D&D 5E What to do with players that always roll well

[Unwise]

My issue in this regard is that my players now all just use iphones for their dice rolls. It automatically adds everything up for them so speeds up the game and we have no dropped dice, or passing dice etc. There is no way for anybody else to tell what you rolled or if your additions were correct though.

 

[The Grassy Gnoll]

How about a curse on the locale they are adventuring in, whereby everything is turned on its head.

The traditional bad guys are the goodies, the usual goodies the baddies. Spells do their opposite. And - just for fun, guys, to reflect the topsy-turviness of the world - all To Hit rolls are Roll Under. All Saves are Roll Under. Any pluses become minuses. So your 1st level Prof Bonus is -2.

AC is reversed from standard bare skin AC10 so AC 15 becomes AC 5, AC 12 becomes AC8, etc.

To hit you need to roll UNDER the target score.

Damage is mirrored. So a roll of 1 on a d8 is actually 8 damage, a 2, 7; a 3, 6; a 4, 5, and so on.

If the cleric tries cure wounds he will actually inflict damage; if he drinks a healing potion he will lose HP - he should be necking poison.

If an area effect curse, everyone is affected equally, but while everyone else's random rolls are just as likely to work, you'll discover if....

If he's cheating, expect the same crits and max damage rolls etc. he will fudge, just fudge backwards.

If his dice are loaded, he'll struggle. All those 20s are now fumbles...oops.

It will soon become obvious what the real issue is.

Of course, he MAY just be a Halfling in real life.

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

In my last AD&D campaign, character creation was always done with the same set of dice - the DMs dice. Same for HP.

We rolled these in a group, to celebrate or comiserate the results. "Oh, no, STR of 6, guess you are the mage ha ha!"

I played in a series of games with someone we suspect was psychic. With anyone's dice, in front of everyone, he would consistently roll well. One of the GMs tracked his rolls and graphed it. Big spike on the 20 and 1. Her solution was to not give him a target threshold. If he needed 17 or better sheld figure "4, 6, 12 and 15 are a success" and tell him to roll. He'd always asks "Do I want high or low" and she'd answer "just roll."

 

[Psikerlord#]

I'm in something of a quandary. One of our group always rolls well to the point where I'm doubting anyone can be that lucky. His characters stats are all in the +3 to +4 bonus range, he seems to roll an incredible amount of 16+ rolls on a d20 and his hit points and damage always seem to be near maximum.

To give you an example at 9th level he's dropped maybe 5-10 hp from his possible maximum so he's rolled 8's or higher pretty much 8 times. He seems to roll many more criticals than seems normal and his damage is usually very close to maximum every time.

I've noticed some other players are starting to do the same to keep up which makes me think the chances of that happening are even less likely. It's got to the point where an NPC with the party, who I roll for and has a range of die results is a comedy figure because he misses his rolls quite often and only has average hp for his level.

The player in question occasionally gets dice checked but I don't want to be doing it all the time. It's kind of spoiling my enjoyment of the system because nothing's a challenge. If I overpower opponents other characters struggle.

I don't want to directly accuse the player of cheating and the occasional dice checks do show high rolls so what do I do?

A common house rule ime is everyone rolls all combat dice in the open, including the DM. Problem solved.

 

[KarinsDad]

Sit next to the player and make sure you see every single one of his rolls. It could be loaded dice, but I have never seen a loaded 20 sided.


I played in a 4E game where a player fudged his dice. I eventually brought it up to the DM because he never missed, etc. He had the "habit" of rolling before his turn, just to keep the game moving. Course, his Barbarians rolled anywhere from 4 to 12 dice every time (boy, was that PC optimized) and he had to add the dice up on a calculator, so who knows what he was punching into it.

After 6 months or so, I finally left the group because a) it was a bit of a haul to get to the game, and b) I don't enjoy playing with cheaters.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Get some of those giant foam dice and have everyone roll with them! Then you can see the results no matter how far away you are!

 

[Lord Vangarel]

I see a lot of this getting repeated, but it doesn't appear that these dice rolls are being made in secret. That'd be a dead giveaway at the table, same with the "roll and snatch" method. If people are just blowing on their dice, killing them, pointing them a certain direction before rolling that's all just an attempt to control statistics, which IMO, is perfectly reasonable.

But the impression I get is that these rolls ARE out in the open, even other players have seen them.

We don't sit around a table as we sit in lounge chairs so are more spread out so generally only one player could see his roll. He tends to call out natural 20's some of the time but snatches up his die quite quickly unless proving the roll. His die is also dark with dark numbers making it difficult to see from a distance.

 

[miniaturehoarder]

A dice manufacturer once gave me a bunch of sample dice. He said he didn't make transparent dice because nobody wanted to buy dice when they had bubbles in them, which made me suspicious.

GOOD CALL!

 

[Lord Vangarel]

Ok thanks for your replies everyone. There's two things in my mind to resolve.

The first is the player cheating? Not sure on this one and difficult to tell without changing the group dynamics.

Secondly is the player gaming the system to put every advantage in front of him and could I just make changes to the system to level the playing field?

On the first point I don't honestly know. Yes my feeling is he rolls much better than all the other players unless in a situation he doesn't want to where it's advantageous to roll lower. I'll monitor/record his rolls against other players and see. Will also have a quiet discussion with other players to see if they think it's a problem.

On the second point I can change the system defaults however not mid campaign. I cannot really ask them to reroll characters even though I want to. For example the average player total ability bonus in the group by mid level is +8 all added together. The player in question total bonus is +18 so much higher than the others and supposedly randomly rolled. Stat arrays and average hp per level can fix this going forwards.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

If you play with someone who rolls improbably well on stats, who averages 34 points of damage on 4d10 spells, and who always makes his attack rolls and saving throws...

Personally, I've quit tables partially due to players like that. (DM issues as well, but playing with a cheater is stressful enough that it was a factor.) I don't know for sure whether the player I'm thinking of was deliberately cheating or if he was just bad at math and biased in his own favor (5 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 2 = 29, right?) but either way, the DM wasn't keeping an eye on him and it was too stressful to have to keep an eye on him myself (either from a die-rolling perspective or from a keeping-the-rules perspective, like "you can't use Daylight to kill vampires") and I didn't enjoy a game with players who don't play it correctly... so it was one reason to quit. I can imagine situations where I would have stuck it out instead, and requested that we all roll out in the open or something, but I'd do that if I were maybe 20% worried that a player was cheating and just wanted to add some social pressure to do the right thing. If I'm 80% sure that a player is cheating, I'd rather not game with him at all.

Therefore, I disagree with those who say things like "Make everyone use point buy and take average HP." That's throwing the baby while keeping the bathwater. Cheaters will always find a way to cheat.