Ever see a Strengh 18/00 rolled legitimately?

[Wik]

I mean, classic D&Ders will know many characters with 18/00... but how often has it been seen legitimately rolled? On the first try (no "that was a practice roll" or "that was an 18/10, roll ,and kind of lame, lemme retry").

I only saw it once. In an unusual twist, I was a player and not the GM... it was the GM's first time running a game, but he was a pretty dedicated player. We had a few other players, including this guy Ian, who had never played any RPG before.

He decided he wanted to be an elven fighter. And he started rolling stats. After allocating them, it was something like Str 18, Dex 16, Con 16, Int 13, Wis 13 Cha 13 or something ridiculous like that.

Then we explained the percentage strength thing, and he rolled his strength - 00. I remember he was really upset, and begged for a re-roll, because he thought his character was gonna be super weak. When we explained "00" meant "100", he got pretty excited. None of us had ever seen a legit 18/00, and we were all pretty dumbfounded.

This was in 98 or so, and I still remember that character - his name was Drake, and he was nigh unstoppable. My half-elven druid/enchanter was quite the badass, too, but nothing next to Drake.

Never seen it since.

 

[kaomera]

Not personally, and in 1e AD&D we typically rolled 3 1st-level PCs per player with 8-12 players in a starting party being pretty typical. I actually saw at least 3 players try to just roll up massive numbers of PCs to get one, and eventually give up. Someone I played with sometimes did, apparently, get one; but I wasn't actually there to see it. I think you would expect to need 700+ games (assuming completely evenly distributed results) to "guarantee" seeing one; given the number of people I gamed with and the frequency of new games starting I think we might have managed that in 10 years or so...

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Sure.

... after about 35 tries.

 

[Stormonu]

Not quite - closest I saw was an 18/98.

However, back in 1E the group had a wizard who managed to roll an 18 Strength (and an 18 Int too; we used the method out of the back of UA). Just for yucks, I had him roll percentile. He got an 18/56 and begged me to keep it. Figuring he'd never get the chance to use it (he was a wizard), I let him keep it. It never really had an affect on the game except once - at about 5th level, when caught in a duel with another wizard and low on spells, he reached over and slugged the enemy wizard. Guess the guy had a glass jaw, cause it not only disrupted the spell, it put his lights out.

His remark? "Now that's how you cast a proper sleep spell, buddy."

 

[amerigoV]

I mean, classic D&Ders will know many characters with 18/00... but how often has it been seen legitimately rolled? On the first try (no "that was a practice roll" or "that was an 18/10, roll ,and kind of lame, lemme retry").

I saw it every time I ran a Fighter! What are the odds!

 

[DumbPaladin]

Yep, in my first D&D game, the DM's boyfriend joined after about the game had been going on for almost a year, and he rolled an 18, then followed it up with double zero on 2d10. He didn't know it was a good thing, but he was pretty happy with the 18 as he was a Roman soldier.

 

[Vegepygmy]

I only saw it once.

Same here.

 

[Umbran]

I saw it twice. Once by another player, witnessed by the entire group. It was kinda cool to see them come up. The other time didn't count, but not in the way you'd think.

We were playing using Unearthed Arcana rules for character generation - where humans had different dice they'd roll for each stat by class, so if you were playing a Wizard you'd roll 9d6, take the best three for Intelligence, but only straight 3d6 for Strength.

I was playing the party wizard, and rolled a 17 for Int, and an 18 for Strength. The DM, just for kicks, told me to roll percentiles to see what my strength would have been if I'd been playing a fighter. They came up 00.

Biggest friggin' waste of an 18/00 ever.

But is was still fun to play a wizard that could beat the party barbarian in arm wrestling.

 

[Tanstaafl_au]

A few times.
And yes, thats as DM watching not as the player rolling.

 

[FATDRAGONGAMES]

in 31 years of playing AD&D I've only ever seen that once, and that was nearly 25 years ago. It was legit, there were about 7 or 8 of us rolling up and we all witnessed the guy do it.