Ever see a Strengh 18/00 rolled legitimately?

[aramis erak]

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've done it personally a couple times since 1981.
I've seen about half-a-dozen.

I'll note that some players do exceed the odds on 3d6 throws or even 4d6K3 rolls, possibly by semi-conscious ability to control release to get desirable results.

I've seen a player roll 3× 18 on a single character twice.

I pretty much don't use rolled attributes anymore.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Legitimately... how is rolling thousands of character illegitimate? It's not my fault the 843 previous character I rolled until now all had the concept of "passionate for mushroom omelettes" and no NWP in mycology despite leaving in Flyagaricsburg?

Seriously, I have never seen it once happening, but my experience with 2nd ed was short. On the other hand, I have a legitimately rolled 5e char whose lowest stat is 14.

 

[Scars Unseen]

I rolled it once back in the 90s. Can't even remember the character's name. It was pretty early in experience with the hobby, and we were still pretty much exclusively doing sessions of mindless dungeon crawls that we made with graph paper. It was fun at the time, but none of the characters we used then had any actual character. I think I was 12 at the time.

 

[Irked Particle]

We used the 4d6 & drop lowest, by the way, which definitely made the 18s easier. My friend & I both rolling 100, though. I can't explain. We did it individually in front of our DM, on carpet if that matters. Two different sets of d10.

My character was I believe a barbarian elf named Xrognogn (pronounced "Zhron" lol) & I'm an idiot because I can't remember my friend's character name.

If I remember right, we were playing maybe 3E? I'd have to see if I still have my PH to check, no idea where that would be.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Sure.

... after about 35 tries.

I mean, that's the thing. Sure there is only a 1% chance on top of the likelihood of rolling an 18, but most players who played through the AD&D eras saw hundreds or thousands of characters rolled (especially if obviously not-going-to-work characters are discarded, which is something I believe both AD&Ds explicitly allowed for. They also both had multiple ways of rolling for attributes, some of which made rolling and placing* an 18. If the game never went past oD&D supplement I (so you had 18/%% strength, but IIRC still rolled 3d6 down the line for attributes), then 18/00 would have remained quite rare.
*and if you roll an 18, the best places to put it are in Str for a percentile strength check, Int if you want a MU who can learn all the spells per level, or maybe Cha to go paladin.

This is an old thread but has since had a happy ending: at my table, about 2 years after this thread was started, Wik got to see another player knock off a legit 18.00.
The character in question, though, turned out to be a real glass cannon and didn't last very long. Ah, Khawy, we hardly knew ye...

There's the rub. Even if you get an 18/00, you can still roll a 2 for your fighter's starting hit points or all 1s on your starting gold and end up trying to survive your first dungeon in padded armor or heck just walk into an ambush. 18/00 was a wild enhancement in power for a martial character*, yet at the same time it doesn't erase all the ways that all the other dice rolls ('permanent' or immediate) and basic decisions determine game outcome.
*So much that I'd call it bad design to have such a character-ability imbalance except that, well, gauntlets of ogre power just aren't that rare.

 

[Nilbog]

I'm normally a pretty poor dice roller but I do seem to have good luck with percentiles when it's higher the better.
I've rolled 18/00 for a character once
The other good one was when we were creating Marvel faserip characters and I was rolling for the number of powers, I rolled a 98 the DM said that was too many and would unbalance the game, so after much arguing I did roll again and lo and behold 00. The look on his face was priceless.

 

[el-remmen]

I saw an 18/99 and 18/68 rolled in front of me during the same session of character creation for a 2E game in 96 - so two different characters in the 1st level group had percentile strength. One would die by 3rd level though (18/99).

 

[Mad_Jack]

I've seen it three times by other people in between the early '80's and the time 3rd Edition hit.

And I've done it twice myself, although one of those times was probably a bit shady - I had recently acquired a new set of dice that turned out to be badly balanced...


(My 2nd Ed. fighter/thief Ripper couldn't have gotten an 18/00 since he was a halfling, but it didn't matter since some skillfully engineered shenanigans led to him acquiring gauntlets of ogre power at a ridiculously low level, lol.)

 

[THEMNGMNT]

In middle school I ran a Dragonlance game and right in front of me one player legitimately rolled 18/90something Strength.

His name was Matt.

 

[Hex08]

I think I did, but I am getting older and have a brain addled by too many years of beer and whiskey consumption to believe that my memories are 100% accurate...