Do your players have the most incredible luck at the key moments?

[Silver Moon]

Tonight we are on our 12th gamenight* of the module "Iron Orb of the Duergar" from Dungeon #46. They are at the climax battle where they have to fight the high priest who is possessed by an intelligent artifact-level orb with great powers of its own.

So they have the high-level dwarf thief try to sneak in for an attack. Bad move, he is spotted 10-feet away and the orb has hatred for dwarves more than any other creature. The orb fires "Disintegrate" and the player saves easily. The rest of the party attacks at the orb again targers the dwarf, this time with "Death Ray" and he saves yet again.

It is stated in the module that only a few very powerful spells (that none of the party has) will actually destroy this orb. So the highest level party Druid casts "Conjure Fire Elemental". There is an 85% chance that a regular fire elemental will appear and 15% chance of something even more powerful - and she rolls a 96%, which means an Effretti - a creature that can grant a "Wish" which is one of the only things that can destroy the orb! Incredible luck!












*The module has taken this long in part because I've also added in other elements from the old TSR Gazzetteer "The Northern Reaches").

 

[frankthedm]

My players tend to have Bad luck.

80% of the gamers in my group really like natural 1s = some type of botch, so thing can get quite messy.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

I think that anyone who has gamed for a long enough time will see things like this, both good and bad. The law of averages doesn't play favorites, as David Weber likes to say.

 

[Harmon]

Few campaigns back, my archer was running low on arrows, the big bad goon was about to kill out cleric and a good solid hit (crit) with his last arrow and almost max damage saved the cleric.

Trying to make a final Diplomacy roll on a lasting impression after keeping village from bringing in soldiers to combat the nearby Stone Giant, and I roll a friggin' 1.

So many times, my luck, and my unluck comes in waves. Once in a while I can roll well enough or have the right spell, or the right character in the right place, but usually my characters luck runs like mine.

 

[Ealli]

It really feels like at critical times we roll either amazingly or terribly. Either we win with the greatest heroics and fortune, or die horribly. I know there were several times in the previous campaign where I thought certain death was coming, but then a nice 20 pulls me back to safety.

 

[Agamon]

Not really a believer in luck, it's just variance in probability that happens to be more noticeable when the chips are down. Like people have already posted, you always seem to have really good or really bad luck against the BBEG. Another way to put it is that you either win or lose against the big threat. No surprise there.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

One of players seems to be incredibly unlucky. If there is a critical attack roll, save, skill check, whatever, he is almost guaranteed to fail it. On the other hand, if anyone is going to get hit with an enemy attack, it will be his character!

His rolls got so bad that now he writes down the result of every d20 roll that he makes. Of course, now that he's started writing down the rolls his results have improved a little (I think the dice know that he's checking up on him so their behaviour has improved. ). Overall his average would still be below the mathematical average of 10.5 though.

Olaf the Stout

 

[Kae'Yoss]

I have some of those to tell:

Good Luck:

DM: "Oooh, that vorpal blade hits you. By our rules, while that doesn't kill you outright, it's like a coup de gras, and now you'll have to make a *rolls dice* DC 56 fort save or die"
Player: "Ouch, I'll have to roll a natural 20 for this." *rolls natural 20*

Then there was the instance where I managed to make a critical hit against the Big T. That was my first crit in ages. The character was a dwarven cleric with a greathammer (crit x4) under the influence of Divine Power and Giant Size (I endet up doing 32d6+200 points of damage or something, and we dropped the Tarrasque in one round)


Bad Luck:
I managed to roll two natural ones in a row, not once, but twice, each time when it counted: First against some spell, then because of massive damage. The second time I rolled the die again just to see what I'd have gotten - and it was another 1.


And then there was the legendary Zed Kobb. It was a decent character on the sheet, and the player didn't do anything stupid, but he always had the worst of luck, getting beaten up by some mooks he was trying to rob and stuff like that. He tried, on several attempts, to take his own life (the player was really fed up), and when the DM took pity, and asked for a ref save against the Cosmic Flash of Death (1000 points of damage, Ref DC 100 half), he rolled a natural 20, and together with evasion survived that thing unscathed.

 

[Keith Robinson]

Yeah, it can happen.

Luckiest moment of the campaign so far is when the characters encountered a blue wyrmling in a 10-ft corridor. Several members of the party were already unconscious from the first breath weapon and the others were all injured. The next round it was going to breath again (read TPK) with only the dwarf fighter still to go - who could only take it down if he crited with his battleaxe (x3 threat range) and then rolled well on the damage. And that's exactly what he did - scraping over the kill line by 2 or 3 hit points.

The releif and surprise of the players was palpable and it made for a very memorable encounter

 

[Aholibamah]

In one session a pc was doing critical hits over and over again when I'd expected him to be subdued--desperate Indiana Jones like action following one after the other, rolling amazing maximum damage. Admittedly he had a rod of lordly might but he had penalties to using some of the weapons. Another pc in the same session rolled so poorly against a ghast that she was being dragged off into the woods to be eaten when she was rescued by the rest of the party. Since she's the ranger she found it all rather humiliating.