Just one of those days . . .

[Scribble]

Ughh...


Sometimes though I think it's almost worse when the dice trick you into thinking they're being nice, only to pull the rug out from under you at the worst possible moment...

I was playing a d20 CoC game a while back, and in the first big fight we got in I rolled a crit to win the fight in a somewhat dramatic fashion... Seeing as my character was kind of a bored rich kid, I rolled with it (hah) and started playing him as kind of a risk taker...

The dice kept rolling well... Until they didn't and I got mowed down by machine gun fire after failing a number of die rolls in a row.

Long live the K'ster!

 

[Dog Moon]

I've found particularly over the most recent two versions of D&D that the dice gods hate characters that have increased crit ranges. I would never dare to make a 3E character that critted on a 12+ because my experience told me that my d20's would never roll above an 11 the entire time I played the character.

I actually DMed a character like that once. He was a Troll Dervisher. Had 12-20 crit range. Dual-Wielding Flaming Burst and Acidic Burst weapons [which I only realized AFTER the battle - don't know why I gave those two particular elements to the TROLL]. In like the 30 attacks he managed to make, only like 3 of those successfully crit. I was sad. The dice just didn't want to roll anything over an 11...

 

[TarionzCousin]

Had 12-20 crit range.

Obviously the Dice Gods disliked that extreme advantage and chose to punish that PC.

 

[ArghMark]

Aha. Ars Magica has a fun mechanic which is on certain rolls if you roll a 1, the following dice is doubled, unless you roll a 1 again which means it is tripled.

Epic final battle against a wizard in a flying ship and his ghostly armies. Massive dragon comes down to toast us. The powerful knight rolls a 0, followed by 2 more 0's. His sword flies out of the hilt and lands at the bottom of the castle, and despite all of his ability (Extremely high) he gets chomped by the dragon on the first hit.

Behind him, an un-named warrior (played by the same person) rolls a 1, followed by 4 more 1's, followed by a 10.

Dead dragon.

The un-named warrior quickly became Pedro the Dragon Slayer, and became a regular character in the game .


The game isn't fun without drastic failures and drastic successes.

 

[coyote6]

Indeed.

The actual odds are around 1 in 268 (0.45^7, or about 0.0037367), which is fairly close to the odds of rolling a natural 18 on 3d6*.

* And we all know how often that happens.

Three times in one fight, IIRC. Playing GURPS, so those were all critical failures.

For a while, with that same GURPS character, I was really good at critically hitting with headbutts, of all things.

Then there was my fighter in the most recent D&D game -- playing Age of Worms, I think I was 8th level before I managed to critically hit something.

 

[DogBackward]

I remember, a long time ago in a 3.5 game, we had a guy playing a bow Ranger. He was the last one standing against a nasty drider boss, after finishing off the giant undead spiders that had finished me (the healer) off. He's got a massive to-hit (we all had somewhat cheesy characters back then...) and massive damage, and the drider was on its last legs. We learned afterward that it had only ~10 HP left, vs. our Ranger's +1 Flaming longbow and +1 Frost arrows. So, he launches his volley, rolling all the dice at once (he had them color-coded by attack order).

Four natural 1's later, the drider hits him with a Finger of Death. A fifth natural 1 and he joins me in the afterlife.