A little OT:
Well, we had problems like this in our Earthdawn games, as our GM tends to roll high (and ED has 'exploding dice'). Sometimes insanely high. Now, imagine the average difficulty of 12 on our circles, and enemies roll around 30-40 on attack. It means both no armor and no real chance of defending yourself. And the enemy gets a guaranteed amount of damage done equal to the dice step(around 15 usually)... It's not fun... But when after a whole streak of getting your ass kicked you start rolling epic results. That's fun. Imagine, when you run from a huge Horror construct you shouldn't even scratch, and fling a spell to slow it down... And it hits. And it hurts it.
In SR Edge is something that lets you do things like that. Karma in ED is just a shade of it, a different kind of help.
So, reseting a failed game that was no fun at all is possible. Once. After that, it's just Save&Restore. I can get that in most cRPG's.