Tabletop games are good because you can trust your DM to guide the failures in an interesting way. Unless it’s a bad DM and you can’t.

I had a DM who believed strongly that failure was what made it interesting, he loved to say “The characters in Star Wars failed almost every time and that’s why it was good!” But actually watching the movies, failures bad enough to result in grievous bodily harm are relatively rare.

One time during our first session of a new game we were somewhere dark and a creature was there. He had me roll athletics with no explanation and I rolled high. Then he had me roll acrobatics, high again. Athletics again, high. Constitution check, high. Athletics 11. Then he cackled and eagerly described how a dragon cut off my arm.

My character was built entirely around two handed weapons, this made me borderline useless. Based off of his comments, he didn’t have any plans to provide a way for my character to recover his limb, he just thought it would be cool to mutilate me and decided to force me to roll until I failed.

Needless to say I didn’t go back.