How to deal with high rates of failure?

Hi everyone -

I recently finished running my first one-shot (the first chapter of Dead Planet) and the main comment from the group seemed to be about how common failure is. Not survivability, but just the ability to succeed at most tasks outside of a particular specialty. Unless you get really lucky when rolling up your stats it feels like you're lucky to have a coin flip's chance at success even when trained in a skill, and even embracing a "success at a cost" mentality it set things up where my players almost didn't want to do anything that might require a roll. The expectation of failure as a default just felt bad for them at the table. Even rolling with Advantage, they seemed to just give up if the governing stat didn't roll extremely well during character creation - something like a 25 was just a "why bother?" moment.

Again, this isn't about survivability, they embraced the idea of being fragile, but more the perception that even the most competent among them still seemed to be pretty bad at just about everything of consequence. It just felt bad to play at the table for them when that mindset took hold.

So as a Warden, what are some ways to address this perception? Failing forward helps the story, but not on what felt like almost every single roll.