Game Design Geek Out

Played a bunch of Flashpoint recently.  It's a boardgame where everyone is a firefighter trying to save people from a burning building.  On your turn, you have 4 action points, which you spend to move around, put out fires, drag people out, and so on.  At the end of your turn, you roll dice to see where/how the fire spreads.

So on every turn, you know exactly what you're going to do, but the dice can lead to more or less manageable situations.

What I think is interesting about this is that you never feel completely useless - you just feel like you have to prioritize your choices, and sometimes even with the best of reasoning, the dice go against you and you can't do anything except adapt.  The dice don't take out short term immediate outcomes, they build up the results over time.

In contrast, a lot of RPGs make your success of actions randomized - you may or may not succeed, which leads to feeling useless and "whiff factor" much more often.