Another option is to have a reliable map or other "constants."

This is one of the reasons I quite like Spelunky and Rogue Legacy despite their randomness. You can get a general feel of the difficulty of each area and plan accordingly, and you also know certain hazards (like slippery ice in the Ice Caves of Spelunky, darkness in the final area of Rogue Legacy, etc) are likely coming up. The precise level layouts (including special levels with different rules) are randomized, but there are still some constants you can rely on when forming specific strategies. It's rare to have zero opportunity for some aspect of the gameplay in Spelunky, and while that's not always true in Rogue Legacy there are still some constants there as well, you just might not find them before you die.

completely missing shouldn't be an option, but maybe a "grazing shot" could be.

Yes, the lack of something like this is one of my major frustrations with XCOM. The combat results are either no damage, full damage, or extra damage, with generally zero possibility of "partial damage" to kill by slower attrition. I wrote about this and other things on another thread if you'd be interested, but I'll copy-and-paste the relevant part:

Due to the RNG and binary fail/win state of various things in XCOM, I feel like a lot of results can potentially feel like a frustrating waste of time. There is no benefit whatsoever to missing. Not even scratch damage. Missing is 100% frustrating all the time because there is no partial success option. You either do zero damage, normal damage, or bonus damage. I feel like the interceptions are this concept to the extreme, because while it is technically possible for modules and strategic aborting to influence your chances, I feel it's largely a gear check that you will either always succeed at or always fail at depending on who smashes the higher numbers against the other. Skill is not really a factor. Psionic training can feel like this too, because while Gene Mods and MECs are guaranteed to succeed, Psionic testing can make that soldier unavailable for quite some time for no guaranteed benefit, and indeed it too can be an exponential punishment if a good soldier was unavailable for a mission where they were really needed. By contrast, unless a unit is severely weak to a specific counter in Civilization (e.g. artillery tends to fill a sort of glass cannon role), you can usually do at least partial damage to an enemy in any encounter, meaning that even a string of failures can eventually turn into a success due to attrition.