Are Any Of Your Players Really Unlucky?

[Olaf the Stout]

I have a player in my group, Garry, whose lack of luck in regards to dice rolling is well documented. If everyone in my group rolled as bad as Garry did there would have been several TPK's by now. I know that you can often start having selective memory when someone seems to roll really well or really bad. However everyone in my gaming group would definitely agree that Garry seems to roll a lot more low numbers than he does high numbers.

It even got to the point where another player gave him a completely new set of dice to have since his set were obviously "broken"! The new dice don't seemed to have helped though. He has just tainted the new dice with his cursed luck!

At the moment in my Shackled City AP campaign he is playing a Fighter/Warblade. He has taken a couple of manoeuvres that basically try and make up for his crappy luck. One allows him to swap out one of his saves (I forget which one) for a Concentration check. The first time he used it he rolled a 2 for his Concentration check and still failed the saving throw (despite maxing out his ranks in Concentration!).

Another manoeuvre he took allows him to re-roll a missed attack as well as giving a further +2 to that re-rolled attack. The group has since re-named that manoeuvre "The Garry Manoeuvre" in his honour! He used that manoeuvre for the first time in last night's session. He did manage to turn a missed attack in to a hit. However I then reminded him that he forgot to add in his Haste and Bless bonuses to his attack, so his previous roll would have hit anyway!

On his first save for the night he rolled a 3 for his Reflex save and took the full force of a lightening bolt. A little later in the night the party was fighting a Huge Fire Elemental and was having a lot of difficultly with it. An NPC cast Cone of Cold on it and, as I was busy looking up something, I got one of the players to roll a save for it. Garry, thinking he would help the party out by rolling poorly for the monsters, rolled.

The result? You guessed it, he rolled a Natural 20!

Everyone at the table pissed themselves laughing. So loudly that Garry's teenage daughter came down and asked us to keep the noise down a little!

Despite his horrible luck, he takes all his poor rolls in very good humour and is one of the nicest persons (if not the nicest person) that I have played with in all my years of gaming. I've only once seen him get a little bit frustrated about his poor rolling in the 3 years that I've been gaming with him. Any other person I've gamed with (including myself) would have completely lost it at least a couple of time now!

So does your group have someone that just can't seem to roll well and no-one will let that player touch their dice for fear of them cursing them? Or is it yourself perhaps that is the jinxed one? Share your stories of poor dice rolls and bad luck.

Olaf the Stout

 

[fanboy2000]

Yep.

Yeah, it's me! It's pretty much limited to initiative. My monsters are so notorious for rolling low on initiative, I had a player once say that he never takes improved initiative in my games because my monsters are always slow.

When I was a player in T20 one time, I was rolling low for initiative. I asked to borrow my friend's d20. He's been rolling 16+ most of the game (so far). Just before I rolled it I said to it "I'm rolling for initiative" it rolled a 1. My friend snatched it up and told me to stay away from his dice lest I curse them.

An NPC cast Cone of Cold on it and, as I was busy looking up something, I got one of the players to roll a save for it. Garry, thinking he would help the party out by rolling poorly for the monsters, rolled.

I did something like this once. I had been whiffing all combat. I asked "Little" Mike, who had been rolling well all combat. So, I asked him to roll the monster's attack. He went to switch d20s, but the rest of the group wouldn't hear of it. (They're not very nice, even to each other!) Anyways, "Little" Mike rolled the attack and, of course, the monster missed again.

If there is a law of conservation of luck, clearly there is some DM out there with multiple TPKs on his record who's monsters always go first.

 

[DarkLord Of DForce]

We have a Paladin in our 4e game that nobody, but nobody will let touch their dice for fear he will "taint" them like his obviously are.

I used to have this stigma attached to me - so when we started a new 4e campaign, I wisely picked a Holy Avenger as my character, and chose a Craghammer as my weapon. (I would have picked an Execution Axe, but didn't see it first).

I'm not reminded much about those "bad ole days" with double-rolls for attack, and not having to accept 1's or 2's for damage.

I think the Avenger was just -made- for me and people like me.

 

[darjr]

I had a player in an RPGA game that a very similar thing happed to.

He kept rolling really badly, then just when he really needed to hit he rolled a 1. In anger he rolled it again just to see, and rolled a 1. Then he threw the die on the floor. Everybody at the table craned to look, it was a 1.

I took pity on him and said I'd use his dice, thinking they were bad. The very next roll I made was against him and I rolled a crit 20.

 

[MerricB]

Yes, one of my players is incredibly unlucky rolling dice as a player. As a DM, he's a fiend - natural 20s all the time - but as a player, it's incredible.

He managed to use the combination of True Strike/Force Orb twice in a campaign. Both times he rolled a natural 1 to hit.



Cheers!

 

[Elric]

There are certainly people who have been less lucky in the past. Looking backwards, people probably haven't been any unluckier on their die rolls than random chance would suggest. Looking forward, essentially the only way to be "unlucky" is to use a die that isn't fair in a way that hurts the player (i.e., rolls low). To the extent that certain rolls matter much more than others (e.g., rolling for ability scores, or getting hit by save or die effects in 3.X), a player can have outcomes much luckier or unluckier than random chance would suggest, since even if you've had 3000 rolls, 30 of those rolls were by far the most important.

There are people who can cheat at dice, but I doubt that anyone who can do this rolls worse on purpose, and it would be strange to accidentally develop a really precise die rolling method and not realize you were using it counter-productively. If that was true and you ever figured out that you could make Y face of the die tend to come out as the result when starting with X face of the die on top, simply shifting the initial face of the die would lead to the player doing much better than simple chance.

 

[ppaladin123]

In my weekly game I am that player. My "unluck" is legendary. I have tainted so many sets of dice that other players are afraid to set next to me. one time I coughed on someone's d20 and it rolled 1s all night. Yes, I am the cooler; I should get a job at the casinos.

 

[questing gm]

In my current group, we had a player who plays a Infernal Warlock. When we just started, he never rolled above 10 for nearly 5 sessions straight.

After that, he never landed any hits unless that attack was dealing the finishing blow (with Diabolic Grasp).

The campaign is put on hold and he's playing as a cleric at another campaign where his rolls are much better now.

You've heard of cursed dices but we've got a cursed dice tower at the place where we game. Once we rolled a d20 on the table and got a 20 then we immediately rolled it again at the dice tower and got 1.

 

[wedgeski]

The dwarven fighter in my 4E campaign is such a one, yes. To put it simply, he favours powers with Miss effects. On the flip side, my own luck seems to come in waves that stretch for years at a time. After suffering bad dice luck throughout almost all of the 3E era, 4E has brought me a run of good luck that I would never have dreamed possible.

 

[delericho]

So does your group have someone that just can't seem to roll well and no-one will let that player touch their dice for fear of them cursing them? Or is it yourself perhaps that is the jinxed one? Share your stories of poor dice rolls and bad luck.

It seems that all but one person in my group has some 'quirk' of luck.

There's one player who always rolls really badly, except when it becomes 'important'. Suddenly, the dice change, and he rolls 18+ with regularity. (And we've checked - he's not cheating.)

There's one player who always rolls a 1 for initiative, but whose luck is otherwise unremarkable... until there's a check on which he 'must' succeed. Then, you can guarantee he will roll exactly 1 less than he needs.

And then there's me. I have almost obnoxiously bad luck. My monsters never seem to be able to hit, and when they do hit the damage is paltry. This occurs, of course, right up until the point where I tweak my encounter design to rebalance the game... at which point the dice roll 20 after 20.