RNG, roguelikes and multiverse

Any one playing any roguelike at a high level knows the RNG is critical to it. For certain designs like Slay The Spire, you end runs prematurely if the dice is stacked against you early game, because you need a certain number of positive rolls early on to accumulate an advantage or profile for later on. 

I've started to feel like starting a new run is like instantiating a different path in the multiverse. It's simply "another me", that "could have happened". 

Delving further deeper into it, I start to feel like the RNG itself becomes everything, because if things don't fall my way I just restart into a new run. And the primary difference in that new run is RNG. And it's almost like, why does it even matter at that point, because I'm not stopping a run because of more or less skill -- though to be fair, as you play more, the depth to which you understand turns, cards, choices and meta-decision dynamics in the campaign tree continue to deepen.

It doesn't mean that roguelikes have become uninteresting, because the first foray into one and learning its rules, discovering its combinatorial opportunities, overcoming a previously insurmountable challenge and such are still deeply satisfying. But the hardcore endgame of a roguelike ala Slay the Spire, where at the very peak you need a startling combination of lucky rolls accumulated throughout a finite number of rolls — that feels meaningless in a way. 

The feeling is similar when my wife and I played The Quarry, got a bunch of our crew killed and we wanted to see the alternate storylines where they survived. We could replay it, and slog through the slow game and its terribly slow movement, or we could just pop onto Youtube and watch it. We chose the latter, and in a sense, we explored our multiverse alternatives by watching and not instantiating it through play. 

It doesn't feel quite as satisfying peering into what a multiverse-you could have gotten, instead of this living, breathing you getting it on your screen, in your hands. But when what's between you and achieving it is a cheap dice being rolled by the game as designed by its developers, and the cost of rolling through these multiverse selves is just raw, brute hours of your very real time.. it gets too much.

Lastly, you sometimes do get this feeling in F2P gacha games, but not usually in the mainline experience. Some games get around this problem by giving you an unlimited amount of rerolls in your first gacha 10 so you start with a crew you want, which is really smart -- why let RNG decide whether a player churns in their first minutes. 

You sense it more when you attempt a roguelike feature like the Labyrinth in AFK Arena or Crusades in Heroes Charge. But the biggest difference here is that every run, your character levels are substantially different as these games have character growth curves that support thousands of hours of gameplay. So you're not entering into each run with the same power, you're slightly beyond where you were, but again, if you play any of these games at a really high level and when you reach a point where progression is at a crawl, the creeping feeling of your progress being at the mercy of senseless RNG starts to come through again.