Aurumvorax
First Post
I always liked how HackMaster made fun of this by including a dice jail on the player's "mat." There was a little area you could "condemn" your cursed dice so it wouldn't infect the rest of the table.
Do you have any dice superstitions
- Thread starter MonsterMash
- Start date
My Players
I game with folks from a crime lab. They all have, or are working towards, advanced degrees in hard sciences. And they are the worst dice ritual people I’ve seen.
They start the evening my rolling their entire collection of d20s and plucking out the ‘bad’ ones. They argue about what constitutes ‘bad’, which leads to dice trading. If the dice roll low 10 times in a row someone will figure that it’s about to start rolling high, while another person say’s it’s cursed. One guy has a thing for d20s that roll prime numbers before the game. Once the game starts they are not allowed to touch each other’s dice, though, and like everyone else they train their dice during the game.
I had to step out for 15 minutes once and when I came back they had taken apart a desk fan and were spinning dice on it. Their excuse was that they discovered it was broke and meant to fix it, but then thought, “Hey, centrifuge … it’ll be like training your dice on STEROIDS!”
As part of their more scientific pursuits they have boiled, microwaved, x-rayed and magnetized dice, and then charted the results at the table. After the fan incident they put a set of dice through a real centrifuge. One of the girls who does firearms analysis took her dice with her to the indoor shooting area to, “scare them.” To mess with me, they once brought in a Geiger counter and went over all the dice, and then acted relieved they didn’t find anything anomalous. On the plus side, a guy hid a few d20s in a high altitude weather balloon last year and handed them out as presents during the holidays.
I game with folks from a crime lab. They all have, or are working towards, advanced degrees in hard sciences. And they are the worst dice ritual people I’ve seen.
They start the evening my rolling their entire collection of d20s and plucking out the ‘bad’ ones. They argue about what constitutes ‘bad’, which leads to dice trading. If the dice roll low 10 times in a row someone will figure that it’s about to start rolling high, while another person say’s it’s cursed. One guy has a thing for d20s that roll prime numbers before the game. Once the game starts they are not allowed to touch each other’s dice, though, and like everyone else they train their dice during the game.
I had to step out for 15 minutes once and when I came back they had taken apart a desk fan and were spinning dice on it. Their excuse was that they discovered it was broke and meant to fix it, but then thought, “Hey, centrifuge … it’ll be like training your dice on STEROIDS!”
As part of their more scientific pursuits they have boiled, microwaved, x-rayed and magnetized dice, and then charted the results at the table. After the fan incident they put a set of dice through a real centrifuge. One of the girls who does firearms analysis took her dice with her to the indoor shooting area to, “scare them.” To mess with me, they once brought in a Geiger counter and went over all the dice, and then acted relieved they didn’t find anything anomalous. On the plus side, a guy hid a few d20s in a high altitude weather balloon last year and handed them out as presents during the holidays.
Wednesday Boy
The Nerd WhoFell to Earth
A lot of the guys that I game with are superstitious about their dice. It drives me crazy when they put the game on hold to fish for a new die after "firing" some die that rolled another 1.
My superstition is that my dice are either feast or famine.
I've been DMing regularly for about three years now - first a long-running 3.5E campaign and now a 4E campaign for the last 6 months. We make all of our combat rolls on the table, and my rolls are either terrible or phenomenal and it generally lasts for an entire session... terrible to the point where I needed 13s for my gang of 15 charging orcs to save or get caught in an entangle spell. Only one of them made it... one charging orc is slightly less scary than 15, I would say. Tough encounter defused. Or, the time where the PCs charged into a goblin lair and had 20+ goblins around them and I thought surely they are either going to retreat or I'm going to have to pull a DM ex machina to save them... but, I couldn't hit for the life of me and they slowly wore the goblins down.
It got to the point in the last campaign where I adjusted encounter strength to compensate for my bad rolling... and, then I had the session where I rolled well and it was a near TPK: hill giant crits the party ranger, sending him to -30 something hit points...elf paladin slashed down to -8 or -9 by the drow warrior, who then proceeds to take down the mighty elf fighter. Plus, a major NPC ally also got blitzed that night.
I've been DMing regularly for about three years now - first a long-running 3.5E campaign and now a 4E campaign for the last 6 months. We make all of our combat rolls on the table, and my rolls are either terrible or phenomenal and it generally lasts for an entire session... terrible to the point where I needed 13s for my gang of 15 charging orcs to save or get caught in an entangle spell. Only one of them made it... one charging orc is slightly less scary than 15, I would say. Tough encounter defused. Or, the time where the PCs charged into a goblin lair and had 20+ goblins around them and I thought surely they are either going to retreat or I'm going to have to pull a DM ex machina to save them... but, I couldn't hit for the life of me and they slowly wore the goblins down.
It got to the point in the last campaign where I adjusted encounter strength to compensate for my bad rolling... and, then I had the session where I rolled well and it was a near TPK: hill giant crits the party ranger, sending him to -30 something hit points...elf paladin slashed down to -8 or -9 by the drow warrior, who then proceeds to take down the mighty elf fighter. Plus, a major NPC ally also got blitzed that night.
Wednesday Boy
The Nerd WhoFell to Earth
In my experience that's a bad strategy for encounter design. Recently, one of my GMs compensated by increasing the encounter strength because he thinks one of the other players always rolls well. The GM had luck with the dice himself and the encounter ended in a TPK.
In my experience that's a bad strategy for encounter design. Recently, one of my GMs compensated by increasing the encounter strength because he thinks one of the other players always rolls well. The GM had luck with the dice himself and the encounter ended in a TPK.
That was what almost happened in my example above. I had beefed up the encounter a bit (a big climactic battle wherein the initial adventure morphed into a full-blown epic campaign...) and then finally rolled well in a combat encounter. Two PCs died, one PC almost died and three of the other four PCs were in serious jeopardy.
However, they also split the party and refused to take advantage of their unicorn ally's magic circle against evil (and the mighty elf fighter twice missed hits by rolling a "12" instead of the 13 or higher he needed to hit...)
After that encounter, though, my encounter building improved and I was almost always able to give the PCs a good challenge. Plus, soon after that, they had access to Raise Dead, Revivify, Heal, etc., and then Resurrection and eventually True Resurrection. (Heck, they even used a 5000xp Miracle to be able to use Resurrection to bring somebody back from having been subjected to Destruction)
