Getting off the track of stats and back onto game events, I had a pair of very memorable percentile rolls come up in my last session. The party of six PCs was tracking an enemy priest around the world in an effort to finally take him out, and they caught up with him in a cavern far underground. What they didn't know when they went in was that this cavern was the home of an age-category-14 Deep Dragon, whom the priest was coming to because his cult had allied with the dragon briefly some centuries past.
Not realizing their danger, the group attacked the dragon when they saw it. The dragon's Epic defense reflected the party telepath's Decerebrate attempt back upon the character, who failed the save and went down. The dragon then proceeded to teleport behind the party and take out the remaining spellcasters with one breath, leaving two characters alive, and neither one capable of teleportation or planar travel. TPK in the making, apparently!
The party tank decided to go forward into the cavern past where the dragon started. Trouble was, this was an opening to one of the dragon's favorite lairs, and was well protected- by a Disjunction trap. The tank happened to be wearing an artifact cloak, so we had to check for the "artifact destruction" effect.
The roll came up 01 in full view of all present.
The players were ecstatic, since this meant there was a high chance of a deity noticing and potentially intervening. I pegged the chances of the deity actually intervening as being lower than the base chance of just merely noticing the destruction of the cloak; 5% sounded reasonable to me since basic deity intervention is never advised as being anything higher than 1%. Since that 1% had just come up, however, I figured bets should be slightly hedged.
The players watched with baited breath as the second percentile was rolled.
And came up 05.
When I picked my jaw up off the floor, I called for a break to consider just what was going to happen next. One of the group's players graduated college with a double major in math and statistics, and happily noted for all present that this, being a 1 in 2000 chance, was not going to happen again- so enjoy it while it lasted.
Long story short, the party's collective bacon was saved and the dead characters restored to full health, but with a hefty price tag attached- which they'll discover as time goes by. But the campaign just took a very interesting new turn, probably the most radical shift I've ever seen one take- all because of a pair of rare dice results.
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