went to rest.
When the explosive runes got triggered, wizard chick and I jumped to our feet immediately. I grabbed my sword, she threw a fireball at the door as soon as it opened, greeting the drow with some massive damage. It had been her last spell - now, she was out. But our cleric, even though he was paralyzed, asked the DM if he could still cast a spell that required neither verbal nor somatic elements. She said yes - he was conscious, after all, so such a spell was castable if it required no movement and no talking. So our cleric of Lathander chose to emit light which did some minor damage to the drow and, more importantly, blinded them for two turns. Half of them resisted the blindness effect, but at least it was something. Then I charged in and attacked. I got a critical hit on my charge attack and killed an already wounded drow with my first blow; I cleaved, had a critical hit *again* and killed another. Cleave, I hit a third drow for some solid damage. When it was their turn, three of them attacked me - and the rest of course couldn't, since the entryway was too narrow for more than three people to stand next to each other. I took only one hit, but my HP were already down so every hit was bad. Next turn, I killed another drow and severely damaged a second.
And then they decided to run away because, after expecting easy prey, they got utterly fucked by just one fighter, one wizard chick, and some barely conscious glowy boi. They had no idea our wizard chick was out of spells. They had no idea it was just me holding the line and they'd have us overwhelmed within two, maybe three turns. All they knew was that they were getting slaughtered after expecting no resistance, and they ran away.
Our DM had planned for them to take us. She had prepared a story arc for when they imprisoned us. But, thanks to our extremely well-played and lucky defense (those critical hits of mine pretty much saved the day), we won and she didn't get to play out the story as she had planned it. Our playing, coupled with some lucky dice, changed the DM's plans.
So no, you're wrong. If you have a
good DM the dice actually matter. How you approach situations actually matters. A good DM will spend a lot of effort on cool setups that are designed to challenge you, but if you overcome the challenge by either skill or luck, you've overcome it and that's that. Or, if you die to a stupid decision or to severe bad luck, you die. Better pay up for that resurrection.
The games she runs are some of the best I've ever played, cause we players know exactly: if we fuck up, we have to deal with it.
It's easy to make anything look bad by proposing the worst game of the bunch.
