I have a bad habit in XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I'll move forward ever so slightly (I play cautiously, but this whole thing still happens,) and reveal a squad of xenos. They'll get their little move, I'll hunker down or go into overwatch or fire or maybe even just move back into slightly better cover. Then the alien turn rolls around, they move up, blast my cover with one shot, and crit my soldier to death in one shot.
Protip: If you Alt+F4 out of the game before that turn ends in Ironman, you can reload back at the beginning of your previous turn. This is totally cheating. I discovered it on accident. Alt and F4 are really close to the camera controls and I was filled with a righteous anger.
Something something out of my hands, something something control, back on topic.
Whether it's the player's fault or not, irrevocably losing a significant portion of their resources (In XCOM's case, you lose somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/6th or 1/4 of your damage output for at least the rest of the mission if one of your squaddies goes down,) on a roll of the dice does not feel good. Or even a few rolls of the dice. Don't get me wrong, I love randomness. Randomness is great!
For like... Large, structural things. Tying a wide range of randomness to a single important event is where things very easily break down. Working around potentially damaging events requires accounting for a series of bad rolls, often through the construction of some sort of buffer or diminishing the impact of the individual events.
I'm aiming for the latter.
It was either the XCOM example or the multiple times I've rage-uninstalled FTL. Every time, I get no weapon shops. None. Not one. It's insane.
