In a dice-based role-playing game, any action you take can either succeed or fail based entirely on the luck of the dice. This is part of what makes the story that is woven during a role-playing game so interesting - you have twists and turns that wouldn't otherwise have happened, purely because of a chance dice roll.

One of the members of a D&D group I played in was trying to take the transcriptions of our game (we played in text format, so the transcripts were readily available) and adapt it into a more traditional novel-like narrative - taking the story we had created during our game and adapting it into a readable story.

The snag I kept running into while reading and editing this, though, was that the sense of chance - that at any time, through no fault of your own, you could completely fail at what you were doing - was missing. Once you don't have that "What did you roll? ...a 1." in the story, you don't see the twists and turns of the dice affecting the story.

Is there any way to re-integrate this sense of uncertainty and possibility of failure into the story, or is this simply not possible in a novel-like format?