“Misses != failures” is, I suspect, part of a larger picture that I’m starting to think a lot about, which is that there’s more ways to look at a situation than “success/failure”, especially because fiction and real life don’t usually map onto that duality. Swords Without Master first clued me into that idea, but PbtA games are honestly really well-equipped to deal with it.

I think there’s a few ways to go about it, but the most general way to describe this notion, I think, is that there’s multiple ways that a situation could go, and one of those ways is the one that you immediately desire. But if the dice don’t go your way, something else happens. It could be beneficial, detrimental, or both! Or neither! But the important thing is that it’s not what you wanted to happen, even if it might be better for you in the long run than what you wanted to happen.

(Swords Without Master has this interesting additional wrinkle, in that even during the results where you get pretty much free reign in saying what happens, you don’t get total free reign, because you’re constrained by the Tone you rolled.)