Bad Luck, Bad Rolling

[eris404]

Our last game session was the worst rolling I've seen the players in our group go through. It was terrible, no, miserable. Though none of the characters died, no player rolled over a 10 more than once or twice, no matter what the roll was for. 3-6 were the most common rolls (and we're only 4th level, so it pretty much meant we failed more often than not). We tried switching dice, but it just didn't help at all.

What do you do in sessions like this? Do you have little "luck rituals" like gamblers do to break the streak? For the DMs out there, are you extra forgiving or do you just go with the raw numbers?

 

[diaglo]

no fudging. the rolls are what they are.

but i notoriously roll bad anyway.

 

[Crothian]

it happens, in a game of chance bad luck happens

 

['o Skoteinos]

Last session we've (3 PCs) spent 15 rounds attacking a rat who in the process dealt 5 damage to our highest AC party member. =S.

What we do is just say: "This is bull." and roll another d20...and another one. Eventually our luck did turn and we killed the main bad guy with two hits. If you don't believe in your luck returning, you could always just accept your bad luck and sacrifice some(one)thing to Beshaba...

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

When I'm waiting for my turn, I flip all the dice so the highest number is facing up. It may look like a 'luck ritual' but it's really fidgeting bought about by giving up smoking.

I've noticed quite a few people seem to roll a whole bunch of dice a few times and pick the ones that come up highest. They claim it helps them...

Cheap superstition I say. Crothian has it right.

 

[Kalendraf]

Dice will do that sometimes. One session in a previous campaign, the party (6 chars @ 3rd level) encountered an Allip (non-corporeal CR3 undead). The cleric tried turning it, but failed every time until he exhausted his turn attempts. Meanwhile, only 2 characters had magic weapons, but both of them failed their checks and got hypnotized. The allip started hitting characters, and draining wisdom and gaining hit points in the process.

Finally, the non-hypnotized characters took the magic weapons from their comrades and started hitting it - except all my rolls for non-corporeal miss kept indicating a miss! This continued for several rounds with dozens of straight misses due to the 50% non-corporeal miss chance. I was using percentile dice and even let the players call high/low, but everytime it would wind up opposite of what they needed. It was eerie. We had multiple characters drained down into single digit wisdom points, and at the rate it was going, it looked like a possible TPK might happen.

Then all of a sudden, the characters started hitting it, and others broke out of their hypnotism as well. In just a few rounds, the creature was defeated.

Since then, this group has a great fear of non-corporeal creatures, and they truly dread my "evil" green percentile dice. Some test rolling has shown them to be fair, but the group still thinks they might be possessed or something.

 

[the Jester]

Well, if the dice generate a tpk, we roll up new characters and start a new campaign.

That said, when the dice are against me I switch 'em out for others; I have a freakin' buttload of dice, so there's bound to be at least one good one in there somewhere.

 

[Talon5]

Most of our group uses multiple dice in a single roll and call- "white dice" before the drop.

Trust in players and GM is the only thing that keeps most of us from lying about dice rolls.