Improbable dice rolls

[Stormonu]

The ENWorld honor system? Wait, @Vhex can ccoborate my story!


That's just nuts. And I'm sure it was all player attacks in the first round against the BBEG too, huh?

Not the first round, but it sure was the last. Party was sleeping in an underground fort (may have been a Daern's instant fortress) and they were attacked by a drow war party led by a drow wizard. Said drow wizard had a cube of force, and activated the side that gave hom all protection.

The party's 11th level monk leaped from the top of the tower for a x2 damage modifier (custom charge houserule) and then proceeded to make the crazy rolls. We did a quick calculation and he did enough with that attack to defeat the 200 hp cube's protection plus knock the wizard into negative hit points.

My resonse was "Well, you just hit him so hard his skeleton is now sitting over THERE", pointing to the back wall of the cavern.

The group's wizard later animated the drow's skeleton and just had it follow the party around as a reminder.

What's really funny is the monk had two or thee attacks left; he was just hoping he could get the cube's hit points down far enough for the rest of the group to punch through.

 

[Ryujin]

In 4e I was playing a Feylock, with a truly abysmal Fortitude defence, but great Reflex and Will. The rest of the party were Fort heavy. In a particular fight against a horde of tentacled Aberrant creatures (DM homebrew in a homebrew adventure), their main attack form was against Fortitude. The fight went on for something like 8 rounds and we were all attacked by no less than 3 of them. By my calculations they needed a 3 to hit me. I made it through the whole fight without being touched, much to the DM's consternation.

 

[adembroski]

Any result is as probable as any other.

A while back, a roulette wheel at a casino hit the same number 7 times in a row. There are 38 numbers on a roulette wheel, so the odds of hitting 19 are 1 in 38. The of hitting 19 seven times in a row would be (1/38)^7, or 1 in 114 billion.

What are the odds that the roulette wheel will hit 4, 10, 1, 31, 27, 18, 22? About 1 in 114 billion.

A football analysis website i used to frequent calls this the "Wyatt Earp Effect"... that is to say, how could a guy who was in so many gunfights survive them all the time? What are the odds of that? Well, for one person in particular, not all the great. When you consider all the gunfighters over the course of history... well, one of them was gonna be special.

Assuming 10,000 roulette wheels in the United States and 1 in 114 billion odds, we should expect it to happen about every 15 months.

 

[Ratskinner]

Any result is as probable as any other.

A while back, a roulette wheel at a casino hit the same number 7 times in a row. There are 38 numbers on a roulette wheel, so the odds of hitting 19 are 1 in 38. The of hitting 19 seven times in a row would be (1/38)^7, or 1 in 114 billion.

What are the odds that the roulette wheel will hit 4, 10, 1, 31, 27, 18, 22? About 1 in 114 billion.

A football analysis website i used to frequent calls this the "Wyatt Earp Effect"... that is to say, how could a guy who was in so many gunfights survive them all the time? What are the odds of that? Well, for one person in particular, not all the great. When you consider all the gunfighters over the course of history... well, one of them was gonna be special.

Assuming 10,000 roulette wheels in the United States and 1 in 114 billion odds, we should expect it to happen about every 15 months.

Yup, that's the funny way probability works on human perception. I saw a statistician in the late 90's (IIRC) who had figured that, by that time, if all the pro baseball players had had the same average odds of accomplishing the games various statistical counts, that the records in the recordbook would be virtually unchanged. (e.g. If you gave them each a .260 batting average and ran a Monte Carlo sim....all the hitting records would be about the same. Different teams and players, but the numerical values would be about the same.) Just recently there's been mild kerfuffle over "hot streaks" in basketball. Nothing but extremes in the noise, but players and coaches all seem to believe in them.

 

[Ryujin]

Same sort of thing that makes people think that the slot machine they've been playing for 6 hours will eventually pay off.

 

[Blackwarder]

Last gaming session I rolled 3d20 and got: 18, 18, 18. Here's a picture for "proof."

The odds of this are like 1 in 10,000 right? Or exactly .0125%?

Any highly improbably dice rolls cropped up in your games?

The odds are 1 in 8000, it happens that why we roll dice.

Warder