D&D General Advise for A Mates Harry Potter/Dnd Hybrid RPG in which Albus and Scorpius persuaded Delphini not to change history so that Voldemort wins

[JMISBEST]

5 or less on 3d6 is not the same as 3 in 16.

Ooops I got the sums wrong. Sorry. Its a 4 in 16 chance

 

[JMISBEST]

Have them roll a bunch of d6's and say "Gosh, the table in my head says this happens when I roll a 5, 4, red, and pocket lint", then do whatever they wanted to do anyways.

Rolling on tables isn't "bad luck", it's deciding to abdicate authority or narrative consistency in service of a chart they themselves designed! The time spent designing entries on "the king's 3rdteenth smelliest nephew orders eggplant parmesan, how much does he like it?" table doesn't make the game more realistic. It's self indulgent, which is fine, but what's the point of the faffery if you aren't going to see it through?

The problem is that they've been using similiar tables for almost 25 years, 10 months, but they've only started having problems with them in the last 10 months and as far as their concerned their merely having a very extented period of very bad luck. Also I've just spotted and corrected 2 mistakes

 

[Charlaquin]

The problem is that they've been using similiar tables for almost 25 years, 10 months, but they've only started having problems with them in the last 20 months and as far as their concerned their merely having a very brief period of very bad luck

They’ve been using the table that says Albus and Scorpius Potter convince Delphini Diggory that she could give her past self a better life by helping them since the year Philosopher’s Stone was published? A decade before two of those characters existed and another decade before the third did?

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

The problem is that they've been using similiar tables for almost 25 years, 10 months, but they've only started having problems with them in the last 20 months and as far as their concerned their merely having a very brief period of very bad luck

There is no problem. The tables do what they were designed to do, provide a "random" answer rather than the DM having to think about what happens next. This is what happens when you cede decision making to an dice driven AI. Not that the resulting story can't be fun!

Two friends won D&D in a game I ran in college when the rest of the party wasn't available. They were in a series of 26 rooms, each containing a randomly monster from Letter A-Z of the monster manual and the monster's treasure. In turn, they killed an Ape, Carnivorous, a Bugbear, and a Cockatrice (who turned one of them to stone). They were sweating the "D" section of the MM, but upon rolling for treasure on the cockatrice, they found a ring of 4(!) wishes. The survivors used the wishes to 1) turn the bard back to flesh ("He is!"), 2) Be 20th level ("You are!"), and 3) Win D&D ("You do!"). The fourth wish was gravy. It may be the best "campaign" I ever ran, and clocked in at about at about an hour!

So, you know, any time people say you can't win D&D, I know they're wrong

 

[Bill Zebub]

Ooops I got the sums wrong. Sorry. Its a 4 in 16 chance

There are 216 different possible results with 3d6 (counting, for example, 1-2-3 as different from 2-1-3). Unless I’m counting wrong in my head, 10 of those results are 5 or less (2-2-1, 1-3-1, 1-1-2, etc.). So there is a 10 in 216 chance of gettIng 5 or less. So slightly less likely than rolling a 1 on a d20.

(The same as rolling 16+, which illustrates why old school “3d6, in order” is so brutal.)

3 of the 16 different results are 5 or less, but not all results are equally likely.

 

[JMISBEST]

They’ve been using the table that says Albus and Scorpius Potter convince Delphini Diggory that she could give her past self a better life by helping them since the year Philosopher’s Stone was published? A decade before two of those characters existed and another decade before the third did?

Of course not. They've been using similiar tables in RPG's as a whole since 1,997

 

[FrozenNorth]

So how should my mate handle a situation in his Harry Potter/Dnd Hybrid RPG were the people that play Albus and Scorpius feel sorry for Delphini and before the 3 of them even do their 1st trip back in time Albus and Scorpius have managed to talk Delphini out of her plan to change history so that Voldemort wins?

What's more Delphini has now done a deal with Albus and Scorpius, the deal is that in return for them going back to The Battle of Hogwarts and changing history so that the number of deaths on both sides is a lot lower then it was they will persuade the good guys to guarantee that the 5 week old version of her that was alive during the final battle has a good life

So, what’s the problem? Seems like the characters, using empathy and good sense, are set to successfully resolve the challenge before them. Isn’t that what the heroes are supposed to be doing?

 

[Bill Zebub]

I don’t watch Critical Role, even though it’s free. I have zero interest.

But I have to admit I’m so curious to know what D&D is like with @JMISBEST and their friends that I might pay to watch that stream.

 

[JMISBEST]

So, what’s the problem? Seems like the characters, using empathy and good sense, are set to successfully resolve the challenge before them. Isn’t that what the heroes are supposed to be doing?

I asked him that myself and he said that he forgot to ask me to ask how you think he should have the rest of the campaign pan out?, after all he wasn't planning on his 2 players managing to convince the campaigns main villain to switch sides and join the good guys

After all his original plan was for Delphini's real plan to be to help her father win and she was only pretending to want to help Albus and Severus go back in time and prevent dozens of deaths during The Battle of Hogwarts but now she genuinely does want to help Albus and Severus go back in time and prevent dozens of deaths during The Battle of Hogwarts

 

[Charlaquin]

I don’t watch Critical Role, even though it’s free. I have zero interest.

But I have to admit I’m so curious to know what D&D is like with @JMISBEST and their friends that I might pay to watch that stream.

I’m starting to suspect JMISBEST is an AI someone is trying to train to run RPGs by running it through increasingly improbable hypothetical gameplay scenarios and asking human GMs how they would resolve those scenarios.

(Normally I’m confident enough in my ability to convey irony through text that I don’t feel the need to specify, but in this case I think it bears stating explicitly: the above is not meant seriously, I’m using irony for humorous effect.)