The problem with DND¹ is that it’s a wargame cosplaying as a role playing game.
We’re not recreating historical battles. Let the players (and the DM) have fun.
1.— It boggles the mind that one of the early failed experiments at making role playing games (by slightly modifying the rules of pre-existing wargames) is still somehow the standard.
Sure, it was one of the main inspirations for the genre… but there’s a good reason we’re not still driving Ford Model Ts.
They do! Each one reopens a different set of white checks, and reduces their difficulty! :D
don’t let the country bumpkin make Arcana checks about monsters he’s never seen
Why not? It could be fun! Of course non-critical rolls would be useless, but on a critical failure they could convince the whole party that dragons can’t see movement, and on a critical success they could buy mere chance figure out where its voonerables are (it’s a million-to-one chance, but it might just work!)…
or let the stick figure try to punch down a wall
Again, why not? All rolls, they take a bit of damage; critical failure, they break their arm or hand, and manage to dislodge a brick which starts a comically unlikely and extremely noisy Rube Goldberg chain reaction which ends up waking up and alerting all the guards; critical success, they hit the hidden button that opens the secret door (in another wall), starting a whole new subquest.
Many of them can be re-rolled later once you get more skill points.
It calls these white checks. Specifically they’ll unlock again (supposing you failed them) once you level up the skill or stat they’re associated to.
You can also find or buy dice that’ll unlock some of them.
Others are one and done unless you reload or start a new game.
It calls these red checks. And they’re often much more fun than white checks, especially when you fail them.
It’s a game designed around math, combat, and dungeon crawling, not around roleplaying.
The objective isn’t to have fun roleplaying, but to roll the right numbers to maximise damage to the enemy. Any real fun comes from ignoring the rules and homebrewing.
The car might have gotten a few coats of paint over the years and maybe more ergonomic seats, but it’s still the same old chassis and engine underneath.
There are many games built around the concept of getting the players to have fun roleplaying, but DND has never been one of them, and if it ever became one it’d no longer be DND.