Clearly calling adherence to DnD rules as adult and mature isn't a hyperbolic adjective. You don't plan for missing an Eldritch Bolt, you just press it again next turn. If your character eats a Bulette slam and dies, there is no strategy about the fact your next character hits Healing Word if Bulette won't be dead by the end of the party's turn. You pretending like reacting to random misses makes for a rich environment in high level thinking is nothing more than self deception. There will always be an optimal route to ending combat, and all a miss causes is the stalling out of said combat, not what actions are used afterwards.
You limit yourself in how you play, and then assume that anyone who doesn't limit himself like you do, is engaging in "self-deception". This has been the crux of all your diatribes, whether it be dice-rolling, or Concentration spells or the other game aspects you love to be bombastic about when you complain. You think that if something has a low chance to hit, then it MUST be useless. It never seems to occur to you that the low hit chance of some of the spells is to balance the power it gives you if it sticks. So you limit yourself to only the obvious and safe choices, like using only Bless and never Bane, and use only attack spells that target the AC from high ground or are sure-hits, and never any of the maledictions such as Hold, or any other spells that target the saving throws.
Good players plan for the event that the Bane didn't stick, or the Hold didn't last and switch up their game plan. Go ahead and limit your own game play if you like, but to say that those who don't are engaging in "self-deception" tells us more about you than you realise.
In fact, it limits the combat because nobody will bother to use witch bolt at a 65% hit chance when you can use force missiles and not waste your time.
When a goblin swings at me and takes off a fraction of the pool, I don't recoil because it's unrealistic to RP of how I would react to having a sword pierce through my upper lobes. It's totally irrelevant , because I understand what suspension of disbelief means in exchange for pragmatic, enjoyable gameplay.
This just goes to show how dismissive you are of DnD. So combat to you is about one party sticking his sword into another without resistance and you call that suspension of disbelief? And what if the DM just says that the goblin's sword lops off your head and you fall over and die? What then? Will you challenge that, or will you go on with your suspension of disbelief? The dice are there to resolve such conflicts. I can't make it any clearer to you.
That's the whole point of HP, ability tuning, and ability combos/layering in encounter design, to add the difficulty by making me figure out optimal ability mixes to deal with an encounter. This dice a rama of yours is no different, no matter how enlightened you portray your argument as. Missing 65% of my wizard skills has not done anything to make me think strategically other than narrow down the set of spells least likely to miss and optimize the one spell with the most damage output and reliability. In this case, force missiles and thunderwave, and when that loses popularity, ray of flame and hex or poison ray cantrip from the staff of the crone after that in the priority list. It just railroads people into monotone gameplay.
This right here is the perfect demonstration of your own limitations in your approach to the game. You only look for sure-things, or those with high hit probabilities. And because your own limitations lead you to a combat plan that plays out like a rote, you're incapable of accepting the possibility that a better game plan might involve taking risks for larger reward, and plan for the event that those risks don't pan out. Hold the enemy and all hits become crits. That's a huge payoff. And then plan for the spell to not land or last long enough, and have a backup plan. Don't assume your game plan that is boiled down to your own low appetite for risk is the optimal game plan.
The vast majority of people playing this game will be doing it as a single player rpg, and their play experience should not be held hostage to the few who will play a campaign with an acting DM.
I'd say the rest of us shouldn't be held hostage to your own limitations on game play.
